User:John Bessa

"Make friends with a few animals." Albert Einstein [[File:Mystery the cat.JPG|right|thumb| I adopted a cat who was still much of a kitten in many respects and very sweet when we found him, but was homeless and had to survive his first winter in the nearby forest by hunting. He is incredibly affectionate, makes himself loved, and wherever he goes, he often gets handouts from my neighbors. When this cat, now named Mystery, and I were first getting to know each other, he showed up with a bird he had just caught. I went to get my camera to document the even, but when I got back there was absolutely nothing was left of the bird except claws and a few feathers. And then when we were playing a little later he sank his teeth and claws into my hand, and she would have torn it apart if I let him. As a hunter, his "sweet" nature had given way to his predatory nature, and while we were playing, his neural mapping--or perhaps "motor memory"--kept his hunter nature alive even as we played affectionately.

One night he caught a mouse, then another the next night another, then another... until I figured out it was re-catching the same mouse! He had changed his hunting style and become a catch-and-release cat, showing concern for the life of the mouse: empathy. Finally the mouse stopped visiting.]]

 Please read: Understanding Bessa

Final contributions

Empathy in education and therapy: My learning and experiences (2012)
Layered abstraction ideas in the human mind:

"network layering helps me conceive of how every emotional communication event "hits" on every level. In the education of children, for instance, happy emotions "hit" their surrounding world through positively constructive activities because they spring forth from healthy neurons" Empathy in education and therapy: My learning and experiences Written in 2012, this became hidden from the web because of permission changes made to Google docs, and no one requested read permission. It has classic original statements. It was hurriedly written as I was entering my psychology masters program because I wanted to preserve my original, observational ideas before they would be replaced with academic information. I recently edited it considerably to make it more readable, and was reintroduced to some ideas I had forgotten--such as Vygotsky's constructivism. Chances are good that I will reduce it further to purely-original thought as it has many purely-original and highly-mature ideas.

Working on tube amps (HiFi project)
Necessity has forced an attempt to understand tube amps; by well-loved Sherwood amp is dying, and has been replaced by a Yamaha Natural amp, that, despite its cost, sounds like a tin can at the end of a string in comparison, despite its initial cost. This Music link sounds labored and weak on the computer, but is one of the best performances played from an LP by a a tube amp from the period it was recorded.

ArtSci
As a subset of this I am attempting to introduce the crossover between art and science that is our everyday reality, and is interdisciplinary enough to displace the 2500 year-old didactic "academy" system (that also defined the aspects of Western Civilization that are killing it right now). Tubes are appropriate because their functionality requires tremendous imagination and the primary use of it is to bring the old school jazz players back to life!

Presently working on my masters in counseling psychology

 * My focus is "empathy," or emotional communication.


 * I finally squeezed some good (non-didactic) material from my counseling program that focuses on the "system of self" which includes well-known self-esteem, lesser-known self-efficacy, and unheard of self-agency; agency is success in reaching goals. It relates to the empathy model by have a parallel group model where "group" easily substitutes "self" and helps dislodge egotism to create the emotional connection that manifests as responsibility (and not the egotists' obligation).
 * wiki Self- and Group-Dynamics in Mutual Support Recovery shows the system of self in the group context of substance recovery. I also attempt to dislodge the ancient APA style of writing by showing how the same concepts can be structured using wikistyle in ways that create functional models that can go to object oriented programming.
 * In with the "system of self" is Carl Roger's 19 proposal personality model that has the human, or organism, evolving through interrelation as early growth. This pragmatist and phenomenological map (going back to David Hume in the 1700s) led to the person-centered, or client-driven, approach to therapy, which has been absorbed by the mainstream as the therapeutic alliance.
 * My goal is more functional than "touchy-feely" (which is important) because I believe that we can make a functional model of the emotion, which, if you don't know, is what most people define as psychology. (So perhaps psychology needs a new name.)


 * I am attempting to summarize my counseling learning (master's degree) as the Wv article Counseling. The task is becoming exceedingly complex, as this counseling psychology program throws at the student a variety of high-level psychology and psychiatry courses without providing an actual counseling framework.  I am developing a constructivist framework to define counseling that can be recursively applied to the underlying material so that it can be applied in the context of real-life counseling.


 * Articles developed from the course are being stored here in anticipation of aggregation into the Counseling article.


