Weekly Review Issue No. 27
On how negative experiences can add meaning to life, grief in the age of AI, dropping into deep time and waiting for Dionysus
Hello and welcome back to another Review. I hope you’ll at least one thing you find interesting, useful or enjoyable. If something particularly resonated, I’d love to know about it.
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What’s alive for me
I’m currently reading The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand (featured below). It’s fantastic and scratches exactly where I have an itch about many things: where we are as a (global) culture around gender issues, the role of the masculine in this ‘correction’ (as I like to see it) and how to re-connect with deeper things in human civilisation and the natural world. It continues a thread I picked up from Brian C. Muraresku’s The Immortality Key, around the historical origins of psychedelics in European culture, and the role of Dionysus as a potential progenitor of many important historical figures (read: Jesus Christ).
As a side-effect, I’m using Dionysus as a motivator to re-frame how I use alcohol. I love how the writer Grant Morrison uses different Gods to channel different states of being: making offerings to Hermes to support his talking; channeling Shiva to enact some powerful change in his life. He refers to Gods and Goddesses as metaphors or ways of accessing states of being and consciousness (rather than say, thinking they actually exist in a cloud in the sky). So I am trying the same.
Dionysus invites me to re-discover the sacred nature of alcohol and to use it to do something meaningful, rather than say, drinking to unwind at night out of habit. It’s pulling on lots of other things I’ve been going through (honestly gotten sick of how much I spend on booze, would like to improve my mood, do other things in my evenings), but I have found it incredibly easy to change my behaviour when I externalise the motivation to another: to a joyous, vegetative God who comes from nowhere, unexpected bringing ecstasy and revelry.
I will drink again when Dionysus comes to my town.
Research on the edges
😫 It's not going to be that fun: negative experiences can add meaning to life
Continuing my exploration into meaning-making, this is a tough one. But like ‘post-traumatic growth’ what can be used from a negative experience that can add meaning to life? Quite a lot it looks like.
Several lines of research support the contention that negative experiences can fuel the processes that support meaning in life. One concerns how people respond to meaning threats. There may be no greater meaning threat than the loss of a child. A study of interviews with parents whose young children died recently looked for spontaneous mentions relating to four types of meaning indicators. Almost all parents attempted to understand their child's death, including relying on biomedical explanations and attributions for what happened. Additionally, almost all parents connected the death to contemporary events in their daily life. In contrast, that their child's death provides some kind of benefit was a less common form of meaning. That bereaved parents seemed to be working through their trauma through comprehension (as well as connection) is consistent with the argument that negative experiences may stimulate processes that promote meaning.
Less traumatic forms of meaning threats also produce efforts to bolster meaning. A review of hundreds of findings concluded that when people experience a disruption to existing meaning frameworks (e.g. how they understand themselves, their relationships, or their place in the world), they seek to bolster connections among established meaning frameworks. For example, feeling socially ostracized, being robbed of agency, and facing personal uncertainty are meaning threats that lead to meaning-bolstering responses such as in-group bonding, upholding cultural norms, and the desire for structure. Encountering a threat to one's meaning frameworks is not desirable nor pleasant. Yet, across a host domains — from loss, major illness, career change — meaning disruptions can renew efforts to find meaning nevertheless.
🧘🏾♂️ What happens to the brain during consciousness-ending meditation?
I have no real meditation practice at the moment, so I come at this with quite a bit of bewilderment. I have had in the past, and had experiences through contemplative practices that have enabled me to glimpse into different states of being, but this one is pretty wild and extreme. Part of me loves the idea of scientifically exploring this, but another part of me comes back to something Douglas Adams said: “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat”. Nevertheless, a fascinating insight into a very powerful practice:
According to David Vago, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and director of the Contemplative Neuroscience and Mind-Body Research Laboratory, nirodha-samāpatti refers to a ‘state of profound concentration or absorption in which all mental activity is temporarily suspended’. It’s said that the state leads to a total absence of sensation and awareness, which would help explain the stories of monks who stayed in this deep trance while fires burned around them.
