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Post by thomas on Jul 1, 2023 10:44:03 GMT
Please note that it was the mods, not me, who designated the Mind Zone "for polite conversation only". Since we are now in the Mind Zone at the moment, you might like to rephrase your aggressive post according to the rules, as you suggest. If you have a problem with that, please look up the word "polite" and address the 6. How you speak to others elsewhere is of no interest to me other than to suggest a certain image. So having been initially rude to me , you then flounce off hiding behind rules , demanding politeness in return when you are often impolite to others who disagree with you on these boards , and ending your post in your usual pathetic dismissive attitude.
Why don't we create a special part of this forum , like a padded cell , for you oracle , where you can pontificate unchallenged , and only those who share your views can be admitted to politely clap the constant rubbish you post on this forum.
How does that sound?
I equally couldn't be any less interested in what image you have of me in your mind.
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Post by oracle75 on Jul 1, 2023 11:04:31 GMT
I have to say you are brave to post such a post in an area and thread about refraining from using such language.
Though clearly a prime candidate for reporting, i'll just put it down to temporary lapse of awareness.
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Post by Orac on Jul 1, 2023 11:53:03 GMT
You aren't allowed to complain about the mind zone in the mind zone.
It's a new rule I just made up on the spot:
Adolf Orac
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jul 6, 2023 13:26:38 GMT
Well, well, well... Based on previous experience, I expected this thread to fizzle out very quickly...not run to six pages. When I have time later today I will revisit the thread and actually read what's going on. I suspect what has been going on prompted TSM's 'Mindless Zone' thread.  It started as an interesting thread.
I have a bit of a problem though when you point out the mind camouflages its real motivation. Since nearly all the data we have on how the mind works comes from what the mind communicates to the observer, then how can the observer differentiate between the "true motive" and the camouflaged appearance? It reminds me of that Freudian psychoanalysis where it was suggested behaviour had its foundation in matters of a sexual nature, one I recall was all women were supposed to be hung up on early experiences of "penis envy". Was Freud just finding a theory that fits when one overlooks the awkward assumptions, like is there another explanation that fits all the facts.
There's another weird one which cropped up on the BBC the other day where it explained a term has been created known as "institutional racism". The definition is racism that comes about through unconscious biases. By such a definition no one who can be accused of institutional racism can know they are guilty of it unless someone takes them to a trial and convicts them. Crazy eh?
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Post by see2 on Jul 6, 2023 14:27:14 GMT
Well, well, well... Based on previous experience, I expected this thread to fizzle out very quickly...not run to six pages. When I have time later today I will revisit the thread and actually read what's going on. I suspect what has been going on prompted TSM's 'Mindless Zone' thread. It started as an interesting thread.
I have a bit of a problem though when you point out the mind camouflages its real motivation. Since nearly all the data we have on how the mind works comes from what the mind communicates to the observer, then how can the observer differentiate between the "true motive" and the camouflaged appearance? It reminds me of that Freudian psychoanalysis where it was suggested behaviour had its foundation in matters of a sexual nature, one I recall was all women were supposed to be hung up on early experiences of "penis envy". Was Freud just finding a theory that fits when one overlooks the awkward assumptions, like is there another explanation that fits all the facts.
There's another weird one which cropped up on the BBC the other day where it explained a term has been created known as "institutional racism". The definition is racism that comes about through unconscious biases. By such a definition no one who can be accused of institutional racism can know they are guilty of it unless someone takes them to a trial and convicts them. Crazy eh?
AS the human brain cannot feel anything it stands to reason that all thoughts are triggered by feelings that arise from the unconscious i.e. learnt hormonal reactions that are then picked up by the thinking brain. The sensory system that builds up a catalogue of hormonal reactions does not think, cannot rationalise and cannot apply logic, its job is to learn, remember and to react. The thinking brain has to work its way through and or around the sensory feelings that are fed into it. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jul 6, 2023 15:02:25 GMT
It started as an interesting thread.
I have a bit of a problem though when you point out the mind camouflages its real motivation. Since nearly all the data we have on how the mind works comes from what the mind communicates to the observer, then how can the observer differentiate between the "true motive" and the camouflaged appearance? It reminds me of that Freudian psychoanalysis where it was suggested behaviour had its foundation in matters of a sexual nature, one I recall was all women were supposed to be hung up on early experiences of "penis envy". Was Freud just finding a theory that fits when one overlooks the awkward assumptions, like is there another explanation that fits all the facts.
