So here we are. You are reading this, I have written this. These occurrences were not at the same time, yet they connect two things. My mind to your mind. Yet, besides your ability to cognitively (by thought process) distinguish characters, words, language and meaning, you will likely also have your emotional luggage stirring up while reading this. Especially the following. But where does neorology and cognitive abilities meet, divert and moved from one to another?
Where animal and mind meet
Ever watched one of those movies, where they had a human person make a connection with an animal? Think Lassie, White Fang, Life of Pi, etc.
How did you watch such story? Did you think it was fiction? Well, likely you did, as of course movies and books are written from the human mind, and as such are always fiction, even recollections of real life events, they are never fully objective representations.
So, lets get back to the story of man and animal. Have you ever looked at such an event, where for instance a person was wounded in the wilderness and the ‘animal’ was suddenly close to their side, comforting them?
Did you ever consider, why this is? Do you think that a dog, wolf, or tiger, thinks: Look, this meat bag looks delicious and I haven’t seen a chicken for a decade, but I will lay with it, because it looks like he has a cellphone, or atleast some money to buy me a McBurger.
Why would it do that? What animal would consider human concepts as its own? How did we come to these concepts?
I hope you will agree with me, that to understand the ‘motives’ of an animal, you will have to investigate to what it’s ‘reference’ is. An animal doesn’t have any words or abstract conceptualization. What does it have? Well, for one it has emotions.
It is very hard for humans to ‘imagine’ how an animal, even one that is so close to us as an Chimpansee or other primate, behaves, without the appearance of a mind.
Ever been angry? Ever been so so…FF’ing mad that you could hit someone? No? Ever been so heartbroken that it physically hurt? That you couldn’t get a straight word out of your mouth, you couldn’t think a straight line of thought? No….jees, though crowd…ever been so scared that the first reaction you had was to jump back? Yes? Aw…finally. Good. Well, I agree, likely you have had all of the three, but now I guess everyone has some reference to connect to.
These things: Anger, hurt (not only pain), fear, etc, are emotions. They are the place where things go when minds stop working, and they are the thing that makes minds stop working. Why is that? Because of the way it creates the mind just the same.
The mind is considered to be a feedback system between the prefrontal cortex and the Claustrum (apologies for the technical terms if they are new to you). How did this come to be?
Well, in other posts I have already explained how our ancestral primate forefathers/mothers were surviving by evading predators. Yes, before several thousands years ago, humans weren’t the primary force on Earth (apologies for the spoiler if you hadn’t seen the episode yet).
Like most mammals, primates had to survive in a landscape that was warming up again after the last ice age
“Nothing is evil which is according to nature.” – Marcus Aurelius
A good start
Think of a person you know. Whether that person is a close relative, or a person far far a way in some forgotten place and time. Imagine that person that has the best intention to the world. The best impact. You would consider that person to be a ‘good person’, right? Why so?
We often find the person that has the most relatible behavior to what we would want to instill on the world, to be a good person. It is the bias of our own emotion and empathy that causes us to consider a person as good. Not just someone that acts like we do, but a person that acts like we WANT to do. This is the person we most often see as good.
Now turn it around. Think again, close and home, far and wide, for a person that you think is a bad person. A personification of evil. Yes, that one. Whether it is a man or woman, killed one or millions with their bare hands, or caused such grief it would be considered equal to as if he/she had killed those. Did you find such a person? Of course you did. Again, we find people that do the farthest of what we would do, the worst, the most evil, the most bad person alive. Not just farthest from what we do…but what we imagine we would do.
Can we agree, from this moment on, that someone we think of as good, is a person that upholds the highest positive values we can imagine (want) and a person that upholds the oposite, or undermines the earlier mentioned values the most, we call a bad or evil person?
If you can agree to the above, you are already quite a step further down the line of acknowledging what the end of this post will tell you (no peeking!)
See no evil, hear no evil
“Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.” – Mark Twain
In the previous paragraph, I tried to show you, that there are distinct features to what you will see as evil or good. These distinctions are very important, but the most important part of them is, to understand that they are SUBJECTIVE. It is what you want them to be. The power of upholding your own moral compass depends on the will to believe that what you do is right and what you envision as good IS good, and visa versa.
But imagine that you were actually wrong? Look at the item you hold as good (whether you have rational reasons to accept this as good or not), and see it as evil for a second. Can you? No? It will be hard, but there are reasons you can’t easily change your view. They are the ways your emotions have been ‘etched’ on the cognitive biases you have created/enforced, in your neurology.
