Tag: psycholinguistics

The entire Western world is ruled by a self-centered elite numbering but a few thousand

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The entire Western world is ruled by a self-centered elite numbering but a few thousand. No one who is not either onboard with them or accepts being a servile toady to them (most politicians) ever gets anywhere near real political power, or honest social influence.

Historically, elites have always manufactured social and political ‘reality’. In today’s world many of their traditional tricks are not working as well as they did only ten years ago.

What’s changed today is social media, especially X, allows the honest voices of ordinary people to be heard.

Moreover, it is obvious to anyone paying attention that more voices and more information about anything actually results in better and truer information. 

Crowds crowd-sourcing themselves have proved to be much more savvy than a few thousand elites, who all bow to a small handful of super-elites.

It is simply a fact that more information seen by more people who add yet more information yields better information. Bad info is quickly sifted out.

Elites fear open-ended information more than anything because it reveals how selfish, wrong, small-minded and crazy they are. 

That said, not all elites are always bad.

The best of them understand what is happening with human information and information-sharing and what is feasible.

It seems clear to me right now that more than one battle is going on among them. ABN

Import the third world become the third world

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

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Eva is among a group of popular influencers who claim not to understand why the invasion is happening or who is behind it. Tucker, Promethean and others speak in the same way. These are all good people who feel forced to evade censorship and a loss of followers, probably reasoning that a 90% complete voice that is heard by many is better than a 100% complete voice that is heard by only a few. I agree with their analysis. I am a 100% voice by choice. Throughout history empires (and we are living in the Western empire today) have always forced dissidents to use euphemisms or claim ignorance to avoid dangerous consequences. The more thing change the more they stay the same. It is important to understand that not all speakers can speak the whole truth in all situations. Similarly not all politicians (I mean the rare good ones) can do everything they want to do because the consequences will be counterproductive. I believe RFK is in this sort of a bind right now. Going forward, this feature of world history is unlikely to change. ABN

Hierarchies evolve to reduce connections (and confusion)

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Large social systems, especially those with many members who do not know each other, tend to evolve into hierarchies because this reduces the number of connections required to establish communication.

When the number of connections which hold a group together is reduced, it is less costly to maintain the group and thus such groups are more likely to survive.

Military organizations, companies, religious organizations and schools are usually organized into hierarchical structures. Creative, independent modules can relieve some of the formalism of hierarchy but these modules will still fit into the hierarchical structure somewhere.

Hierarchies are (always?) organized around a purpose—money for corporations, winning for militaries, belief and organizational systems for religions, food for animals and so on.

A research project on this topic as it applies to artificial intelligence demonstrates that biological networks evolve into hierarchies:

…because hierarchically wired networks have fewer connections. (Research showing why hierarchy exists will aid the development of artificial intelligence)

If we accept this principle behind the development of hierarchies, I would submit that we can also apply it to how language has developed as a hierarchy in and of itself and also as a support system for the social hierarchy within which it is used.

Language and culture are held together by a system of hierarchical categories.

These categories are what we think of as beliefs, values, codes, stories, political systems, who’s who in the group, and so on.

Hierarchical systems based on general categories typically also exist between individuals within any society. Indeed, we can find the same sort of hierarchical system within the individual.

This is an efficient and very reasonable way to maintain a society and a language.

Problems arise in this system, however, when the individuals do not know any other way of organizing themselves or of communicating with others.

Individual who exist and communicates only within a hierarchical structure will be alienated from the great mass of idiosyncratic perceptions, responses, thoughts, and emotions which exist within them and others. I think this causes a great deal of psychological suffering and is a major part of what the Buddha meant by delusion.

FIML fixes this problem between individuals.

Why aren’t men excited about dating as they used to be?

