With the world accelerating and raging around us, sometimes it helps to find a calm place where you can step back, evaluate and figure out how to navigate better. Hopefully this website can be that place for you, helping you Live Your Realities better or at least understand what that even means. Using this blog post as a place to start, if you have not taken the time to build some self-awareness and figure out how to more effectively manage what is coming at you, the world can be a bit overwhelming.
Information is growing at exponential rates, further blurring the line between fact and fantasy. It is exposing our systemic racism, sexism and wealth and health inequities — which isn’t going well. Many of us are trying to make sense of our family scripts and handle our childhood baggage. Unfortunately, our religions, cultures and politics are all under siege and not really helping. In 2021, we’re slowly recovering from a pandemic that has needlessly killed hundreds of thousands here in the US and millions worldwide. Countries are still resorting to wars to support their politics. Climate change is taking effect even faster than expected. Gun violence continues to rise and the expectation of a dystopic future has become part of our culture. It seems our lives are a constant stream of drama and crises with fear mongering and virtual mobs marauding around the internet.
So how did we get here and more importantly how do we get out? Well first off, just “Yikes!” Let’s all take a step back and think this through a bit. I would suggest thinking about this from two aspects: collectively and individually. We are collectively learning and that’s a good thing. Collectively, technology is fundamentally changing the world and we’re trying to figure out how to adapt. Individually, we are all still struggling to survive, thrive and make sense of our human experience. Simply put, we are learning. More importantly, we need to improve our self-awareness and learn our way out of this overwhelming bundle of seemingly endless problems. Probably not the answer you were expecting but let’s sort it out a bit.
I find this quote from an NPR broadcast from 2009, E.O. Wilson and James Watson, frames things nicely. “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” While I like the insight and awareness of Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology, I think the conclusions, humanity’s problem, terrific danger and crisis overall, simply point to the stress we are under to adapt and learn. My view is that technology is updating our medieval institutions and exposing our emotions as assets that make us truly human as we survive and hopefully thrive in a rather hostile physical reality. Let’s take a deeper dive.
To give you a little context, I have a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics specializing in Intelligent Systems through Case Western Reserve University. It sounds like I should be one of the cast in “The Big Bang Theory,” but in reality I’m just a dad that grew up on a farm and took an unusual path to get here. Focused on sports through high school and college, in my twenties I apparently had my mid-life crisis and put a big dent in my bucket list, which has actually worked out well. For most of my professional career I’ve been an entrepreneur operating on the bleeding edge of technology. Mix in martial arts and a lot of time in the mountains of Colorado and it results in a unique perspective.
What started me looking at things differently was studying Intelligent Systems back in grad school. The simple view is that we learned how to use computers to control machines — but it was more than that. We learned that intelligence is a quality that we assign based on the individual and collective behaviors we observe and just about anything can be thought of as an intelligent system. A phone, a car, a pet, a person, a family, a building, a community, a business, a healthcare system, a city, a state, a country, an economy, an ecosystem, a tribe, a culture, a religion, or even humanity itself are all examples of intelligent systems. Obviously, some systems are more intelligent than others but a common quality is that they can adapt and potentially learn.
Intelligent Systems opened the door to robotics, computer vision, automated guided vehicles, factory automation, etc. but the real game-changer was when I looked at myself as an intelligent system. Our brains are incredible computers and our bodies are amazing machines and there is a lot to be learned from simply observing ourselves and building some awareness about how we get through the day.
The major breakthrough for me came while working on my dissertation. My dissertation was around computer vision and I modeled just about everything after human vision. Being able to observe and experience my own vision, it made it easy to understand how my vision works and use the information as the basis for my dissertation. More generally I was able to observe and understand how our senses work and how they build our observed conscious experience. I assume that is a stretch on the self-awareness front but having followed me this far down the rabbit hole, hopefully you’re good going the rest of the way.
The key that unlocked things for me was learning that there is a region of our brain that builds a 3D model of the space around us as well as a completely different region that searches back into our memory and attaches information, giving meaning to the objects in our 3D model. Hopefully your self-awareness is good with neurons in our brain producing our thoughts, so think it through. It is rather clear we use our senses and our memory to effectively produce the livestream that we experience when we are conscious. It isn’t virtual reality produced by a computer but it is our personal version of the physical reality around us. Call it what you want but I find it easiest to think of it as a ‘personal reality’ and there are 8 billion of them running around the planet.