There's another weird one which cropped up on the BBC the other day where it explained a term has been created known as "institutional racism". The definition is racism that comes about through unconscious biases. By such a definition no one who can be accused of institutional racism can know they are guilty of it unless someone takes them to a trial and convicts them. Crazy eh?
AS the human brain cannot feel anything it stands to reason that all thoughts are triggered by feelings that arise from the unconscious i.e. learnt hormonal reactions that are then picked up by the thinking brain. The sensory system that builds up a catalogue of hormonal reactions does not think, cannot rationalise and cannot apply logic, its job is to learn, remember and to react. The thinking brain has to work its way through and or around the sensory feelings that are fed into it. What you are doing there is essentially what Freud did and called it psychoanalysis. The idea is to construct a model that fits all observations which are of course made using the same instrument( the human brain) as is the thing you are trying to study. It's like wondering if a Z80 would understand itself!
Using more modern and what is regarded as hard science techniques we actually find something different going on. The human brain in its conscious state makes millions of observations each day through its sensory inputs. It stores these experiences in a temporary memory, a bit like a computer cache. Experiences are like a chain of neuron firings. During the night when asleep the brain goes through all of this and replays those neuron firings for the purpose of finding relations between one thing an another. It then compresses the information for long-term memory storage into higher level abstractions, and these are kind of nested so you can have an abstraction which abstracts a set of abstractions and so on. For example lets say in one day I put my hand in the fire on many occasions at different time and whilst doing different things. My brain then sees I get the same feeling on each occasion and it does not depend on which room the fire is in. I then don't need to remember these many experiences as I can just store what is useful to know, such a fires burn. As my life progresses this mental concept map gets more refined, so we learn big fires burn more than small ones and we become more certain of these concepts the more times we see the same pattern, but if the pattern started to change we would reconfigure the weightings accordingly, like a few fires burn, about half o them do, or whatever the stat really is. It's a case of successive approximation, tracking moving targets, finding better algorithms to interpret new experience and so on. The brain is such a general system it can solve almost any problem. A specialist system would be faster but not as versatile, such as a handheld calculator.
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Post by johnofgwent on Jul 6, 2023 15:10:26 GMT
Reflecting on fifteen years of participation in online politics discussion (pofo.org; pofoUK and this place), I have been endlessly both fascinated and horrified at the psychology behind so many exchanges one can read. The polarity and binary thought on display is staggering, in an arena wherein the object should be to find solutions to society's problems. There are structural factors, too, such as our adversarial, 'debating society' model of parliament, which subliminally entrenches that polarity and partisanship, but it is the deeper psychology I find interesting. Here is something lifted from Twitter, by Prof Jonathan Shedler, a psychology professor from UCSF. Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks "I'm a sadist" or "I'm a malignant narcissist." They find a belief system/social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues. The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true and right. They find a way to give free rein to their cruelty, to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously. And they find allies to cheer them on, who also believe they are on the side of all that is true and good.
For colleagues looking for more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection and projective identification. Splitting means not recognizing one's own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves. Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other. And this other person, via the defence of projection, is now seen as the repository of all that is bad and evil and necessary to destroy. That's the projection.
The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their viciousness and hate on the other person, who is now seen (via projection) as someone monstrous who must be destroyed. If the person who is projected on responds to the provocation with anger, this is now seen as further confirmation of how hateful and destructive they are (this is what is called is "projective identification.") The end result is that the person can deny their own sadism, cruelty, and hate—while simultaneously acting it out without restraint. And feel themselves to be 100% on the side of truth and right as they do it.