 * Neuropsychology: I left off my empathy learning with a comparison of reason and sensibility, where reason has its roots in calculation (from the Romans), and sense is much older, often meaning seeking or pathway in the various pre-Indo-European descendants.


 * My empathy experience started with a suggestion from my mentor/professor that I read de Waal's work on empathy in higher animals, specifically elephants. The underlying neurology of empathy is the "connecting" type of neuron: mirror and spindle cells.  These are "bipolar" with long dendrites that, presumably, connect parts of the brain.  As it happens, the neurons that connected sensory receptors with parts of the brain are also "bipolar," and I assume that they have similar functions in the brain, or effects on thought!


 * It may be that "lower-level" sensing neurons are part of the "animal" responsibility that creates the offspring raising responsibilities that we see in all mammals, birds, and many reptiles. If so, we can easily explain empathy in animals.  I, well, sense that this may be a good place to look for evidence to further support empathy concepts.


 * And perhaps even more interesting is a "layering" approach to the evolutions of both language and neurology. The two are on different time scales (by many factors), but, still, there is sophisticated communication in animals, such as songbirds use, where birds evolved along different path than we did.


 * "Sense" derives from menos, according to the PEI translator. Ironically the Romans used menos to mean "minus," a mathematical term, such as "rational" is. "Rational," in my view, describes the opposite aspect of thought, or its "flip side," deriving from Latin ratio: analysis.


 * A down-side to neurological research is that sensing technology is not able to measure conscious thought, and neurological electrical measurements may never be "granular" enough to detect morality. (Notice how I avoided using the word "sensitive" to describe sensing equipment.)

Wikipedia threats show paranoia as the basis of hate
''There is apparently an attempt to improve the WP--or better protect the problem, whichever. So when they stroll over here, this is where they should look for my data:''
 * As the World's  most substantial wiki, and its largest public website, the Wikipedia's many contributions may change the World.  Working on the Wikipedia comes with a price as we all know; what passes for governance are in reality extreme levels of stalking and harassment that would never be tolerated in real life.  My latest unexpected and undeserved conflict there gave me invaluable documented evidence of the idea of paranoia as the source of hate, where fear is purposely created for the purposes of conflict, which in this case is political, and highly paranoid.  Shortly after this learning experience, I found an opportunity to apply the learning directly to the much higher level of international conflict (see bullets below).


 * An exceedingly important social science breakthrough, yes, but also scary; this harassment is apparently what genocide is made of, and it actually appears to be promoted in our giant sister site. The Wikipedia has in its operational structure the basis of hate, and there seems to be no facility within the Wikimedia to control it, or even understand it!  Months later, I am still pursued across the Wikipedia with blanket deletion by the author of the specific hate documentation that I am using.  I want to stop him, and I believe I can, but then I would lose what I am calling "the World's only hate lab." (supporting notes)


 * I want to approach the Wikiversity's present issues in the context of understanding these types of problems on the Wikipedia so that we can separate ourselves from them to prevent us from being afflicted with the Wikipedia's internal tendency for conflict, which affects it like a sickness.


 * I will introduce this text into the Colloquium, but I am editing it as a scratch page for the time being: Harmonizing the Wikiversity, and I will propose a policy page, Criteria for Harmonizing.  We need to learn what the Wikimedia's relationship is with the level of antipathy, and what historical factors may be influencing the Wikipedia, possibly from the very beginnings of Western Civilization.  How can we prevent this specific source of hate from hurting us as a web community, and how we can preven its influence from making us hurt ourselves and the Wikiversity from within,  We can also disseminate this learning in ways that will likewise prevent hate World-wide, allowing us to make a significant contribution to  Humanity.


 * Research in to the meanings of the two components of thought, sensibility and rationality (article), ultimately led to the classics: the basis of Western Civilization as developed by Socratese, Plato, and Aristotle. Nowhere in these classics is "sensibility."  We find the familiar debate between Plato and Aristotle, giving us modern components such as the Scientific Method and contextual justice (which in reality is rare), but we find almost none of the openness that characterizes modern society, and especially the modern Information Society.  Aristotle may not have not have been the man we have been led to believe, but was in fact actually  anti-humanist and racially biased, and hence incapable of openness and natural morality.