Being an engineer, the concept of a personal reality is second nature. Everything we do is based on physics and the framework is actually simple. You have time, distance, mass and four types of forces — gravitational, electrical, magnetic and nuclear — that explain essentially everything. What is hard about physics is that our senses can directly observe only parts of our physical reality and we have to construct and model much of how it works in our mind. More broadly, we have to sort out fact from fantasy where physical reality is the fundamental underlying truth.
It’s important to understand that our personal reality is just our brain thinking. Other than neurons firing away, our personal reality is simply information flowing around in our brain constructing our belief of what is going on. If we want, we are free to adopt a belief system full of fantasy, with little to no connection to physical reality. However, from the perspective of survival, science deniers or science uninformed can be a danger to themselves and others. You really want the beliefs of your personal reality as in-tune as possible with physical reality. Not saying physicists have a corner on fundamental truth … but they kind of do.
If we are good with our brain producing our personal reality, then the natural conclusion is that our brain is just a neural computer and we are just a program. This has some truth to it but it is hardly that simple. Most of the 80 billion neurons in our brain and nervous system are part of our subconscious, instantaneously compiling millions of pieces of information, processing our emotions, executing our behaviors and producing our livestream, feelings and intuition. With a little self-awareness it is easy to see that our subconscious is a massive amount of neural processing happening at the same time, which we are not controlling directly. Leaning in a bit more on our self-awareness we can also see that in sharp contrast, our consciousness is a single, sequential process with an observer, the voice in our head, that applies logic and directs what our body should be doing. At best our conscious mind navigates, but we are definitely not a computer program that is controlling our behavior.
When you get into it, our abilities as humans are jaw-dropping. We have remarkably similar capabilities and we all share a common human experience which centers on surviving and thriving – both now and before we started drawing on cave walls. Like other species of animals, we evolved and to a large extent are hardwired through our emotions to band together, behaving collectively to better survive and thrive. We accomplish things through collective behavior that we simply cannot do with individual behavior alone.
Looking at the physical reality of collective behavior, when we connect to our families, businesses, communities, cultures, religions, etc., associated neurons in our brain function to make us agents of these groups. Invoking some self-awareness, it is easy to see that the groups essentially compete for processing time in our single, sequential conscious processing. Day-to-day our connected groups effectively drive a large portion of the behaviors in our personal reality acting as agents for the groups.
If we push our awareness a bit further and switch our perspective to that of the groups, our connections are used by each group to distribute the group’s intelligence across all its members. You can view it as the groups are using neurons in the brains of its members, effectively a distributed neural computer, giving the groups the ability to think and learn. Understanding this, you become aware that the groups exist and think in their own ‘collective reality’ similar to how we exist and think in our own personal reality.
A fun way to illustrate collective reality is to make the case that Santa Claus exists. When moms and dads buy their children Christmas presents and put them under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, their collective behavior certainly looks like Santa Claus. Lists were made, they were checked for who was naughty or nice, presents were built and they all got delivered on Christmas Eve night. The individual behavior of making lists, building or buying presents and coordinating with millions of other individuals to deliver the presents on the same night, results in collective behavior that we can personify as Santa Claus. If you are willing to define Santa Claus as collective behavior, or more specifically a collective being, then it certainly appears that he exists and is quite intelligent as well.
Whether we are aware of it or not, through our individual behavior we are participating in collective behaviors all the time. Buying food, sending a text, driving a car, waving to a neighbor or simply breathing the air for example, we are participating in collective behaviors. The more we are aware of our participation or interaction with collective behaviors, the more we are aware of the collective reality behind them. Similar to connecting with another person, it’s really useful to understand the collective reality on the other end of our connections. As uncomfortable as it may feel, taking a hard look at our connected realities can go a long way toward lowering our fear and anxiety, enabling us to better manage and navigate going forward.
So, at the bottom of the rabbit hole, we find that we think personally and groups think collectively. We see that we individually exist in our own personal reality that is participating in a common physical reality, while also participating in the collective realities of the groups where we are connected. The easy way to think about it is that as we journey through life, we are navigating three different types of reality, not just physical but personal and collective as well. I like to think of it as basing our belief system on physical, personal and collective reality (PPCR).
PPCR is just a more useful way to understand how the world works that includes how we think. Lots of material for future posts but in round numbers there are 8 billion personal realities out there along with the collective realities of maybe a billion families, hundreds of millions of businesses, 195 countries, hundreds of religions and cultures, etc., and one humanity that are all thinking, learning and driving behavior in physical reality.