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I’m a woman so my views might be skewed. But everyone has seen that Hollywood movie of TV shows where the male friend duo goes out as each other’s wing men to meet women at social gatherings and have a good time. Both my grandfather’s told me about how back in their men used to have their father’s drive them to their first date or how everyone had a crush or someone special. Nothing but fond memories. However it seems guys today seem to be all doom and gloom about dating. Why is that so? Why do I never hear men sharing positive stories about their dating experiences?

FWIW as a woman, I think women tend to be more vocal about their dating experiences for better or for worse lol. I chat with my GFS all the time about our dating experiences and I think women tend to talk about it more.

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There are 500+ comments as of right now. It’s an interesting question with a range of answers, which form a telling, crowd-sourced barometer of our world(s) today. Seems more issues than just dating have diverged from raw instinct to techno-modulated post-instinct. The underlying semiotics of traditional behaviors have shifted toward digitalized, instantaneous, sharper but weaker. That’s not all bad. It’s just different. In some ways it’s sublimation, which can be good. When I started dating my current partner, my head was spinning for days. That happened because we already knew each other and only went to the dating level due to changed conditions and there was never any app between us, just human presence and first-order emotions. She still makes my head spin today. ABN

An example of a psychological morpheme

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A psychological morpheme is defined as the smallest unit of a psychological response.

This term is used in FIML practice to distinguish psychological micro responses from meso and macro responses which are more general and less amenable to change and productive analysis.

There are many kinds of psychological morphemes and every individual has a multitude of them that are unique to them. Some are associated with personal memories and emotions that were aroused in the past. Others are new and arise in the present moment.

Still others are internalized social responses which at their most basic feel almost like disembodied responses, responses that precede thought, that begin creating the world we live in before we even know it. They are part of us, but can be slightly astonishing when we notice them for what they are.

A good example of one happened yesterday. My partner was away on a short trip and since it was a warm day I was working at home in my birthday suit. At some point I decided to call my partner, who would think nothing of seeing me in my birthday suit, but before I did I found myself reflexively putting on a pair of shorts.

I stopped and wondered why I was doing that and realized I was being “directed” by an almost completely emotionless and thought-less psychological morpheme.

Since I was going to speak, I was going to engage in a social act. And since I was going to engage in a social act, some part of me decided I needed to put on a pair of shorts.

This morpheme is interesting because it is so elementary. I was going to speak over the phone, long-distance to someone I have been living with for many years. And yet even still a very weak and basic sense of propriety that I had learned from my culture arose in me and got me to put on a pair of shorts.

It was like a single cold spark. And yet it was strong enough to move my system. It was a sort of “logic” like the logic of a small pattern in sand, or a twist in a tree’s bark. It was “me” putting on the shorts, but the “logic” of my doing so seemed to belong more to nature or a physical process than “my” being.

Psychological morphemes of this type are wonderful to observe. They belong to an almost blank class of responses that work like directional signs that induce us to move one way or another, to do something or not.

Other kinds of psychological morphemes induce us to feel, think, or believe something with no more “charge” than the single small spark that got me to put on my shorts.

Psychological morphemes are the most basic data of FIML practice. They are the small signs that make up the “language” of our psychologies, our minds. Understanding them leads to a rich understanding of your own and others’ behaviors, feelings, and thoughts.

Disruption of neurotic response in FIML practice

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By analyzing minute emotional reactions in real-time during normal conversation, FIML practice disrupts the consolidation, or more often the reconsolidation, of “neurotic” responses.

In FIML, a neurotic response is defined as “an emotional response based on a misinterpretation.” The misinterpretation in question can be incipient (just starting) to long-standing (been a habit for years).

The response is disrupted by FIML practice and, thus, tends not to consolidate or reconsolidate, especially after several instances of learning that it is not valid.

A neurotic response is a response based on memory. The following study on fear memories supports the above explanation of FIML practice.