“You can think of anything to be good, until the aftermath of the action shows you otherwise.”
People that you might think as evil, have done the same as you, but visa versa. Even sociopaths and psychopaths don’t automatically wake up in the morning: ‘Woah, I need to do something superbly evil today, or people will not think I am a psychopath!’. They wake up as Joe next door, mind you, married and playing in a soccerteam or hard laborer at their company. They don’t intend to do evil, they tend to approach their ideal of good as best as they can. This ideal can seem bad to you, but imagine you have been searching your life for what is good and you found out all around you are dellusional and lying people. Even if they don’t, if you believe it, it will mean those are bad. We can agree that lying is bad, right? Being dellusional is not a healthy treat, right?
Evil is as evil does
So, why do we think that someone did good, even if that person has a history of violence? And now I will come with a very dangerous example, because I myself find this man to have changed the world for the better, as many do: Nelson Mandela. He fought against apartheid, by many means. He did so by being a lawyer, by presumably using militant force against citizens (these days called terrorism or rebelism). Thanks to his effort new generations of humans live more equal to each other.
Another person, who many think was good, is someone I do not think in any way represents what is good:
Che Guevara. He fought for freedom of his people in Cuba, but used such brutal force and enjoyed violence at one point, that I can not find myself to agree with anyone wearing a Che silhouet shirt. It is, to me, a utter sense of ignorance of history.
These two are examples of many people, ranging from Mother Theresa, to Ghandi, to worse examples like Stalin, Hitler and Mohammed ‘the prophet’. Sainthood can be attained by showing good, even when being bad. As such, if you don’t openly ‘do bad’, you are not seen as bad or evil (example most vile is Mother Theresa, who gained sainthood, while she openly has shown misconceptions on the need for human suffering on more than one occassion).
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
As you will know from this page, it is in no means a religious page. Even the opposite, it is rationalist and atheist. So why use this phrase used often, regarding an imaginary place from contemporary religious writing? Because of the meaning that is indistinctive calling from it.
The general idea of a place called ‘hell’ in judeo-christian religion, is that of bad omen. If you go there, you did something bad (or not enough good, depending on the perspective of religiosity). In general, all participants of this believe that if you do evil, you go to this place.
Regardless of faith, if you equate ‘hell’ as destructive and negative impacting the environment around one, you could say, that one easily causes unwanted negative effects, while wanting to do good things.
You can think of anything to be good, until the aftermath of the action shows you otherwise. The same is true in reverse. How many stories or movies have you watched, that you were sure the bad guy was bad, until at the end, the real cause and effect was differently explainable, making the bad guy the good guy all along? Yes, that is right. Until the point where the protagonist in the 12 Monkeys accepts that HE is the one who brought out the disease, all viewers are thinking that HE is the good guy. Now a more heavier load is the latest (year 2020) ‘phase’ ended in the ‘MCU’ Marvel Cinematic Universe), where the bad guy Thanos was portrayed as such a rational guy, that his reasons for doing what he did almost seemed good.
Good measurement, evil insight
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. – Will Rogers
Now, I did add the ‘almost’, but the most important thing to remember is, that good and evil don’t exist. They are constructs in our emotional-cognitive worldview. They are concepts, a hatstand for combining observations into a more complex judgement.
Once you forget about the idea of evil and good in the judgemental sense that even the best religions and politics try to hold you on, you will start to make better judgement for yourself. Remember, any human is as good as you, you are as good as any human.
We, as a species are in a weird predicament. Our entire species, no matter what culture, is in trouble with a new version of a virus that we have been threatened by several times over the last few years. Now we can go into large detail on what the virus does and how it is a danger to young and old. But the bigger problem isn’t the virus. It is our sudden inability to distinguish between usable patterns and non-usable patterns (aka superstition/conspiracies).
Super stitious
Humans have prided themselves (especially from scientific perspective) on our ability to distinguish patterns and to use concepts regarding patterns that exceed our visual observation. However, as a species, we have learned many things parallel and these things haven’t all be correct.
Some of the most obvious superstitious items that have been lingering in western society for a long time, was black cats and walking under ladders. There are many more, but these most likely everyone knows. Lets consider the claims and see why they exist and why they are bogus (or not).
