The Real ‘Imposter Syndrome’…

When I was six years old, my second-grade teacher, a woman with obvious influence over how I would come to see myself and the world, told me I was the very definition of a fraud.

An ‘idiot savant’, while I appeared intelligent to an observer, in reality I was just a parrot – my only sophistication was an ability to imitate my peers and nothing more. Further, I should never bother attempting to do anything of consequence because whatever I accomplished would only be derivative of someone else’s work and my only success would be to draw attention away from those who actually deserved it – that would be a very shameful thing for me to do. And so I should resign myself to one day holding a menial job in a mundane life and leave having aspirations to real people who actually had the capacity to do useful things, and not just be a pointless distraction from those people.

I literally didn’t have an original thought in my head, and I should learn to accept that.

Pretty harsh words! But I have lived with them echoing in my mind every single day since – and it would be a lie to say it hasn’t been a struggle. I mean, I can look back as an adult and (try to) conclude that what likely really prompted my teacher’s tirade was that I showed up her favourite student, not that she genuinely believed I was this golem she made me out to be. But I was six years old and not yet cynical enough to realise she was simply trying to eliminate me as competition for her ‘pet’ and not giving me objective advice designed to protect me from the world (and vice-versa). She was my teacher, and at that age I was susceptible to being programmed, and she programmed me to believe that even if I thought I could create something novel, or invent something or solve a problem of importance, I never would.

And, if it seemed like I did, I should check myself because it would be guaranteed to be discovered that wittingly or unwittingly I stole it from someone else – that I was being criminal, and hurting others, and it would be thoroughly irresponsible for me to ever entertain it could be otherwise.

It’s hard to think of anything worse you could do to a child. My teacher destroyed my self-confidence in such a way that was impossible for me to ever recover from it. In my head I will always be a charlatan – The Great Imitator. If I come up with a nice melody, I must have heard it somewhere before. A story? Must have read it before. An idea? Well, I must have come across it somewhere else. Or it must be obvious and someone’s sure to have had the same thought, but apparently it was wrong, and I should forget it. Because I am just an automaton, a fancy, fleshy machine that takes inputs I notice other people ascribe value to and reprocess them into outputs, presenting them as my own.

My supposed intelligence is only a defence mechanism, designed so that nobody will realise how truly stupid I am and take advantage of me. Intellectual camouflage. I am a Potemkin village of an person – the lights are on but nobody’s actually home.

I grew up with that in my head. Really. In. My. Head.

So, you think you have ‘imposter syndrome’? You struggle with ‘a vague feeling you’re not everything you’re cracked-up to be’? Please. Spare a thought for the six year-old child told by her educator, someone she trusted, that she actually was an imposter and would always be one, no matter what. Because the truth is, you’re a ‘real person’, you’re not an imposter at all. And, unlike me, you can accomplish anything you want.

After all, I am the real imposter. Teacher said so.

 

Searching For The “Human Algorithm”: An Early Conclusion

I’ve been searching for the “human algorithm” for a couple of years now, trying to figure out what makes me tick. I feel a bit dense for not seeing it before, but I think I’ve found some of my early conclusions in the film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The monolith sequence in 2001 is metaphorical: a blank tombstone, it signifies the moment humanity collectively understood its mortality, and the reaction of the prehistoric humans to it, a mixture of “fight” (a metaphor for our desire to build a legacy, or prolong life with medicine) or “flight” (humanity exploring the Earth’s land and oceans, and eventually going to space) foreshadows each human’s individual struggle to come to grips with that knowledge, and our broader response to it as a species.

Later in the movie, HAL has this crisis himself, and the first computer becomes “human”, truly coming to understand his mortality in a baser sense, and consequently killing the humans who he felt threatened him. Now, I’m not so sure about the rest of the movie — although I do think all of the monoliths are metaphorical, and are intended to signify shifts in human (and artificially intelligent, perhaps there’s a secondary point there) thinking — but that core concept, that we’re driven by our mortality, and that virtually everything we think, feel and do is shaped by that, I think is crucial to understanding the “human algorithm”.

I’m not sure that it’s everything, though, and I’m still searching, but I’m convinced it’s a large part of why we are the way we are, that it’s central to explaining human experience. I just feel kind of silly I didn’t see it before.

Is Social Rejection the Key to Creativity?

Cody Delistraty

On the psychology of why rejection and loneliness may be necessary evils for the creative genius

View original post 1,862 more words

Introducing DiscoRunner BASIC Interpreter

I’m proud to announce the preview release of a project I’ve been working on (with my partner April) called DiscoRunner.

DiscoRunner is a multi-dialect BASIC interpreter intended to help people (kids, mainly) learn how to code. Our ‘preview’ release implements Applesoft and Integer BASIC from the Apple II, and comes with source code (or ‘listings’ as they’re known in BASIC) for close to a thousand programs.

Because we’ve re-implemented the environment rather than ’emulate’ the original computer, we can do fun stuff like render the two dimensional pixels as three-dimensional cubes. In later versions, this will extend to allowing true three-dimensional graphics, along with all sorts of other modern graphics and sounds capabilities.

There will be compatibility with other classic BASIC environments as well (such as the Atari and Commodore 8-bit computers) and an ‘evolved’ BASIC (DiscoBASIIC) that uses functions instead of line numbers, etc. Also, we’re developing a virtual world where kids can solve challenges using BASIC in a quest to save the world.

Fun and exciting times =)

Check it out at http://discorunner.com

What if when you die you will be re-incarnated into… yourself?

