So, to continue some thoughts ... by 1kiki

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

So, to continue some thoughts ...

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POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Monday, November 1, 2010 19:50
SHORT URL: http://goo.gl/ciAqi
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Monday, November 1, 2010 8:53 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I've concluded that - with the exception of born sociopaths - people are deeply emotional. Nothing happens without emotional basis.

(Here's a supporting fMRI observation - born sociopaths do not respond to pain the same way most people do. While most people feel stress and anxiety under pain, and fear pain, sociopaths do not have the emotional components of pain the rest of us do. They do feel pain - they just don't care.)

And emotions are sometimes poorly cognated - for example, the observation SignyM made that hierarchies reduce testosterone-influenced male competition and thus internal tension - leading to an unexamined preference by some for hierarchies.

It's not enough to say that 'because' a social system is efficient (for example) and it 'evolutionarily' garners more resources it will be adhered to (which was the argument in another thread). The necessary mechanism between evolution and behavior - is feeling within us.

And what we feel is influenced by what we think. Cognitive behavioral psychology is extremely successful in getting people to challenge their automatic thoughts with reality checks in order to change their emotions. Meditation does the same thing, allowing people to observe their emotions as a way of thinking about them, rather than reacting. The easiest way to manipulate emotions is to change what people think.

So, I was watching a show about the Mayans. They are so alien. Why did they do what they did?

THEY thought it was b/c they had priests in touch with gods, and meaningful rituals and sacrifices to expiate them. But with time, distance, and science, and viewing the ruins of their beliefs, we know that that wasn't true.

They were successful not b/c of their hierarchies and gods (in fact, it was the economic demands of their hierarchies that probably brought them down), but b/c they had a system of irrigation and agriculture that made the most of their work, and b/c they had social cooperation.

So what did they see in their leaders? I propose that their hierarchy - like any hierarchy anywhere - skillfully manipulated mass emotions by telling people what was 'real'.

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Monday, November 1, 2010 9:01 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Interesting post, I hope we discuss it more. The only thing I disagree with is

Quote:
And what we feel is influenced by what we think

I think it's the reverse, insofar as what Ithink a lot of people believe subconsciously affects what they feel (which is not conscious thought), and often feelings overcome rational thought.

Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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Monday, November 1, 2010 10:09 AM

KANEMAN

One more day....Whoooooot

Kwicko, I formally condemn your mother for not aborting you. Yeah, I'm sure her brother was happy to have a son, but you are inexcusable....

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Monday, November 1, 2010 11:25 AM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by Niki2:
I think it's the reverse, insofar as what Ithink a lot of people believe subconsciously affects what they feel (which is not conscious thought), and often feelings overcome rational thought.

I think you're both right. The influence extends both ways.

What you think can indeed change some feelings. A different perspective can be life-altering, a la Christmas Carol.

But what you feel can trump some thoughts any day of the week. Witness the devastating effects of addiction (obvious or not) over rational decisions such as "Just say no." If it were only that easy.

The human psyche is quite complicated that way.

-----
"Tch, secret government killing activity! That's why I don't pay taxes!" -- Sheik Amar, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

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Monday, November 1, 2010 12:35 PM

KANEMAN

One more day whooot.....

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Monday, November 1, 2010 1:56 PM

DREAMTROVE

Quote:

They were successful not b/c of their hierarchies and gods (in fact, it was the economic demands of their hierarchies that probably brought them down), but b/c they had a system of irrigation and agriculture that made the most of their work, and b/c they had social cooperation.

So what did they see in their leaders? I propose that their hierarchy - like any hierarchy anywhere - skillfully manipulated mass emotions by telling people what was 'real'.

This was surprisingly more on target than I expected.

Also, they had a culture whose priesthood and scholars were the same, so they respected the superior knowledge they worshiped. That knowledge was primarily devoted towards living in balance, and like many peaceful societies in history they were defeated by a society that devoted more effort towards war. The trick is that it wasn't the spanish or the aztecs, but another mayan cult which lived north of Tikal. They happened to border the Aztecs, and so had had experiences in being raided and fighting wars, and probably felt that the Mayan empire needed to be more militaristic than it was if it was to fend off the Aztecs. In the takeover, they overturned pre-existing limits on conservation and as a result precipitated an ecological collapse of the traditional mayan agricultural system. The result of this was that mayan citizens deserted their cities which could no longer be sustained, and opted for a life in rural villages, thus endeth the empire. The cultural traditions remained strong until they were largely wiped out by the Roman Catholic Church.

That said, I'm not convinced about born psychopaths. Violentization theory makes more sense to me as part of the key to how a psycho is made, not born.

I await Frem's rant on this...

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Monday, November 1, 2010 3:09 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Well, I don't want to get sidetracked into a debate about who is a 'born' sociopath and who is a 'made' one. There are people who have all the personal, heritable, and biological risk factors - fMRI measured brain activation pattern, warrior genes, multiple generations with a high percentage of sociopathic family members all through the family tree - who are normal, happy well-adjusted people. And the reverse is probably true as well. I suspect there are probably several different flavors of 'sociopath', from the amygdala abnormal to the oxytocin deficient to, well, who knows?