Bad luck
‘Black cats bring bad luck’. For one thing, when in the dark, black cats are hard to see. When a cat is in heat or are fighting, their screams sound very very unearthly. Combined with the fact that because they are hardly to see in the dark and when you do see them, mostly you will see the prying eyes that judge you as all cats do, it makes them mysterious and scary creatures.
So, if someone stumbles (literaly) on a cat in the dark, one can say: That is bad luck. But if more people admit this has happened to them (black, brown, grey, turtleshell, whatever color the cat had), the patterns starts to become very easy. Sometimes someone repeats it as a joke, sometimes someone wants to be the middle of attention and reiterates the story altered or that of another. Eventually, the story sticks and people start to create constructs in their minds that will RATIONALIZE the pattern that they should be able to distinguish. For some, all cats become a danger. Others stick to the specific story. If we take a look at when the superstitious tale about cats started to diminish, we see a trend with street lighting. The more electric streetlights (and therefore continous bright) the less the story would stick. Nobody tripped over cats in the dark anymore. Cats don’t like looking into bright lights, so they would mostly look away, diminishing the ‘scary judging view’. Additionally, more and more people in western countries started holding cats as pets and their different breeds started to make the stories less ‘general patterned’.
Math and geometry magic
Then how about ladders? This is more of a goofy thing, where people took religious concepts into realworld situations. A ladder against a sil will create a triangle (often almost perfect), which people from abrahamic religions would adher to 3, thus trinity. This combined with the fact that a ladder is mostly used to bring things to a height (like paint or water to clean windows), it could happen that someone got some of that paint or water on them when walking under a ladder. This seems to be the most legit version of rationalizing illogical patterns. It is better to not walk under ladders, though there is no actual ‘superstitious’ reason for it.
Con spiracy
Most often we seek patterns that are biased to what we want. This is logically, because we as an organism, want to trust on our ‘instincts’ to get us easy food and lazy life fast and easy. If something falls in our expectations, we are easy to accept it as confirmation of our bias, so we don’t have to venture into scary territory. When we add confirmation bias on confirmation bias and the bubble/box we keep ourselves in, is not broken, we will claim that something is true. Our subjective observations can not prevent this mistake, because we are less ‘intelligent’ than we think.
Masked truth
The problem is that most of our actions are hidden from ourselves. Our thoughts are only a small portion of our cognitive activity. When we are children much of our thought is new, because much of what we observe is new. We conduct investigation. Question everything. But when we get older, things we have observed before, are processed by our brain automatically. Much of the patterns that we have recognized and determined (whether right or wrong) as some kind of causal effect, will remain beyond our future vision. These patterns then cause an automated reaction in our brain, a reflex/instinctive behavior, and we are then sometimes wondering why we behave a certain way in certain situations. We, depending on what values we have before learned, decide these actions are having special meaning. Nothing is further from the truth. If we were to have learned of these behaviors before, we might have thought differently about them.
Blurred vision
But the result of this ‘masking’ of our own behavior by the fact that our identity is only a limited part of ourself cognitive awareness, is that anything we observe afterwards depends on the way we have created the filters before. These filters are the automatic processing of patterns by our brain. The reflexes and instincts. Anything we observe and think is objectively processed, is not so. It is always subjectively processed. Depending on our reference frame and our internal processes. This causes us to never see clear.
20/20
How can we prevent that we fall for the most obvious of mistakes in superstition and conspiracy thinking? By taking the first step back that is possible and be honest that whatever we observe will NOT be the whole of the pattern and what we will think of it is NOT determined by the moment alone. Once we are honest to ourselves and say: Look, whatever I think will be influenced by how I became who I am and judging things based on that will not do much more than confirm my bias. Take a 360 perspective first. Look at it how you think it is, BUT then also look at it totally opposite to what you think it is (But that is only 180. Correct.). If you have a clear overview of where you might be right and you might be wrong, shift the burden of proof halfway against and halfway for yourself (and yes, then you have 4 directions).
Conclusion
The most important part is, acknowledging that you are human and that humans are nothing more than primates with additional neocortex functionality (aka selfawareness). Also, as soon as you think you are clear on a subject, expand your view, include more parts. If the pattern from smallest to broadest part concur, it is more likely to be correct.
Deja vu (as far as I have been able to investigate and incorporate existing research) is the moment the mind recognizes a pattern that has been (at some prior time) ‘considered’. This means that the brain has a response structure for it and at the moment of deja vu, it fills in the blanks. That is why the consciousness feels everything that transpires is predicted. But this only goes for the very basic response to stimulus.
