P: “Hi Nell! It’s a rarity that you call me.”

N: “I wouldn’t normally dream of imposing on you, but I remember you said that you were home this afternoon. Is it okay? Nothing urgent or serious. I just wanted to, you know, …”

P: “Have a cosy talk? I am so much for that. Previously I was tired all the time, and the darker days only exacerbated it. Perhaps due to us talking, I feel more ahead of the game in my mind these days.”

N: “I am writing up notes for the last chapter before the epilogue. The one about our biological organism and how that figures in in a society’s reality.”

P: “Society limits the organism and the organism limits society.”

N: “That chapter, yes. Gosh, you are ready for your tests!”

P: “Anything that bothers you?”

N: “Well… yes! Yes, but it’s rather lofty. I write these notes, as you know. It helps, but I notice a different change too. Notice how I have gotten used to monitoring the reality accent?”

P: “Your notes are not bad. You are getting under the skin of the mentality very well.”

N: “That’s not it. The more I write, the more obviously correct it seems.”

P: “Yes, I really mean it. You are getting better at the whole thing.”

N: “No, dearest, it’s nothing like that. Even if I do the calculations countering for that improvement, it is like the brain is changing my reality. Yeah, that is perhaps what I mean.”

P: “What do you mean, ‘countering for’?”

N: “I know all the words in the book and I know which assumptions about humans, language and phenomenology they require. So it should be like we can always append a qualifier: »assuming that the required laws and heuristics of linguistics and phenomenology holds«. Then that should serve as a reminder that the whole thing could be wrong.

That was how I started, toying often with the idea that the whole thing could be wrong. But now, it’s like I am losing the ability to distance myself from the theory as a theory. Some new level of reality has arrived, and the actual knowledge matters little.”

P: “Oh wait, so… we could say that the ‘realising potency’ of their sociological theory is big. The theory, once internalised, commands a powerful reality accent, which penetrates all other spheres.”

N: “That’s the part where we come to terms with how reality is different from knowledge. I think it bothers me because I still have those initial definitions lingering in my mind. Reality is what cannot be willed away, given its objective nature. Knowledge is the certainty that, etc.

Disregarding that, we cannot ignore the phenomenon of reality as something above and beyond mere knowledge, certainty or realisation that something cannot be willed away.

Reality is a force, a wind in the aether. It is wordless, but words are hoisted sails that provoke the winds.”

P: “I have had that thought before. I attributed it rather to the fact that during learning and socialisation, the landscape, the cognitive landmarks change. We live in a perpetually changing landscape, and soon we can’t figure out where we are. Then we are waiting for the world to catch up, so to speak.”

N: “Or to begin to recognise the new one. B&L spend much time alluding to reality as having an accent; it thrusts an impression on us. Going beyond the sensation of taken-for-grantedness, it is like reality has colour and a mood.

Your learning example shows that reality can change through complete replacement of the cognitive furniture. Different explanations now fill up our mind. And yet, though all this is known, it is not familiar.”

P: “No, not at all. Not like an old house or a park you know really well. It almost has a voice.”

N: “But once the change stops, we begin to develop familiarity. Typification and habitualisation actually replaces knowledge in lieu of familiarity. The latter is also knowledge, but now a sense of reality, or familiarity, has joined up with knowledge. Now we start to experience existential continuity.”

P: “So true. I have somewhat managed to cultivate a new reality, but compared to the best days of my life, it feels meagre and shallow.”

N: “And that ‘it’ that you there talk about - when you put it to words, it always makes the listener connect it with ‘your life’ as a student or something else. You talk about one thing, but your listener notices another, and forever the two get mixed up.

Imagine we could give impressions of reality true names. Then we could avoid cross-contributing descriptions.”

P: “Something like, »I arrived at class yesterday, but Ol’ Familiar Not Ready to Present Yet So We Just Sit Down And Watch The Sky wasn’t there, but I found New Confused had come with me.«?”

N: “Hehe, why not?”

P: “So… are you still feeling undistanced to sociological theory?”

N: “Yes. I will try to invoke the old incarnation of existence that felt like it kept me at a distance. Perhaps I need to complain more and explain less.”

P: “You are almost done writing up notes for the book. Isn’t it better to wrap it up for completeness’s sake?”

N: “Okay. Yes, no reason to panic. They just replaced ‘me’ and Ol’ Familiar will have to come to terms with that. New Familiar must unite with Old Familiar, and then there is certainly no going back.”

P: “There isn’t. I have had to realise that too.”

N: “Talk to you later, okay. I can wrap it up before going to bed. Two chapters left.”

P: “You are doing fine. Are you also reading that Robert Sapolsky book?”

N: “Determined? Yes. Halfway through it. Wonderful entertainment. I must say he is in quite a battle with his fellows out there.

In some ways it feels funny. He spends a good deal of pages explaining how we neurologically and chemically rarely have that degree of self-control we believe we have. Our decisions can be swayed by dozens or even thousands of events if you widen the lens. All neurological action has a past.

I can’t help thinking that psychology and sociology had almost abandoned the topic as a given outcome before neurology even arrived. But of course, behaviourism is almost as old as they are. Seen from the insect level, or from the science level, the human ant is hardly something we’d consider the master of its own fate. It belongs in a fabric of society, culture, neurological development, limbic space and all other sorts of connections. Pull the rug in one end, and the ant is carried along imperceptibly.”

P: “But at no point does it give up that it has a free will of its own and agency.”

N: “No, it doesn’t. The ant makes all sorts of life-changing decisions all the time, but from the level of anthropology, it can all be explained. At least the available options and the likely choice can. Add to that all those political theories, rational actor, frustration based decision theories and whatnot, and the ant’s behaviour is pretty much mapped out.”

P: “Asking the ant to give up its free will and become a slave is clearly oppression. But letting it be a slave to societal impulses is not. In that regard, our sense of free will is merely how we experience aggressive protection of freedom of movement.”

N: “Yes… Well… What a sad tale.”

P: “I agree. What are we to do then? Realise we have no agency, we talk using the latest fashions around us and act within the confines of our own fabrication, this society of ours. We feel hungry, okay, small potatoes. We yearn for meaning… that’s kind of worse.”

N: “Much worse.”

A pause.

P: “Call me some other day, okay? I want you to feel free to call me when you need it, or just to be friends again.”

Nell sighed.

N: “Oh, that felt good hearing you say that. Thank you.”

They said goodbye, and Nell smiled into an empty room. She went to the desk and sat up properly to work a bit.

She sent it and went to bed. That was becoming the usual signal to her brain that speculation could start.

Could society really do anything but silence the limbic voices? B&L talk about the dialectic between body and society, but they provide only examples agreeing with a notion of self-control.

A little later an email arrived.

Patricia was a strange little creature, Nell thought. She felt grateful for the thinly veiled attempt at spending time together in a friendly talk.

Nell observed her own struggle with her biology against all of society. Sure, she could easily modify her plausibility structure by coming out of the closet, but she dared not alter the wonderful pain of her present reality. She was visited upon by murmuring ghosts, and it gave her strength.

And frankly, what a self-defeating way to put it. There was no coming out, only a coming in. Jumping into a predefined role was just the opposite of what she needed. She needed the walls to tumble down.

•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•