It’s a bit chaotic and unstable with all the personal and collective realities thinking and acting independently. To make it work we establish personal and collective boundaries and manage conflicts when boundaries are crossed. Boundaries get packaged into common rules, laws, morals and ethics, etc. establishing right and wrong, enabling judgement which drives back into our emotions and feelings of guilt and self-worth. We compete and work cooperatively to survive and thrive and we rely on love and compassion to hold us together when the conflicts get out of hand. If we step back and simply watch for a while it is quite the show.
What gets lost in all this is the role of technology. Humans made it to the top of the food chain because of our ability to adapt and learn both personally and collectively. We are able to create and use technology to extend our ability to manipulate and manage the world around us. Through history, tools and weapons were the dominant technology driving our thinking. However, in recent decades the explosion of computing and information technology is the primary driver of change.
The change is not just that we have better access to information to help us think and learn personally but massive memory and connectivity have fundamentally improved our ability to think and learn collectively as well. Our collective memory and boundaries, typically managed by our “medieval” institutions, have been augmented by computer memory and instantaneous connectivity. Our collective realities of families, businesses, communities, cultures, governments, religions, etc. are fundamentally more intelligent managing an exponentially growing store of information.
As our “god-like” technology propels us forward changing our collective realities, our personal reality, being fundamentally grounded in our “Paleolithic” emotions, effectively has not changed much at all. If we lean in on our self-awareness, we can see that our emotions have always, and are still, driving us forward attempting to thrive while holding us together as our conflicts drive us apart. Technology is not just changing how our collective realities work but as our collective knowledge grows, it is exposing our systemic problems and amplifying our conflicts as we attempt to find better systemic solutions. Our emotions, particularly fear, need to be well managed if we expect to keep our amplified conflicts in check.
When we look at our systemic problems of racism, sexism, classism, wealth and health inequities, social disparities, mental health, the pandemic, climate change, gun violence, etc. being exposed or created by technology, these are all the result of collective behaviors with a collective reality behind each of them. Using a little PPCR perspective it’s fairly obvious that collective behaviors are based on individual behaviors so changing collective behavior requires changing the underlying individual behaviors as well. Clearly technology is driving the need for change. But where do we even start to fix our systemic problems to hopefully get to better versions of our realities.
Being an engineer I’m obviously a little biased but I would say we need to embrace truth, not only in our physical reality, but in our personal and collective realities as well. Fantasy is great for entertainment but our behaviors need to be based on facts, knowledge and understanding for our best chance to survive and thrive. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of information instantaneously available at our fingertips is more than we have time to process. We need to have enough self-awareness to understand that we rely on filters and trusted sources where connected personal and collective realities are generally considered to be trusted sources.
Understanding that systemic problems are being created by our connected realities, I would suggest it is not working that well to assume our connected realities will fix themselves any time soon. Hopefully it is clear that if you want to make your connected realities better you have to challenge the assumption they are unquestionable trusted sources. I would suggest that you want to spend some time raising your awareness and learning more about the how and the why, behind your connected personal realities, as well as your connected collective realities. This will enable more effective navigation as you move forward in life. I find it easiest to do this by taking deep dives, which I will be doing in future posts. Ditching the fantasy, embracing truth and thinking for yourself can be intimidating but it enables you to build a true sense of self, stop being driven by fear and anxiety, take personal control of your behavior and affect real change. We all need to embrace our connections but do it with your eyes open if you want a happier and more fulfilling life.
The good news is that the future is bright and I’m glad to be here. Moving forward, if it helps, personally I’m unaffiliated politically and religiously. I find that arguing and fighting are rather ineffective ways to get others to learn and affect change. Taking deep dives in future posts I’ll try to explore topics from all angles, attempting to leave judgement and bias out of the conversation. My motivation is to address our systemic problems by engaging individuals to raise their awareness and understanding of their realities, enabling more effective behavior. I can’t personally change the world but we can help it learn.
Hopefully I’ve left you thinking and questioning. I’ve pinned the topics of Intelligent Systems and PPCR with more details on their own page on the main menu so they can be easily referenced. I have plenty of topics planned but let me know if there is a particular topic or question that you would like to see covered.
Please leave your comments and feedback on our Connect page where you can also sign up to receive notifications when future posts are available. Lastly, if this all makes sense to you, please endorse the PPCR perspective and invite your friends, family and connected realities to follow this blog and take part in the conversation.
Carpe Diem