confusion enough

this post is about solving problems by transforming domains. if this reads confusingly, don’t worry about it – i’ve got two examples. the first is from math!

there’s a famous piece of math called the fourier transform (FT) that is absolutely vital to all communication technologies. we would be utterly hosed without it. here are the barebone basics. the FT is a method by which you can take some signal in time (like, say, a one second clip of your voice) and look at what frequencies are in it. i’m sure you have all seen visualizers or equalizers that do just that: you sing into a machine and a screen shows you what frequencies are in your voice and how loud they are. that’s done with the fourier transform.

one cool thing about the fourier transform (there are tons) is that it is used to easily solve problems that are intractable without it. how? well, it takes time signals and turns them into frequency signals. it changes domains or perspectives. whether you look at a signal in time or in frequency, it is the same signal – you can undo the FT and then you have the signal you started with again. so what do we gain by doing it? this isn’t a mathy word, but the answer is perspective. in the frequency domain, certain facts are obvious that were completely obscured in the time domain. one example is filtering. let’s say you record your voice and there is a high pitched whine in the background. if you look at your signal in time, you’ll see a bunch of squiggles. your voice and the unwanted whine are all on top of one another & there is no way to separate them out. so you use the FT, get to see your signal in the frequency domain and then, kablammo, there is the whine, obvious as a pineapple in purgatory.

if that confused you even more, no worries i have a more human example! i met an italian woman in burma. she’s a psychiatrist (or psychologist?), and has published 10 books about a method of therapy she invented. here’s how it works: the client is asked to come up with a fairy tale. not to think too hard about it, but just let it come. inevitably, the client gets stuck in the story. a hard-to-resolve event has occurred, and it’s not clear what to do about it. further instructions are given: keep the fairy tale in the back of your head over the next few weeks & pay close attention to what’s going on in your life. nine times out of ten, the client stumbles onto a solution to their fairy tale problem, and manages to finish it.

then, the fairy tale is analyzed by the psychiatrist. the basic idea here is jung-inspired. the fairy tale is a mythologized story of the client’s life. the place where they get stuck is a version of their main Obstacle – the one for which they sought out the psychiatrist in the first place. the idea is that the obstacle is simpler to solve in the domain of the fairy tale because of its unconstrained nature – anything goes in the new domain that the client’s life story & self are transformed into. just like in the fourier transform, a signal (the story & the self) is transformed into a different domain (the fairy tale domain) and the problem at hand is solved there. the solution to the fairy tail block is the solution to the real dilemma that it stands for, but it is easier to arrive at in the seemingly fictional universe of the fairy tale than our “real world.” why? because there are no limits. got an evil wizard problem? his dragon eats him! haunted forest? just get your father, the king, to hire 10000 lumberjacks. you get the idea. the full creativity of the mind is let loose because the client isn’t blocking her or himself at all; there are no considerations of practicality or consequence. the fear goes away, leaving behind pure curiosity.

the distilled wisdom is this: domain, language, perspective matter. the way something is framed or spoken of or understood will change what it does to you and what you can do with/to it. this is why it is a great idea to look at various metaphoric, symbolic or narrative systems, and see what each of them can do for you. you don’t have to be stuck in one domain! all are admissable & good in their own way. go out and study: jung, zen, tarot, western philosophy, science, math, religion, art (my favs). all of them are useful & all of them are true. as the principia discordia says:

GP: Is Eris true?
M2: Everything is true.
GP: Even false things?
M2: Even false things are true.
GP: How can that be?
M2: I don’t know man, I didn’t do it.