Posted by 64bowtie on May 9, 2004, at 17:47:39
Reason is a label for "lumpers" to not think about thinking... (Bad,Rod! Bad,Rod!)
Did you ever wonder why children aren't capable of managing buying a house? They can reason. They can read the same books adults can. They could read a book on house-buying and do all the instructions. But they can't, or are not allowed to try, to buy a house. Wonder why?
The results of "reason" to a child of five, six, or seven, is stored differently than when they are 17, 18, or 19. Five years ago all of this changed; a paradigm shift. 100 years from now, talk in the street will be about this change, trust me. In the 1500's, it took till the 1600's before talk in the street was about how the Earth was round, not flat, as it had been in the past.
I call instincts "hardwire" elements to our nature. Here in the Silicon Valley (the Silicon Gulch to the locals), computer terms leak into my everyday parlance. Same thing, though. Instincts in humans act like "hardwired" does to a computer.
However, genetics has thrown a wrench into the gearworks. We have genetic alarm clocks waking up this or that cell pattern, while putting this or that cell pattern back to sleep. Exempli Gratia: pubic hair; nuff said.
Children store memories by satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum. Remember, we come hardwired to avoid dissatisfaction. Bad-feelings are a no-brainer; circumstances that evoke them must be avoided in the future.
Adults store memories more elegantly. Memories are pictures for efficiency. Vision is processing 95% of our waking time, so memories can be called up most quickly as pictures for the visual cortex of the brain. What gets tricky and elegant is that we carry some details from childhood memories as emotions.
We no longer store the memories as feelings but we do add value to the picture by attaching a particular emotion to it. This is the nexus of intelligence. How chaotic our storage is determines our intellect. The myth is that mass quatities determines it, but if we can't get to it, we look stupider than we are while searching for it.
We have a perception. We pass it by our belief filter (a tool). We sort out the attached emotional stuff. We check our options. We either add it to this or that pile of similar pictures, or do something fantastic; we suspend it till more information arrives; "Eureka! I found it!" phenomenon.
The rewiring process, inferrentially alluded to by Jean Piaget over 80 years ago, is pretty much complete by age 15. From that time on, avoidance-of-the-new can seriously limit our performance. Yet many hold on tightly to the notion of avoidance, since they don't accept their newfound ways and powers of reasoning.
They irrationally protect themselves from danger and evil that doesn't truly exist. They create more dysfunction than they avoid, thus more troubles in their lives. Then they go about their lives, and their families lives, creating layer on-top-of layer of more dysfunction. Then they demand their children, as well as their children's children, act in this same way.
Istant multi-generational, multi-layer dysfunction.
To recap: children reason with feelings; good=approach; bad=avoid. Adults reason via context appropriate sharing of thinking and feeling, reflecting on the pictures and studying them for value (feelings). Dysfunction emerges when reason is also based on a value sourced in the faulty belief used as a filter, or the picture is stored distorted by a faulty belief.
Since a belief is a collection of facts and opinions which are supported only by testimony, faulty and distorted testimonies are the most common. Sad! Very Sad!I advocate suspension of beliefs until we can decide if the belief is ours, or has been induced onto us by someone else, making it their belief, not ours. Only then can we farret-out faultiness and distortion of beliefs closely held and useful to us. Only then can we find freedom, and those good feelings we been looking for.
Rod
poster:64bowtie
thread:345158
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040503/msgs/345158.html