Language-Based Reality (Mentis Non-Compos)
Mirror Neurons, Autism, Soul Connections, & the Art of Language, Part One
The first version of this piece (“Skywriters in Hades”) appeared at Reality Sandwich and Pijama Surf in 2011 and was over 15,000 words long. In 2015, a much shorter version (“Raskolnikov and the Peanut”) appeared at Empty Mirror. Initially, I was planning to republish the shorter piece for free subscribers, to provide some free content to readers who may not have seen it before. In the process of getting it ready, however, I found all kinds of threads that were irresistible for me to tug on. It is as if, in 2025, the times (and my own awareness) has caught up with the article, to reveal opportunities for exploration that I hadn’t realized were there when I first wrote it. The result is that it is now expanding into something longer than the 2011 version. As a result, I will be serializing the new essay for paid and unpaid subscribers both (half and half as previously) over the next few weeks. I will also attempt to extend some of the questions being raised here into the online group meetings, if there is sufficient interest. Audio version at the end of the article.
“Don’t scorn the word: Poets, the world is noisy and silent, only God speaks.” —Antonio Machado
(Original art by Mrs Horsley)
Pornography & Shamanic Healing
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
In 1992, or so the story goes, Giacomo Rizzolatti and a team of neuroscientists accidentally discovered mirror neurons while experimenting on monkeys. The monkeys had their brains wired up in order to observe how motor neurons related to hand movements, and when a monkey picked up a peanut, the neurons fired. To the team’s surprise, the same motor neurons also fired when the monkey was watching a lab assistant pick up a peanut. Apparently, to the monkey’s brain, seeing someone grabbing a peanut was a similar experience to grabbing the peanut itself: action and perception were “tightly linked.”1
I don’t know how true this story is—it’s probably an apocryphal way to catch the average person’s attention because the real story of how mirror neurons were discovered (or posited) is, like Stephin Merritt’s book of love, long and boring. I also don’t know how reliable—or desirable—knowledge gained by torturing monkeys is. But the idea of mirror neurons is now firmly established in scientific culture, so we may as well test its utility.
The following is from “Porn and Mirror Neurons” by Jonah Lehrer:
But how does porn work? Why do humans (especially men) get so excited by seeing someone else have sex? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: watching porn triggers an idea (we start thinking about sex), which then triggers a change in our behavior (we become sexually aroused). This is how most of us think about thinking: sensations cause thoughts which cause physical responses. Porn is a quintessential example of how such a thought process might work. But this straightforward answer is probably wrong. Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes us to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television or computer screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed (emphasis added).
Needless to say, this has major implications when it comes to understanding cultural engineering and “psyop cinema” via the application of mimesis; but first up, let’s apply this frame to something more ancient, such as a shamanic healing ritual.
How does shamanic ritual work? Why do humans get healed by seeing someone else perform a ritual? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: watching a ritual triggers an idea (we start thinking about healing), which then triggers a change (we are healed). This is how most of us think about thinking: sensations cause thoughts which cause physical responses. Shamanic ritual is a quintessential example of how such a thought process might work.
But this straightforward answer is probably wrong. Shamanic ritual does not cause us to think about being healed. Rather, shamanic ritual causes us to think we are doing the healing. From the perspective of the brain, the act of healing is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via watching the shaman. The act itself is the healing. In other words, shamanic ritual works by convincing us that we are not watching a shamanic ritual. We think we are the shaman, doing the ritual.
I juxtaposed pornographic sex with shamanic healing to show how this interpretative model can be applied to a broad spectrum of human experience. What I am most interested in applying it to, as a writer, is writing. Specifically, journal writing, which is something anyone can do, and which involves the observation of behavioral patterns.
Journal writing is how I first became fully immersed in a daily practice of writing, and it may be why, even now my journaling days are far behind me, the element of self-observation and self-examination remains central to everything I write.2 Like shamanic ritual (and non-pornographic sex), writing has the potential to be cathartic, and hence self-healing; not only for the writer, but also, potentially, for the reader.
“The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours.” —Philip Dick, Valis3
Writing is a lot more than just marks on a page or pixels on a computer screen. Computer programming and html code have provided a kind of practical confirmation for the anthropological and (postmodernist) philosophical idea that reality—or rather, our subjective experience of it—is a language-based construct. While this is an idea made familiar by authors like Jacques Derrida, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, and Carlos Castaneda, and movies like The Matrix and They Live, it’s not one that’s easy to understand or articulate. It’s also seemingly impossible to test.
We can say a tree is still the same tree without the word “tree.” But, short of suffering from Alzheimer’s, or some other degenerative disorder that completely wipes clean our linguistic program (at which point we wouldn’t be able to report our findings), how can we be sure??
This speaks to autism as a “condition” closely tied to an incapacity, or refusal, to internalize and adopt language.
