Frames of Reference & Origins

Part I of the "Fundamental Problem" Series

Over the next few philosophical essays I will be deconstructing what I believe to be the fundamental problem of the human family. Though I cannot claim to have been the only person to develop the theories which I will posit, I can say with sincerity and surety that I formulated these thoughts on my own, fueled by written works from Nietzsche, Rand, Campbell, and Hardy, as well as lectures from Hicks on Postmodernism, and Peterson on Frames of Reference.

There exists an innate drive for simplicity in the human mind, which finds its origins in the biology of our ancestors, and which seeds the fundamental problem within humans. To begin discussing this, we must first understand the crucial purpose of a "frame of reference" in our lives. We require frames of reference in order to maintain normality and lower the relevant sensory input which must be processed by our higher brain functions. A frame of reference takes the objective reality your senses perceive and removes all of the general consistencies, forming a subjective frame of oddities which you can easily process. For example, when you wake up in the morning, you're not struck by the chair at your desk, or the clothes in your laundry basket. To you, they're irrelevant. Over weeks of sleeping in the same room in the same house, you have refined your frame of reference to include only things of imminent importance. For the same reason, when you try to sleep in a new room, you may find your ears perking up at every sound, and your eyes straining to discern a body from the pile of clothes on your chair. Here, your mind doesn't know what to make irrelevant, so every creak in the floorboards is a potential intruder.

As a bit of an aside, Aldous Huxley brilliantly details the effects of a mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception. Psychedelic drugs strip away all the general consistencies which your mind subconsciously removed from your perception; a stone wall suddenly blossoms with vivid splendor, and even the slightest touch turns into a profoundly titillating experience. It also helps explain why too many of these experiences leads to psychosis and schizophrenia.

The evolutionary origin for frames of reference can be traced fairly easily by the same logic we just used in the room analogy. Say you're part of a hunter gatherer tribe in a relatively new terrain. Your first order of business as a prey animal is to determine potential threats. Is that dark shape in the tree a large snake, or a gnarled branch? Are those fuzzy strands of grass simply the plant, or the ears of a stalking lion? Are those sounds a consequence of the breeze moving the grass, or a pack of hyenas closing in? The sooner you and your tribe can distinguish between threat and normal occurrence, the more successful you will be, and the more your people will propagate. Soon, you may be so in tune with the natural world that you begin to dominate the predatory hierarchy. 

In the modern world, we worry less about lions and snakes, and more about ideas and people. However, the same intrinsic need to belittle as much about our setting as we can leads to one of the most dangerous aspects of our psyche: confirmation bias, which can only be described as an utter abandonment of reason and abdication from even the basest responsibility. We all possess the instinct. When challenged with a new idea from a conflicting frame, we retreat into the slums of our own ignorance - rather than face the challenge and try to incorporate it into our own frame, we take the route of least resistance.

Frames of reference and the desire for irrelevance manifest themselves in an even more pathological way when we look at ideological possession, something which has unfortunately been plaguing society for many years. In the 18th century, the clergy of the Catholic Church had a crisis. It seemed that science was on the rise and rapidly demolishing faith in its path. They could either accept scientific thinking and try to initiate a new age of faith mingled with science, or they could stick their heads in the sand and maintain their largely disproven theories until the bitter end. In the late 20th century, the academic Marxists faced a crisis of history, as tens, if not hundreds, of millions of lives were lost in the fires of Communism and Socialism. Instead of accepting the flaws of Marxism, they simply abandoned reason and fell into unbounded relativism which masked their dogmatic absolutism. The result was Postmodernism - a largely flawed and contradictory bandaid over the wounds left on the world by Lenin, Stalin, Zedong, and their contemporaries.

A pattern appears: A person will develop a narrative about the world which normalizes their mediocrity and forgives their shortcomings - often by way of errant victimization. They will then proceed to fall into a crowd of likeminded individuals, who will use their own frames of reference to confirm everything the person already knew in their narrative. Lastly, and most importantly, the ideologically possessed person will proceed to mark every dissenting opinion as entirely unreasonable, and will demolish any attempts at coherent dialogue from anyone not strictly in their camp. This exemplifies tribalism at its worst - the unyielding enemy of progress.

In America, one can see this manifest itself in the ideologically driven far left and far right of the two political parties. I find it humorous to observe two groups which claim to be antithetical in values exhibiting so many commonalities in their behavior. Or rather, it would be comical if it weren't so damning. 

Now the natural question arises: How do we defeat this problem? Well, first we have to ask the broader question: How do we, as humans, extricate ourselves from the biological driving factors which catalyzed our initial success as a species? The problem is, we can't, at least not by flicking a switch. In order to combat the negative aspects of frames of reference, we must slowly cultivate our minds to be conducive to accepting new ideas and trying to wrestle with them, rather than immediately seeking comfort in the arms of subjective truths. We need to be open to dialogue and listen to those who disagree with us. We need to be willing to accept that we, and our ideas, may not hold all of the answers.

Sounds simple enough, but we can't turn off a biological function which has served us so well. In fact, it still serves us well, as detailed in the room analogy at the start of this essay. Widespread education would seem to be the only recourse, but even then, how do we teach in a manner which doesn't accelerate ideological possession? We can't, not on a large scale. This explains why the proclivity to make things irrelevant as a consequence of our need for frames of reference starts our discussion of the fundamental problem: It can't be solved. At least, not without massive evolutionary change, which comes through millennia of adaptations and mutations. Our society simply grows at a rate completely obtuse to slow evolutionary progress. As such, we are doomed to fester in our own frames of reference, at least for now. The only cure would appear to be individualistic - to listen and be open to new frames, and to accept that there will always be people, and ideas, with which we don't agree.