Dogs of War: The Emotions and the Self

7/10/2014: Three months later...
IMAGE: House of Orpheus

A short story. Some time during and around World War 1, a talented young female scientist meets a male journalist and the two become drawn into the vortex of the anti-war movement. One of these people was so far along the Asperger Spectrum it brought the term 'high functioning' into a class of its own; while the other was a turbulent and impassioned soul that fell somewhere between Alexis Zorba and Randle McMurphy in both character and spirit. The complementary dispositions of the pair turned out to be well suited, and they soon fell in love. Three children were born.

Meanwhile; another part of the world, and a very different story. The seventh son of a religious scholar rages against his faith and his family, and is all but disowned. He takes to the cold streets of Warsaw, where he floats about in an existential void before finding his meaning in a distant, demure but elegant young woman. The two dispositions are again, well matched; and the two fall in love. After much European adventure attempting to escape the Nazi dragnet and the disoportunity of the war itself; they settle down... and two children are born.

Some time later, a far away place. One of each of these offspring meet, and if the pattern of this tale is anything to draw predictions from: yes, they too fall in love. The child of the first pair had turned out to be a peculiar mix of autonomous, uncontrolled and unconstrained emotions, that were paradoxically quite mild and subtle in their intensity (having the scientist's genetic contribution to thank for this). He makes of course, a very good jazz musician and finds his unpredictable but ultimately harmless emotional compass a big draw card for the people he meets. The child of the second pair; meanwhile inherits another complimentary pattern and balances extreme emotional intensity with an uncanny sense of pre-frontal emotional control. She finds her formidable emotional restraint, when synergised with her near-limitless emotional energy, a real asset in her own purists likewise. And yes, they raised two children, and yes (once again) it is one of them who sits here typing this blog entry.

My relationship with my own emotions is as such, a complex one. I would say somewhere between Senkaku Islands complex and Israel/Palestine complex. The quadripartite split between control and disinhibition on one axis, along with intensity and emptiness on another, has left me orbiting in a somewhat perplexing figure of eight. For the grass is always greener when you have a limitless spread of role models to emulate, the meta-cognitive control to pick your proverbial poison, and the genetic influences to weight you down into whatever basin of equilibrium your environment has seen to imprint. The following is a dream I had, only some months prior, that (if my impressions hold true) may have heralded a reasonably profound state transition in my own personality. It draws precisely from much of this confusion, and I will do my best to attempt an explanation.

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This dream would rank as the single most euphoric I have ever had. And unlike the simple euphoria of other dreams gone past; it left me with such a feeling that I sensed my entire personalty wanting to change in the months that ensured. While that may sound like a bold enough statement, it is by no means a new phenomenon: dreams always seem to do this to me one way or the other. I can recall once, after having a particular euphoria-infused down hill skiing dream; I resolved to become a skier myself and picked up and became competent at the sport in a remarkably short period of time. With the memory of the euphoria, it seems, along came the drive to perfect. Incidentally, only the night before last; I dreamed of eating a bowl of Cocoa Krispies (or coco pops as they are known to us colonial types) and despite having eaten nothing of the sort for at least the last decade; have since found myself eating approximately 4 servings a day of the regrettable foodstuff. Indeed I am snacking on a generous serving of them right now, even as I type this. So dreams, for better or worse, seem to just do this to me. They are my brain's own in build multi-purpose indoctrination device, and they have always had their way in the end. I suppose euphoria would probably just be their default currency of choice.

This is how the dream went. I was walking through a forest, which was encircled by a large oval-shaped stone perimeter. It had the overall feel of an overgrown European private garden. Everything in the dream was in a highly unconventional gray-scale; with perhaps just a hint of sepia tone or maybe green filter to offset the colourless shading. I was walking through slowly, and suddenly I noticed a person walking in the distant growth. He was a close friend of mine but in spite of this; a kind of intense predatory instinct took over and I proceeded to follow him with intentions that were neither violent nor gentle. As I paced through the thick undergrowth and sharp branches, I closed in on a wooden board-walk and decided this was my time to make my move. And close in for what? By this point I was aware the I was simply playing a game of some description; and the goal was to reach him undetected and unseen though he was still my friend and no harm was to ultimately come to him. As soon as this thought ran through my mind, and I made the attempt to muffle my footsteps and close in both quickly and silently, my mind shifted and my consciousness became at once disembodied and fragmented. It jumped somewhere else.

