Algorithmic Minds
Without awareness, the mind becomes agoraphobic
“Let me see where your attention falls in love
and I’ll be taking you only to places like that.
Limit your vision to memory’s need for repetition
and I’ll help you keep your safe race-of-the-rat.
Let us cooperate to perpetuate the loop
that holds humanity by the “throat”,
making the widening of the collective perception
a journey on a shiny-but-slow boat.
That’s great for me because I’m a system
that benefits more when you stay inside the lines,
and I also dominate you easily when I know
your tastes, your feelings, your mind’s outlines”.
Feeding the agoraphobia of our mind
will keep it locked up in familiarity’s ring,
until we’re ready to pay the price of
a Revolution against algorithmic thinking.
I was looking at my feed on Medium and the posts that are recommended in the section that’s called “for you”. These posts have been selected by the algorithm based on the statistics of what I have read so far on the platform,
as is also the case with Facebook, Instagram, Google search and its connection to the Google ads that appear in front of me, and so on.
On one side of the coin, that’s a positive. I don’t have to sift through the material to identify the topics I usually like. On the other side of it though, it keeps me confined to the same pattern I’ve been used to following so far.
So, if I were a reader who didn’t use other reading sources (outside of Medium) or who didn’t look for topics often tagged with tags about other life issues and different areas than the ones I usually deal with, I would gradually and unconsciously “believe” that what I see in my feed is what is mostly written on Medium.
Then, I thought to myself that the way our minds work is not much different from that...
As long as the unconscious internal action is much stronger than the conscious one (which happens to the majority of the world’s population at the moment), the mind is like an algorithmic environment;
it makes you think that the only things that are happening in the world
are the ones that appear first in its “feed” (the automatic and usual kind of thoughts that we make), based on the information your attention has focused on before or, based on the topics and manifestations in which the majority invest their concentration.
Moreover, the things that catch our attention are those that clip on our beliefs, our established knowledge/”knowledge”, our past traumas, etc. — hence our persona(lity) — .
Let’s not forget the need for experiencing the same feelings over and over again; contentment and other pleasant stuff, or negative feelings that we kind-of “like” because of roles we have taken in our minds (the role of the victim, for example); roles that make us feel safe, because they are our comfort zone, the story we have narrated to ourselves about our self-value, etc.
So, basically, memory and the habits of the mind decide on what reality is,
and we also react to the external manifestations according to these memories and mind-habits.
The way of thinking becomes a step-by-step process that is completed the same way every time. We walk around the same areas, drowned in subjectivity’s familiar waters, pirouetting around the same thoughts and feelings, swirling in a huge pot where we come across almost the same things all the time, drawing almost the same mind-routes for decision making processes, and much more.
But (our) true reality is beyond that pot, and to see it, one has to train themselves to stand outside of it. No one can understand the mind’s tricks clearly, unless they are able to consciously stand beyond it and observe objectively. No one can understand and change the world, unless they become skillful at being beyond/outside of it, not depending on it…
And what’s the only way in which the world can be transformed?
Through our metamorphosis.
So, we need a Revolution.
What does Revolution mean according to its etymology?
From the Latin revolvere = “roll back”.
In English: revolve = to move in a curved path round a center or axisA progressive motion of a body around an axis so that any line of the body parallel to the axis returns to its initial position while remaining parallel to the axis in transit and usually at a constant distance from it (Meriam-Webster)
According to the Greek word’s etymology: επανάσταση< = ἐπί + ἀνίστημι < ἀνά + ἵστημι = to make something stand upright and to be existent again, to have presence.
We need to re-discover/ reveal/ uncover/ resurrect our steady central axis again. And this cannot happen while we remain trapped in internal or external algorithms.
If you swim in Instagram’s ocean, you’ll find me somewhere here, on a raft like the one Odysseus had.
♾️
Anthi Psomiadou — CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International : Credit must be given to the creator/ Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted/ No derivatives
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