In more everyday language, what it boils down to for me is two factors: First, people on all sides of politics allow themselves to believe that only they and their allies speak the truth. Ergo, everyone else is deluded. Second, having convinced themselves of the 'truth' of their position, they feel justified in simply not caring about the impact their 'truth' might have on others. You'll notice I have not made any party references. This phenomenon knows no party boundaries and can be traced back to Greece and Rome. What has potentiated and accelerated it in the last decade or so has been social media. Prior to Twitter et al, one's only option was the apocryphal letter to the (broadsheet) paper from the eponymous 'Outraged of Tonbridge Wells'. Now anyone and everyone can, if they wish, comment in real time on the opinion of anyone else and, let's be frank, most of those comments tend to be aggressively ad hominem and without substance. Taking this place as an example, few threads last more than half a dozen posts before they descend into aggressive, ad hominem attacks that add nothing to the discussion. I hardly post these days, precisely because of that phenomenon. When I see a topic of interest, unless it's only recently been posted it will have degenerated into a slanging match between polarised groups and any comment I might make in relation to the OP gets lost in the bar fight. Unfortunately, a vocal minority only log in for those bar fights. The same has become true of the political world upon which we come here to comment. 'Personality politics' and populism have wrought a political landscape in which little meaningful discussion can take place, thanks to the entrenchment of polarised thinking and the consolidation of notions of righteousness in those polarised positions. I suppose a good question to put in response to this is how many times has someone posted something that gives you an insight or understanding you did not have before you read their post. On here, i think the last time was a post citing the view of a former political adviser to Theresa May on stop and search, that the likes of Abbott and Lammy criticise it for focussing on blacks, stopping and searching a far higher percentage of such people than live in the area, whereas the reality is the measure is applied to those on the street at the time, and since large numbers of the population are in bed asleep at 3am, in fact comparison of those stopped versus those available to be stopped shows a leaning to stop far more WHITE people than the ethnic breakdown of those on the street at that time suggest it should be. It is stuff like that i come here to be dazzled by. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jul 6, 2023 15:33:52 GMT
Reflecting on fifteen years of participation in online politics discussion (pofo.org; pofoUK and this place), I have been endlessly both fascinated and horrified at the psychology behind so many exchanges one can read. The polarity and binary thought on display is staggering, in an arena wherein the object should be to find solutions to society's problems. There are structural factors, too, such as our adversarial, 'debating society' model of parliament, which subliminally entrenches that polarity and partisanship, but it is the deeper psychology I find interesting. Here is something lifted from Twitter, by Prof Jonathan Shedler, a psychology professor from UCSF. Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks "I'm a sadist" or "I'm a malignant narcissist." They find a belief system/social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues. The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true and right. They find a way to give free rein to their cruelty, to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously. And they find allies to cheer them on, who also believe they are on the side of all that is true and good.
For colleagues looking for more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection and projective identification. Splitting means not recognizing one's own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves. Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other. And this other person, via the defence of projection, is now seen as the repository of all that is bad and evil and necessary to destroy. That's the projection.
The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their viciousness and hate on the other person, who is now seen (via projection) as someone monstrous who must be destroyed. If the person who is projected on responds to the provocation with anger, this is now seen as further confirmation of how hateful and destructive they are (this is what is called is "projective identification.") The end result is that the person can deny their own sadism, cruelty, and hate—while simultaneously acting it out without restraint. And feel themselves to be 100% on the side of truth and right as they do it.
In more everyday language, what it boils down to for me is two factors: First, people on all sides of politics allow themselves to believe that only they and their allies speak the truth. Ergo, everyone else is deluded. Second, having convinced themselves of the 'truth' of their position, they feel justified in simply not caring about the impact their 'truth' might have on others. You'll notice I have not made any party references. This phenomenon knows no party boundaries and can be traced back to Greece and Rome. What has potentiated and accelerated it in the last decade or so has been social media. Prior to Twitter et al, one's only option was the apocryphal letter to the (broadsheet) paper from the eponymous 'Outraged of Tonbridge Wells'. Now anyone and everyone can, if they wish, comment in real time on the opinion of anyone else and, let's be frank, most of those comments tend to be aggressively ad hominem and without substance. Taking this place as an example, few threads last more than half a dozen posts before they descend into aggressive, ad hominem attacks that add nothing to the discussion. I hardly post these days, precisely because of that phenomenon. When I see a topic of interest, unless it's only recently been posted it will have degenerated into a slanging match between polarised groups and any comment I might make in relation to the OP gets lost in the bar fight. Unfortunately, a vocal minority only log in for those bar fights. The same has become true of the political world upon which we come here to comment. 'Personality politics' and populism have wrought a political landscape in which little meaningful discussion can take place, thanks to the entrenchment of polarised thinking and the consolidation of notions of righteousness in those polarised positions. I suppose a good question to put in response to this is how many times has someone posted something that gives you an insight or understanding you did not have before you read their post. On here, i think the last time was a post citing the view of a former political adviser to Theresa May on stop and search, that the likes of Abbott and Lammy criticise it for focussing on blacks, stopping and searching a far higher percentage of such people than live in the area, whereas the reality is the measure is applied to those on the street at the time, and since large numbers of the population are in bed asleep at 3am, in fact comparison of those stopped versus those available to be stopped shows a leaning to stop far more WHITE people than the ethnic breakdown of those on the street at that time suggest it should be. It is stuff like that i come here to be dazzled by. How does knowing that improve your life? |
