The world is too complex to properly conceive, as are you, so we simplify the world as a place to act rather than to merely perceive. The story is the simplest unit of useful information with the regards to action and perception that you can be offered.
You make a complex model of the world and hold it our mind, and if it matches, you’re good. All is oriented. But evidence of an affair disorients you. You are taken aback and reorient yourself for action. You have a physiological response, marking that person as a threat. This emotional response creates trauma that might go on for years in a complex learning process of understanding and re-orienting yourself. You engage in exploratory work to update your model of reality.
What makes a chair a chair? We speak of its usefulness instead of its appearance. Anything that can be sat on becomes a chair. Monet painted the same hay stacks in different seasons and contexts to show how the same object changes in different contexts. Postmodernism similarly says a text is so complex and the reader’s interpretation is so complex that we can never get to the actual meaning of the text.
Dan Simon made the now infamous video of three people dressed in white and three in black. They run around in circles passing a basketball to each other. You are to count how many times the white team passes the basketball to each other. While this is happening, a man in a gorilla costume comes out, stops in the center of the screen, and walks away. Many people, keeping their eyes on the basketball, never see the gorilla.
You are blinder than you think you are and notice less of the world than you think you do. The center of your vision is high resolution, but the periphery gets fuzzy. How do you decide what to point your eyes at? There are an infinite number of things if your field of perception. You make a partial model of the world on which you’re currently operating, with some goal in mind, and compare that to a model of the world as it is currently unfolding. But your perception of the world as it unfolds is also a model. You don’t see anomalies between them unless they upset your current pursuit. What you value determines what you see. You miss everything else.
The brain circuit we use when we curse is the same in monkeys when they signal there is a predator. We don’t have just one linguistic circuit, as we see in people with Tourette’s syndrome. The circuit for swearing is different than for other circuits of speaking. It’s a simple expression in monkeys—there is a predator, run and hide. With this comes aggression. You computer stops working, so you swear and hit it. Then you try simplistic fixes—check the power, check the outlet, etc. then it gets more complex, or so complex you should take it to a specialist.
People who are depressed or have an anxiety disorder are prone to catastrophize. Every little thing that goes wrong shakes the entire system. You argue with a mate and jump to, “Are relationships worth it at all?” You read something tragic in the news, “Is it worth being alive?” Those high in neuroticism have a disproportionate negative response to every little change, positive or negative, because the whole environment now feels like a threat.
When you get a flat tire, you don’t buy a new car, you find the most useful and simple tool possible to fix it because you have little time and energy. When you argue in a relationship, be as specific as possible in solving your problem or the conversation will become unhinged and you start asking whether you should even be together.
If you’re well socialized enough, you understand how the game works: be polite so people’s emotions aren’t upended. People want to preserve their culture so that everyone plays the game correctly. Culture is a game, not just a set of beliefs. Wolves keep themselves organized in packs by playing wolf games, not by having wolf beliefs.
Some think we have all the facts, but disagree on interpretations. But we don’t have all the facts. We simplify reality with ideologies. Both our perceptions and our opinions are biased. The thing-in-itself is a hypothetical entity because we can never see anything as it is. We see things as tools, asking what we can use them for in relation to our goals.
We can’t see the thing-in-itself because it’s too complex, so we compress things according to our aims. We pack a world in low resolution and hope the word is unpacked in the other person’s mind when we share ideas through words. This is why we use simple words and concepts with children.
Christian fundamentalists and atheistic scientists have the
same problem. Fundamentalists believe that Biblical myths are scientific
truths, like Genesis. Scientists say they are wrong, so dismiss the myths.
People who wrote ancient literature did not think scientifically, neither do
we, and neither do most scientists. We all have confirmation bias, but a
scientist tries to falsify what he wants to be true. Modern scientific thinking
emerged with Bacon and
Science doesn’t tell you what to value. It gives you facts. For atheists, scientific facts replace old Biblical myths, so we should discard them as archaic and useless. Christian fundamentalists try to shoehorn scientific facts into their mythology which doesn’t work, trying to put evolution and Genesis together. They both miss the point of myth.
You don’t just need one way of looking at the world. “What’s the world made of?” and, “How should you conduct yourself while you’re alive?” are questions that can’t be answered by the same approach. They are in two different domains. One is a place of objects, the other of actions.
You have to have a value system. Your emotional health and interactions with others depend on it. Science can’t validate your values, so do you say they don’t matter? Where does that leave you? You’re left with no rational for taking any action or even for living, so you say, why do anything at all if everything is meaningless and we’re all going to die one day? Who cares if children freeze to death in the winter when we’re all gonna be dead in a million years? This is the wrong frame of reference. The parameters are set too far. We need to narrow them, then the reasons become clear why we should help starving children.
Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances . . .” Life is a like a drama. We want a good guy and a bad guy. We want to see good and bad both in and between characters. We are compelled because we want to learn what a good and bad person is. Next to music, humans universally like stories. Are they a waste of time? No, a story is a context in which we behave.
Sometimes people’s lives become so complex that they would rather be dead, especially if life can no longer be managed from taking too many hits at once. People come to therapy because life is too complicated and they start to break down and need help being put back together again.
There are five big temperaments: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Liberals are high in openness and low on conscientiousness, conservatives are the opposite. Some people are so open they’re completely disorganized and they jump from one thing to another. They are interesting to talk to, but can’t get their lives together because they are interested in absolutely everything and their attention flitters from one thing to the next. They are very intelligent, always thinking outside of the box. If they are low in conscientiousness, they see no utility in order.
Orderly people want everything in its separate place and properly structured. They like to have boxes next to boxes on shelves with everything labeled, being where it belongs. Conscientious people are high in disgust sensitivity, which happens when things that shouldn’t be touching touch. It’s a boundary violation. How close or distant should we be in society? Some tend to only enjoy being with people who are like them and have a low tolerance for people different than them. Those high in openness say to open the borders, those high in conscientious say to build a wall as high as possible.
In your house, you allow those you can tolerate the best and leave the rest out. God knows what they will do. Discrimination is a good thing, especially when picking sexual partners. Almost everyone is racially prejudiced when it comes to choosing sexual partners. We discriminate by age, physical attractiveness, health, strength, wealth, and education. We have an understanding: “You get to say no to me if I get to say no to you.” It’s fair.
Falling in love is the ultimate exclusionary act—you’re special and everyone else is not. In Huxley’s Brave New World everyone belongs to everyone else. There is no discrimination. This doesn’t work.
The internet allows you more information and sensory experience in one day than anyone without the internet has had in a lifetime.
Your mind and emotions are embedded in your body. Your brain is not limited to your head, but distributed through your whole body via the nervous system. You don’t have a brain in a body just like you don’t have a soul in body. The soul/body dichotomy has become the brain/body dichotomy and even the mind/body dichotomy. This is a holdover of the Enlightenment idea that the soul should never be contaminated by the body and reason should never be contaminated by emotion, so emotion must be repressed, inhibited, or controlled.
Thinking does not create an objective representation of the world, but conceptualizes the world so we can practice how to be in it. We want to successfully manifest what needs to be done to survive and reproduce in the world.
Your brain has frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes as well as a motor cortex, sensory cortex, and medulla oblongata, each of which have specialized functions. Your prefrontal cortex allows you to create avatars and imagine how they will behave in the world.
Intelligence and conscientiousness have nothing to do with each other. Abstraction is separating thinking from action. You have to be able to think before you do, or you are thought of as impulsive. The reason you think is so you can act better.
Memory is not an accurate or objective representation of events, but who cares? Most of your life is not worth remembering. You mine your experience for information you can bring into the future.
PTSD happens from betrayal, abandonment, and loss, so your mind forces you to keep going over it until you retool your perceptions to avoid going through it again. We often think we did something wrong so we should change something. The trauma causes you to think everything you did must be wrong. Do a situational analysis to extract out information from your past to know how to behave in the future. This is the pragmatic element of thought.
There is no such thing as a uniform set of emotions or motivations. Different parts of the brain contribute to motivations and emotions, which when defined, are simplifications. We don’t know exactly how to define them.
Motivations set goals, while emotions track progress toward goals. Motivation tells you what to aim at, then as you act toward your goal, you have positive emotions. Anything that gets in your way produces negative emotions.
What do you do when you come up against a problem so big it is better to give up and do something else altogether? You don’t want to be stuck in counter-productive persistence.
Motivation is not a goal, it’s not a drive, and it’s not a behavior. It’s a personality—it has a viewpoint, thoughts, perceptions, and action tendencies. You see this in addiction. Alcoholics lie all the time, creating rationalizations, using words as tools to get what they want. Once they get the drug, they reinforce their lies, getting better at it to keep meeting their goals.
Anxiety makes you stop, pain makes you flee. These are indicators toward action. You don’t want to go anywhere where the hypothalamus is activated, which helps us avoid places where we would need to panic or escape.
A frame makes everything else irrelevant. It keeps you moving in the direction you are moving. Your attention is divided between: does it help me, get in my way, or is it irrelevant? Hallucinogens make everything relevant. The whole world comes alive and everything is interesting, but you can’t be that scattered. PTSD does the same, causing you to lose focus by making you hyper vigilant to everything. You want to be in a place where you can focus your attention and act in line with your goals.
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