Thursday, August 28, 2008

Insecurity in the world and self

All mental experiences come from prior physical experiences. All genetics are the passing on of physical experiences that people had before we existed. These give us the reactions we naturally intend to go toward and away from considering what feels good and bad physically or emotionally. Mental choices can't come from nothing and even mental ideas are physical reactions in the brain to external events. The historicity of self dictates that as emotional creatures we will act out things based on prior experiences that felt good or bad without even without knowing we're doing so in most cases. When one argues they have free will by choosing to raise their arm you'll find that the choice to do so wasn't really free, but a reaction to something in the external world. If we trace back the willing to raise the arm, we find the actions in the brain were inspired to react to something outside the body before choosing to move the body from the inside, which is also physical in the brain. That something prior to the choice to move the arm came from someone challenging the idea of the free will to do so, meaning someone in your external world challenged an idea that caused an emotional reaction in your brain and then your arm. The act can even be delayed such as being challenged by someone early in the day, then doing the action later to try and prove your free will to yourself is still a reaction what someone said outside of you earlier. The choice of the person challenging who is external to the person raising their arm came up with this challenge from something external to them, which was likely reading a book or someone challenging them in person, and you'll see this is actually physical external activities encouraging internal mental actions and reactions that we aren't even aware of due to causality of prior events. Where did the first challenge begin? Most likely it started in nature and the mutation of ideas by viewing it was eventually decoded as such an idea as free will, because we become conscious enough to view our reactions and consider them our own.


When we react to someone to try and prove what we think, it's because we care about what they think. We care about what people think because we have beliefs created from prior experiences with other people we care about plus care about ourselves, and do we choose who we care about or does it just happen through interactions? We don't choose who we care about, or the beliefs and ideas we care about, and this caring about people and ideas is what drives our wills to do things because we care what people think of certain actions we do tied to those things we aren't even conscious of most of the time. If someone chooses to put their hand on a hot stove and hold it there calling it free will because they're choosing more pain than pleasure, the real reason is because of external incentive and causality of the event. The person who put their hand on the stove either has a gun to their head, is offered money to do it, is given pride when dared by friends to be cool, or it can be as simple as they are emotionally tied to the belief of their free will to do so and by reacting to the challenge of the capability they can have pride in their belief, but this is still a reaction and not producing of a will from nothing. It's about caring what people think and we think, and since we don't choose who we care about or what ideas we care about we react to prove what we care about outside of free will. We don't choose what ideas we care about even though we think we do, because what we really do is say what we are good at is good and bad at is bad, and the people we care about are good so we care about the things they care about. So the "free choice" to burn one's self is really a reaction to others actions of challenging them to prove something and not a choice of free will.

Even our genes which are a series of emotional actions and reactions that seem to come from nothing came from a physical history of something acting in the world. A child acts as they do because their emotions naturally tell them to laugh or cry when certain things happen in their environment and their genes react. The only reason we don't act like children is because as the environments shaped us they taught us what behavior is acceptable and unacceptable. We're still as emotional as we always were; we just learned that expressing certain emotions, certain ways, in certain places, will bring more pleasure than pain in our environments. Why did the Christians let themselves be persecuted so long? It's because they believed there was a greater reward in heaven and they are emotionally tied to this idea and their friends who share it. If someone acted in a way that naturally felt bad to prove free will, once again I'd make the same argument, which is they are acting in a way that would be awkward to prove a point that was driven by external physical circumstances to gain more pride in something they care about than the pain of that particular action. They seem freely willing in their actions, but really did so as a reaction to the environment, because we really are emotional creatures seeking gratification and validation for the actions we make due to genes and due to physical reactions we learned from past experiences in our personal lives tied to beliefs, friends, and values.

This brings me to the insecurity of self and insecurity in the world. Although they are different concepts they are closely linked so when someone says they aren't an insecure person this is actually relative only to environment related to past similar or different environments (people, places, and things). It's the things and people we are most familiar with that we are most comfortable with and this is where we have the most security. Everyone is insecure insofar as they are in an unfamiliar task or interaction with a person they don't know well. Friends and family are people we're very familiar with, so we are the most secure with them. If we grow up in environments that had stable friends and family we're more likely to be naturally secure the more places we go for this reason, but that doesn't mean we can't have insecurity in the world, which does create insecurity of self. The first time we all went to school as kids we were very insecure because we were unfamiliar with the environment. As the year went on we became more secure with the environment realizing certain norms constantly take place in a particular manner and we make friends we become familiar with. The next year after a whole summer away from school we feel a little nervous again, and this pattern goes on all through life, but we get more and more secure with school in general because it became something we learned to always be somewhat familiar with. The insecurity of self can come about if we were always unpopular and picked in school, so no matter what school we go to for college we are always more shy and less talkative. This makes us more insecure in the world of school, but it doesn't mean we can't be more secure other places in life. The more environments we learn to be insecure in the more we have an insecurity of self over all. Since there will always be new environments we'll always be faced with the insecurity of self on some level. The same goes for people who have bad relationships over and over develop an idea of what a relationship should be like by claiming all things that made them insecure must be bad and all things that remain secure must be good unless a new person can prove old things wrong in our life, there by changing our interactions in the relationship as well and our belief of relationships.

Insecurity in the self exists on a spectrum due to relative insecurity in the world we found through prior experiences. If we always fell off a bike we'd never want to ride one again eventually. It's because we fall less than don't fall that we keep riding, and as long as the accumulation of good feelings override the bad ones we continue in a direction. What looks like free will then in a sense is more driven by utilitarian like ethics beneath the surface of subconscious action then by what we think is being freely willed. The past and the present dictate the future for us and the conscious mind is really just watching ourselves in action and not controlling the actions. Free will is the illusion of thinking we're causing an action, but the will is really due to prior physicality's we are most likely not aware of.

I'll express this further in some neuropsychology studies done by Patricia Churchland that show how ingrained our habits really are. Choices are made in the lateral intra-parietal cortex of the brain, which is influenced by the middle temporal area. It also gets information from sub-cortical structures that inform it of the goal. In a study where monkeys were asked to push a button showing the direction dots were moving on a screen, the action of pushing the button came seconds after the cells in this part of the brain started acting. The brain thinks before we are conscious of it, and the reason the monkey was willing to act is because if they answered correct they were given a food reward. Just by looking at a single cell it could be seen which decision the monkey had made before it even acted. LIP cells interpret the external environment and then react the way a statistician does by evaluating evidence and making a decision. This shows our rationality is based on probability and we make decision when we think we have enough evidence to act on something. Further evidence could possibly prove otherwise but the mind doesn't care to accumulate evidence on this level before acting. This is because our time in life is finite and we have limited time to fight or flight in our situations.

Brains are causal machines because neurons behave in causal manners where one neuron works on another and so on. A particular order of sequences must take place in order to exercise our wills. We consider, choose, intend, then act in order to will, but what makes us consider is caused by things around us based on what we know from prior interactions. The four things I listed before we will something are what we are conscious of, but that doesn't mean we're controlling them even if we feel we are. As Hume said we have beliefs, desires, reasons, and motives, and these all come from past experiences. We'd have to have such immense computational power to understand all probabilities that we can't possibly predict all out comes of the future so how can we will our life in specific directions? We can only base what we are familiar with to hope it sends us in a general direction. In another study people were given a clock to watch and push a button noting the time on the clock. Once again electrodes were placed on the scalp showing that people feel the urge to act in their mind quite some time prior to when they actually push the button. The point is that we already have different motor responses, skills, and habits, we developed prior. Part of the motor structure's job is to send signals to other structures that they are making a report of what is happening and we interpret that. There's a temporal contiguity between the cause in our minds and the actions we perform. It is unconscious elements that play a more powerful role in actions than anything conscious.

In another study by a psychologist in the Netherlands (I can't pronounce his name) he has number of cars that differ on four features in one experiment. The optimal car with the most features is pretty obvious. There's another experiment with cars that have twelve different features. These are two different experiments with two groups on each experiment. In the first experiment one group gets to look at the four aspects and consciously choose right away which car they want. The second group is distracted with a task for ten minutes before getting to choose. The first group does better. In the experiment with twelve features the same thing is done and oddly those who were distracted for ten minutes with a task picked the more optimal car than those who had time to consciously think about it. In other words we can make better decisions consciously when what we're focusing on is very simple, but we're more likely to act in our favor with the subconscious power when the variables and probabilities get to choose for us.