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Post by oracle75 on Jul 6, 2023 16:28:58 GMT
Reflecting on fifteen years of participation in online politics discussion (pofo.org; pofoUK and this place), I have been endlessly both fascinated and horrified at the psychology behind so many exchanges one can read. The polarity and binary thought on display is staggering, in an arena wherein the object should be to find solutions to society's problems. There are structural factors, too, such as our adversarial, 'debating society' model of parliament, which subliminally entrenches that polarity and partisanship, but it is the deeper psychology I find interesting. Here is something lifted from Twitter, by Prof Jonathan Shedler, a psychology professor from UCSF. Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks "I'm a sadist" or "I'm a malignant narcissist." They find a belief system/social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues. The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true and right. They find a way to give free rein to their cruelty, to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously. And they find allies to cheer them on, who also believe they are on the side of all that is true and good.
For colleagues looking for more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection and projective identification. Splitting means not recognizing one's own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves. Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other. And this other person, via the defence of projection, is now seen as the repository of all that is bad and evil and necessary to destroy. That's the projection.
The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their viciousness and hate on the other person, who is now seen (via projection) as someone monstrous who must be destroyed. If the person who is projected on responds to the provocation with anger, this is now seen as further confirmation of how hateful and destructive they are (this is what is called is "projective identification.") The end result is that the person can deny their own sadism, cruelty, and hate—while simultaneously acting it out without restraint. And feel themselves to be 100% on the side of truth and right as they do it.
In more everyday language, what it boils down to for me is two factors: First, people on all sides of politics allow themselves to believe that only they and their allies speak the truth. Ergo, everyone else is deluded. Second, having convinced themselves of the 'truth' of their position, they feel justified in simply not caring about the impact their 'truth' might have on others. You'll notice I have not made any party references. This phenomenon knows no party boundaries and can be traced back to Greece and Rome. What has potentiated and accelerated it in the last decade or so has been social media. Prior to Twitter et al, one's only option was the apocryphal letter to the (broadsheet) paper from the eponymous 'Outraged of Tonbridge Wells'. Now anyone and everyone can, if they wish, comment in real time on the opinion of anyone else and, let's be frank, most of those comments tend to be aggressively ad hominem and without substance. Taking this place as an example, few threads last more than half a dozen posts before they descend into aggressive, ad hominem attacks that add nothing to the discussion. I hardly post these days, precisely because of that phenomenon. When I see a topic of interest, unless it's only recently been posted it will have degenerated into a slanging match between polarised groups and any comment I might make in relation to the OP gets lost in the bar fight. Unfortunately, a vocal minority only log in for those bar fights. The same has become true of the political world upon which we come here to comment. 'Personality politics' and populism have wrought a political landscape in which little meaningful discussion can take place, thanks to the entrenchment of polarised thinking and the consolidation of notions of righteousness in those polarised positions. I suppose a good question to put in response to this is how many times has someone posted something that gives you an insight or understanding you did not have before you read their post. On here, i think the last time was a post citing the view of a former political adviser to Theresa May on stop and search, that the likes of Abbott and Lammy criticise it for focussing on blacks, stopping and searching a far higher percentage of such people than live in the area, whereas the reality is the measure is applied to those on the street at the time, and since large numbers of the population are in bed asleep at 3am, in fact comparison of those stopped versus those available to be stopped shows a leaning to stop far more WHITE people than the ethnic breakdown of those on the street at that time suggest it should be. It is stuff like that i come here to be dazzled by. What surprises me is that you think stop and search only happens in the wee hours of the night. Or that only white people are out then and black people are tucked up in bed. Live and learn. |
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Post by see2 on Jul 6, 2023 17:22:10 GMT
AS the human brain cannot feel anything it stands to reason that all thoughts are triggered by feelings that arise from the unconscious i.e. learnt hormonal reactions that are then picked up by the thinking brain. The sensory system that builds up a catalogue of hormonal reactions does not think, cannot rationalise and cannot apply logic, its job is to learn, remember and to react. The thinking brain has to work its way through and or around the sensory feelings that are fed into it. What you are doing there is essentially what Freud did and called it psychoanalysis. The idea is to construct a model that fits all observations which are of course made using the same instrument( the human brain) as is the thing you are trying to study. It's like wondering if a Z80 would understand itself!
