the_fantastic_ms_fox | Entries tagged with psychology

Rats fight over scraps of food. Even ones that have always had full stomachs. You can train it out of them - or most of it from most of them; even with the training instituted, they'll still fight.

Rats do a lot of other things. And they're smart. Like us. Being smart is a part of the whole package of beinga rat or a human. You can't separate one from the other, though we try.

But we like to think we are categorically different. Or rather that our minds are, and since "we" are our minds, then we are categorically different. Different from not just rats, but from all the animals, even those that think. That there is somtehing called sapience that make us us, and that is special and unmistakable.

We think that our minds have struggled up from the ground, until one day, around the age of majority if not exactly on it, >pop<, they slip the bonds of the earthly body to float free, tethered like a balloon, bobbing around after us. After that point, we are reasonable. Or capable of being so if we only choose it.

Thought. Reason. Pure. Free.

Our goal is to be brains at a keyboard generating words in such a way that they had no writer; they simply descibe what is. Like God.; disemboided mind; unemcumbered; free; all-being/all-seeing/all-knowing (despite the lack of a body through which to be, see or know).

Moreover, closer to Earth and before godhood, we are told that we humans, especially adult humans, are different. That we and only we choose rationally. When someone eles does something, it is because it was their rational personal choice.

We build policital systems out of this. Rationally choose one representative. Be informed by watching campaign ads. Nevermind that said ads have been deliberately dumbed down and tailored elicit gut responses. Everything from camera angle to lighting to music to length to text to height, weight, race, sex, age and dress of performers has been engineered to circumvent critical thinking. We talk about prospective leaders not like we are picking a decision-maker, but like they are two dogs fighting for alpha. Not "who hasa bettor choice for finance minister," but "who is more firm." Nevermind dogs, these are clear primate social responses.

Our economy. How we buy and sell. How one person gets a job and the other does not.

And this is why the world is fair; just. Because we are different.

We study primates to show that despite their animal-ness, they are like us. But maybe instead we should realize that we are like them. We will err. We will fight. We will do stupid things - much like the computers do, the computers we somehow hope will act as pure minds.

CS Lewis and The Great Divorce

I finished it yesterday. We have all these people in the afterlife where hell is a self-imposed stasis in a world where you can wish a house into existence, but no furniture, and it'll let in the rain. If you wanna get out, you have to wait for the bus, which flies up and out, to drop you in a forest where you're a ghost and everything else is solid, solid enough to hurt. The narrator wanders around on the water, which is a bit tricky 'cause it moves, and the grass, which is sharp.

                                        Nice thing about any human relationship for me is that I find it motivating.

It's written well: It's CS fucking Lewis. And it's pleasantly short, which is a rare thing that's getting rarer in the age of the word-processor.

                            I realize that I'm drained by hanging around depressed people.

So we have all these people who are too stubborn to choose to leave hell. They don't like waiting in line. They get into fights, and so on. Upon leaving hell, they spurn offers of help and wander around aimlessly because they won't give up bad habits. Many of them get in a huff over walking on grass that feels like knives, and talk about returning to hell, but few do.

                                        I'd like to eat more ethicially, so I hang around with people who eat ethically.

Now, the advice that spirits are giving them is a kind of smug and obtuse normally found in Kung Fu Masters. No one says. "Look, you're miserable because you're doing this, this and this, and you need to sort through that, and I'll help you in this way, which may seem counter-intuitive, but I'm sure It'll work because I've been where you are and it seemed stupid at the time, but you're the one walking on knives. Oh, and there really is heaven over there, so lets go this way." No one says this. Partially because you're not supposed to want to get into heaven because it's nice, you're supposed to want it because it's G-d. And You should want G-d... because you want G-d. Not the best marketing.

                            Erin has been finding that I'm taking a lot of her energy.

So the bad: This is not a great work of theology*. God seems kind of passive aggressive; setting things up so that He can take credit for the saved, but not the damned.

                                            I wanted to get involved with organzing students and that cute smart chick in my class was looking for people to show up to her student union meetings.

And the good: I find The Great Divorce to be a fine rendition of damnation, but in this life, not the next. We do things that make us miserable, and we keep on doing them. If wanting G-d for G-d's sake seems silly to some or most, then wanting misery for misery's sake is at least 2.38 times sillier. And while being enigmatic while trying to help someone get out of a rut may seem foolish, pretending that there's no problem at all, or at least not mentioning it to the afflicted/afflicting is perverse.

                        Aha, I'm depressed. Better fix that.

Another fine rendition of damnation can be found in Dead Like me, wherein grim reapers are people who died and got hired by the powers that be. Although granted a form of temporary immortality, some of them, after being dead for longer than many people have been alive, are stuck in the same stupid habits that wrecked, or ended, their lives. Others are enjoying the experience. Most, I imagine, do a bit of both.

*("Theology" n. 1. an intellectual endurance contest of making contradictory information fit. e.g. "without faith, you build your house on sand, with faith you build it on rock, with theology, you build it on the back of a giant turtle with sledges pulled by angels that fit fifty to a pinhead").

Current Music: Squirrel Nut Zippers - Damnation, Cranberries - Salvation

Something's shifted recently, I can see into what I'm doing, why I'm doing it. I can see where the problems with how I'm living my life are, and what I need to change them. I can even see them on the fly, while I'm erring, and hav ethe impulse to fix it.

Weird.

The genie seems out of the bottle. Being in some sort or capital-R Relationship uncorked something weird and it's still spilling out and all over the place. I feel different, see myself, sex, and the interaction between the two differently, and I can't pin down events to cause this, just events that should cause this, that make sense.

It's good, but scary.

Chronic psychological shittyness led me to seek out a physician and now I've taken two 37.5 mg doses of effexor. The big reason for this is that I was having trouble sleeping and, throughout the last 24 hours, I've felt as if I've just had two cups of coffee.

This raises questions surronding the word "am." Is this an altered state of me? Or would some medicated-to-the-point-of-"health" state be me? Or are they both? Or is the question moot?

Is this nine-volt-to-the-wet-part-of-the-brain feeling the medication? Or is it the medication under specific circumstances? Or is it just feeling good to be back, with my friends, at school, sleeping with Erin, and away from a really crappy week of death in Kelowna?
On the subject of feeling wired, there's an interesting variant on the placebo effect that bears consideration. I don't know it's name, but it goes...

"The worse the side-effects, the more potent the medication is perceived to be."

...if you're on a drug for chronic knee pain and you feel normal, it may or may not actually be working, but if you're on a drug that makes you dizzy and unable to see the colour green, you can be assured it's doing something. Besides, if the side effects are this bad, it must be effective.

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The Fanstastic Ms. Fox

Entries tagged with psychology

Pure mind; free mind

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Falling into balance

Questions surronding the word "am."

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August 2017

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