 * Nearly simultaneously, I found the above-mentioned examples of hate in its creation process as a Paranoia-hate model. Paranoia, it seems, is at the basis of hate, and is created by people who may not be hateful or fearful themselves, but are using manufactured fear to manipulate others to hate.  Like much psychology, this idea can be applied internationally to mitigate potentially genocidal conflict.


 * These areas of learning are bringing my larger writing to a locus that so that it can show historical relationships between psychology and society's many missteps.

Photography

 * JohnBessa.info
 * An easy way for people to find my photography


 * Rainbow Gathering pictorial of portraits and weddings headlined on OpEdNews.com
 * The Rainbow Gathering was founded in the mid-70s by soldiers returning from Vietnam and their families to heal the traumatic stress of that war. It meets every year, 10,000 strong, and each is greeted with a loud "welcome home!"


 * American Contaigon: Photos and thoughts on my return from Canada
 * It is difficult for a native American to visit another nation and not sense that there is something desperately wrong with the United States.


 * Empathy and the photographer's finger
 * During what I call the "Black" period, from 1964 when Blacks finally got full citizenship in the US, up to the mid 70s. Photojournalism also blossomed, perhaps for the last time.  I don't think a bad photograph was taken during that period, and among the best were sports photographs.  Blacks dominated sports during that period, with Muhammad Ali leading the way -- as a photo subject!  I think the electronically-released shutter ruined that period.  People like to blame digital, but I think you need a mechanical shutter to coordinate the timing necessary to capture the moment-- like a piano stroke.

Education and Therapy

 * Empathy Model
 * An extension of my empathy paper, Spiritual Darwinism and a product of the work of the empathy work group on Care2.com, it attempts to create a map for Human success in terms of healthy (or failed) emotional communication.


 * Empathy, or Spiritual Darwinism
 * The recent discoveries of specific emotional communication and conceptualization neurons reinforce Darwin's idea that empathy and morality descend from "natural affection" found in animals. This website attempts to convince readers that empathy comes naturally at birth, is manifested everywhere, and that humanity is historically connected to its surrounding environments.


 * Empathy experiences in education and therapy
 * My learning and work experiences framed in unrealistic optimism; in reality, institutions tend to be anti-empathic irrespective of how they are presented by their managers.


 * Teaching about hurricanes
 * A pedagogy developed for traumatized students in hurricane-prone areas, it combines project-based Science learning with United Nations strategies for community-based trauma recovery.


 * Learning to learn
 * Modern knowledge construction approaches can help children organize information in disciplined and collaborative ways that give them the confidence to overcome cognitive difficulties and become successful.


 * Middle_School_Science
 * Combines project-based Science learning with the didactic requirements found in "normalized" school systems here on the Wikiversity.

Information Society
The soft side of Internet technology


 * A New Model for the Internet that supports contextual learning and action
 * Web communities built from my experiences as a moderator, with the development of an online Research Action model


 * Wikiology
 * The Wikipedia attempts to be an encyclopedia utilizing the wiki format in ways that deny the natural knowledge construction power of wikis. The Wikivesity should go the opposite direction; rather than attempting to emulate a school as a website, it should enable its natural tendency to construct knowledge bringing education to levels far beyond the traditional schooling.

Politics, Economics, and Change

 * Developing an artists' production environment in Torrington, Connecticut
 * Artists thrive on emotional communication, the basis of collaboration, yet tend to work in isolation. This model revives the guild guaranteeing local art's relevance to the community, and a place in the World.


 * Capital Structure cheat sheet
 * This writing hopes to provide inspiration and direction for economic change. It integrates with the  Empathy Model and will be fully connected to it with critical writing describing the roots of Western Civilization, what I call Neoism, and with writing in the Empathy Model that will show the Capital's uses of mental illness for control, and the deliberate creation of paranoia to precipitate hate and genocide.


 * Capital Structure was originally intended as a prelude for the Art Production Environment that, unfortunately, may take many years to develop into a real production space. Now Capital Structure serves as a societal component in the  layered model  to connect society to humanity as I describe it in the Empathy Model.


 * The empathy model is highly optimistic, and shows humanity having a highly empathic majority that guides those without empathy to find niches that can make them important, but don't exceed their social capabilities. Unfortunately this the reality for a minority of regions; more often the empathically defective minority uses cruelty and domination and has control.  Capital Structure provides the societal layer for this unfortunate downside of humanity.


