Chapter 6: Old Tools, New Tools - Part Two

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Plasticity itself is seeking novelty.  True plasticity of mind does not wait to learn, it seeks.  This seeking makes a multitude of mistakes, but a few discoveries as well.  So the seeking is not to be silenced by "quieting the mind" as in some eastern traditions.  It is beneficial to possess a seeking drive, in spite of our errors.  Seek new things, keep learning.  Learn a language or take up yoga or play music or read more off of paper rather than a monitor (it improves your brain's comprehension).  Use your non-dominant hand for simple tasks.    If that is easy for you then strive to become ambidextrous.  

Diet also facilitates neuroplasticity.  Walnuts, blueberries and avocado as well as sources of Vitamin D and magnesium maximize flex-brain potential.  Seven to nine hours of sleep is important.  A 20-minute mid-day nap also works wonders for neural flexibility.  Don't let your work consume your day.  Learn a new word every day.  Study a new language.  Learn to juggle.  Learn a new game.  Practice mnemonic skills.  Obviously, you don't have to do all of these things (or many other things in the infinity of possibilities).  These are a short few examples of what is on the menu for fostering neuroplasticity.  Think of new things to do and do them.  Keep seeking novelty throughout your life.   

Accepting novelty is one thing.  The pace at which the world forces you to do so is not really something human beings control anymore.  A useful tool is to learn to love not only change but acceleration itself.   Accept the speed at which things are truly happening in a world of constant becoming.  

Breaking my original intent and being more specific, one terrific aide to maximizing our use of novelty as a psychological tool is something known within Zen Buddhism as “beginner's mind.”  This self practice came to my attention in the 1980's when I read Shunryn Suzuki's insightful book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which remains one of my all-time favorite spiritual guides.  

This book shows how “in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.”  It is a celebration of not knowing or understanding but, rather, of being inexperienced and open to possibilities.  While being an old teaching and, therefore, an ancient tool, beginner's mind takes on renewed applicability today.  Such a mode of Being inherently appreciates novelty, making the practice of beginner's mind a more essential tool than ever before.  Beginner's mind is a key to the lifelong learning necessary to be relevant in the Modern.  

Our ancestors never could conceive of anything like what Generation Alpha is now doing as it demographically emerges into the world.  Immersed in technology these persons will accept novelty as a matter of course.  Novelty will satisfy that generation's manifestation of convenience and consumption, the two prime movers in human social development.  Novelty is a new tool for plasticity to the extent that the variety of novelty today is unparalleled in human history and accepting novelty is simply the way their lives are today.  The future is here, it is just a bunch of babies and near-future pregnancies right now.

Technology reached the point of being self-perpetuating decades ago, but that does not mean human beings are trapped in a dystopian nightmare that most people rather shallowly and fearfully envision.  Technology can also provide tools that can be added to our psychological toolboxes.  If algorithms are truly learning to know us better than we know ourselves and will have that capacity within the next 20 years or so then how will this play out?  Will the algorithms become like dictators of human behavior?  Will the algorithms be as invisible then as they are to most of us today?  Not really.
 

In the near future, algorithms knowing individual humans better than we know ourselves will have direct-to-consumer monetary value.  People can get rich off of transparent personalized algorithms. They will become a commodity.  They will have value and individuals will either purchase one or be given one by the government or whatever.  The tech industry might actually fight against this to protect their monopoly on algorithms (and their surveillance advertising revenue) and thereby keep them non-transparent.  But that will not stop custom personal algorithms that can be queried from changing the world.  

It is difficult to overstate how significant a query-able algorithm would be for the development of individual human consciousness.  A direct two-way interaction between a personalized algorithm and that person is an unprecedented opportunity to learn more about your own instinctual drives and biases.  You could also query how to best address certain aspects of your behavior and, presumably, get “guru-level” advice from something that “knows you better than you know yourself.”

I claim that technology will assist human beings to attain a better understanding of themselves and lead to diverse human experiences beyond the natural world.  How would this work?  Again, the most likely scenario within our passion for convenience and consumption is that we will see the commodification of self algorithms.  

Right now, rudimentary algorithms make relevant content suggestions based on our past interests and consumption.  What if you could purchase your own custom algorithm as an interface for your life?  You could query the algorithm, have it assist you in multiple ways from feeding to cleaning to working to playing to interacting with others.  

Your algorithm would become your virtual assistant, not some device like an iPhone, but an AI empowered tool.  It would probably be securely stored in blockchain (or some such security concept) and it could do more than “assist” you in the traditional use of the term.  It can give you life coaching advice and recommend your best options based upon aspects of yourself that you may not even be aware.
 
The commodification of algorithmic selves will have tremendous acceptance among Generations Z and, especially, Alpha and this will mark the beginning of the Modern.  Human beings will drive the Singularity, such as it will be, and in turn be driven by it into a transformed state of consciousness only now glimpsed in online virtual worlds, cryptocurrency, and transgender persons.  In truth, the Singularity has already happened and we are already living in it.  More on that in the next chapter.

35 per cent of the world's population is under 20 years of age.  Infants of the techno developed world that are only a few months old today will grow to become the most diverse humans in history, with a large minority of them transgender.  This politically explosive topic will become accepted and  commonplace as our youngest generations reach adulthood.  