Using more modern and what is regarded as hard science techniques we actually find something different going on. The human brain in its conscious state makes millions of observations each day through its sensory inputs. It stores these experiences in a temporary memory, a bit like a computer cache. Experiences are like a chain of neuron firings. During the night when asleep the brain goes through all of this and replays those neuron firings for the purpose of finding relations between one thing an another. It then compresses the information for long-term memory storage into higher level abstractions, and these are kind of nested so you can have an abstraction which abstracts a set of abstractions and so on. For example lets say in one day I put my hand in the fire on many occasions at different time and whilst doing different things. My brain then sees I get the same feeling on each occasion and it does not depend on which room the fire is in. I then don't need to remember these many experiences as I can just store what is useful to know, such a fires burn. As my life progresses this mental concept map gets more refined, so we learn big fires burn more than small ones and we become more certain of these concepts the more times we see the same pattern, but if the pattern started to change we would reconfigure the weightings accordingly, like a few fires burn, about half o them do, or whatever the stat really is. It's a case of successive approximation, tracking moving targets, finding better algorithms to interpret new experience and so on. The brain is such a general system it can solve almost any problem. A specialist system would be faster but not as versatile, such as a handheld calculator.
You and your source are about half right. The sensory system DOES NOT DO LOGIC ANYWHERE OR AT ANY TIME. The brain is clearly active overnight, but I would suggest that whatever it is doing is 1. Is not produced by the thinking brain, all pictures in the mind are produced by the sensory system. 2. It is clearly not applying logic to anything. The Sensory System is very basic in that it learns remembers and reacts, it does not do logic which is why there is so much unnecessary and inappropriate anger around, and so many cases of depression. If the Sensory System could do Logic there would be no such thing as depression. |
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Post by Orac on Jul 6, 2023 20:46:17 GMT
Anna Kasparian finally escapes her psychopathic abusers
She's not out yet but she is definitely pushing at the dungeon door
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Post by Dubdrifter on Jul 12, 2023 8:48:52 GMT
Reflecting on fifteen years of participation in online politics discussion (pofo.org; pofoUK and this place), I have been endlessly both fascinated and horrified at the psychology behind so many exchanges one can read. The polarity and binary thought on display is staggering, in an arena wherein the object should be to find solutions to society's problems. There are structural factors, too, such as our adversarial, 'debating society' model of parliament, which subliminally entrenches that polarity and partisanship, but it is the deeper psychology I find interesting. Here is something lifted from Twitter, by Prof Jonathan Shedler, a psychology professor from UCSF. Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks "I'm a sadist" or "I'm a malignant narcissist." They find a belief system/social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues. The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true and right. They find a way to give free rein to their cruelty, to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously. And they find allies to cheer them on, who also believe they are on the side of all that is true and good.
For colleagues looking for more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection and projective identification. Splitting means not recognizing one's own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves. Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other. And this other person, via the defence of projection, is now seen as the repository of all that is bad and evil and necessary to destroy. That's the projection.
The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their viciousness and hate on the other person, who is now seen (via projection) as someone monstrous who must be destroyed. If the person who is projected on responds to the provocation with anger, this is now seen as further confirmation of how hateful and destructive they are (this is what is called is "projective identification.") The end result is that the person can deny their own sadism, cruelty, and hate—while simultaneously acting it out without restraint. And feel themselves to be 100% on the side of truth and right as they do it.
In more everyday language, what it boils down to for me is two factors:
First, people on all sides of politics allow themselves to believe that only they and their allies speak the truth. Ergo, everyone else is deluded.
Second, having convinced themselves of the 'truth' of their position, they feel justified in simply not caring about the impact their 'truth' might have on others.
You'll notice I have not made any party references. This phenomenon knows no party boundaries and can be traced back to Greece and Rome.