In another experiment Churchland shows the difference between intention and choice. What she does is give people a handful of pictures of children to choose from, takes the pictures, turns the pictures around in her own hand, and then gives them a different one than they chose. In 90% of cases people didn't notice the difference between what they chose and what they didn't. When asked why they chose the one they didn't they would tell a story about how this one is prettier and I like their hair and so on. They lied to themselves about what they didn't even choose. The only way we can possibly have a better future is to listen to each other in life because those minorities who see things slightly different may have insight into things most of us don't. Think of all the things we think we choose in life and then tell ourselves what actually happens is what we wanted compared to what we claimed to have wanted prior in the abstract. In another scenario people are given two jams to try in a supermarket with two very different flavors as well as with teas and the outcome is very similar to the pictures where people are told they liked a different one than they chose and they make up why they chose it and like it more. We seem to function better when we don't think about what we are going into very hard than when we over think.

In another experiment we are shown how the unconscious will can be primed. People were given words they had to unscramble and make into sentences. One group has words like social, connect, and relationship to give them a mindset of a talker and listener. Another group is given words like compete, do your best, and someone for achievement and success. After this they give each group another unrelated job to work on a puzzle with someone. Those who had words to be more social and listening were more likely to be the confederate and take orders as well as be dumber and make mistakes, where as the second group wanted to take control of the process. When people say words don't hurt me they're lying. Another thing is when the non achievers were asked to quit the puzzle they didn't want to and would say wait I can do this. Those who were primed to be successful quit easily. People can be primed for power too if they are put in the professors chair versus a guest chair. People who were found to be more communally oriented and put in the chair really wanted to help people while taking responsibility for the situation. People found to be in it for themselves oriented or exchange oriented and were put in the professors chair had a more self oriented way of giving out tasks to benefit themselves and blaming others when things went bad.

In another experiment two pictures were shown to two different sets of people. One was of a library and one was of a railroad. Each person was told to examine closely and give opinions on what they thought about the architecture and design because they were going to go to these places to work on them. Afterward they are given a completely unrelated list of words to read and the people who were told they were going to the library would whisper them and those going to the railroad would yell them. If they were never told they would visit these places it didn't affect how they read the words afterward.

When giving people achievement words versus neutral words in another unscramble into sentences task, they were also given another task after this. Those who are taught to be aggressive and compete without knowing it and were given tough tasks after tended to fail and get very angry or miserable. The neutral people were given tough tasks and didn't care if they failed much. After this even a confederate was told to walk down the hall toward them as they left the test like they were going to collide with them. Those who were taught to be competitive would walk right at the confederate and dodge at the last minute. Those who had neutral words walked out of the way past the person moving aside early on. People who are taught to be aggressive tend to have worse moods and are less happy than those who aren't. Even Aristotle talks about developing appropriate habits from the time people are young for the right rewards if we are to live well. People with long experience and discipline in certain environments and actions will be the most secure and perform the best.

Since we are creatures of desire and only speak and act to get things, we won't be happy till we're in the right environments that give us the things to desire that will make us the happiest long term and we can have. We can't stop caring about people and ideas, so we don't freely will where we choose to act. When a friend gets hurt by someone and they ask us for advice, we'll find that in most cases people don't listen to us if they love someone more than the advice we give, and so people will act on what they want even if everyone around them claims it won't work to their advantage. The only way people seem to learn is by running into a brick wall enough times that they realize it hurts more than it brings good things before they change actions. We can prime people before they walk into situations so they may act a little different but it seems we only get more secure and knowledgeable with our own experiences. You can't speak sense into someone about something they love or care about and it's only through their own pain in pursuing it they may eventually change from learning that.

This is why we should prime people to stop putting their fingers in the dyke of a person who is a part of their life when that person starts leaking. People who leak on us are going to keep leaking till they have enough other experiences away from us that make them realize we were a good thing being taken advantage of in their lives. When we hang around and try to fix things with someone that keeps making our lives painful or try to find solutions in the area that can't be fixed anyway, such as a person breaks our heart and we start thinking of how to fix them, replace them, or date different; what we're doing is putting our finger in the same dyke. The person will respect us less for hanging around and trying to fix them and our situation with them when they were broken before us and then blame us instead for their brokenness. Trying to figure out how to approach dating different or replacing people is still worrying about that part of your life that isn't changing at this point. It will hurt regardless but it's wiser to move to an area of town where the dykes are good and the resources we have there are stable and can be built on till the pain in the old part of town has a few years to pass. By this time things will have changed in our lives or the place we came from enough for us to visit that place, and possibly start a new friendship where it used to be part of our problems.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

The purpose of speech.

The primary purpose of action and speech is to create self-definition. The secondary purpose is validation, security, and to prove our existence to ourselves. It’s not so much if we exist as much as why we exist and in what manner we should, as well as the relation of our existence to that of other people and things around us. Speech helps define where we think we should belong and what we should do while we’re here. Nothing defines us more from other people than the fact we can act and speak differently than they do. Although within a group the actions and speech are very similar we have a slight marginality between overlap of our own uniqueness. Unlike the objects we create with our hands, action and speech come directly from us, while those things we make to represent ourselves are more similar to photocopies of our actions and speech. Someone may claim they are not insecure and don’t seek validation through their actions and speech, but I’ll make the claim that security and stability are constantly in a state of diminishing similar to the way our bodies are in a constant state of decay by a certain peak, and just as we would eat well and exercise to slow this process and maintain what we have, we also seek to constantly reassert our validation and security through action and speech. If we were forever secured and felt our existence was valid we’d never have to speak or act again. Some may argue that they don’t speak and act to get validation or security, but choose to do it because they like to and it’s fun. These to me are byproducts of the real reason that we are genetically inclined to choose action and speech for the purpose I claim they exist.

The reason we speak is to generate a physical reaction. Since life comes down to physics for me in many ways I’ll say the pressures in our external environment create pressures on our internal environment causing us to say things we think will be interactive with that environment. When we speak it’s either to hear someone speak back or to cause their bodies to move. Both of these are physical in a sense because their organs have to move to create a sound in order to react to the sound we make. We wouldn’t speak if we didn’t want a reaction, and a reaction validates that what we said was important enough to react to and there would be no reaction. If we were to continually yell at someone without them responding in some way we would become upset, because we are speaking so they do something for us to make our existence feel valid and give it purpose. If people react to what we say then it means we must matter and people who ignore us should probably be talked to less or perhaps not at all if they never respond. People can drive themselves crazy to get a response from someone who doesn’t care about them enough to respond, so this action isn’t hitting something emotionally in others that gives us a reaction we’d like on the frequency we’d like.

People who aren’t our friends may very well plays games with us and not realize it, because they may only speak to us when they want a reaction and we always give it to them, but when we want it they may not always respond as much as we’d like. It’s those who want the least in an interaction that have the most power over a situation when it comes to speech, because they always get as much as they want when they want it from someone who cares enough to give it, but the other can’t ever get enough of their own desire in the process. It’s not till we realize we’re being used more than we’d like to use that we can stop acting and speaking more than is being responded to. When two people want to use each other at the level water meets on a regular basis we call it friendship or love. People might be more likely to respond to anger when kindness doesn’t work, but love and hate are just two different versions of the same thing, which is caring and if we get apathy we should give nothing, but if we get hate back for our hate we aren’t really getting something good anyway, so this doesn’t allow us to be validated in a positive way.

The difference between friendship and strangers is when we speak to friends it’s to maintain the secure, stable, environment we already have in their presence by building on what has already existed prior. This is the positive validation that keeps us knowing we exist in a way that feels good and matters as well as confirms our beliefs about existence. These are the people we relate our experiences to and come to conclusions with about what things we can agree are reality and what things aren’t, as well as what things are right and wrong about reality that we need to change or avoid if wrong, and continue to act upon if right so we can maintain our secure and stable lives to the best of our knowledge. When we speak to strangers in a manner that isn’t business it’s to seek another kind of validation and security. We already know the bureaucracy of most business we deal with like giving money to a cashier so these are limited in emotion. It’s those we seek in leisure speech that we’re testing how much we matter by getting emotional reactions seeking care about us for speaking. Since these people aren’t our friends we’re testing the claims about reality we’ve already come to with our friends to either get them confirmed or rejected by strangers. If they are confirmed then we can maintain them easier the more people agree. The things that get rejected will either strengthen our belief in them if we can argue them well, or cause us to believe otherwise if we’re defeated in speech or action. We will always be more likely to believe our friends over strangers on matters pertaining to reality, existence, and validation, which is why we keep them close to maintain a stable and secure environment we can exist in together.