Memories become labile when recalled. In humans and rodents alike, reactivated fear memories can be attenuated by disrupting reconsolidation with extinction training. Using functional brain imaging, we found that, after a conditioned fear memory was formed, reactivation and reconsolidation left a memory trace in the basolateral amygdala that predicted subsequent fear expression and was tightly coupled to activity in the fear circuit of the brain. In contrast, reactivation followed by disrupted reconsolidation suppressed fear, abolished the memory trace, and attenuated fear-circuit connectivity. Thus, as previously demonstrated in rodents, fear memory suppression resulting from behavioral disruption of reconsolidation is amygdala-dependent also in humans, which supports an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism.

~Disruption of Reconsolidation Erases a Fear Memory Trace in the Human Amygdala

FIML practice works by partners consciously and cooperatively disrupting reconsolidation (and initial consolidation) of neurotic memory (and associated behaviors). FIML both extirpates habitual neurotic responses and also prevents the formation of new neurotic responses through conscious disruption of memory consolidation.

FIML probably works as well as it does because humans have “an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism” that favors more truth. Obvious examples of this update mechanism can be seen in many simple mistakes. For instance, if you think the capital of New York State is New York City and someone shows that it is Albany, you will likely correct your mistake immediately with little or no fuss.

Since FIML focuses on small mistakes made between partners, corrections are rarely more difficult than the above example though they may be accompanied by a greater sense of relief. For example, if you thought that maybe your partner was mad at you but then find (through a FIML query) that they are not, your sense of relief may be considerable.

Covert speech proscriptions and the psychological harm they cause

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Speech proscriptions can be overt with legal ramifications.

Or they can be sort of covert, couched in ideas like good manners, respect, make no waves, maintain friendly relations, follow group norms, etc.

I believe the covert ones happen most basically because almost all people are terrible at speaking their own subjective truths. And this leads to being terrible at hearing others’ subjective truths, even if they are well-expressed which is rare.

This problem arises from the pervasive, inherent ambiguity of language in general but especially spoken language.

Speech flies by and we are required to extract coherent meaning from bits of it. We make stories out of it and judge people, including ourselves, based on bad evidence.

Ambiguity in speech also requires us to maintain the same personas and most of the same beliefs for decades. We travel in herds of ideological banality due to it.

Staying the same, conforming to the group, is a way of displaying a profoundly diminished species of unambiguous meaning, even though we may sense that deep down the whole thing is a bad game.

I used to be bothered by this, but stopped after I figured out FIML and practiced it with my partner for a few years.

After maybe five years, our speech started to become so much clearer it didn’t even feel like the same medium anymore. After ten years, it got so good it seems we may have transcended psychology as it is normally conceived.

This happened because psychology as normally conceived is massively based on speech ambiguity and the ways people react to it. Fact is, you probably should feel a bit crazy in most interpersonal situations because speech proscriptions mixed with compounding ambiguities cannot possibly allow the psychological freedom needed to be cognitively healthy.

The number one sign you were raised by a narcissistic parent, according to top family therapist

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The most lasting wound left by a narcissistic parent may not be what they said to you growing up, but what you still say to yourself today.

That is the warning from family therapist Jerry Wise, who believes one of the clearest signs of a narcissistic upbringing is not a difficult relationship with a parent, but a person’s relentless inner voice that constantly criticizes, judges and tears them down.

‘Mom and dad, or whoever was narcissistic, were hypercritical and judgmental,’ Wise told Lesi Howes, the host of The School of Greatness podcast.

‘Now I grow up and say, “I’m not going to be like that,” but what am I to myself? Hypercritical and judgmental.’

He added that adults raised in narcissistic families often become their own worst critics, carrying overwhelming guilt, shame and a tendency to judge themselves harshly long into adulthood. 

The therapist believes that in many cases, the voice people hear in their heads is not entirely their own. Instead, it is an internalized version of the criticism they experienced growing up.

