Following the Curve II

Part of the reason our detailed descriptions for subjective experience can sound so surreal is because there really isn't any language to describe that class of experience. Another reason is that it takes the minute gestures of thought apprehending itself in midstream, kind of like using a microscope to study itself. In a sense, it just wasn't built to do this type of work.

It also belies a quality of sensory experience that many of us may consider from time to time, though we don't often comprehend the consequences: that the senses do not in fact take in and represent for us a completely uninterpreted representation of the external world. Color, for instance, doesn't exist outside of what is made possible by the structure of the eye, and the calculations of the neurological system. What comes in through the eye is only a collection of information that our bodies need resort and reorganize in order to construct the images we recognize. Depending on what we are paying attention to, and how we are thinking, the information will be distorted differently. In particularly extreme situations, even time can be shorted and lengthened dramatically, as when one is in an accident, or are responding to an emergency.

To a certain extent, even language can further influence, not only what arrives from our senses into conscious awareness, but also how the shapes images, sounds, et al, are packaged before they make there way to the brain, through the pre-arranged sensory grids cultivated by language, such as geometric shapes, for instance, which get sent forward from the brain into ocular receptors, or get trained into the sensory motor system as patterns to filter for.

In short, our senses and nervous systems do not represent the world for us as it is, but in ways that may be useful for us, the same way mathematical formulas do not give us the world as it actually is, but in a way that we can predict and act upon it.

Since we need to rely on the same systems to describe what we are doing when we think and act as we do to think and act, it is impossible to represent what we are actually doing. But we can track some of the qualities of this behavior, and use them to delineate patterns that can be reused, and combined with others. Early in the history of NLP, the originators and developers came up with the notion of "strategy elicitation," in order to create models of what people do internally to produce the results they do. For instance, by using this methodology, they found out what made good spellers different from bad spellers, and could then teach the bad spellers how to do the same.

While tracking mental processes through a sequence of sensory modalities has its obvious limitations, it can often be useful to extract simple curves, which are often clustered together to create more complex models.

From another perspective, Jonathan Altfeld has used his knowledge and experience in Expert Systems (a field within Artificial Intelligence) to create a methodology based on Boolean IF/THEN logic, which he calls, Knowledge Engineering-TM, that is adaptable to more complex systems, and parallel streaming. The content of IF/THEN statements, or rules, can be very open ended, and can be made of multiple rules themselves, and may run on multiple logical levels (i.e. there can be rules about rules, and rules that can be guided by higher level rules).

All of these systems have been invented, and didn't exist out in the world, per se. The point I'm trying to make is that a symbolic system, outside of ordinary language, is often useful for doing this kind of work, so that one may keep a record of what one does, and when. Once you have a record of what you do when you are playing music, for instance, you can then experiment with using some of the same patterns, or appropriately altered, in other contexts, such as one's day job.

If I were to quickly summarize Jill's writing experience (see previous post) in terms of NLP Strategies, I would say that she begins with the visual experience of staring at the blank screen (Ve -- visual-external). The absence of anything on the screen allows her to begin paying attention to feelings in a particular way (Ki -- kinesthetic-internal), which she mutates through an experience of synesthesia to an imaginary sound (Ai -- auditory-internal), which lines up through some other type of process (needs further elicitation) with words and word phrases (Ad -- auditory-digital), which she will type onto the screen. The notation would look something like this: Ve->Ki->Ai->Ad. Just knowing this much is often enough to replicate the pattern in another person, or in the same person in a different context.

A more complete model will, of course, bring into consideration the sensation, both visual and kinesthetic, of spreading herself outwards past the boundaries of her body, as it will also take into account the feedback produced in the tactile sensations of keying the words into the computer, as well as that of the images apearing on the screen. Perhaps the word images influence the internal imaging she is using to guide the semantic aspect of her writing. This may sound rather complex, but we are talking about things that occur within fractions of a second, and that will continual to cycle, in a pure process sense, over and over again, though the content can change, and the results can be infinitely varied.

Which brings up the issue of quality control, which is often guided by a strategy, or strategies, of its own.

For almost everything you will want to do, you will never need to get as complex as the above implies, though depending on how precise you need to be, the degree of complexity can grow exponentially. In the end, you will weed out almost everything and leave only the most relevant details. It is usually best to remain simple, unless completely necessary. Sometimes it's something as simple as a single link or two that can make a huge difference across contexts, as can be inferred from reading about the spelling strategy.