This is an example of traumatizing yet indomitable emergent human behavior.  It is traumatizing on two levels.  At the individual level, people going through psychic transformation are potentially traumatized by the experience itself.  That is one reason so many more of the very young are anxious, angry and depressed than ever before. But, again, this is a symptom of something unstoppable.  

At the level of culture, transformation is traumatic because it inherently challenges precedent and tradition.  Most perceive it as potentially dangerous and distasteful.  But technology now has a momentum (karma) of its own, beyond any ruling body, beyond culture itself.  It attracts through convenience and consumption, which immerse the person within a satisfying artificiality – which will be preferred by Gen Alpha.

The world we are living into does not care about anyone's hard-brain preconceptions about “precedence” or “tradition.”  It is being built by and for flex-brains who seek not only new stories but the technological augmentation of human experience.  Flex-brains are not traumatized in the same way as hard-brains.  Neuroplasticity is open, in flux, seeking, observant and accepting of the difficulties.  Trauma further hard-wires fixed brains thereby withdrawing and closing them, often lashing out in anxiety and frustration.

There is an inconvenient irony here.  Children under age 15 display more anxiety than ever before probably due in part to how immersed they are with technology.  Nevertheless, they are also the most open and fluid and dynamic generation interacting with technology.  They cannot conceive of a world without artificiality (augmented and virtual reality) pervading it and that will transform human experience.  Their ability to deal with their own anxiety-enducing techno behavior, what I call the Modern, depends upon what psychological tools they have (or don't have) to work with and how they use them – or are used by them.  It demands flexibility.

Algorithmic selves will transform our psychological toolboxes.  But even without them we have every habit, drive, bias, and emotion within us to work with. As I have already claimed, many of the tools in our psychological toolbox are ancient but nevertheless still relevant, which is part of what makes us “human” as a matter of fact.  Resilience or grit, for example, has always been a helpful psychological tool of humankind.  Likewise, gratitude remains still highly relevant.  It is nothing new to say these are important features in a well-lived life.

Lastly, a word about guilt, a powerfully negative psychological tool.  Guilt can be projected from one person to another, intentionally or unintentionally.  It can be conjured within the person themselves for a variety of reasons, mostly religious.  Indeed, it seems that the central purpose of most major religions today is to perpetuate guilt into the world.  A world without guilt is a threat to the legitimacy of most religions.

Guilt can obviously be used by you to make someone else feel guilty about something.  It is used this way by hundreds of millions of people that way every single day.  That is an immensely powerful force (karma) into the world, a superb example of what I mean by naming this force a “tool.”  It is all completely negative, however.  It serves no beneficial purpose.  

There is no reason for guilt in the world anymore and it is time to stop using this ancient psychological tool.  Do not project guilt.  Do not hold yourself guilty.  The herd gasps!  Dostoevsky would proclaim that in a world without guilt anything is allowable.  I have been called a sociopath before simply because I do not believe in projecting or accepting any guilt.  Regret is certainly a part of me.  But not gnawing, festering, relentless guilt.  I harbor no guilt toward anyone in my life nor within myself.  In the metaphysical sense, I am not guilty and neither are you.

Guilt is not preventing mayhem in the streets.  You can live a perfectly loving and compassionate life without guilt.  Ethics and laws still apply.   The chief accomplishment of guilt is to make everyone feel terrible about themselves and want to escape a condition they never should have experienced to begin with.  It serves as a driver for religion where people feel absolved of this existential guilt we all seem to feel (due to so-called morality's repetition through countless eons of time).  

But such people are not truly freed.  Their guilt will return in other forms.  This is one of many flaws in the pathetically antiquated concept of sin.  It is utterly useless if we want to manifest a highly-engaged person who is in love with Becoming.  Sin and guilt drag everyone down psychologically.  

Long gone are the days where the (originally tribal) concept of sin actually controlled many human actions.  And even in cases where it did/does prevent human behavior, that too is negative and psychologically harmful.  More harm has been done by the tools of guilt and sin than in all other negative human expressions (war, pollution, etc.) combined.  No one can name anything positive that comes out of guilt besides the perversion of wanting to cause pain in others and ourselves.  For this reason Nietzsche desired that humanity only say “Yes!” to life and live with proactive affirmation not with guilt-ridden affliction.  

In any case, there's no point in continuing to use guilt or to be used by guilt.  It should be tossed from your toolbox.  That requires effort on your part to make that happen.  Most people are hardwired to feel guilty.  You have to use your flex-brain to detach “you” from your guilt either through meditation or altruistic action or whatever.  Don't be so rough on yourself and others.  Let's all cut one another some slack where the collective guilt is concerned.  The world will be far better for it.

The use of the new tools suggested thus far should be enough to allow the person to address guilt and minimize its effects if not eliminate them.  Use your growing plasticity to help you stop using guilt as a tool.  It will lighten your psychic load and it will cause you to see the world differently.  Indeed, as Nietzsche said, we have to think differently so that we can feel differently.

Generation Alpha will be immersed in a completely new psychological toolbox created by technology (like personal algorithms) and by recent psychological discoveries about the brain (like EQ).  Of course, we all have access to these new-use tools, not just Gen Alpha.  But these tools require self-work for most of us and the older we are the more discipline we need to place into this type of work.  For Gen Alpha it will all seem perfectly natural.

Most of us were not born into a world completely changed to the extent that the developed world is today.  Once today's babies routinely command query-able algorithms, they will become the most dynamic human force ever, capable of transforming themselves and the planet in the next 50 years.