Survival patterns
Humans are the result of evolution over a long line of organisms that were (for a long time) not the top of the food chain. Our brains is the evolved version of the brain of other primates. However, our line has had the luxury to gain so much overhead in responses, that we could counter possible threats, before they occurred. This means that our system has space and basal response blueprints (instincts) embedded that are not used anymore. These options made us, as species become self aware. The same options caused us to become ‘religious’ (seeking a parent outside, or generally called animism), plan extensive, become verbal in more complex ways and sometimes have been hotwired in the complex structure of neurons.
Reaction Chain
Our brain is behaving primarily to respond to threats. We don’t have those in all levels of society anymore. There are levels where most of these parts of the brain are used for more cognitive options. The structures in which the brain is wired is inherited to extend. The decisions are caused by impulses coming in initially. When we come to a moment of deja vu, some arbitrary part of such a decision tree, is activated and the brain shoots hormones and other neurotoxins into the bloodstream to activate defenses of the organism. Such gives the organism a hastened response (heightened awareness) and the moment the brain sees something. The organism has the idea it has already transpired. We as humans are aware of direction of time and know that we can’t act what has already transpired, so our consciousness tries to make the event fit and you get the ‘idea’ that it was a repetition of an earlier event (but as we KNOW we haven’t been in that specific situation, we tell ourselves it must have been a dream).
Ever wondered, how the brain learns to contain information? Ever wondered how we, as humans ‘learn’ empathy and use emotions to respond to our environment? And what does fear has to do with that?
Nothing to fear but fear itself?
I will start of with an eye opener: Fear is the first emotion. ALL, without any exception, organisms are embodied with fear. Why? because it is the most basic and primal survival instinct.
Simple deduction: What is your initial choice between life or death? I am guessing over 60% of the people who read this question ‘well, life of course’. There will be about 30% saying: ‘In what situation?’ and approximately 10% or less will say: ‘I guess it would be death’. Why? Because death means end of existence of you. And why would you not want that? Because that is how our brain works. And from that our mind.
Mortal coil
Before animals were able to see, everything it touched could be instant death, or slow death. Imagine you are a single cell. You have no arms, no legs, no eyes, no nose, no ears, no brain. You consume, but not much else. When you have gathered enough proteins and building blocks, your RNA/DNA starts to split, diffusing the amount of ‘weight’. But if something would touch your cell, or start to lower the fluid-level inside the cell, you would start moving away from the place where that started to happen. You would try to find a safe place. You would go heads on. How would you do that? ‘Bore me to death?’
Figure 2
Is fear a good thing, or a bad thing?
Well, lets see, for a single cell organism it is the only thing that will indicate to the core that it is in danger of perishing. What about a larger organism? A snail, or an worm?
Trigger happy
Even as humans are more complex, the response mechanism is still the same. A trigger when something touches the outer skin, which takes away either density or causes dehydration of the cells (salt on the finger of a human will cause the fluids from a snail to compensate for the solution difference within a cell and outside. Also a snail is not used to warmth, so it will ‘shy away’ from it.) In all, the initial response from such organism is still the same. It will ‘fear’ the change in environment. All organisms after come from the same genepool. Some changed their response to how fear influences the internal system. Predators, for instance will get forced by their hormone levels and neuron response to attack, instead of retreat, unless the situation contains signals or causes enough pain (like the dehydration of a single cell) to make it choose the safer route for survival.
So, though the quote in Figure 2, comes from a seemingly very intelligent person, it is not entirely right. What we should fear, is losing touch with our ability to respond to signals that are cause for fear to survive and to fear too much.
Fear of history
Human history has shown what happens when you are cognitively enabled (self aware and can ‘think’) and still have a very strong sense of fear response for survival. It means that in a changing world, with less dangers, more false positives will occur. False positives are ‘detections of danger’, which aren’t really dangers. This is what we now call ‘superstition’. This caused the early man to see dangers in wind waving the grass, or a bush. And as we know, as a child with limited cognitive understanding of processes of nature, we had little way to see anything more in those false positives, than projections of our fears. Of ourselves.