 * The layered model helps bring together neurological, social, and soceital components together as an adaptation of the abstracted technological concept of the network stack. As with network communications, the layered model shows how seemingly unrelated events occur simultaneously to create the full effect of organismic experience.  The connection from Capital Structure to the Empathy Model will be Neoism, a broader term for the initiating modernism of oligarchies.  The connection from the Empathy Model will be the relationship/connection between paranoia and hate.


 * Organismic Fate
 * Attempts to discuss the relationship of natural science and religion with respect to the purpose of life.


 * Rattlesnake Rebellion
 * This document discusses about the initial American rebellions, Shays and Whiskey, as if they can still succeed, or perhaps did succeed. I developed the plan a few years ago, but the "what if" is not completed, especially economics, which may become increasingly relevant as the new American president works in opposition to the desires of nearly all the people with respect to war and the eco. Recent notes


 * Mental Diversity: Finding the demographic "sweet spot"


 * What people need as much as anything is each other; compassion is directly related to our biological systems and community also interrelates. Size is an issue: small towns are supportive but discourage mental diversity; big cities support social critical mass, but can isolate and crush the spirit.  What is the happy median, or the "sweet spot?"  About 300,000.


 * Insider relationship between Obama and Soros
 * I was optimistic about the nation and the economy when philanthropist/trader Soros helped elect Obama, the nation's first Black president. But the two may have committed one of the biggest insider swindles in history as Obama reversed his socialist-sounding campaign promises, bailed out the failed, and seemingly corrupt, banks while keeping trader Soros as a close adviser. Soros very likely had advanced information from the president guiding his market "picks."

Small but significant contributions to the Wikipedia and Wictionary

 * Wiktionary, Rationality as calculating thought, as opposed to sensibility, which includes observation, meditation, and communication
 * A component of my latest hurdle, I began to research the meaning of "rational" and found it to be derived from "calculating thought," which is completely different in lineage from "sensible thought." Rational thought, based on the Latin ratio, or calculation, is exceedingly new in comparison to the idea of sense, which derives from the Pre-Indo-European (PIE) word for learning and searching.  The two provide for the basis of modern thought as understanding and analysis, but it is easy to show through modernist language use that rationality has replaced sensibility--what Daniel Goleman calls "pure intelligence."


 * Limited usefulness of Dawkin's meme
 * Dawkin's meme is useful for describing modern containers such as movies and MP3s, but it may be limited because of Dawkin's own limitations.


 * Soft Modularity
 * Neural modules must be on a high level as neural constructs rather than neurons: virtual machines. They are constructed as maps, and they are transportable through neuroplasticity, which is interpersonal mapping. A soft model can wash away conflicts creating unified model that brings together neuroplasticity to modularity.


 * Guilds
 * Guilds may have been human society's most important evolution, as they joined groups of people to create collaborative production environments, but they have disappeared in the face of Capital. Worse, many Wikipedians write that guilds were repressive, controlling, and prevented progress. I attempt to convince that this is wrong, as the guild model provides inspiration for the  art production environment.


 * Emma Goldman discussion
 * Thoughts about anarchism in the context of my observations of the Lower East Side of New York City two decades ago in relation to my recent reading of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid in the contexts of empathy and Darwinism.


 * Neoism, the ultimate anti-art
 * I coined the term in my Capital Structure cheat sheet to describe the very beginnings of modernism to mean the beginning of civilization. In the West this would mean Plato's Republic to most, and it would be bias to say that there weren't similar initiation points for, say, Eastern or Indian civilization.


 * I discovered the anti-art form, which caught me by surprise and deepened my understanding of post-modernism by many factors. In fact, I had thought I had been an expert!  The evolution of Neoism, the anti-art form, crosses over with the modernism-postmodernism topic, which I am framing as Neoism.  I am still not a Neoist expert, and since I want to start from the beginning (which would be the work of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle), here I simply try to provide a framework for several excellent sources.  To Neoism's credit, it was highly predictive of much of the modern Information Society: its "plagiarism" is exactly the same Internet sharing (which is still called plagiarism and worse), and its mail-art predicts the collaborative matrices of the Internet through email, and now wikis.


 * Aristotle: Ethnocentric or racist?
 * Aristotle is given credit for introducing "openness" to Plato's structures: the observation components of the Scientific Model, the contextual approach of modern justice (which is virtually ignored), and Eudaimonia, which in Empathic terms, means healing by learning.