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Narcissistic parents can also leave their children with an enormous vacuum, an absence of normal instinctual care. This vacuum can be leveraged in adulthood, or sooner, into a place of great calm and reasonableness. It can be transformed into samadhi states, or provide an experiential introduction to them. The vacuum is also you, deeply you, and should not be ignored or filled with fantasies of what might have been or resentment that what might have been didn’t happen. Those were your parents, that’s what you learned and experienced. It’s not all bad, not at all. ABN

Paradigms and communication habits — a key to understanding FIML practice

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One of the problems in transmitting FIML practice to others is no one has a paradigm for learning that includes a friend saying to them “I have something good to tell you, but it will take a fairly long time for you to understand what I mean and learn how to do it.”

People are used to getting small bits of information from friends, not large, wholly new ways of seeing themselves and the world around them.

This problem in FIML transmission is compounded by the need for FIML practitioners to speak to each other in a way that is taboo in almost all cultures and subcultures. FIML partners must be able to thread a communication needle, the eye of which lies very close to a common human flash point.

The flash point is our “identity” as it is actually functioning in a real-world conversation in real-time.

I don’t know of a single culture anywhere (except those of FIML partners) that allows real-time queries of the sort that form the basis of FIML practice. In all cultures that I know of, queries of that type are seen as rude, petty, carping, nasty, distracting, lacking proper decorum, weird, and most of all, threatening.

Culture supports identity and vice versa. This makes the culture-identity matrix a very difficult entity to analyze in real-time.

To touch on it or even near it is to touch that flash point that tells people they are being threatened, that they must defend themselves against a dangerous assault on their sense of who they are.

Of course, FIML does not actually assault or threaten anything, but as mentioned, very few of us have a listening/learning paradigm that will allow FIML to be given a proper hearing.

One day, I imagine, FIML will be taught in classes where students will have desks and chairs and white boards and where they will be given handouts and lessons will proceed gradually and logically from point to point until the whole is revealed to them with a nicely prepackaged smile.

That day has not come yet (and I hope I am doing something else when it does). For now, all we have (and all you need) is the raw idea, a willing partner, and a paradigm shift that allows you to undertake a new way of communicating.

The worst thing about the humanities

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The worst thing about the humanities is so many of our insights and discoveries are used to harm people, manipulate them, propagandize them.

Another bad thing is the open, confessional, and exploratory styles of artists too often are used against them by gaslighters, scammers, back-biters.

If we cannot even allow artists and social scientists to speak openly, all of us suffer from the reduced culture that results.

Psychopaths don’t EXIST – and Ted Bundy was simply misunderstood, scientist claims

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…according to Dr Rasmus Larensis, a forensic scientist from the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada, psychopathy might not exist at all.

The big issue, as Dr Larensis points out, is that every single claim which has ever been made about the nature of psychopaths has been systematically disproved.

Ideas, such as the notion that psychopaths don’t feel fear, have either been flat–out disproved or faltered as rigorous evidence in their support failed to emerge.

Dr Larensis even argues that famous ‘psychopaths’ such as the serial killer Ted Bundy are really just misunderstood.

Dr Larensis told the Daily Mail: ‘After decades of research, we still lack compelling evidence for the specific type of person described by the traditional psychopathy model.’

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Germans in Germany now deemed ‘non-migrants’

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The new neologism for the „German locals“ is now „non-migrant“: The ARD carries out the linguistic death sentence on the German people.

While the Basic Law of the „German people“ refers to the German people, public propaganda turns it into a regrettable residual category – an act of cultural self-deprecation that extends deeper than mere stylistic error.

In an unprecedented, yet deliberate, linguistic derailment, the “Tagesschau” officially disappeared the German people on the 77th anniversary of the Basic Law, degrading them to „Non-migrants“.

This means that the ancestral people of this country are no longer positively named, but are defined only as a negative foil of an imported reality.

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The limits of general semiotic analyses as applied to human psychology

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Much of the work done in human semiotics involves analyses of semiotic codes.

Semiotics and semiotic codes are often treated like language or languages for which a grammar can be found.