What has potentiated and accelerated it in the last decade or so has been social media. Prior to Twitter et al, one's only option was the apocryphal letter to the (broadsheet) paper from the eponymous 'Outraged of Tonbridge Wells'. Now anyone and everyone can, if they wish, comment in real time on the opinion of anyone else and, let's be frank, most of those comments tend to be aggressively ad hominem and without substance.
Taking this place as an example, few threads last more than half a dozen posts before they descend into aggressive, ad hominem attacks that add nothing to the discussion. I hardly post these days, precisely because of that phenomenon. When I see a topic of interest, unless it's only recently been posted it will have degenerated into a slanging match between polarised groups and any comment I might make in relation to the OP gets lost in the bar fight. Unfortunately, a vocal minority only log in for those bar fights. The same has become true of the political world upon which we come here to comment. 'Personality politics' and populism have wrought a political landscape in which little meaningful discussion can take place, thanks to the entrenchment of polarised thinking and the consolidation of notions of righteousness in those polarised positions. It’s a shame you see little of merit to discuss here on this Forum … or the last space we had.… you did so little to petition to save it … so maybe your respect for what was written was limited. I have found some great contributors over the years … attracted by the marginally greater freedoms here … where all polarised factions can lock antlers on ideas and politics … even science … knowing they might be safe from being removed from the Platform … and censored by opponents … even these days by scientific overseers and political law-makers who hate their Laws being challenged. … Sadly we discovered 19 years of ordinary people’s thoughts and ideas could be easily removed from History by American interference and a foreign absentee owner(Fox) with no respect for Libraries and Archives. This is the problem when ‘intellectuals advocate censorship of Social Media’ … which is to me what is behind the psychology of this OP … Are you creating a template here to justify ‘censorship of the Masses’ …. shutting down Social Media?? … or am I reading too much into your piece?? … Intellectuals and the State have made concerted attacks on Twitter and Tik-Tok recently … just because ‘intellectuals’ are too lazy to write an effective counter argument to whatever offends them … Americans are scared their economic + military World Domination is being threatened by another power - China and Russia …. and think controlling Social Media will help sell their ramping up nuclear conflict … surely not their only optional threat they have left … ??🤯🤯 Why should ‘perpetually angry from Tunbridge Wells’ not have a voice and platform to vent?? … just because The State cannot defend it’s totalitarianism any more? … Maybe if Governments and the MSM didn’t sell out and censor 50% of their Citizens … and break their borders to invasion by the worst scum on the planet …. become poodles to foreign powers and religions … maybe the levels of anger might diminish??🤔 |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jul 12, 2023 12:10:09 GMT
What you are doing there is essentially what Freud did and called it psychoanalysis. The idea is to construct a model that fits all observations which are of course made using the same instrument( the human brain) as is the thing you are trying to study. It's like wondering if a Z80 would understand itself!
Using more modern and what is regarded as hard science techniques we actually find something different going on. The human brain in its conscious state makes millions of observations each day through its sensory inputs. It stores these experiences in a temporary memory, a bit like a computer cache. Experiences are like a chain of neuron firings. During the night when asleep the brain goes through all of this and replays those neuron firings for the purpose of finding relations between one thing an another. It then compresses the information for long-term memory storage into higher level abstractions, and these are kind of nested so you can have an abstraction which abstracts a set of abstractions and so on. For example lets say in one day I put my hand in the fire on many occasions at different time and whilst doing different things. My brain then sees I get the same feeling on each occasion and it does not depend on which room the fire is in. I then don't need to remember these many experiences as I can just store what is useful to know, such a fires burn. As my life progresses this mental concept map gets more refined, so we learn big fires burn more than small ones and we become more certain of these concepts the more times we see the same pattern, but if the pattern started to change we would reconfigure the weightings accordingly, like a few fires burn, about half o them do, or whatever the stat really is. It's a case of successive approximation, tracking moving targets, finding better algorithms to interpret new experience and so on. The brain is such a general system it can solve almost any problem. A specialist system would be faster but not as versatile, such as a handheld calculator.