 * These are very important components of modern society, maing Aristotle important. But there is a problem; Aristotle also promoted the killing of Persians as objects, meaning he redefined humans as objects, which is the purest of bias  He also appears to have mentored Alexander the Great to invade much of the rest of the World as it was known to Athens, a move the Athenians regretted.  My hypothesis is that the same person could not have promoted both "healing as learning" and redefined "humans as objects."  The first is pure health, the latter is pure hate.  My belief is that two or more people are wrapped into the person we think of as Aristotle, and there is material supporting a "post-Aristotle."  I also wonder aloud, however, that could Aristotle simply have taken others' material as his own, a common strategy I have seen used by obsessives and narcissists.

Technology

 * Thinman.Com
 * Data-centric and anti-application model that proposes a VM open to the Internet for both data and functionality built on top of L4. Its proof of concept was in the Perl language using Perl's CPAN for inspiration a decade ago(!)


 * Empathic Technology
 * A people-relevant future for technology


 * Natural Life of a Networked Machine
 * The human nature of the Open Systems development era in New York City (and environs) during the tech heyday, and its seemingly deliberate destruction by Wall Street Capital


 * Open Systems overview
 * My information technology career written as a syllabus
 * Operating Systems
 * Software Systems
 * Languages
 * Server types
 * Systems development
 * Administration

OpEdNews and Care2.com

 * OpEdNews Articles
 * It's news site that consistently publishes my photojournalism as headline articles, and provides me with a soapbox for my economic and political ideas.


 * Writing on Care2.com
 * Care2.com hosts activist groups and for a while, at least, created a healthy environment for an online activist community able to affect change. I created and moderated two significant groups: Katrina Hurricane and Flood support group, and Empathy Action.


 * The Katrina group was able to affect real-time change for those suffering from the disaster. It connected those actually on the ground in New Orleans with Congress through Indiana's Evan Bayh.  The group's experience was documented in a degree paper written from direct experiences and real-time research that paints a significantly different picture than other writing on the topic does.


 * Empathy Action came about to help me with my thesis, Spiritual Darwinism, and then grew considerably to debate the issues surrounding empathy as it relates to the discoveries of mirror and spindle neurons.

Soldier Protection
We pray for their safety in church, so I felt I might was well create design criteria for their protection in combat. After seeing these design criterion, you might wonder what I am planning for ground-support aircraft design.


 * Form Car
 * This design criteria attempts to combine twin benefits from its bottom strengthened design criteria: explosion proofing and amphibious-ness.


 * Load bearing body armor
 * The load-bearing component of a military pack system has to be body armor. Weapons, water, ammo, and short rations need to clip to that, and the load bearing body armor components need to conform closely to the body, like an exoskeleton, to properly distribute the weight. Superiors will weigh down troops far beyond what is reasonable; that cannot be changed.  The big packs are painful to carry and make soldiers vulnerable.  Load bearing body armor, or LBBA, attempts combine body armor with pack equipment, and then layer it so that troops can quickly unload unnecessary weight, yet remain ideally protected and prepared to defend themselves.

Annotated Bibliographies
Mediated Citations


 * An idea that categorizes extended quotes that are used as citations from the works of significant authors. They are cited indirectly through a "mediation" page that invites critical inquiry into the meanings of the quotes, and perhaps the emergence of newer meanings that have evolved since the quotes were initially authored.


 * It extends the idea of annotated bibliographies by inviting discussion. My intention is to move these annotated bibliographies with the hope that others will add quotes to the authors' "namespaces," or extend my comments.


 * Under author name is the quote (and where the text is found) followed by comments on the possible meaning of the quote. Each of these meanings then would presumably link upwards to some writing that references the quotes.


 * Japan, From Will Durant's Our Oriental Heritage


 * The Life-Giving Sword by Yagyu Munenori


 * Carl Rogers on Personal Power


 * Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford


 * The Information Society by Christoper May


 * Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman


 * The Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow


 * Prisoners of Hate by Aaron Beck


 * Carl Rogers: Dialogues with BF Skinner


 * On Becoming a Person


 * Cognitive Therapy by Aaron Beck


 * Politics and Innocence: A Humanistic Debate by Carl Rogers


 * The Carl Rogers Reader


 * B. F. Skinner by Daniel W. Bjork


 * The Control Revolution by Andrew L. Shapiro

Other writing
Other artciles that I will integrate as they become relevant