When we talk to strangers somewhere like a party it’s to see if they have the potential to care about us and what we think matters in existence too. If they don’t care about us at all they won’t react. If they don’t care about us but care enough to disagree with what we’re saying they’ll follow through with conversation, because it must be about something they feel should be defended in speech concerning claims to reality. They care about the topic emotionally. The reason we speak to strangers is to test if we or what we think matters enough to validate us personally or what we believe in, which is closely tied to our existence, because these things are motives we live by each day. The truth is we’re all insecure when it comes to people we don’t know well and choose to talk to because we potentially hope to matter enough to be talked back to in a positive manner like our friends do for us. When we talk about matters pertaining to things that involve the actions of people versus other people in lifestyle we’re most likely setting ourselves up for debate, but if we talk about things that aren’t people it’s easier to find agreement about reality and this is small talk people test the waters with before important topics might come up. Small talk can be questions about what an individual does each day with the objects around them and there may be deeper inquiry into the functions of those objects. A lot of times we start conversations with strangers by pointing out obvious objects in the environment at the time or a task we’re both involved in. When we eventually get into deeper topics and if we can find comfort about enough of them on a continuing basis we eventually call these people friends also.

The difference between a friend and an acquaintance is that a friend exists fairly regular in our lives and interactions with acquaintances are random, and sometimes friends can becomes acquaintances and acquaintances eventually might be friends. The difference between and acquaintance and stranger are we already know it’s comfortable to talk to an acquaintance in random encounters. The reason an acquaintance doesn’t become a friend is because they have limited agreements with us on what matters in reality to where we may only interact at the few places we share those rare things in common like a party. That means our actual friends are very limited in life to a small group of people. We should be as close to these people as possible. They make us the most secure and stable because speech and action are so reciprocal we don’t even think about the reactions we’ll get anymore. As for all other people we live in a world of insecurity that we have to validate our beliefs of reality and existence against compared to the group we already identify our views with. Where there isn’t fear in speech with strangers there is aggression.

Speech as some claim isn’t a market system where we measure how much speech gets how much reaction, and those who do don’t find themselves very happy. The way a person gets good at running isn’t by riding a bike, skating, and lifting weights, but simply to run. To become better at speech in ways that feel like they’re getting the reactions we’d like isn’t to measure them against the people in our lives to our own, but to do it when it feels right. If it feels wrong we should just stop speaking in places that don’t give us the validation we’d like, because eventually we’ll start feeling like we don’t matter, and if we really want to feel insignificant in the universe we can just look at the stars each night and realize our insignificance instead of testing our hearts against those who won’t give us the time of day as we’d like. Speech and action are not measurements the way a product is on the market. We can measure ipod A against ipod B, because ipod’s don’t have feelings and we can only project our own into them insofar as what we can get out of them. We aren’t supposed to rationalize the subjective value of our interactions with people against other people like an ipod, because projecting emotions into people is done to be reciprocal, and the value of speech with one person next to another isn’t something we can measure the same as an object and its output. When people tell us we could do better we don’t just drop one person and pick up another like an ipod. What some see as discontent in our interactions could very well be highly content to us when it comes to the quality of people in our lives. Speech and action are not a market system to measure our security under. Our friends should be the center of the universe and the world should be measured only against the group idea value in life and existence.

Friday, August 22, 2008

To be a human.

Nature does nothing vain, and things that exist in nature do so with a purpose or they couldn’t exist. The problem with people is they want to deny their nature’s ability to perfect their nature through working on it, or they want to indulge in the nature that was given to subsist on. In nature the behavior of an individual changes before the structure of its physiology, and when we change our behavior as individuals it changes our characters. People are a lot like water. The essence of water stays the same no matter where it goes but changes in composition due to its environment. Water became as it is in essence over many years through processes that existed before us. We wouldn’t want to force the essence of water to be different than it is in nature, but may want to put it in different environments to shape its composition the same as an individual’s character.

Nature can come in the form of virtues or vices and the virtues are those things like water we want to build on, and work with the current the way it wants to flow. When we try to run against the current we find more discomfort than a current that may be coming into new environments the direction it was meant to. Change can be painful but if we roll with it instead of against it by accepting the way things are we’ll find much less discomfort. We can consciously watch ourselves flow, but don’t change our flow consciously. Things that can cause discomfort are a person from a small town coming to a large city. In a small town people tend to have similar customs that develop similar characters to suit that environment. A small town is like an organ of its own where everyone identifies as cells of the organ, but a city is more like a human body and crossing into different organs feels uncomfortable, and that’s why civilization makes us uncomfortable. Our essence will always be established by where we started more than anything else, but our character will alter to fit the new environments to identify with a new organ. The reason most people die within fifty miles of where they’re born is because they tend to be drawn to their natural habitat where the customs feels the most natural.

We can’t change our essence though our characters might adapt to new habits through new behaviors. The essence is the thing we want to focus on the most though. The essence of our genes makes us human and where we grew up is the most prominent social essence that points out our socializing direction for life. The genes and the environment we were raised in that develop our core characters shouldn’t be resisted. All character beyond this is the adaptable kind that exists on the surface. I’ll say the genes are emotional and the environment and language are social. Since our essence is to be emotional creatures we should just become as our essence wants us to and try not to work against this nature. Our experiences in different environments and the language we use constantly go into our memory banks so we naturally react a certain way in certain environments and situations when we come into those familiar places again. This is where my determinism comes in claiming that people will try to convince themselves that they can will themselves to be something they want to be, but I’m going to say something can’t come from nothing, so all physical past experience creates all present physical reaction due to memory. In the process of reaction come new memories for the future potential experiences. The illusion of free will is one that allows us to think we made something possible through creation, but it’s more like physics where chain reactions are taking place.

People who aren’t doing well the same a sickly plant won’t do better unless they randomly have a new experience that creates new reactions in their lives that can relate to old reactions so they want to change. Something has to pull them by the social essence they came from. People in a poor neighborhood won’t leave unless something new that connects to something of the past to pull them from where they are to a new environment. Just like the water has an essence that allows it to be water, we have an essence that allows us to be human. What does it mean to be human? To be human is to be an emotional creature that seeks validation and love, and we shouldn’t force those who don’t seem to give this to us into our lives. We don’t need to rationalize how we can pound square pegs into round holes. If something doesn’t feel right it isn’t mean to be. This shouldn’t be confused with the pain of adapting to a new environment. That’s a different kind of pain. The pain I’m talking about is people oriented. Its people that things don’t feel right with that shouldn’t be forced in our lives. What we tend to do is take the stories of past people in our lives and try to alter this story to fit present people in our new lives. We should be doing the complete opposite, because the people of our past are the environment we came from that shaped our core characters, and this is our social essence. We don’t want to alter the story of our social essence, but seek people out that fit this mold we already exist in. These people who suit us will make it easier to adapt to environments that would otherwise be more painful. Bringing people from the past new places with us is a good way to do this too so we’re never alone in our changes.

To be human is to roll with the thing that feels good while it feels good, because our essence is already made for us. Our genetic essence is to be emotional and social. Our social essence and the character built around this that will learn to grow the way it was meant to once put into motion from where it started. This is why the environment a child is raised in is more important than any other environment, because this will shape a person’s social essence for life. The most important is the family where we all start, and the institutions surrounding this family will add on to the social essence in a child’s upbringing. If someone is emotionally broken as an adult they may always be broken and we should accept this, because their life has been determined by the past from which they came, and this is why we shouldn’t try to change people who don’t fit the organ/story that we already belong to. We are only a chapter in a greater story produced by history and the society as a whole must change its composition before the characters of all the people in it will become better people in the future. Those of us who don’t shape this structure should stick to our story within it. We get to shape our chapters/characters in the book and nothing more.

It’s true that we can find our essence of being human in times of seclusion where we can reflect on ourselves, but to live in reflections our whole lives doesn’t help us in experience. We can be authentic temporarily, but what’s the purpose of being authentic more than not if we can’t share this with people? Authenticity is merely a reflection of reality, and reality is more inauthentic but is the way that lets us know how to live. Conversations with friends will bring out realizations we don’t find as easy on our own contemplating, because we are only one mind gazing into reality. Being human is about knowing how to exist through trial and error, and reflection should be minimal, because it takes away from the human experience. The more things we try or teach young people to try the more they’ll try new things with time so they should be encouraged, but it’s also wise to put the variety of things we think they should try close to them so they’re more desirable than things we think will hinder them. By the time people reach a certain age they’ll know what they want because they got all the trying out of their systems. All the character shaping has completed itself by this point, and we will learn to react quickly in our older ages to the best of our abilities. Being inauthentic is actually more desirable. Being part of an organ is better than being a single cell. All the philosophies that preach individuality are lying to themselves about being human, because being human is about doing things with other people, and being a person in action. The being of a human is really a human doing things the way water was meant to flow in a current. Just go with the flow and don’t rationalize away from this.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Consciousness and the will.

Consciousness and the will.