What would we even be without language? Imagine if, like the inhabitants of Macondo in 100 Years of Solitude, your whole itinerary of words was wiped away, leaving you with no way to label anything in your experience, no way to speak or think in words, at all? What would happen to the identity which you’re used to calling “you”? Would it still exist? If it did, how would you even recognize it?
These are the sorts of thoughts we wouldn’t be able to have if we lost the use of language.
Mentis Over Corpus
As illustrated by the rise of gender pronouns, the idea of existence as language-based went mainstream in the fourteen years since I first wrote this piece. Pronouns and the woke-tyranny of doublethink and newspeak seemed to come, not out of nowhere, but out of political correctness spawned by civil rights, feminism, and sexual liberty movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet during the same period, as critical theory and postmodernism became the dominant academic ideological framework for the new administrative elite, the discovery of DNA (1953) and the idea of genetic coding was also establishing, in a very different way, this same idea: that the building blocks of reality were a kind of language.
Since few people had any direct knowledge of DNA, it remained an abstract hypothesis, until, that is, it was introduced into forensics and became the primary means of securing a conviction for violent crimes. It can hardly be coincidental that the “True Crime” genre, as the surest populist delivery device for DNA science, has become probably the most widely-consumed genre of entertainment in the internet age.
These shows seem to present the hard proof of DNA by delivering hard results (legal convictions); but since we still lack the perceptual instrumentalities to confirm the evidence, we are still putting our blind trust in something we do not understand, and succumbing to a circular loophole of logic. (Since DNA samples are reliable evidence, the convictions are certain; since convictions are secured, the DNA evidence is reliable.)
The same empty loophole can be seen, even more starkly, in the case of a gendered “identity” that has no basis in biology or psychology (both of which are denied a say in it), but only in postmodernist ideology.
Curious to note then, that while these two mindsets mirror and in some ways complement one another, they are really at odds. DNA research affirms the fundamentality of biological reality over ideological conviction, where postmodernism and identity politics reduces biology to a construct of language.
How can these two opposing constructions somehow become twin pillars in a scientistic worldview? The answer is via the brace and bridge of technology, specifically information technology.
With computer programming, the contradiction can be canceled out forever, because the idea of a series of letters giving rise to material reality—image—is something we get to experience every time we boot up our PC. Everybody knows now that code creates images, and images reflect (and can pass for) reality.
So why not the same principle for all of organic matter? Or anyway, since most people don’t get anywhere near to thinking it through this far, who cares, when technology and our own inventiveness can rewrite biology?
“Mind over matter” is no longer a fancy of parapsychology. It is the overriding principle of human progress: both its prime means and ultimate end.
Spellcraft
Once upon a time this idea—and most of all the possibility of applying it—was restricted to the few. Once upon a time, only initiates were privy to the occult knowledge required to activate “junk DNA,” raise the “Kundalini,” transmute lead into gold, and recalibrate consciousness, from human to divine frequencies.
In Gnostic tradition, this self-activation process was symbolically described as moving up the chain of planetary “Archons,” using certain key words of power to get past each Gatekeeper, until freedom was attained. These days, adults who don’t know an archon from their arsehole were shaped from a young age playing video games which require clues and passwords to get past a series of obstacles, or “gatekeepers,” and make it to “the next level.” Texted codes, passwords, paywalls, etc., are now an intrinsic part of our moment-to-moment digital existence.
Without digressing any further into the quasi-science of occultism, it’s easy enough to see how there’s been a progression:
from the tradition of spellcraft once reserved for the elite caste;
to government-sponsored biologists and neuroscientists tinkering with DNA and monkey brains, and Fabian professors permeating academia with postmodernist programs of anti-patriarchal progressivism;
to today, when the oldest and most arcane art is being taught to pre-schoolers by drag queens, and anyone with the time and patience to master computer-programming (or with sufficient desperation to demands puberty blockers or special pronouns) can summon occult forces and shape reality—via the power of words.
All of these various disciplines, demands, and methods have one thing in common: language.
Language is a series of symbols which only become meaningful once their meaning is agreed on and they can be used to communicate. DNA, html code, god-names, and video games are all metaphors, because in a reality that’s interpreted (and hence shaped) via language, everything is metaphor.
In the same way that HTML code only works when it is written for a system that has been built and programmed to recognize, interpret, and translate it, so adopting pronouns only works in a society reconfigured to respect and affirm them, and DNA is only useful as evidence in a system that “honors” DNA as evidence, without any of the legal professionals having the means to test it.
So what are all these things metaphors for?
In simplest terms, they are metaphors for the human psyche, and the process being described is that of individuation; or, to place this within a very different conceptual framework, and since the psyche is the Greek word for soul: salvation.
(Over the Paywall: 90% new material, on Babies, Autists, & Ufos, Why to Write, and How to Write Authentically)