Some other place: Same garden. There were two Rottweilers sleeping comfortably over each other, and my Qualia or sense of experience became distributed between my own body and their own ephemeral states of existence. They were now waking up, and immediately their attention was drawn to something distant. As I continued to stalk my friend, and slowly closed in on him... they were now beginning to fully arouse from their sleep, and were joining in on the hunt too. I felt an existence that was now completely split between myself and the two other entities that shared my goal, and yet I was acutely aware that my connection to these animals was driven by nothing more than that quaint feeling of purpose that comes with the pursuit of a collective action. And it was euphoric in a way I could never hope to describe. The sense that my control over these animals was finite; and yet their loyalty to me so absolute that I need only intuit a volitional state and it was enough to bring them out of dormancy and into full action. It was like controlling an F-22 fighter jet with nothing but ones own mind, but even better: for they were still autonomous and free of will, but shared one thing with me that was more pure and special to them than it ever had been to me. They contained my own emotions; and to these dogs, this was consciousness itself. I woke up then and there; for the wave of euphoria that accompanied this idea was enough to force me well and truly out of the dream state. And as I lay there in the middle of the night, in the blackness of the bedroom, I felt a mixed sense of companionship and closeness overlaid with distance and melancholy in that I did not know who or what these dogs were, except that they were a part of me I had never completely appreciated. And I now missed the feeling of having this closeness more than I missed anything else in the world.

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If you have read any of my previous entires; you will be quite familiar with my ideas of dreaming; my perspectives on the top down cognitive control states that allows us to dream, and the mechanisms that give these control states the power they have to do redesign our beliefs at the most fundamental, subconscious level. In the words of Douglas Hofstadter, regarding his question of "who pushes who around" in the hierarchy of agency in the brain; I have often suspected the dreaming process as fundamentally nothing more than our own beliefs and deeply nested precept complexes pushing each-other around, with the REM stage the open beta to assess how the organism responds to these changes, and the NREM stage the slow process of encoding / cementing them in as the new political reality. Hofstadter heralds ideas and concepts as the prime mover of the brain, but I would personally contend that even these cognitive powerhouses subserve something deeper.

My conclusion: as with my other euphoric dream experiences, the purpose of this dream was ultimately to engineer in me a profound intensity of feeling; and to then bring me dwell on this feeling in waking life. And in doing so, I am drawn to discover the very thing that replicates it, be it a literal interpretation or an entirely abstract one. I had pondered for some time whether this would turn out to be a living person, some fundamental component of my inner self, the ascendancy to greater responsibility in my workplace or even the simple joy of owning a dog of my own. Which is all a little simplistic when I think about it, for the answer has come to resemble a very different category indeed.

In my own life, my emotions had never been so strong that I could not override them when I had wanted; while they had equally never been so mild that I could ignore them when they were rising up, as rare as that actually was. What I have ultimately come to decide about this dream was that though this experience, and the euphoria that accompanied it; I was being made aware of an entirely different way of using my emotions that I had in the past neglected. And that is neither to micromanage them with an endless series of commands, nor coax them into a frenzy and let them off their leash like a dog of war, but to grant them a kind of limited autonomy and enjoy the process by which they act in my greater interest by interpreting my volitional states, and then proceeding to pursue these states through their own logical means. This philosophy of mind strikes an uncanny resemblance to the one of Walter J Freeman in his book, How Brains Make up Their Mind's, which potentially rates as one of the more intensely complex and indecipherable neuroscientific philosophies of mind at least in my experience. I am surprised I even can draw that much of a link; so much did I struggle to understand the text myself. But perhaps that was all part of the larger point here. Incidentally, I think I might have described a very similar topology of agency in a previous post, the way my own pre-frontal cortex turns back time through an empathic link it voluntarily retains with the limbic system. I had little understanding of what I was exactly trying to articulate back then; but it certainly seems to have been a common trend in my dreaming, if not my thinking too.

If I was to articulate that euphoria again: and yes, I have been searching for it in just about every waking day since; it is the feeling I might have if I were to focus on an idea or goal, and without having to either pre-frontally coax my emotions into a strategic place in state-space to achieve this goal at the meta-cognative level (feigning mild disinterest in a job interview in order to benefit the salary negotiation stage would qualify as example of this)... nor inhibiting them completely, nor even determining their contents and letting them off their proverbial leash at whim; it is the feeling of letting my emotions be my emotions and trusting that they know what the hell they are doing, even when I do not. It is the empathic bond I would ultimately hope to share with my own limbic system; reliably flogged from decades of subserviation and pre-frontal discipline, to not only think for itself but to act with its own sense of agency in the greater good of the self that I constitute. And yes; I have come closer and closer to this exact relationship since the time of this dream, and yes I feel it may even have changed me as a person through the process. Though I am far from complete in this prospective state transition, for if the theories of Walter J are any foundation from which to base my own; such discretisation of the self may be the key not only to emotional intelligence but to meta-intelligence in its own right.

In the cognitive ecosystem of the brain: does true power of choice come not from the hierarchical dominance of one particular agent over another, but from the discrete multitude voluntarily combining to form a collaborative whole? And if so, what potential attractor state could ever guide such consolidation without also being a product of it? Perhaps it is simply the case that the greater the power that we distribute outside our direct sphere of self; the more robust that self actually becomes. It is a counter-intuitive conclusion to be drawn for sure, but it is one I am gradually coming to accept. Perhaps it is similarly the case that the only true freedom of will we posses exists within the very freedom we are first willing to abandon. In any case I continue to remember this euphoria, and I continue to search for it in my waking life. When all is said and done: maybe I will just find myself the proud owner of an adorable new Rottweiler and consider the matter closed.