I'm a believer that things we experience mentally can't exist without something already existing physically. Consciousness is an experience that takes place when chemicals and physical actions in the brain interact due to physical phenomena outside the body. All conscious experience is tied to some physical experience and I have a hard time believing that things can come from something non-physical. Obviously there was a time before all that existed there was perhaps nothing and through creation or big bang or whatever there started something, but I'm not one to try and argue where things began, but rather that once objects are set in motion we become part of a chain of events so complex that even what we become conscious of isn't necessarily our ability to will anything into action, but to watch ourselves being propelled through time by events prior to our existence and within our existence prior to the moment that events occur. If we could create something from nothing, we could essentially will things to change around us physically with our bodies because of our thoughts, but our thoughts are actually created by physical events we don't have control over. The physical events in the mind exist due to millions of years of events that happened before us and allow us to think in ways that the past has allowed us to. The social events in our lives from the time we were born shape us to be certain kinds of people within our environments. We can adapt to new environments, but we adapt based ..xperience in old environments that we can use or have to substitute in the new environment. We see stories of people who mange to change and become better people within their society, but I don't see this coming about by itself, and instead see natural forces that unseen within us and social forces that act upon us and pushing us in the direction desired. If we value the forces we compliment them and move in their direction. If we reject them there is equal and opposite reactions that push us away from groups, and if we reject even larger institutions we are reacted against with jail or prison. Things that are a priori are those things given to us by nature that we have innately due to the past before we existed, and things a posteriori are created by actions within our own lives. Energy and matter are interchangeable and what we don't see is still under the influence of something at a molecular level that is in constant flux. The only way we might possibly change our actions is through the actions of others around us. We don't see who we are and what our flaws are till others in our environment can point out the sources of potential past experiences that caused us to be who we are, and from that point we can alter a path we're based on new information. When our thoughts collide with the thoughts of others based on their experiences we change course. Otherwise we compliment one another and remain the same in certain aspects. Life is so complex that it becomes more important to know how to do things than to know about things in general. To "know that" can easily be achieved through reading several books on how the world works to the best of our knowledge, but to "know that" is worthless if it isn't applicable to our personal interactions. To "know how" is far more important and we can only get this through experience by acting out life in the physical with our bodies. We could have numerous books that tell us what the color red looks like and have never seen the color red. It's not till we see the color red that we have a new ability, which is to understand the experience of the color red and recognize it from this point on in time. The flaw I see in the lives of many is their ability to "know that" is much more prevalent than being in some kind of constant action. Even if were poor and had nowhere to be jobless, it would be more fulfilling to walk endless all day if this is the only thing we know how to do that comes to mind till a new action can come to mind. To think and to act is a constant cycle and those who live in the abstract all day don't act enough, while those who act all the time without thought are hiding from themselves what they don't want to think about.

The historicity of self is always in action even when we think we are acting on our free will. All choices are based on the historicity of self like the roots of a tree that we don't see on the surface of the ground reaching down to the water reserves below the surface of memory. We are just a time and place in society and history that has caused us to land where we are, and this place we are isn't created by our actions, but are effects of things that have already placed us here. Any actions we create are really effects acting out the past. We might not be robots, billiard balls, or a rock rolling down a hill, and have features that aren't like these things, but even in our unique human state we are powerless in our illusion of free will. We don't really have control of our lives, but it's the ability to think we have control that gives us comfort. The stories that exist in the backs of our minds from prior incidents are the stories that tell us how to live. If we look back at our lives the only things that stand out are the events that are the most emotional events. If we think of an old relationship most of it will seem like a blur, but the incidents that we do remember are only those that were either full of hate or love. We remember all of our worst fights and romantic moments with a person. We don't remember the meals we had together unless those meals were centered on emotionally intense events. We don't touch the hot stove out of habit, because we felt its warmth and had some situation prior where the heat caused us pain, and we don't think consciously of this whenever we get near something that looks like it could be hot. We already know through habit not to go where it looks like it might hurt us. The hot stove on one hand is the same for everyone who grew up around a stove, but our experiences with people are all unique to an extent. In one situation we could have a person who only has good feeling experiences with dating and on the other we could have someone who only has bad experiences and this is why we all have different pictures in our heads of what it means to date and the purpose of dating. Most people likely have a combination of these. These stories get recorded into our memories and we treat them as fact. These are emotionally intense experiences because we're in a new place in life that we're unsure of so we're more conscious at these moments to record information. This same information gets resurfaced when a new incident that reminds us of the old incident comes into play, and without even knowing it we start to act out as is we're in the old context and situation.

Even when we are conscious of something it's only because we care about something and the only reason we care about something is because it relates to some other thing or things we care about in the subconscious driving it. Once again I come back to the carpenter nailing planks together in the garage and the act of nailing these planks together involves a hammer, nail, and planks, but we don't really see these things. We're focused on the bigger picture of how what we're doing will look like when the work is done, or dreaming about something else while in the process of doing this. When we're engaged in events we don't recognize the objects that are interactive in our experience in the conscious, because all these objects we figured out on a level we are comfortable with or mastered prior to this experience. When we were young we pick up a hammer for the first time and analyzed it. We don't stare at the hammer anymore when using it, because to do so would take us from the engagement of its action in a greater picture, and create a new engagement in staring at the hammer. What feels like a choice is really done under a feeling of necessity, because past events have already convinced us that nailing the planks together was important to do for some reason, and we're just acting out the causes that brought us to do so. When we cheer in a stadium with a crowd all the people are objects we're engaged with and we don't see ourselves anymore than we see the hammer while nailing planks. We are focused on the bigger picture of the game taking place at the center of the cheering and don't focus on how we are playing a role in this interaction. Life is really a totality and fusion of objects and equipment that are part of greater tasks and actions that is the only conscious focus of our lives, and the reason we are conscious of something is because we have emotional feelings driving the actions that make them seem important. If we didn't care about something we wouldn't do it. If the head flew off the hammer while nailing this becomes a new emotional experience because it stalls the prior emotional engagement where we have to pursue a new hammer as a task to engage in before coming back to the greater task we emotionally desire as important. When people ask us who we are or to tell them about ourselves we tell them what we do or what we engage in as a way of saying who were are, because we are nothing more than our experiences of action or the sum of causes that creates the effect that we claim to be as a person. Just like we don't become conscious of the hammer till something is wrong with it in a situation that it is part of a greater function, we as an object existing in the midst of others don't become conscious of our own actions till something appears wrong with us by others pointing it out to us, or even in relation to our own past when comparing what we think we should be in a situation relative to others in the present. The will to do something in the abstract versus the will to perform something in real life always end up being different, and we have to keep readjusting the abstract of what we think is possible with every new experience. This is why it seems pointless to try making plans far into the future. We can abstract a basic skeleton of the direction we think we'd like to be based ..xperience, but self-bureaucratization seems to be our best action to creating things we've already found to be stable as a vehicle that can move us toward other things that might feel good too.

The historicity of self is compiled by all our social experiences put into action by the greater task of life itself. We can't really value life unless we are focused on greater tasks compiled of many simple tasks. To only focus on simple tasks is live for the sake of living or to live for what nature gave us the ability to desire and nothing more. Nature gave us a capacity to strive for consumption because we spent so long in scarcity of it that we were always in modes of production. The desire for consumption was to maintain the greater task of striving for life in itself, which was the greatest gift given by nature and at the same time is taken from us by nature too. When we created civilization we ended up with surplus consumption. Consumption that is more than needed for production and isn't invested elsewhere in life ends up being destruction, and the things from nature that sustained life end up being self destructive in civilization after a while. To over indulge in food, sleep, sex, and drugs is the become stagnant only to act them out for the sake of living in itself, which was only a gift in nature, because we had to constantly strive for life and it was special to do so. Now we have what was once production of seeking out consumption as an act of living, so all production was construction toward maintaining action while consumption was stagnation before acting once again. Once consumption needs are stable in our lives we find there is no longer a struggle to seek it out in order to produce. This causes nature to reverse inward on itself. Without a struggle to consume we lose our feeling of control, and the only control we have left to fall back on is the kind nature planted in us. This is why we feel bored and depressed a lot in civilization. In order to take away our feeling of boredom and depression we latch onto natural instincts of consumption because it's the only thing that give us a feeling of production. Otherwise our bodies wouldn't be in any form of action. We tend to seek out food, sleep, sex, and drugs to give us a feeling of production in our lives. Consumption is longer the key to life but ends up becoming self-destruction due to its surplus and our lack of ideas for production. Instead of struggling to produce all the time to consume just enough to live, we consume all the time in hopes of producing something out of our lives. When we find we can't produce anything we just consume again in order to have feelings of control over life. Since the goal of all production at one time was to struggle to live and the value of living was based around seeking consumption, so the only way to value life in a world where we consume in order to hope for a potential to produce is to value death. Death in the big picture is the greatest task achieved by all of us in life, because it's the end of all life in itself, and if we focus our lives the fact we're going to die each day we'll act out life for greater things than living in itself. It's not till we embrace death with the same value we embrace every other emotional burst in our lives with purpose that we can eventually find things of value in life to act on. Once we love death the way we love the stories of life we will seek cultural control instead of natural control. If we looked in the mirror with thoughts of today could be the day I die, we'd begin to live each day different. If we can embrace death with the same emotion as a relationship or the desire for a new toy, we can finally begin to question what we want in the larger picture when pursuing tasks in life.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