You and your source are about half right. The sensory system DOES NOT DO LOGIC ANYWHERE OR AT ANY TIME. The brain is clearly active overnight, but I would suggest that whatever it is doing is 1. Is not produced by the thinking brain, all pictures in the mind are produced by the sensory system. 2. It is clearly not applying logic to anything. The Sensory System is very basic in that it learns remembers and reacts, it does not do logic which is why there is so much unnecessary and inappropriate anger around, and so many cases of depression. If the Sensory System could do Logic there would be no such thing as depression. The night time ordering of information is done in the hippocampus. I'm talking about recent research. A neural network can learn logical patterns but it is often just working it out by probability. Things like you see a red thing in a fire and learn a red thing in a fire burns you and is hot. It's like recording logical patterns in the environment rather than the deductive reasoning which is a higher mental function. It can do logic but not very well. |
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Post by Dubdrifter on Sept 8, 2023 7:09:59 GMT
Reflecting on fifteen years of participation in online politics discussion (pofo.org; pofoUK and this place), I have been endlessly both fascinated and horrified at the psychology behind so many exchanges one can read. The polarity and binary thought on display is staggering, in an arena wherein the object should be to find solutions to society's problems. There are structural factors, too, such as our adversarial, 'debating society' model of parliament, which subliminally entrenches that polarity and partisanship, but it is the deeper psychology I find interesting. Here is something lifted from Twitter, by Prof Jonathan Shedler, a psychology professor from UCSF. Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks "I'm a sadist" or "I'm a malignant narcissist." They find a belief system/social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues. The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true and right. They find a way to give free rein to their cruelty, to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously. And they find allies to cheer them on, who also believe they are on the side of all that is true and good.
For colleagues looking for more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection and projective identification. Splitting means not recognizing one's own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves. Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other. And this other person, via the defence of projection, is now seen as the repository of all that is bad and evil and necessary to destroy. That's the projection.
The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their viciousness and hate on the other person, who is now seen (via projection) as someone monstrous who must be destroyed. If the person who is projected on responds to the provocation with anger, this is now seen as further confirmation of how hateful and destructive they are (this is what is called is "projective identification.") The end result is that the person can deny their own sadism, cruelty, and hate—while simultaneously acting it out without restraint. And feel themselves to be 100% on the side of truth and right as they do it.
In more everyday language, what it boils down to for me is two factors:
First, people on all sides of politics allow themselves to believe that only they and their allies speak the truth. Ergo, everyone else is deluded.
Second, having convinced themselves of the 'truth' of their position, they feel justified in simply not caring about the impact their 'truth' might have on others.
You'll notice I have not made any party references. This phenomenon knows no party boundaries and can be traced back to Greece and Rome.
What has potentiated and accelerated it in the last decade or so has been social media. Prior to Twitter et al, one's only option was the apocryphal letter to the (broadsheet) paper from the eponymous 'Outraged of Tonbridge Wells'. Now anyone and everyone can, if they wish, comment in real time on the opinion of anyone else and, let's be frank, most of those comments tend to be aggressively ad hominem and without substance.
Taking this place as an example, few threads last more than half a dozen posts before they descend into aggressive, ad hominem attacks that add nothing to the discussion. I hardly post these days, precisely because of that phenomenon. When I see a topic of interest, unless it's only recently been posted it will have degenerated into a slanging match between polarised groups and any comment I might make in relation to the OP gets lost in the bar fight. Unfortunately, a vocal minority only log in for those bar fights. The same has become true of the political world upon which we come here to comment. 'Personality politics' and populism have wrought a political landscape in which little meaningful discussion can take place, thanks to the entrenchment of polarised thinking and the consolidation of notions of righteousness in those polarised positions. It’s a shame you see little of merit to discuss here on this Forum … or the last space we had.