But ultimately, a sociopath is one who gains material advantage by manipulating the feelings of others without being subject to those feelings themself. And in that I find an interesting parallel with many of our 'isms' and 'iosities'.

But first I want to repeat what I find so interesting. One is that most people are so deeply, and often unconsciously, motivated by feelings. I think EVERY motivation for most people is ultimately derived from satisfying one feeling over another.

The other is that if you look at societies over time, like for example the defunct Maya - which hopefully gains you distance from your own immediate personal emotion - you can see that there are millenia on millenia of people who fervently BELIEVED - who were willing to sacrifice family members and themselves, who were willing to kill and die, who suffered and prayed - in support of Mithra, or Ra, or any of the varieties of fiction. And my hope is that people will see that the things they are so vested in might be fictions as well. I suspect that MOST of what we tell ourselves is fiction.

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Monday, November 1, 2010 5:28 PM

DREAMTROVE

1kiki

The data in this study you site is very far from conclusive of anything. This is becoming extremely common in the science news of today, which is scarily reminiscent of social darwinism.

The reality is that, speaking as someone who is extremely familiar with the brain and how it works, that we are just at the very dawning of looking at the brain, and drawing conclusions about what might relate to what, and which would be caused by which is somewhere between fallacious and absurd.

Our current understanding of the brain, if I can draw a parallel, is like our early study of the stars. Far from knowing where we come from, we're looking at it and noticing that at night, there are tiny dots. We fancy these to be the shapes of Gods.

Another one would be to say that we're not at the parallel point of looking at blood and reading the structure of hemoglobin, much less the complex interactions of leukocytes, we're actually at the point where we've just surmised that it is red.

Sorry for the rant, but I've known a number of psychopaths, and a number of people with neuological deformities and imbalanced. The psychopaths I've known have been the picture of neurological health. The neurologically and chemically abnormal have been rocks of mental stability. That's anecdotal, but it's enough source to draw on to say that not only does this fail to make any medical sense, it also has no circumstantial evidence that would even lead one to the conclusion, or even to suspect that there was any kind of relationship at all.

It smacks of crackpot academia to me. In fact, most of these studies do.

[/rant]

Now, back to your other point, yes, people are irrational actors manipulated by emotions.

I don't actually think it's a principle motivator. The mechanism of human decision is based on the logical conclusions of nodes surrounded by cell clusters that interpret objective input. At least this much we know. What they use as a logical structure we know less about, but we do know that there is a division of labor between large groups. Whether or not that can be affected by training and programming? Probably. By chemical agents? Almost certainly.

Your point about people being driven by irrational action and misplaced belief has a point, but it need some fine tuning. Right now I think you're tending towards more sweeping claims than you actually have data to support.

Start with

"It may be a factor which is under-represented in our analysis of human action"

... and try to build from there. Anything presented as grand unifying theory from the start is sure to meet with rejection, and it's probably well placed rejection. If people think it's white, and you say it's black, they'll disagree, and probably because it isn't black. Maybe what you mean to do is move them to a position of admitting that it is off-white, and some might call it cream, but perhaps the place to do that is by saying that there are some yellowish specs...

I'm not sure that I would say fiction so much as delusion. People are misinformed, or underinformed, and that causes them to make irrational judgments. I don't seriously believe that Muslims blow themselves up because they think they will get 72 virgins. I think they blow themselves up because someone else put a bomb in their car when they weren't looking, someone who has a simple evolutionary drive to depopulate genetic groups other than their own. We might not like such people, but it would be hard to argue that such behavior was evolutionarily unsound (it can be argued and I've done it, but it requires a longer term perspective than I think most people have.)

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Monday, November 1, 2010 7:50 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"I've known a number of psychopaths, and a number of people with neuological deformities and imbalanced."

As have I, which started me on the whole trail. And I've done a lot of reading and thinking. What I report is something found in at least three studies by three different researchers. In addition to personal experience and study, I've spent time on websites by, for and about sociopaths. So I think my observations are valid - albeit limited. And I'm more than willing to wait on new information before I draw firm conclusions. So I didn't want to get into a lengthy debate about sociopathy per se b/c it's fairly peripheral to my train of thought.

Functionally, from the sociopathic websites, I see that sociopaths are distinguished by deliberate emotional manipulation of others to materially benefit themselves while being immune to those emotions themselves.

So I think about a regular person in an uncertain world. There are so many things they want and need in a powerful way about which they have no surety. Will the hunt be good? Will the rain fall? Will both woman and child survive birth?

And I think about the function of language, which allows us to abstract experience into ideas of things not yet experienced. If I know a red ball and a green key, I might think of a red key and a green ball, as a parrot does. If I also know a yellow star I might abstract the idea of color and shape as independent categories, as a chimpanzee does. Having abstracted the concept of color and shape I might consider the idea of no color and no shape, as a human does.

So we have the mix of extreme uncertainty about powerfully emotional things combined with the abstracted idea of the all powerful - and voila - we have the key to systematically manipulate another person's emotions without materially benefiting them in any way. All we have to do is claim we know the all-powerful's intent about those vital emotional topics. All they have to do is have faith. In that way, I find the 'isms' and 'iosities' to act like sociopaths.

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