On Free Will. Part 2

The laws of physics dictate that every effect has a cause, and if every effect has a cause then how do we know our will is really a choice of our will or a choice of necessity? The idea that I can choose or not choose to eat a cheeseburger would be seen as my free will. I can’t control my natural desire of hunger, but people would believe I was making a choice to not eat the cheeseburger. Why would I not choose to eat the cheeseburger? This is my argument against free will, and the reason is because the effect of my choosing not to do something doesn’t necessarily mean it was a conscious desire that was driving what I had as a conscious desire to eat something or not. If I’m hungry I should eat, but the choice not to comes from another desire or desires, which could be a number of variables. I might value not gaining weight, my arteries, animal abuse, or may even have an emotional disposition against the person offering it to me. A person who has created a habit of not eating the cheeseburger could have any or all of these and deny it without thinking twice. When pressured to answer why they won’t eat by someone else they’ll likely force one of their subconscious desires to the surface for debate. The more reasons we can consciously give for a decision in our lives at certain points, the more subconscious reinforcements we have for acting on them as we do, and the more variables involved in a choice to do or not do something, the more unconscious the decision becomes to make a choice in this direction.

This is my dispute with compatibalism or the Hobbesian view of soft determinism that leaves room for some free will. Where does that will come from to begin with? The Hobbesian idea is that we have free will insofar as is doesn’t come into conflict with the will of others, but the will of others may be just as unconscious as our own wills to do something. Back to the cheeseburger we’ll see that my choice not to eat it was driven by numerous subconscious wills that I learned to value and internalize, and these are the wills that are truly driving my desires more than others. Where do these desires come from? Desires are extensions of beliefs and values, and beliefs and values are extensions of emotional incidents we experienced consciously at points in real life with people we cared about or hated. From the time we’re young we are building the foundation of a house under the influence of our environments. When the basic frame is set in place we come into contact with new people throughout our lives. The basic frame is made up of values we learned from people we cared about, which are most likely family and peers. If the value and belief gained from these people is that we should try to be with the person we love for life, we’ll try and do everything we can to keep a person in our lives once we develop emotions for them. This is why people may come across as irrational sometimes. On one hand we might see that someone keeps calling and chasing another person down to show them how much they love them and the other person isn’t responding. There are two likely reasons they aren’t responding. One is that they grew up in a home that doesn’t value the things we were taught to like staying with the one we love for life, and the other could be they just don’t have emotions for us anymore. Maybe they never did, but then why did they start talking to us in the first place? The one thing we all have in common seems to be that we want validation of some kind for our existence, and the only place we seem to get this is by hearing the echo of ourselves off of others. When I say I love you, it isn’t to let you hear it as much as it’s to hear it back and that makes me feel like I matter. The reason someone shows an interest in us is because they have a different story than we do. All the cells in an organ are driven by self desire, but they all value the organ, and won’t work against each other because they don’t want the organ to collapse. The story they all learn to tell is about how important the organ is.

Where does the story come from? Glad you asked (lol)! The story once again comes from people we learn to gain emotions for in our lives. If we love them we want to be more like them and will find reasons to combine their story to our already existing story. If my house only has a basic frame of values and beliefs and you move into my life and bring some decorations with you to fill my house with, it will only be a matter of time before I forget you brought them and start to identify them with myself as my own. Once I develop an emotional bond with the new beliefs and values that seem to compliment my own I see them as representations of myself, so when you move out of my life I still hold onto them because I fell in love with them the same way I fell in love with you, and even though you’re gone I see the decorations as a part of me more than you now. This is why we’re never really the same people as we travel through life. All the causes that come into contact with us are really creating new effects. We tend to maintain the same personalities throughout life, but once values and beliefs change we change our lifestyles with the same attitude to project them in our own sui generis way. If we decide we hate someone we start to reject all the values we associate with them, or clean house in a sense. We throw out these values and beliefs because we see them as harmful and bad like the person we hate. There’s really a conglomeration of these feelings that compliment or substitute one another.

Once again we’re back to eating or not eating the cheeseburger and what we find is that our “choice” not to eat it is driven by numerous subconscious affiliations with things we learned to value as our own due to the fact that we learned to value people they came from at some point in our lives. In a sense this is an empiricist way of looking at these tendencies, because what we didn’t experience at some point in real life in some form is not a value we will hold onto. At the same time I’ve added an emotional spin to the empiricism to express the fact that we don’t all see the world the same due to our emotional perceptions of the experiences based on those we care about and care about prior and internalize the values of. Since we don’t really care about people and only care what they can do for us we have to ask what do people want from us? The only thing we all have in common is the validation factor, which is the ability to hear ourselves in others. How we want to hear ourselves in others on the other hand is socialized in the bigger picture. Just like the organ all the cells are telling the same story about how important the organ is that houses them. They all refer to themselves as cells of the organ and not just a cell. Cells without an organ don’t really have a known story in common with other cells. If we don’t come from an organ and meet someone from the same organ we have no story in common and have to make up a new one from scratch. If I was taught to value the stability of loving someone for a long term relationship and you weren’t taught anything by your parents, you’ll likely pick up these values from school and television till your peers give you an idea what to value or you have your own experiences with attempts at love. Since young people are naturally more unstable and many don’t have clear definitions of what a relationship is supposed to be about, we can say young people are in a state of anomie, because they haven’t been given any norms when it comes to how they should love another in their life. Since the age of industry people have become more individual and autonomous so we have to act out many of the things that aren’t in laws or stories from religion, which most people give up on these days through the same methods the chimpanzees use, which are reciprocity and a development of mutual empathy through interaction. This means every new relationship we encounter is another house being built from the ground up with parts from our old houses, because we aren’t all raised in the same kinds of houses anymore or even houses that teach us values others are taught. One of my arguments for religion is the fact that everyone in a church tells the same story for the most part and these people can just pull their house together to have a bigger house due to the fact they share so much cultural history, values, and beliefs. The fight and flight battles are no longer physical but symbolic and what we’re really fighting for is emotional stability by trying to keep the house we have in tact when our cultural values and beliefs are under attack. If we are outnumbered and defeated then the cause creates a new effect in our lives, which are new values and beliefs, and we become part of a new tribe or empire of people who defeated us. We all want validation due to the insecurity created by civilization, but from here we want to add to our story with the aid of another who may have fooled us and fooled themselves into thinking that we would complement their story the same as they would ours. Instead we substitute ours original virtues to construct something new that isn’t always stable, and this is why a friendship is the best stability to potentially build a house on, because we don’t want to build houses with people we haven’t seen the toolbox and supplies of yet, and that takes a long time to understand. The truth is, beyond validation we don’t know what people want from us, and this is why we can’t let ourselves be fooled into changing our stories to bring people in our lives. To be emotionally intelligent is to stand by our story that has a stable meaning, and through friendships let that story tell itself slowly instead of ripping the pages out and stapling them in new books. New people should instead be compatible enough to be the next chapter in our own books. Our stories should be built on self-bureaucratization that comes from a lager stable unit of friends with the same values, and anyone who can’t be compatible with the already existing organ is a threat to the organ if not at least our cell as a person.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

On Free Will. Part 1

It was only a matter of time before this topic would come up and I’d have to write my opinion on it. I could still change my mind in the future, but as of now I’m going to side with some of my favorites including Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, and William James…to an extent. I still have some of my own opinions or perhaps they’re the same as these men and I don’t know it yet. As far I know the concept of free will first came about in Zarathustraism (a religion I’d like to talk about another day). The concept seems to have come about based on the ability to defy the laws of determinism. Determinism is the idea that all events of past and present, plus the laws of nature decide the future. In this perspective we don’t decide the future at all. Whether we’re coming from a deist or atheistic perspective on determinism the outcome is the same. If god was the first cause who then became indifferent to us and all effects came from all causes preceding then the world is already going in a direction we don’t choose. If god isn’t indifferent and made our bodies, and the genes that give us desires then god controls our minds too, because this is part of our genes and bodies. If god is all-omnipotent, all-omniscient, and-benevolent then god already made the future for us and all is determined. However if god is all-benevolent then why would he allow us to be sad and suffer or let evil exist? Either god is indifferent or isn’t truly all-omnipotent. I’m going with the idea that if there is god then god is indifferent. Even from an atheist perspective regardless of where things began doesn’t matter as much as once there was a cause there are a series of effects and causes that continually follow. There are genetic determinisms and social determinisms. In either case once again we don’t have control over the genes or the environments we grow up in, and once we’ve internalized certain values a chain reaction is already set off causing us to work off of what already exists and limiting possible outcomes. The idea behind free will being capable was that all matter had to abide by the laws the of nature, and it was also determined by the laws of nature meaning it was probabilistic to us who don’t have control over nature. If we push a rock down a hill it’s probabilistic where it will bounce on the hill on its way down and where it will land. Each spot the rock hits is another cause leading to another effect in the direction it bounces. Free will came about because we must have souls that are immaterial and don’t apply to the laws of nature or matter, and therefore these souls can decide to do as they like and move our bodies as we please despite nature. I’m not going to touch the idea of god or the soul and pretend that god is indifferent and the soul can’t do this.

