When do you lose temper? Did it start recently? Also: What is your age, if you are between 13 and 20, it is likely a hormonal thing and you should try to learn to count.
Losing temper can come from hormonal inbalance, stress, justified irritation (though irritation itself can have many different causes), too little sleep, but also neurological/cognitive dissonance caused by many different factors (from light/sound sources, to actual conflicting information).
In case you are under a large amount of work stress, of course this can cause ‘a short fuse’. Your mind can not cope with the given signals and you respond with the irritation about other stressfactors, that is not connected with the situation at hand. Because it is an emotional reflex, it is difficult to do something about it at the moment. I suggest that after having had a stressful time/moment/period, you take a moment away from everyone and everything and blow off steam. This can be by ‘silence’, ‘meditation’, a punchbag, running or listening to music (preferably classical or ambient).
In other cases, I would suggest you consult a professional.
With hormonal imbalances, it might be due to gland over/under production of enzymes and hormones, but it can just as well be a insuline/glucose issue (meaning early diabetes).
Sometimes you really just are in ‘the wrong crowd’, people around you behave against your most basic values: Being on time/late, using foul language or not, respecting others or not, etc. This can cause a continuous build up of internal strife, which will (if continuously) result in fast bursts of reactions from you. This is basically a form of neural/cognitive dissonance.
In case you are not in any of the above, there can still be many different causes. One of the most ‘devious’ ones, is cognitive dissonance. Why? Because mostly people don’t recognize it. Heck, even professionals often miss signals. What does it mean? Your brain is basically a network of neural paths, which allows electrical currents of different strengths to influence parts of the brain depending on combinations and strength. We are born with a blueprint given by our parents, but are building our own actual network from the moment the brain is started up in the womb. What this means is the neural network will be ‘etched’ according to the decision tree you build from everything you learn. If something fits the patterns you create nicely, it causes a ‘ressonance’, like when listening to sad music, you feel sad, and doing something where someone reacts happy can cause your nervous system to cause ‘happy hormones’ to be emitted into your bloodstream. Dissonance is the oposite and causes your brain and nervous system irritation. Sounds, ideas, feelings, sights can all cause ressonance or dissonance.
In any of the the above cases, I suggest you do one thing first (you already started with this question): Write it down.
I use the method I created, called: ‘Affairs of the state’. This means you write down the subject you are unaware of why you act in such way and then start to go by 5 basic sections that go for everything. The first is: What happens right before you get angry. Then you see what other elements you can find in your life that are connected to the same feelings. Historically.
All humans by definition are irrational. This is the emotional state we are in. We have out grown the animalistic rationale behaving solely on survival, yet animals when not in their everyday behavior of such survival show emotions and irrationale.
Are theists more irrational than non-theists?
The point is here that rational or irrational isn’t a general state of mind. You can be fully rational about one thing and totally irrational about the other. For the deduction whether one person is more irrational than another, we need to look what it would be that we call irrational. Irrational behavior or thinking means it is inconsistent with logic (hence irrational could be equalled to illogical).
So, irrational would be illogical response to specific stimuli, information or knowledge.
For instance, if we know snow is cold, illogical would be to say it is hot. If we know snow melts from heat, it would be silly to say you can’t melt it with a fire. That would be irrational.
Humanity started of as an animal with a totally changing habitat, which gave its nervous system many new possibilities. It didn’t need as much responses (all based on fear meant for survival) to survive anymore, it could predict, plan and imagine. Eventually the huge brain mass was used to make causal connections which weren’t needed for survival of the individual, but for the generation, and next and next. Communication became more complex and caused holding knowledge from one generation to another other than the fear etched instincts that are inherited genetically. Cognitive knowledge was growing. But this cognitive knowledge was build on emotional knowledge (patternicity), for survival. As with all species, the choice for survival supersedes that of the cognitive mind. Thus fear is still causing people to choose rather on fear than cognitive insights. This is what we can define as irrational (as long as the choice is not warranted by actual stimuli). Patternicity eventually caused agenticity and this is where belief started. As with every theory, one first has to believe something occurs for a specific reason. At first, like children, humanity saw patterns that seemed connected to arbitrary events. Mostly connected to their own actions. Opening your eyes in the morning would bring the sun back. That kind of magical thinking. But like children, humanity learned how to distinguish more and more.