There are many tales like these from religious texts. Vivid descriptions of dramatic alterations of consciousness that seem to defy our day-to-day experiences of mind and body. However, because the stories come from anecdotes, or ancient sources, it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s mythical. Recently however, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to look for ways to find out what’s going on in the brain that might lead to such states.
🌧 ‘It was as if my father were actually texting me’: grief in the age of AI
As you might imagine, I have a lot of thoughts about this. But I’d rather you read this and make up your own mind. But I will say this, and being gracious, that AI and applications like ChatGPT are just another form of technology and communication that - like the photograph, or vinyl record, or camcorder - offer an eerie way for us to maintain connections with the dead. I suppose the difference here is that with everything else, it was not actively attempting to be the dead. So that worries me a little. But as Megan Devine rightfully says in the piece: Who gets to decide what ‘helping people grieve’ means?
At the peak of the early buzz surrounding ChatGPT in March, Henle, who works in the artificial intelligence industry, made a spur-of-the-moment decision to feed some of the last phone text messages and Facebook chat messages she had exchanged with her mother into the platform. She asked it to reply in Linda’s voice. It had been a few months since her mother had died, and while Henle had previously connected with a local therapist to help her cope with her grief, she found it disappointing. “It felt very cold and there was no empathy,” she says.
She told the chatbot she was upset because she felt like she had made mistakes and that the hospital had also made mistakes, and that she should have been there to advocate for her mother more. The program responded: “Remember the good times we shared. Remember my love for you and let that be your guide. Grieve, yes. Grief is the price that we pay for love. But don’t let it consume you. Remember to live, to love, to enjoy the beauty of this world for you, for me, for everyone who loves you. And sweetheart, remember to take care of yourself. You are so precious and I want nothing more for you to be happy. I’m very proud of you. I love with all my heart and soul.”
Henle was surprised by how much she felt seen by this technology. She also tried using Bard and Bing AI for the same purpose, but both fell short. ChatGPT was much more convincing. “I felt like it was taking the best parts of my mom and the best parts of psychology and fusing those things together,” she says.
This interview with Sophie Strand is incredible. Having just discovered her work, I’m in awe of her weaving of stories and attitudes towards - I feel like - a huge collective shift in how we relate to the world. It has all the urgency that represents our time right now, but also speaks to a real slowness, a dropping into a different wavelength of time. I love what she says about the focus of healing and progress as a mechanism of productivity. I’m trying, as a result, to understand what all the work I am doing on processing past experiences is for. (It can’t be so I can be a more productive person can it…)
I think the dominant cultural paradigm is we must be constantly progressing, integrating, healing, so that we can get back to work, and that for survivors of violence and sexual trauma, and illnesses that don’t have a cure, those narratives don’t work, they don’t map on to our lived experience.
So instead of thinking we are always failing, narratively and physically, what would it mean to recontextualise these wounds as portals? As connective tissue. Although we are more porous how does that porousness allow us to understand microbial life, ‘smalls’, beings that don’t necessarily get our attention? I’ve done a lot of healing and therapy, but I’ve never been fixed, so instead of problematising that incompleteness, that liminality, I’ve tried to think of it in terms of process philosophy, so I am a doorway which matter flows through, and my experiences have opened that door wider. Instead of trying to close it all the time and enter back into a legibility culturally, what if I open that ‘door’ wider and open it so that I can be in service to the general aliveness and not to my particular aliveness?
🎧 Listen
Having grown up in Edinburgh in the 90s, I had the very good fortune of being surrounded by an incredible spring of amazing music. The problem was of course, that anything that is from where you are is rubbish: I was always looking to distant shores to develop my musical taste. I shouldn’t have bothered really. It’s quite amazing the musical scenes and sounds being created literally in my own town. But you can’t tell a teenager that they should do something other than what they’re doing.
So imagine my surprise to really re-discover The Beta Band many years later, far from home.
I remember them at the time of course, but was far too much into aggressive punk, trip hop, chemical dance music, for this more drippy psychedelic rock. So I enjoyed this greatly this week, and hope you will too.
You'd like to feel that I would float away someday
I cried a hundredth time, things never came my way
But I will find, but I will find
Who's gonna shake a corner of my mind today?
What's in those dusty rooms, I fear for in every way
But I will find, but I will find
🤔 Last thought
