Chaos, Perception and Myth
by
Matt Giwer (c) 1995 <2/10>

      The mind stores memories not as events. Memories are stored as characteristics. The memory of a baseball is stored by its shaped, its color, the stitches, the weight. If something looks like a baseball but is too heavy to pick up, it is not a baseball. If it is identical save for the stitches we consider it almost a baseball. But if it is the wrong color we think someone painted it. We know things can be painted.
      Note the difference in the response we have. We have stored the characteristics and we compare the thing to the characteristics. And linking the characteristics we have the idea of baseball. If we stored a baseball as a complete description of an object then we would be at a loss as to what a wrong color baseball might be.
      When a child first sees an old one (or a new one depending upon circumstances) a natural question is, what happened to it? Obviously something other than the color is different. Thus the child learns a new characteristic aging (or newness.)
      This is important as this is the way biologic neural systems store information. Obviously squirrels may have evolved in the forests but they survive quite well in cities. They may have adapted to trees but they have no problem -- other than comical -- with clothes lines instead of branches. They quite readily climb telephone pole which have straight sides something almost unheard of in nature. They are not confused by these things which do not exist in nature.
      Now it is commonly said that they have adapted to city life. Certainly they have not adapted in any evolutionary sense. Make a pet of a squirrel and it will adapt to living in a house. That form of adaptation would imply intelligence.
      Rather, as biologic neural systems organize by characteristics, the roughness of a phone pole or the sofa is what the squirrel uses to determine the action of climbing. Thus we do not have to ascribe great intelligence or learning abilities to other animals to explain what they do. Higher indulgence can explain the ability to grasp more than the essential characteristics for living. A dog or chimp can certainly do more things than are necessary for survival.
      Other than degree of or number of characteristics or abstractions there is one more thing that goes with this ability. That is to abstract the characteristics of life experiences. This are the round and stitches and weight of our baseball life. The characteristics are what we call myth.
      Tragic failure, triumph over impossible problems, learning the ultimate secret, these are the perfectly straight lines, the ideal shade of blue, the perfect apple in the realm of life experiences. Of course no one is every the perfect hero and neither do we have perfectly straight lines. We never have the perfect apple but at State Fairs we just how close an apples comes to perfection.
      We never have the perfect football game but we know if it approaches the all time great games. We know the perfect game when there includes a come from behind victory by that one point at the last minute. We know the perfect game has one person who made it possible. But since there has never been the perfect game, how to we know it is a great game as we have nothing to compare it to?
      It is because it approaches the ideals of myth which are abstractions of daily life. Talking a cop out of a ticket is just a story. Talking a cop out of a DUI while blind drunk is beating impossible odds and worth retelling until people are bored silly with the story.
      And we judge our behavior against these ideals and when we feel we do not measure up we have problems with our conscience. The overly scrupulous can be depressed by their failure to ever embody the perfection of myth. The perfect father or mother is never attained and there is often guilt over that. And the opposite of guilt is measuring one's self against that ideal and never ceasing to try to be perfect.
      These are not personal ideals as within the differences in modes of expression we know what the "perfect" anything is. The more we strip away cultural differences in what a perfect parent is the closer we are to the universal concept of myth, that is, what Zeus did for his children. He did he best to get them started but they had to succeed on their own because of the traits they inherited. Of course there are qualities of myth also, most distinctly non-feminist.
      Myth is the simple extraction of life experiences into its basic characteristics. This is the way we perceive life. It is in the same manner in which we perceive baseballs.
      Stories told around a single myth are simple. Complexity arises in the story by adding other aspects of myth. With enough aspects the story approaches real life. The truer to the perfection of the myth abstraction the more interesting the story. The story of Dudley Doright is boring or told juxtaposing the narrative with fact as a joke. But if the perfect hero falls perfectly and arises perfectly it is a "real" story.
      And we life these myths. We act in accordance with them. When confronted with a decision of what to do in some new circumstance we draw upon the characteristics of experience. In other words we live our present based upon the ideals we have abstracted from our past. We can learn from each other also as in, take a different approach. Note the approach is only one characteristic of the event but that is the most common therapy suggestion.
      And as to one style of comedy, best associated with Monty Python and the Naked Gun series, when confronted with a hostage situation, the negotiator putting on a chicken suit and dancing. That is capricious with respect to myth and with respect to the way we think of things. We enjoy having wrong connections pointed out. We love comedy. Laughter is eliminating false associations. If you get the joke you have corrected a false association of a myth with an event. Seeing why the association is wrong is funny and we crave for more.
      There are several divergences from this article to be dealt with at a later date. This one closes the loop on myth and perception. The Bell Curve and religion loops come later as does the rest of the chaos connection.