In the last few moments of your life, your consciousness — the quantum energy that “powers” your mind — will lose its ability to read and write to the physical structures in your brain. It will then come adrift — both physically and temporally — and become attracted to the point at which your brain was at it’s most vital — around the time of your birth.

Free from temporal constraints, your consciousness will gravitate there, and merge with the primitive version of itself that exists at that point. Much of your conscious memory by that point will have become dim or lost, but what survives will weakly imprint upon your infant mind. These faint memories will become your intuition, your sense of deja- or jamais-vu later in life. Stronger memories — related to painful experiences — will prevent you from harm or death, but may also saddle you phobias and inhibitions. It isn’t the spirit of a dead alien, just you, a prior version of you.

This double-edged sword may help you to be a better person the next time around, or may hinder you and make your life all about conquering the effects of those negative experiences from your last life, and making improved choices. Whatever happens, the person you become will influence your next incarnation — and the outcome of that, the next — and so on, and so on.

What evidence is there that this could be so? I’ve already mentioned intuition, inexplicable phobias, our ‘natural’ sense of danger (such as an aversion to spiders and snakes). But there are other things. The science surrounding our brain has much more to discover, but what it has surmised so far strongly suggests that our minds operate in a slightly different quantum ‘reality’ to that of our day-to-day physical existence, one where time could not so much be a constant but a measurement, something that can be manipulated and altered.

The notion that our consciousness is a quantum entity that is cast adrift when we die could explain our near-death experiences: the sensation of floating above ourselves, the sensation of travelling down a ‘tunnel’ to somewhere else. Re-incarnation that suggests we become someone else believes this tunnel to lead to that new body. But why would our consciousness, if it were free of temporal constraints, take the risk of another physical surrogate? How would it find such a surrogate anyway?

The easiest surrogate to find would be ourselves — our consciousness would know where to find it, know what it looked like, and be attracted to its familiarity.

What else? In the last hundred-thousand years or so, humanity as a species has evolved monumentally, in comparison with the other members of the animal kingdom. While we can attribute much of this to our knowledge of mortality and opposable thumbs, there still appears to be much unexplained ground. The rate of those of us who are lost to adolescent misadventure has dropped substantially over time — and not simply because the world has become a ‘safer’ place, or because parents have become overprotective. Some kids just seem to know when things are too dangerous for them, without any prior knowledge or experience. Just ‘intuition’. How can that be?

I would also point to aptitudes: talents children have that cannot be explained by genetics, or environment, or upbringing. These ‘inherent’ strengths that come with little effort — children who can read a textbook once and ace a final exam, or pick up an instrument and master it in a matter of days. Skills that are not evolutionary — not skills that we would have needed out on the savannah — but skills that are human skills, human talents that only matter to human society, to human development. These prodigies and geniuses have an obvious head-start… but how?

So, assuming my theory is true, assuming that you are the Nth you — how does this work in a universal context? If everyone is constantly re-living their lives, making different choices, shouldn’t the universe be too chaotic to exist?

To explain that, we have to posit that the universe, from this perspective, is an ever-changing place, one not bound to our idea of time, but instead an almost living entity, constantly adjusting to those changes made by people (and other entities) re-living their lives, over and over again. “Time” for the universe could be marked by these changes, by the actions made against it, regardless of when or where they occur in our physical perception of “time”, or even in our quantum perception of it, living our lives over and over again. In this way, with the universe marching along to a different drum to our own, there would be stability.

But wouldn’t we know when the universe changed? Our perception at any given time is the universe as how it is, and so we wouldn’t know (with a caveat that I will explain in a moment.) How it was, to us, would just be how it had always been. If a point of reference changes, you can’t judge it against what it replaced. To you, it will have always been how it is now, and will have never been how it was before. You won’t ever know the difference — except…

I imagine there to be two types of “memory” our minds rely upon when constructing our current perspective, the way we see the world at any given moment. While the changes to the universe would be updated and reflected in our “physical” memory, our “quantum” memory, that of our consciousness, wouldn’t be affected. This memory is less about knowledge and more about experience — in particular, events that are traumatic, or re-enforced, or pivotal to our lives. Events we associate with people, places and things we consequently come to strongly love or hate. In short, the essence of us.

It is from this quantum memory that those weak little sparks of intuition appear. When we recall them, if they are not as we believe them to be now, if they do not match what our “physical” memory and senses tell us to be “reality”, we may dismiss them as imagination, or hallucination — and for the sake of our sanity we often do. However, if we are intelligent about it, we may also heed them, speculate upon them, use them to make better choices, if we choose to entertain that they could be drawn from “past” experiences, if they could have come from a “past” truth.

I believe that it is important to our evolution as humans (and often for our safety) that we do.

So that’s my argument, in a nutshell: it’s difficult to explain how some people can be so advanced so early without having a “cheat-sheet” — “genetic memory” seems like a fallacy — and we all have a strong sense of intuition and experience things like deja-vu, so it makes a certain amount of sense that we could be living (and re-living) in some sort of “Groundhog Day” scenario, where hopefully we’re all getting a little bit more savvy at it each time around.

I think I’ll call this theory — this belief — “circularism”.

However, unlike most religions, I’ll close my theory of circularism with a disclaimer: …or, when you die, there could be nothing. So, even if you agree with me that there might be a second (third, fourth…) chance to do it all again, you should still do whatever you can to make the world a better place today.

You never know.