As a true compatibalist I’d go as far as saying that there is no free will when coerced by the will of others. If this was the case then I can choose to live as I please till my will comes into conflict with the will of another person who desires otherwise. I could for instance stop writing this page right now if I so desired, because my will allows me to, but if someone had a gun to my head to keep writing my will would be coerced by another will. An incompatibalist would either assume there is no determinism or free will (hard compatibalism) or that there is no determinism and is only free will (more existential). The latter is the idea that our will creates the causes that allow us to affect the world as we please and we can create our futures. The former of the two claims we are completely reliant on determinism. So, compatibalism is congruent with determinism in that we do have to exist based on past, present, and the laws of nature, and at the other end is we don’t have to rely on any of that stuff. It’s hard for me to be a complete compatibalist, but I lean more this direction between this concept and the hard compatibalism of no free will. The reason is because of what I would call layers of consciousness. The empiricist in me would go as far as saying that what we didn’t experience through the material world could not be a thought. If someone told us about heaven and described what it looked like we could only picture the things they said in relation to things we’ve already seen. If we were blind it would be based on what we think those things would feel like compared to things we’ve felt. The other element of social construction would be how we emotionally perceived those physical experiences. Since there are so many variables going on we will each experience what we see in the material world differently, even if we’re all in the same place at the same time. So, on one hand we relate what we see to other things we’ve seen before, and on the other hand we relate emotionally to a new experience based on a past experience that has relations to the present one (many times subconsciously). This is how cause and effect work on a subconscious level. The combination of all perceptions of the past, both physical and emotional, socially construct our outlook on the present and the future. The emotional construction is aroused both by genetic emotions such as fight and flight based on pleasure and pain, and also language and the meaning of things to us that cause symbolic fight or flight in the form of emotional reactions to our understanding of words and phrases projected at us creating pleasure and pain. So, the emotional is the combination of nature/nurture determinism combined. Two different people could react to the same verbal phrase differently based on past experiences with other people who may have said the same things. On one hand a person may have said something similar to someone that we enjoyed the company of that wouldn’t bother us at all, and on the other hand the same thing could be said to another person who had a past experience with someone abusive causing this to trigger fight or flight toward the person speaking. This is why I say broken people can create more broken people and cause us to have an emotionally broken society. If we continue to act out experiences that don’t create stability and others see this that came from fairly unstable backgrounds as well, they’re more likely to repeat our treatment of them or run from what could be a stable situation in the future.

The reason a movie, book, or story can touch us isn’t because we suddenly feel something new we hadn’t before, but because what is being said relates to something we already related to through a personal experience in real life consciously and in many cases it arouses unconscious emotions relating to it. My example is I grew up in a church community that taught Christian morals and I had emotional attachments and experiences with these people. When I would turn on a cartoon like GI Joe I’d relate to the story strongly because there were blunt dichotomies of good and evil and I wanted to be a good guy. Now the combination of these morals and stories construct an even deeper picture what a good guy looks like as well as how to act, so when I would see Arnold Schwarzenegger as a hero in movies and a bodybuilder I wanted to body build, because Arnold seemed like a good guy that was built like a GI Joe and I wanted to build my body to be like that of a good guy, but it all started with the personal experience in a church where I was taught the definitions of good and evil and acted them out in personal situations with real people in my life. On top of this the stories told by people we know are that this is attractive physically, and at a later point in my life it was my fear of having to fight that I built myself to be a fighter out of low self esteem and insecurity in my environment, but the habit was always good to me despite changing environments, because I internalized the value on so many levels. The point being made here is I put that construction together consciously as I was writing this. I never realized it till this very moment, and the fact my fingers are moving on the keys shows another form of unconscious behavior. If I were to keep track of every key’s letter as I typed it I wouldn’t be able to type anymore than a carpenter who would stop to examine the nail, hammer, or wood individually wouldn’t be able to hammer the nail into the wood. These things can only all happen at once on an unconscious level. These things are only possible because we develop habits based on past conscious events and constructions. Once we develop a capacity consciously it then becomes unconscious when it is mastered. The more variables that are taking place at a given time the more unconscious our behavior is. When a circumstance comes down to something with very few variables or we manage to eliminate all the variables we don’t think matter, this is the small window of consciousness we have the ability to manipulate at a given time.

I guess I drew what appears to be a fairly pessimistic picture due to the fact that we are emotional creatures who only focus consciously on something that arouses our emotions at a particular moment. Everything else seems to be deterministic in our lives. Nietzsche tried to claim that good and evil were made up and so was morality. I disagree with this because even though the words good and evil didn’t always exist, there we elements created by nature that gave us a sense of “we” with those we belonged to as a community and this defined our morals. Everyone who wasn’t “we” was “they” of some kind and we were either indifferent to these people’s moral practices or declared them enemies and practiced the opposite of them. It was only a matter of time before a religion came around that people created an allegory of this scenario that was being lived out for so many centuries. Since all past and present creates the future and we’re trapped in the middle of this, the only thing that could possibly save us from where we are at a point in time would be a story that relates to someone that had a more positive past experience growing up enough that it would encourage them to tie themselves to the values in the story and eventually move to a place where the structure is different around them. We don’t change a habit completely till we change people, places, and things, and we have to start with places that we believe will have people doing things different than our present situation. Most arguments on choices come down to blaming the individual versus blaming the structure the individual exists in. If you live in the area of LA that has the most fast food chains you’ll find the most obese people in LA. The structure plays a crucial role in how people turn out. The only thing that might change someone’s desire to eat at these places is their emotional tie to someone who doesn’t value eating fast food, and tells a story about why this is no good. If not this then there would be an experience similar to my own where you want to be a good guy and a good guy values having a strong body that looks healthy. Aristotle was right in my eyes when he said that we have to teach children the right habits, because when we teach them these things that they have to acknowledge consciously in youth by those they care about, these habits are causes that will create all effects later in life when internalized on the subconscious level. We will always have some broken people, but they won’t cause as permanent of damage on our children if our children are already in a habit of distinguishing from what they’ve internalized compared to what another does to them as valuable and right. I suppose this is a method of causal determinism put in an ecological scenario. People who will make the claim that we can use our abstract thinking abilities to make better choices about the future are only right insofar as they’ll plan the future based on what they’ve already internalized as valuable at another stage in life consciously through someone they cared about and wanted to be like. That little window in consciousness only comes about when it symbolically agrees with or defies something we’ve strongly internalized on an emotional level through a confrontation. When what we care about is challenged in a way that is hard for us to refute we may just change our minds about things at the conscious level once again before internalizing it different at another subconscious level. These internalized unconscious values change when those we care about change. If a liberal moved to a small town of all conservatives and had no connections to anyone they left behind, and they also managed to assimilate into this small town and develop new emotional ties, they’d eventually change the way they felt about crucial issues through a series of symbolic tug of wars till they caved their ideology into something else or fled the town. Only someone with no friends could maintain the same values over a lifetime, and this person would eventually go insane from no human interaction.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Clearing up some points and explaining self-bureaucratization.

First of all I'll start proof reading my entries, because apparently I have some readers now and it would be courteous. I also want to clear some concepts up that some people may have gotten confused. Just because homosexuality came about in its present form through the changes in definition of love, marriage, and sex doesn't mean it's wrong. Through all of history we've tended to become physical with people we are close to regardless of sex. The next is that normal and abnormal is the opposite and not normal and broken. When I say broken I'm talking emotionally. I believe people are emotionally broken and these people can be very successful in many areas of life, but they aren't truly happy which is more important in order to find success in areas of life that are more personal and self fulfilling. Normal is created by a given dominant group within an institution. The other thing has to do subordinate and dominant groups. When I say "we" and "they" I don't mean there are one "we" and one "they" in society as in one dominant group and one subordinate group. Institutions exist all throughout society and in each institution there is a hierarchy. Some institutions are tangible structures like a church or a school, and others are intangible like a family or civil society. The intangibles are bound together by nothing more than people's bodies that agree that a space exists they share mentally. Dominant and subordinate groups today work similar to a democracy. In the combination of all the dominant groups there are things they have in common and things that aren't common. If for instance an element they mostly have in common is being white and male then this is a shared reality that becomes an intangible institution of its own without recognition of it even existing perhaps. The most powerful institutions are likely family, peers, schools, and the media as socializing agents. Being emotional creatures we will base our morality and outlook primarily on that we are most familiar with meaning family and peers, because we've managed to develop bonds with these people. The only way we bond with an idea or a stereotype is if we haven't had personal interactions on regular basis or a mutual attachment to someone that opposes the idea or stereotype. This is how a school or media outlets can influence us. These institutions fill in the holes for the things we haven't had personal interactions with and explain to us what the world is like. We like seeing the world in the imaginary as much as the real.