Figure 3
Prey and Predator
Eventually, in different parts of the world, where humans traveled and settled, different social growth and different cultures caused different ways to fill the false positives. The oldest agreed within the community to different ‘animism’ to cause the wind to howl, or the sun to shine or thunder to strike. Eventually humanity grew and and its freedom from fear of predators in nature, gave it the possibility to explore different ways to survive. But all these new emotions and ways to interact with our surrounding, within our groups, with problems, with opportunities, were still based on the very first: fear. Love for others, is often showing its real face: fear of losing. Fear of losing offspring, fear of losing protection, fear of losing the posibility to be empowered by sheer number (social group dynamics). Anger, love, sorrow, all come from fear.
But as Lucas Jonkman said (Figure 3): Fight your fears and you’ll be in battle forever (fears don’t go away, you can’t kill fear, it is a symptom. Most often for the unknown), face your fears and be free forever (accept that your body and mind responds to something with fear, and find out what that thing is, is it really to be feared?)
When Logically inclined, Honesty frames the view of Reason
The body is an organism that is build to survive. Thus, input and internal processes are meant to have it live and keep living. We have chemical influences to the brain, making sure that the neural responses stay in favor to survival, but of course we have an abundance of neural input from visual, auditive and haptic stimuli. However, most organisms (and humans are no exceptions to this rule) have instinctive behavior to these stimuli. The crux is, that the more complex the neural network, the more diversion there is in processing the incoming signals.
Fear the dream
Emotions are the level where instincts can be ‘conflicting’. Animals have this, where they are ‘instinctive’ to act one way and eventually are forced by either other instinct or stimuli to divert from this. That is why dogs also are sometimes noticed to be vividly dream. Humans have not only instincts and emotions on top of them. They are even self-aware of their choices from both these two layers. The stimuli are electrical current changes in the nervous system. Neurons are the storage/processing containers of these electrical charges and respond to specific ‘levels’ of charges. When something is processed repeatedly, the neurons/nervous system will ‘etch’ it. It becomes an instinctive behavior. Before it becomes something like that, it requires quite some work. The layer above it, is the emotional processing. We store most memories by emotional hooks (do understand that these are also connected to strongest stimuli during these emotions: smell, sound, visuals).
These emotional hooks decide how we will respond to these kinds of stimuli the next time. But before such emotional hook is stored, it has to have a unique flow in the nervous system (If you know what an EEPROM is, you might get some analogy here).
The Alpha and the Omega
When we receive new stimuli, that cause (and they always do, don’t kid yourself) emotional feedback on the nervous system, it doesn’t mean the brain will automatically process it. Often we are cognitively so busy that the default electrical charge on the brain the ‘signals’ to be bouncing through the matter, without having any effect. But you can understand (I guess) that this just adds to the already existing charge in the brain (consider it the Beta, Alpha and Gamma wavelengths, where the level of stimuli adds to the lowest, causing it to move to a higher frequency). When we go to sleep, the average charge is lowered, because we are not actively influencing our own awareness anymore. Visual cortex is ‘shutdown’, Auditive cortex is shutdown. etc. So, the brains ‘instinctive’ and ‘emotional’ responses are shutdown. But what is left is the residual charges that bounce through the brain. This residual charge will fire parts of the cortexes, that will result in dreams. The same is also why especially as a child, our dreams seems so random and often have no limit in weirdness. Because as a child we are learning about our instincts, emotions and cognitive abilities (often most apparent in our social behavior), we dream more during our younger years. Our brain needs more answers to ‘unknown’ emotions etc.
Dream Ja Vu
When we sleep enough (and dream enough in REM level), our brain has time to process all the ‘overhead’ charge. It has time to settle in the sediments and etch or sink down the new behavioral patterns.
When we don’t sleep enough, we tend to feel restless, because these additional charges cause a discrepancy in our instinct/emotional and cognitive responses. Consider the following:
We have experienced something.
We have responded, but are unaware if this is the right way.
We sleep but the emotional charge is not dispersed into the brain.
We experience the same situation, but we are aware we do, but we are also aware we ‘haven’t made up our minds yet’ on how our response will be.
This is a short example on the neuro-biological behavior.
Why does THC influence dreaming?
Because the neurological impulses are held back (basically THC causes the nerve endings to slowdown and stimuli to not reach the brain the same moment for instance visual input does. Unless the intake also influences the visual cortex, in which case, the brain will fill in random blanks with very weird stuff), and therefore there is a disassociation between the different signals (besides the signals being weakened. When you finally stop the THC feed, the nerve endings will discharge and even the slightly lower levels of charge will hit the brains neurons full on, with the extra. Consider it a hose, where you left water in it, because the tap was not closed correctly, and you open the tap and the hose will burst water (including that which was already there).
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