The human origin in mind
When more and more humans populated the earth due to the improving temperatures and more secure locations, more and more ‘technological’ advancement came about. BUT, emotions came first, societies grew on the same fears and emotions as the first humans. They still needed soothing for these fears, to not go crazy. Religion was the structure that, based on answers given by ancestors, to these fear questions, controlled the societies (like witch doctors and medicine men and others ), even when people were using less emotional driven choices to decide who should lead (often out of greed, or alpha male protection). Eventually humanity started to become fragmentised. As everyone (literally) had their own belief, they would teach their children a little bit different. Eventually folklore and superstition were slowly discredited by logical thinking. We now could philosophize what was a rational thought and irrational thought. Something that was (by test and deduction) an illogical choice or reaction to the pletoria of impulses, was seen as irrational. As such, holding to any superstitious idea from before, was seen as irrational, because these ideas were rebuked by science and advancement in human intellect. Answering that ancestors were both rational and irrational, is correct. We all still are. Humanity doesn’t know everything yet, but we do know where certain ideas came from. We even know that in some way, believing (irrational sometimes) isn’t mutual exclusive or is even required to get to the next step of finding out.
Irrational in a way is subjective to the observer, like quantum physics. Don’t tell Highs by the way.
So, yes, when a person is religious AND chooses to deny humanity’s collected facts, he/she is irrational. If one keeps to religion for the comfort of it, but still tries to find new knowledge to equate away the leftover beliefs, he/she isn’t automatically irrational.
“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.
Question: Is all determined or do we have what theists call ‘free will’? Does the universe determine everything, or does causality cause the choices we make? In this article we will explore the questions to hopefully result in the conclusion that in reality the universe determined causality causes choices in quantum realm.
To determine whether all is set in stone, or is changeable by our own intent, we need to have a couple of things clear. What does ‘determinism’ mean and what does ‘free will’ mean? And more over, what do they imply for our question.
Determinism, in philosophy, theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do.
Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen.
As you can tell from reading the part of Determinism, it clearly states: Precludes free will. As such, IF Determinism is true, then Free Will is impossible. And inherently, if Free will is possible, Determinism is void.
A very very brief history of everything
Now, we can start talking about how the universes processes are continuously evolving and this means every thing that happened before caused what comes after (this is the mental awareness of time). And yes, on the scale of the cosmos, there is little we can do to change it. Now, lets zoom into the star called sun which holds about 9 large planets in its grasp, which themselves often have moons, circling them. One of them is covered mostly by liquid water and from a closer distance contains vegetation.
Are we calling determinism or free will here? When there is no selfaware actor yet?
On that globe, something happened during the last several million cycles of that globe around the star. In the constantly moving waters, friction and processes have caused proteins and amino acids to combine and fold, creating selfreplicating entities we will call ‘life’. All this, was caused from an initial moment that later lifeforms that are able to be aware of themselves will call ‘The Big Bang’ (fools, you don’t hear sound in the vacuum of space). For millions of years, it seems this life changed and differentiated due to several causes in the way the selfreplication requires chemicals and how the surroundings caused the natural selection of cultures with traits to overcome obstacles.
Are we still talking about deterministic processes, as life is fully dependent on two factors: Internal processes and external processes?
In the last 700.000 years something interesting happened with the more and more complex lifeforms, these primates who live in groups that are creating communication, that requires labels for ‘imaginary’ concepts like ‘other group’, ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘day’, ‘night’ etc. A creative bunch those primates.
Are we already talking ‘free will’? Or is this still determined by all previous processes?
So…which is which?
There is basically several flows that coincide and have their way depending on the amount of force applied. A. Cosmic evolution B. Biological evolution C. Animalistic instinct D. Human Civilization E. Human individuality
The starting movement causes us to be on a globe spinning silently in space. The complex folding of proteins, due to several interacting revolutions of spheres causes live to evolve. Life has caused changes to the environment as environments have caused changes to life and the way the latter reacts. Primates evolved into socially grouped species. They evolved to an awareness and size that caused them to create ‘concepts’ of mind. The individual primate genus Great Ape, family Homo Sapiens is able to choose his food and decide his short term and long term goals. But the before mentioned lines still influence his/hers.