This is one of my arguments for being a proponent of religion. If we took the institution of religion away people would still use their imaginations for things people would consider weak, pointless, and imaginary outside of real life. Just look at TV and video games. These things tell us stories too that we don't have real interactions with. We watch them the same as some people would watch a sermon for entertainment and ritual. On the other end where people claim religion does negative things in the world we can still imagine a world where racism, sexism, and any other ism you can imagine would still exist without religion reinforcing it. People will always create reasons from their imaginations and minds to see themselves as different and sometimes better than others. The last thing is the positivness of imagination in religion and other forms. We certainly couldn't have created all the technological marvels we have today if someone didn't first imagine how the components would come together in the abstract such as metallurgy. This ability is also important for understanding laws and morals. If we didn't have an imagination or emotions we'd be robots. So, religion just like any other kind of imagination can create both good and bad things and getting rid of it won't make the world a better place. Just as some would argue religious institutions are places of brainwash I'll make the point that all institutions are places of brainwash. This means our families and peers even brainwash us as well as schools and the media. Since we can't escape brainwash we should try to exist where it feels good and seems to allow us to excel. It's the same as the idea that we can't know or understand all reality. Should we then throw our hands in the air and say forget trying to live or find ideas that make us feel good? Even if life is completely pointless we need to give it a point by finding some kind of ideological traction to run on. It would feel better running on treadmill going nowhere than to stand around wishing we had something to believe in (and mentally run on).

Since we're most influenced by those we have emotional attachments to we seem to approve of their stories the most. Since I believe we are more emotional that rational and emotions precede rationality, then this is the reason we buy into the stories of those things we are least familiar with on a personal basis from our family and peers. If our emotional bond to our family is weak due to an unstructured home we'll lean to our peers more than our family for emotional support and belief in stories. If the television said people of a certain race had certain characteristics and we had personal friends of that race we'd disbelieve the television. If our friends tell us doing drugs is fun and recreational and the television has ads saying it's bad for us, we disbelieve the television. So, our rationality revolves around those we connect to the most. This brings about an important question. If on one hand we should always stay where it feels good while rationalizing around that to be emotionally unbroken, and on the other hand we like to lie to ourselves about what is good due to past painful encounters where we might avoid going to the place more stable instead of the unstable place we've told ourselves feels right, how do we progress? We like to lie to ourselves through storytelling based on emotional pain and pleasure. One example of this is my sister who came up with the ultimate plan to marry a man who she'd never live with in order to never get divorced. It might sound crazy to some people, but the belief is that the purpose of marriage was to avoid divorce in a sense. I chose to ask her some questions so she could critique herself. I'll make the point before I start that she is a devoted Christian who believes premarital sex is wrong at this point. I start with the question why is it wrong to have sex before marriage? The answer is because it goes against god's will. Why don't we want to upset god? Because it's wrong to break the laws of god. Why is it wrong to break the law? Because we'll be judged before god….she almost had it so I decided to come from another angle. Name something other people are really good at that you aren't good at? Math. Why don't you try doing math? Because I think I'd suck at it and I'm afraid I wouldn't do very well. At this point I say let's take these two things and see what they have in common. On one hand we want to obey god and laws because they keep a stable system and they're good for us. The other reason we don't disobey god is because we fear disappointing god and fear punishment if we disobey laws. You personally also fear math, because what we don't understand or aren't good at are seen as things that are bad…or at least bad for us. What we don't understand or fear is what we call bad and what we do understand and feel comfortable with we call good. People we fear or don't understand apply the same. Stories that ended up not making sense or hurt us when applied in real life are called bad, and the opposite good. I then made the claim that they fear a marriage where they'll live together, because neither of them ever had a good relationship, and fear that living together will cause divorce because all the stories they've heard of other people getting divorced happened for this same reason. They don't understand how to make a good marriage work living together and they fear it as well (I was correct on my guess by the way).

How do we exist in a place that feels emotionally comfortable and know it's the place that will be the most stable over time? I can make the point that our natures exist because we used to live in a world of scarce consumption and constant production seeking consumption, so when we're depressed we fall back on nature to seek comfort in consumption and a feeling of control. Avoiding the nature whenever possible beyond what is needed is one way to find more stable production. The question may also coincide with, how do find things to self-bureaucratize in our lives and what things should we self-bureaucratize? This would occur the same way we make friends? We don't tend to go out of our way to make friends. We usually go places and do things that have always been an interest to us and that we managed to find pleasure in on a regular basis. How did we find these things? We find them the same way we find our friends, which is on accident in a sense. Someone told us a story about something that might be fun or interesting to do and we tried it and liked it. If we found that we kept trying it over and over again we kept doing it and eventually realized it was a hobby. The same happens when we make friends. We meet people at places we're doing things we like and may talk to them on occasion and eventually we find that we've been interacting with them more and more over time till one day we say hey we're pretty good friends. When did we meet anyway? It happens in a way that's so unconscious that by the time it does become conscious we've had a habit for a long time. It usually takes a few months to get into or break a habit. If we find that we're doing something more than a few months that seems productive then we should keep doing it. If we meet friends doing these things that we keep talking to after a few months we should keep them around. Self-bureaucratizing then means that once we find something that seems productive and keeps bringing long term pleasure is something that we should continue doing on a regular basis in our lives. The more things we can create in our lives like this the more stability we will have and the less chaos, which will give us more emotional stability. People who try to take us away from these things or that we have to change these things for are people looking to harm us even if it isn't intentional on their end. When we find people doing the same things that we are in our lives, and then realize that we're friends and these people are part of our rituals, then they should be brought closer in our lives to help make these processes easier for both of us. These are the kinds of people we should marry too. Anyone who doesn't already share many of the constructive things in our lives most likely won't able to do well with us in the long term if they only exist for the sake of marriage and having a family. If we never find anyone who matches these requirements then perhaps we should never get married, because marriage, love, and sex don't equal happiness in themselves, and the true purpose of life are the rituals and the friendships that come with them. The rest only exists to make things better. Even if these things seem redundant and like running on a treadmill or a track at least it's our track, and that's better than standing around wishing we had an ideology to exist for. Only broken people will run on tracks that aren't circular or treadmills that run out of time, because they seek pleasure from doing what is the opposite of pain rather than going after the things that will really bring long term pleasure and keep producing. When we are out of rituals for a day we should try to learn something we think we would be interested in through a story (conversation with friends, a movie, documentary, book, or news). This is the place where we first get the ideas to try new rituals in our lives if we've come to feel limited through our family and peers. Knowledge is the most important ritual because it creates all other rituals. The second is production and the last is consumption.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

The fallacy of the conventional relationship (and the invention of homosexuality.)

The fallacy of the conventional relationship is the fact that is exists backwards from what it was meant to be. When we seek sex, love, and marriage as ends in themselves we’re using the icing of the cake to build the foundation of our houses. How did it come this? The way we came to this was by creating sex as an identity. The things of nature like eating and sleeping don’t give us an identity unless we do it in a way that isn’t the norm or exists in the mainstream. If someone is a vegetarian it will become one of their defining features, because most people aren’t. The only way this would be overlooked is if something even more obvious replaced as our master status. The dominant group always has entitlement to label subordinate groups. It’s not till subordinate groups can put enough differences aside and find something in common that they can have leverage against the dominant group. For instance a white male is the dominant group here. The white male has the ability to criticize the other white male by calling them fag or pussy, because it’s a sign of femininity imposing the idea that the dominant person is less than dominant. When we see a white man we call him a man…just a man, but when we see a black man we call him a black man, because we’ve made black his master status. Finally, of course we have a gay man, who isn’t just a man but a man who is gay. We tend to overlook all the other features because the dominant group allows themselves make this the only feature that matters. It’s not till all minorities of a certain kind can combine groups based on a similarity rather than difference that action can occur against an existing power, which will either cause an overthrow or integration into the mainstream.

We can then say that it was the creation of gay as an identity that helped create a chain reaction to all other sexual identities, and this caused a change in the definition of love and marriage as well. First if we go back to the Victorian era we find that the ideas set forth by Benedict in the 850’s of sodomy and procreation was still in place. It was the enlightenment that we believed through more discourses we could eventually create scientific ways of looking at the world objectively, but the complete opposite seems to have happened. The enlightenment influenced by old ideas through religious belief decided to categorize all the forms of sodomy into scientific discourses. This is when homosexuality was given its own identity, and with the identities we give things come definitions. We defined homosexuals as people with feminine traits that were trapped in men. In the 1890’s this brought about the idea that existed opposite which was heterosexuality. We could no longer define ourselves through procreation and sodomy because we created new identities through discourse.