… you did so little to petition to save it … so maybe your respect for what was written was limited. I have found some great contributors over the years … attracted by the marginally greater freedoms here … where all polarised factions can lock antlers on ideas and politics … even science … knowing they might be safe from being removed from the Platform … and censored by opponents … even these days by scientific overseers and political law-makers who hate their Laws being challenged. … Sadly we discovered 19 years of ordinary people’s thoughts and ideas could be easily removed from History by American interference and a foreign absentee owner(Fox) with no respect for Libraries and Archives. This is the problem when ‘intellectuals advocate censorship of Social Media’ … which is to me what is behind the psychology of this OP … Are you creating a template here to justify ‘censorship of the Masses’ …. shutting down Social Media?? … or am I reading too much into your piece?? … Intellectuals and the State have made concerted attacks on Twitter and Tik-Tok recently … just because ‘intellectuals’ are too lazy to write an effective counter argument to whatever offends them … Americans are scared their economic + military World Domination is being threatened by another power - China and Russia …. and think controlling Social Media will help sell their ramping up nuclear conflict … surely not their only optional threat they have left … ??🤯🤯 Why should ‘perpetually angry from Tunbridge Wells’ not have a voice and platform to vent?? … just because The State cannot defend it’s totalitarianism any more? … Maybe if Governments and the MSM didn’t sell out and censor 50% of their Citizens … and break their borders to invasion by the worst scum on the planet …. become poodles to foreign powers and religions … maybe the levels of anger might diminish??🤔 Firstly … apologies for bringing this discussion to a grinding halt with just one post …. …. I guess we were all waiting for a response from the OP to some valid points made here?? … and waiting … patiently … … if Members are going to drop opinion … and then walk away from the discussion … arguably plant a ‘malevolent seed of an idea advocating more CENSORSHIP being justified in the WEST today’ … then walking away … job done …. surely that smells like yet another Brigade 77 propaganda piece from the British Establishment.?? On my “PoFo Forum closure/Who was Fox?” thread …. ( that was bumped from Fringe Meetings into CT by Admin - in an attempt to marginalise it’s importance and ridicule the content … a move that didn’t work btw … it still got thousands of views) …. I dropped the idea that Fox, Lewis + Cartertonian and Co were all Deep State operatives trawling the World’s ‘Opinionistas’ for anarchists and terrorists. … Members soon surmised the switch to ‘American control’ only happened when the CIA Ukraine Propaganda Engineer’s DEPT and their Russian dissident translators needed to try harder to lockdown certain POV beginning to flood out against the war … on our relatively FREE SPEECH PoFo platform. The Peace-Mongers here 🕊soon surmised that the REALLY SERIOUS anarchists and terrorists were (shock horror) actually firmly entrenched in The Establishment! … and rarely out there in the REAL World where most Media fingers were pointing and jabbering excitedly at loners and misfits. 🤔 Ho hum! …🤪 … the day we get an honest answer to our probing on here … will be a day to remember. Still waiting in anticipation for Cartertonian’s reply to the points raised above … |
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Post by Vanna on Sept 8, 2023 8:37:07 GMT
Just seen this thread now. Interesting but unfortunately downgraded into a bit of a pie throwing contest, as these things tend to become. It is virtually impossible to have any point of view without someone getting up and calling you an evil, devious troll. Or a nazi. Or an idiot. Or making comments that leave you covered in the mind gunk of someone hiding true colours. I've been called so many ridiculous things I have lost count over twenty years of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I just didn't want to admit that the people I was fighting for were willing to treat me and my fellow travellers like dirt. You do learn a lot more about humans when you (foolishly?) venture into activism for causes you think are important. If you can't learn something else from what you have learned from experience then you are shutting off a section of your common sense and your ability to assess what is in front of you.
I assessed and I came to a few conclusions, discovering that my mistake was believing in something that wasn't what I thought it was. There was a hole in the bucket and that was why all the water placed in it was drooling out. Instead of fixing the bucket, I decided to throw the bucket into the recycling bin.
When you are young, or younger, you tend to have an energy for righteous rage and wanting to save things that dwindles as you age. I put this down to disillusionment with what you thought and enlightenment as to what you can reasonably expect to be the case. You aren't that rational when you are young. You become a rationalist when you reach a certain age and miraculously see through the miasma. You become like your elders who also got the hump with the way things are as opposed to the way they might, or even should, be.
So that is where I am now. A wiser old bat getting wiser every day and moving off toward a consideration of what else there might be besides all this suffering and intolerance, rage and narcissism, materialism and ego. It has always been there, this search for the underlying mystery, but things happen, you feel terrible about them and you go into battle. Only to emerge, if you are lucky, scarred but enlightened into the sad fact that humans will possibly never achieve their own ideals because they sabotage themselves all the time. Why they do this is a mystery. But they do and I no longer wish to be one of their punchbags. Not because I can't punch back (oh, yes I can!) but because I couldn't be bothered with what has turned out to be disappointment.
There are certain humans who are waking up and turning on their fighting spirit to face the madness of woke and degeneration of the western world. Good luck to them. They will probably all be fired, dragged through the muck and impoverished. If they survive you will know that time's wheel has passed a point where things revive. If not ... prepare for what visited Rome.
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