Ring around the rosie,
Pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes
All fall down
Iâve only been listening to Sapolskyâs âBehaveâ while walking Maddy, it makes for some interesting musing and is quite the juxtaposition to this thread.
Itâs a marvelous book and if Darkness got started on it, he might find it interesting.
It transforms the conversation to something more relatable than the weltangst Dark seems fascinated with.
From the inside out, rather than from the top down, which seems to be the western propensity.
Probably out of some sense to correct misinformation. They have that sort of naive view of kids as being pure examples of happiness before all the concepts and hangups of the world came in and mucked us up. Itâs like what I mentioned they said about words being grunts we assign meanings to, that stuff like authenticity is a story that we tell, a concept, and we weave these stories and get stuck in them and suffer (smacks of something like what Buddhists told me).
But to give you a sense of what they think emotions are:
"THAT is the secret. There is no great secret. Humans create emotions through stories and remembering all the time. Thatâs how music movies and stories work! They trigger memories that create emotions. Emotions are exactly as real as they feel. The source is not what matters to the feelings.
The feelings, the emotions have their own value apart from, in addition to, or independent from the source. Then that amazing device just behind our foreheads, the pre-frontal cortex, gets to ascribe meaning to it and start the next cycle by generating even more emotion, this time coloured or even determined by the story we tell.
NOW you are starting to see! Itâs that simple. And it works. And in the middle of looming unemployment, very high levels of uncertainty and fixed expenses I do not control, I can function and be happy. It works. "
Which I doubt is true, because that doesnât explain how the story does it if itâs just words and concepts given meaning by us. No one there can explain to me how it works, they just cite personal experience as proof.
Though looking at his youtube page Iâm beginning to wonder why I ever took him seriously:
Thatâs because you fail to see the importance microtubules play in ALL Eukaryote life and as simpler filaments in Prokaryotes.
MT are a âcommon denominatorâ in all living things and perform a incredible range of functions in every cell of every animal and plant on earthâŚ
What about investigating the role MTs play in every cell in every living thing that gives you pause? Any questions?
I donât think microtubules are going to make Gary look any better.
Lol, had a minor posting error. Carry OnâŚ
I find the best way to use Amazon is to read the 1 and 2 star reviews. Especially for self help. People think they get something out of these because it makes them feel better, even though they are still doing the same bad habits. So, here is a good one
Interesting approach to understanding beliefs, but much repetition and rather pseudo-science
Reviewed in Germany on June 9, 2022
I wouldnât personally recommend reading this book, since it didnât give me the desired effect of understanding and changing my beliefs. I like the approach of creating different âcharactersâ that are responsible for our thinking, however beliefs are generally formed without knowledge throughout our life. The mere awareness of âcharactersâ and switching to a neutral observer perspective is not enough. The reactions and thoughts we have today happen 95% of the time through subconscious emotions that we carry around with us, that originated from childhood experiences and the alike. Hence, it is not enough to solely adress the symptoms/characters. The book was also not a nice read itself, Gary dedicated whole chapters to the exact same messages he tried to project.
It looks like Gary has taken some psychology and maybe some Buddhism and garbled it. He has a clue about it, but canât arrange it into a practical guide.
This guy has a much better, and more entertaining, way of approaching the subject. And there are many interviews and follow-ups where he is challenged and meets the challenges. In this, he talks about advertising, isolation, and other factors that affect how we feel about who we are.
How the Light Gets In: âSolving the Meaning Crisisâ (youtube.com)
I fail to see how that has anything to do with what this is about and sounds more like trying to make your pet theory work.
Sounds like their experience of it is much like the experience I had with trying to get anything out of him.
I do doubt this notion of the âneutral observerâ though, since to be that level of neutral would involve no decision making.
This does sound right though, he has some level of education and notion of these things but badly mangles them and the understanding behind them. I also question whether some of the people he responds to are real or if they exist, since some of it feels too scripted.
I also find it weird that he calls these things unconscious belief systems, yet if they are unconscious then by definition we canât be aware of them so how do you know theyâre causing them?
Then again this is a guy who thinks that the mind creates reality (I posted a video on it) just because our brains add stuff like color, sound, and smell.
You really should study up on how scientific inquiry works. You know we understand a lot about the early universe now, even though we werenât there. We understand tiny things we canât see and forces that arenât visible at all. And, we understand things about the brain.
And that biological data-process causal to emotion is what I am discussing. Not the abstracts.
Well some would take that since we canât reproduce the beginning of the universe then we donât know what caused it, seeming to think science is just about whether we can run tests on something or not.
Though I mean that if something is unconscious then you arenât aware of it, and if you arenât aware or canât be aware of it then how do you know if you found something?
Also that link to that guy wasnât as good as you thought it was. Not only is it from IAI (which is a very unreliable site since they are strictly biased against realism and favor anti-realism) but his talk was putting a lot of questionable interpretations about meaning that didnât real track. It honestly felt like a Jordan Peterson lecture.
Or to give you a more direct example of the type of people you are citing:
Vervaeke has hundreds of other stuff on other sites. He is not a âtypeâ. I can see now, as I suspected before, that you are only good at nay saying. Itâs not much of a talent.
But he does have a type if he is posting on and associated with cites that suggest science doesnât describe reality. Itâs no coincidence heâs posting on an Anti-realist site.
ITâs not really nay-saying, itâs pointing out the obvious. I even showed how he was mistaken in that video. He didnât address the problem of meaning, he projected way too much onto the zombie metaphor to the point where you could have just stuck Jung up there for the same effect, he doesnât understand why people play video games and choose a virtual world, likeâŚit goes on.
It, much like a Peterson lecture, is a showcase on how to talk on and on without actually saying anything.
TLDR: He doesnât address any of the subjects you mentioned. He also hasnât addressed the âwhy botherâ of existence. No one to date really has.
Our mind registers, assesses, interprets - itâs misleading to think that our mind is âaddingâ stuff to our senses. Our mind is simply the inside reflection of your body/brain doing its thing. Same as it is with other biological creatures at every level of complexity.
Have you had a chance to listen to any of Robert Sapolskyâs talks on YouTube?
Seems to me thatâs been addressed for a long time by a great many thinkers, in that basically it boils down to: âLife means as much or as little as you want it to mean.â
What more do you want?
Do you believe in evolution and such?
Or are you trying to find the mind of god?
What do you chose to be present to?
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So in other words what youâre saying is that no one has answered it. âgreat thinkersâ always bail out before they get to the actual meat of the issue. Life doesnât mean and little or as much as you want it to, it is fundamentally meaningless and that line is just avoiding acknowledging that reality. ITâs what humans do, we make meaning out of meaningless stuff.
Also irrelevant.
Also as a side note they referred me to this rather questionable neuroscientist whose work reads more like pseudoscience and leaps in judgement:
You got it. You said something clearly and succinctly. Very nicely done.
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That is a shallow perspective. It is clear that life means a lot to living things.
The struggle for life includes some tales of extraordinary feats of survival.
Evolution is the result of natural selection for superior survival skills. That suggests life is not only meaningful, it is imperative.
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