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Explorations Outside
...if the brain and its tracking systems didn’t do a reasonable job of approximating reality, I wouldn’t be able to write this sentence because Homo sapiens wouldn’t even exist. An animal has to be tuned into the world in order to survive that world.
When we try to resist temptations, there's a tension between immediate, certain reward and later, uncertain reward. The more certain the later reward, the more likely temptations will be resisted. But certainty is just one part of the equation. Later rewards may feel far-off, abstract, and only intermittently compelling, while temptations are concrete and immediately satisfying.
What matters is a sense of control and hope within a lifetime. The feeling that through my actions, I can make progress towards something that matters to me. Self-efficacy! Not that I’m the master of my destiny – more that there are things I can do that will make it better.
Political coalitions are more or less ideological. On the less ideological side, they may be held together by alliances of convenience, whose common cause may be more dislike of the other side than broad agreement on a range of issues.
An ideology is an army of convictions about how the world is and how it ought to be. As befitting a military force, ideologies are fueled by a sense of threat - kept at bay through a fortress-like structure called the ideological square.
Whenever we seek goals under conditions of uncertainty – not knowing the best way forward, perhaps not being sure what success even looks like – we are faced with explore/exploit trade-offs as we guess our way to what we think we want.
Here is the theme of endemic pain and suffering in our everyday lives, in which minor and transitory negative feelings become something deep and debilitating...
Some neural networks are associated with attention capture, where the stimulus rules. Other networks are associated with attention deployment, where goals rule.
...attitude is rooted in 19th Century romantic aesthetics, in which emotion, imagination, freedom from rules, and spontaneity are opposed to soulless capitalism and the instrumentalist mindset it engenders.
... we often consider effort through proxies like time spent, sacrifices made, opportunities turned down, pleasures denied, unpleasantness endured, and money spent
The threshold of conscious experience is about 200 milliseconds, or one fifth of a second . This is enough time to pronounce a syllable....If the “psychological present” is 3 seconds long, the longest thought that is articulated subvocally “as it unfolds” is 15 syllables.
They all agree that some people are insufficiently skeptical, fail to appreciate their own fallibility, and/or are way too swayed by some version of authority (e.g., the consensus, unorthodox thinkers of one’s own choosing, this particular subset of research, gut feeling…).
Why does this matter? Because losing focus and having attention captured by whatever can enhance creativity, problem-solving, even wisdom.
The problem with sentences is that we rarely know what they mean without knowing what came before and what came after. Not to mention all the background information. Plus all the non-sentence-like stuff going on. Bigger worlds and smaller worlds. All are being spoken to. Or “thought” to.
In none of these articles were there specific references or links to academic papers. Rather, the authors use markers of scientific authority to present their claims as “facts”.
So a thought can be a process, the outcome of a process, capacity, inchoate intention, opinion, state of beholding, state of awareness, tentative belief, or an act of contemplation. Is there a common theme to these definitions?
Harming others directly through hands-on action is harder on our psyches than causing harm indirectly, either through inaction or action at a remove (e.g., pulling a switch, pressing a button).
To think is to follow a scent, focused and determined. To think is to pursue. To wonder is to become a vessel. To wonder is to be filled.
Patriotism is devotion and loyalty to one’s country. Some say patriotism is the author of all sorts of ills. It easily morphs into its ugly cousin Nationalism, that bully with a superiority complex. By favoring one’s own country over others, patriotism encourages the denigration, hatred or distrust of others, making violations of human rights more acceptable.
Optimism undermines success when it’s based on magical thinking. We engage in magical thinking when we believe happy endings are the result of a will-to-success. Voila! It will happen because I Can Do It.