The purpose of marriage in the Victorian era was to procreate. Sex wasn’t seen as something that should be enjoyed but instead was seen as a byproduct of something that could happen in the course of trying to make a child. People married for their love of god and the ability to make children. There was no mutual affection beyond the time of trying to procreate. Men would work long days and spend time with other men. Children were used to communicate through when the spouses wanted to talk, and women in many cases formed romantic relationships with other women that we can find in letters about how they missed each other’s kisses and embrace. Since there was now a definition for homosexual, being heterosexual had to be defined against this, and whenever the dominant group labels a subordinate group it’s double repressive. When we invented race in the enlightenment and created categories of people with definitions, and states in the US created one drop of blood laws saying just one drop of black blood makes you black (but a drop of white blood couldn’t make you white), we divided the vast array of color and shape of people into categories and once we are not of one category we have to define ourselves by not being in that category. That means to be white is to not have any of the traits we claimed were black. This double repressive attack consolidates the things we want to be because we become defined what we can’t be. It doesn’t only repress the subordinate group but causes the dominant group to repress themselves.

At the same time hetero/homo was becoming an identity people were starting heavily urbanize. One of the things that defined gender before this migration was the jobs people performed. A man did harsh physical labor and women stayed in the home and nurtured the children. Men started taking on white collar jobs that involved more cooperation and “feminine” traits, and women began to move into the workforce. In the early 1900’s Sigmund Freud managed to create many more discourses through psychoanalyses. He proposed that sexuality is primarily for pleasure and what comes after can vary, whether it is self expression, love, or procreation. At the same time this was going on there was a new crisis emerging. Women were becoming more educated and started gaining more economic power. This allowed women to stop being so dependent on men for financial needs of men, which was a large reason they married. They also married just to procreate but as they read Freud and became more independent they decided they liked finding their own ways to express themselves. This put the institution of marriage in crisis. In order to maintain the institution of marriage the purpose for marriage had to be redefined. Instead of having its focus on procreation it was based on sexuality and expression. A good sexual relationship is a loving relationship, and if two people love each other they should be able to express this through good sex. This is what allows things to be sought out for the pleasure in themselves rather than the icing on the cake.

The next big change came during WWII. During the war men were grouped together for long periods of time and many of them started to emotionally bond in a way that lead other things. After the war some new groups formed in the underground during the 1950’s in what we call the closet. The 1960’s and 70’s however were when big revolutionary movements were occurring. This was a time of criticizing institutions and seeking to change them. We had Vietnam War protests, black panthers, civil rights, free love, gay rights, feminism, and a long list. The argument at this time of homosexuals was to be called gay, because homosexuality was actually a pathological term that wasn’t removed a disease from psychiatric books till 1973. Since marriage was now defined a good sexual relationship and no longer procreation, and people were also criticizing intuitions like marriage for claiming that the only way people can express their love and have sex is through marriage, we end up with the argument sex and love can be enjoyed for what they are in themselves as a form of expression and identity. This is the point where love and sex become separate ideas, and sex and love are no longer ways of expressing the other. Sex is simply for pleasure or expressing ourselves. The dominant group still views the sexual norm as penis and vaginal penetration as a way of expressing love and having a good relationship. We still have commercials like Viagra to reinforce this norm. The commercials present the idea that if your relationship is going downhill it’s probably because your sex life is failing you in age. All you need is a pill to fix your sexual ability and then you can have a better loving relationship with this, and it will always be a man and a women in the commercials, which is to subconsciously reinforce that this is the norm as well as sex is the norm used to create love and love sex.

If love can be sex and sex can be love, or they can exist separate and people can use them to express their identities, then the purpose of a relationship is no longer marriage and possibly procreation. If this is the case gay people can have an identity equal to that of straight people now. After the movements of the 1970’s came many other forms of deviant sexuality. The lesbians, transsexuals, transgender, S&M, feminists, and bisexuals all began to emerge. Now that the deviant group was growing in number they did what most groups do when they grow big enough…they started dividing into factions against one another and accusing each other of standing in the way one another’s political actions for equality. In the 1990’s the queer movement formed with the message of sexual ambiguity and disassociation with sexual labels. Sex should be a way of expressing ourselves and nothing more according to the queer movement. Giving ourselves sexual labels divides us and causes us to lose power against what is seen as the sexual norm, and the queer movement doesn’t want to change the institutions as was wanted in the 1960’s and 70’s, but instead want to be accepted into them and integrated.

The institution of marriage isn’t the only thing in jeopardy. Love is also in jeopardy, and reason is because we no longer value these things as icing on a cake, but foundations to build our lives on for the sake of them, and for the sake of them because we think they’ll make us happy within themselves. We have sex thinking it will bring us good feelings in itself, but feel alone and a need to repeat the action again when this is done in itself for itself. Perhaps only a porn star can have sex for the sake of it and expression, because it’s used to create stability in all other parts of their life and isn’t for pleasure. When we seek out love it’s because we’re taught that love is happiness, but in many cases we find ourselves falling of love. The greatest day of a women’s life is her wedding day. She prepares herself for this day for many years thinking this is the day that will make the rest of her life wonderful, and after she is married she finds all the buildup was for a one day event that never becomes anything more after that day, because seek happiness in the event itself. We never find happiness in things that only allow us to be something. We only find happiness in things that allow us to become something. We can be married, be loved, be sexual, but we are not becoming better people because of this. If we were asked to have a choice to move in with our best friends growing up would we? Of course we would. We would want to live with our best friends because we not only find pleasure in their company, but friends try to better each other, and share hobbies in common, and friends all belong to a community of other friends. The only reason we may not be friends with our best friends from childhood is we moved away when we grew up.

That means the way we find happiness is by taking the gifts nature gave us for subsistence with one another and use them to become something greater. If we observe the modern relationship what do we see are the activities taking place? I observe four things. Couples eat, drink, watch movies, and have sex together. If we were to take these activities and do them alone what would we find? We do them when we’re bored and depressed. We over eat when we’re bored or depressed. We drink when we’re bored or depressed. We masturbate when we’re bored or depressed, and we watch movies for the same reason. Movies may be the only one that can have some positive aspects because we can learn some things through story lines, but we use these activities to pass time and not become anything more than we are. This is why the modern relationship is in jeopardy. People get married or want to find love just so they can pass time together. Now people don’t have to be miserable alone. We can be bored, depressed, and broken with other people. This is why we need to self bureaucratize, because we need skills that we can use to make ourselves better people in order to share those skills in the public. Eating, sleeping, sex, movies, drinking, aren’t skills we can share with others in the public and they don’t our own lives better. It’s not till we have abilities we can share with others that we might find friends that share the same abilities, and this can be a cornerstone for a good friendship where two people may realize they can communicate well too, and have a long lasting friendship where they can better each other. If we can have this then we can put the icing on the cake and seek love and possibly marriage with some of these people. When we find rituals we can participate in together we can become better people together. We are in jeopardy because nothing is sacred anymore, and everything is profane and seen as happiness in itself…but it’s not.

Why do we fear getting married? We fear marriage because we fear divorce, and we fear them both because we’ve been hurt. Broken people produce more broken people and unless we find a community that shares things with us that can fix us we will never be whole people capable of sharing a good life with someone else. We run away from what we fear and what we don’t understand and we prefer the opposite of what caused us pain. If we’ve only had bad relationships we will begin to value no relationships, or relationships with strange rules in place like no living together. We end up valuing the thing that is unstable over the thing that has more potential to be stable, because we attempted the thing we were told could give us stability with broken people who hurt us and took away our faith in it. This is why the conventional marriage is in jeopardy. We value the thing within itself in an opposite manner than will bring stability or don’t value it at all for something more unstable we are familiar with because it feels safe and it’s not that other thing.

In nature there were certain elements in place that allowed the community of life to flourish, and those are important today as well to build stable long term futures with people:
1) Belong to a community of friends based on shared stories, language, and beliefs.
2) Share a utility with these people like props in the play of life to fit the story. Ex. a church has books, music, and a community acting out rituals together. A band has instruments. A gym has weights.
3) Seek economic interdependence with the people who share your stories and utilities the most frequent. Create a community of life that celebrates their sameness.
4) Make sure the person we become the most mutual with is also friends with all the others in our community to create social pressure and emotional stability by giving other insights and the ability to create emotional outlets in other besides the one we’re mutual with.
5) Use the first two to perform rituals that help us become better people in the sacred so we don’t just pass life in the profane manner.