As you can see, there ‘two’ options above, but the lines are several outcomes after those choices. Where on the line is your choice resulting? You can’t know yet.
So, while most things in the universe go without any choice made, including many of our own behaviors, some things are still what we as humans determine. If we CHOOSE not to do something, that is not automatically based on all previous processes. Yes, certain choices are more likely to happen, but as water can go two ways even when the Planck length determines the maximum deviation of particles. (this is an oversimplification of how even the smallest thing you can think off has a smaller resolution at base).
Forget about free wil, about determinism. Learn to understand causality. Though things CAN go a certain way, it doesn’t mean everything DOES go a certain way. In hind sight, things have gone a logical amount of steps that seem to have been determined (much like collapse of a wave function in Quantum Physics) by those steps…however, they are only that, in hind sight.
Determined causality causes choices in quantum realm
These are interesting times. Because the US is in this scenario that much of Europe was in 30-40 years ago, we seek to find ourselves in this. Where do we, as individual, as group, as society, as culture, as humanity, where do we stand.
Of Apples and oranges
The thing is, discrimination is human, but it is also instinctive and animal. And yes, no matter how you look at it, humans are yet another species of animals.
As you might have read elsewhere on https://www.metawareness.com, the first emotion, is fear. Fear thrives survival. Without fear, most don’t survive, unless very lucky. Fear causes use to find safe spots, safe havens. As humans, like all other great apes and many mammals, we are a social species. We are born in the safety (most of us) of a community. Our parents initially keep us safe (most of the time), but the fact that they themselves live within the protection of a community, within the rules of a society, keeps us double safe. This causes two things:
We are aware that we need to protect our offspring
we are aware that we need to protect our community
Danger, Robinson
To make sure that we don’t get into danger, we make sure that the ones in our community, are the ones we know and the ones we know are the ones that think like us. We can identify them, because we can identify ‘as’ them. We immediately recognize (instinctive) their meaning, if they look a certain way.
Them and us
The further an individual differs from our ‘group-general-markup‘, we tend to be more cautious. This is all instinctive, because different means danger. Fear will make sure that you don’t think on it too much. Step back from danger, or die.
Choose to change
Humanity has evolved, but what we don’t accept as part of our genome, we can’t decide to change. Religion and general ‘leaders’ demand that people behave a certain way. The more power a person has, the more money they have. Riches are to be lost and losing creates fear. The more power one has, the more fear one has to lose what is connected.
Everyone is unique, so different
Each individual is different. There is no two humans on earth exactly alike, not even twins. But why do we tend to ‘discriminate’ and fall for the ‘etnicism’ (or called ‘racism’? Because of our marvelous intelligence. True, the more intelligent a person is, the less he/she will ideally be concerned about arbitrary things like skin color or bone structure, but it is our intelligence that caused use to go from simply protective, to discriminating and do etnic profiling on the go.
It’s just an idea
Here is why: Conceptualisation. When I tell you I went to the store. You don’t ask me what the store looked like. You know the function of what ‘store’ represents and mostly you will ask: ‘What did you get?’. The same happens when I tell you I bought a new car. You will not ask me what kind of wipers it has, you will ask me the max speed, the color, the more obvious traits that don’t require extensive knowledge of either brands or technicalities of cars.
How come we can’t differentiate (most of us) between one Asian person and another, just like you most likely can’t tell one from the other from any etnically different human from your own group?
Clean up, stand up
To keep our brains tidy, we group things: Balls (that can be big, small, blue, red, football, soccer, tennis, etc balls), we don’t think about the type of balls that can fall into the hegemony, we make it a homogenous group of balls in our mind. Same with Houses, with Money, with Feelings, with Cupboards, with Math equations. We group, to preserve space in our brain, and to (IF the need arises) do differentiation later on when it is important. We do the same with people: Brothers, Sisters, Siblings, Fathers, Mothers, Parents, Spouse, In-Laws, Daughers, Sons, Nephews, Nices. Nowhere while reading those words did you pick one specific image and did you think: Oh, this is about this person. Except possibly with Fathers and Mothers.
Doesn’t differ to me
We discriminate because it makes life easier. Circles are circles, squares are squares. However, there are people who are very much aware of this, and they will use it to advantage. Fear is the strongest emotion and therefore the easiest to invoke. ‘Divide and conquer’ is how wars are won. It is how communities are controlled. You know who you CAN trust, so all one has to do, is make sure you don’t trust people that fall outside that scope and you are set for control.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
When you see your own kin, you put them in a box, when you see non-relatives, you put them in another box. When you see people that are ‘images of self’, you will allow them in your box. When they differ on visual, auditive or other traits, you will first put them in another box. Why? Safety, quarantaine, ease of mind, conceptualisation for later.
Now is the time, that people can become honest. Move to a new neighborhood and unpack all the boxes. Go to ‘Earth’ and meet your new neighbours. Unpack and bring a cake. If you don’t like your neighbours, dislike them for their actions. That is something that represents their individuality. Not their skin, not their feet, not their smell.
They only divide you, if you let them
We are all human. We should shed the bad concepts like religions. Those are still causing great grief. We should fill our problems with solutions from all trades of life. So everyone can live the same kind of life and enjoy their life on Earth for how long it lasts.
The Universe is all of space and time[a] and their contents,[9] including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. While the spatial size of the entire Universe is still unknown,[3] it is possible to measure the observable universe. [From Wikipedia]
to have actual being; be:The world exists, whether you like it or not. [From Dictionary.com]
“The greatest teacher, failure is.”
So, you ask what existed before existence?
Post Hoc
Guess what? Before existence, many imply non-existence (We have a 0 in our numbers, which is an empty collection, but this is simply conceptualizing). Though this is impossible, there was no ‘before’. This has nothing to do with the cause – effect state, but simply because we know things (though some have postulated ‘virtual particles’) don’t come INTO existence (again, this shows lack of understanding of logic and reality, as something coming IN would have to come ‘out’ of somewhere else. We know magic doesn’t exist and even if it did, it had to hold to the fabric of spacetime and thus the laws of physics).
Causal dependency
To elaborate why there was no ‘before existence’:
Time is the only measurement to use in the ‘before and after’ setting (unless meant spatial, duh). But what is time…how do we actually experience time and how does time relate to anything humans don’t experience? Like the 13.8 billion years you didn’t exist (woah woah, you said nothing comes into existence and now I didn’t exist? Yes, exactly. Though all the material you are existed, you did not. Hold that thought, because it is imperative to understand the state of the universe). Time is the measurement between change.
Uncertain configuration
From the very beginning of the current configuration of the universe (lets say ‘lifespan’), time has moved forward. BUT we know time doesn’t move at the same speed everywhere. We know that time moves faster where ‘gravity’ is higher. But what is gravity? Gravity is the movement (force/energy) of particles/waves that cause fields around it to move in a certain direction. So…the more matter, the more particles/waves that spin, the more inert energy, thus the more gravity. Because time is measured in change/movement (towards entropy), there is a requirement. There is a need for something to change, to have moments between one state to another. if there is no particle then there is no change, then there is little to no time (remember, light is energy/matter too). Imagine there is no matter/energy at all…what is there that would be able to change? To …be time? Nothing. So, they are implicitly connected. Without the universe, there is no time possible.
Charged Frequency
But…what is the situation with our universe and its ‘beginning’? Well…imagine that we know that change is what is happening from the very start of the universe. In our human words we say it was immeasurably hot. But what does that mean? That means that the frequency of energy was so high, it would burn anything we know to exist as matter. That is why there was no matter yet. But energy can not stay that state for long, so as it moved away from itself (I know, sounds weird), it slowed down and energy turned into matter. Very rudimentary, but as matter and energy meets and matter and matter meets, they form new complexity of elements. Like each element has a different charge/electron amount. Eventually atoms gained cohesion causing molecules of more complexity to exist.
Cool it, you are dead wrong
All the while the universe cooled down and the end state will be where there is no change anymore in the universe. Though I think this moment will only be a fraction of a …well…some length of time very short, causing all condensed cooled down matter to explode into another life…as such…you might consider the only thing that actually can really rebirth, is the universe. In that sense…before the universe (as we know it now) there was the universe.
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