One obvious problem with this sort of approach is semiotics indicates a set that is much broader than language. Stated another way, language is a subset of semiotics.

Human semiotics also include music, imagery, gesture, facial expression, emotion, and anything else that can communicate either within one mind or between two or more minds.

It is very helpful to analyze semiotic codes and it is very helpful to try to figure out how cultures, groups, and individuals use them. We can compare the semiotics of heroism in Chinese culture to that of French culture. Or the semiotics of gift-giving in American culture to that of Mexican culture. We can analyze movies, literature, science, and even engineering based on semiotic codes we have abstracted out of them.

We can do something similar for human psychology.

Analyses of this type are, in my view, general in that they involve schema or paradigms or grammars that say general things about how semiotic systems work or how individuals (or semiotic signs themselves) fit into those systems.

This is all good and general analyses of this sort can be indispensable aids to understanding.

General semiotic analyses are limited, however, in their application to human psychology because such analyses cannot effectively grasp the semiotic codes of the individual. Indeed general analyses are liable to conceal individual codes and interpretations more than usefully reveal them.

This is so because all individuals are always complex repositories of many general semiotic codes as well as many individual ones. And these codes are always changing, responding, being conditioned by new circumstances and many kinds of feedback.

Individuals as repositories of many codes, both external and internal, are complex and always changing and there is no general analysis that will ever fully capture that complexity.

For somewhat similar reasons, no individual acting alone can possibly perform a self-analysis that captures the full complexity of the many and always-changing semiotic codes that exist within them.

Self-analysis is far too subject to selection bias, memory, and even delusion to be considered accurate or objective. The individual is also far too complex for the individual to grasp alone. How can an individual possibly stand outside itself and see itself as it is? Where would the extra brain-space come from?

How can a system of complex semiotic codes use yet another code to successfully analyze itself?

Clearly, no individual human semiotic system can ever fully know itself.

To recap, 1) there is no general semiotic analysis that will ever capture the complexity of individual psychology, and 2) no individual acting alone can ever capture the complexity of the semiotic codes that exist within them.

Concerning point two, we could just as well say that no individual acting alone can ever capture the complexity of their own psychology.

We are thus prevented from finding a complex analysis of human psychology through a general analysis of semiotics and also through an individual’s self-analysis when acting alone.

This suggests, however, that two individuals acting together might be able to glimpse, if not grasp, how their complex semiotic codes are actually functioning when they interact with each other. If two individuals working together can honestly observe and discuss moments of dynamic real-time semiotic interaction between them, they should be able to begin to understand how their immensely complex and always-changing psycho-semiotic codes are actually functioning.

An approach of this type ought to work better for psychological understanding of the individuals involved than any mix of general semiotic analyses applied to them. Indeed, prefabricated, general semiotic analyses will tend to conceal the actual functioning of the idiosyncratic semiotics and semiotic codes used by those individuals.

The FIML method does not apply a general semiotic analysis to human psychology. Rather it uses a method or technique to allow two individuals working together to see and understand how their semiotics and semiotic codes are actually functioning. ABN

On Freudianism and the assertion of interpersonal meaning

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Freudianism is an extreme example of the assertion of meaning where there is none, or very little.

It is extreme for two reasons: 1) because it is scientifically groundless and 2) because so many people believed it.

Communism, many religious beliefs and practices, fads, styles, ethnic myths, many “historical” misinterpretations, and much more are examples of false meanings that are asserted and believed by large numbers of people.

You could say that pretty much all human culture is a similar stew of strongly asserted falsehoods mixed with some facts.

Freud was an interesting writer and his ideas were and are worth considering, but they should have remained minor points in the history of psychology and never become “meanings” that influenced the entire Western world.

In this respect, Freudianism is an excellent sociological or macro example of what individuals do psychologically, on micro and meso levels with themselves and others.

Humans are extremely prone to append or assert meaning where it does not belong either because there is no “meaning” in that context or because the “meaning” being asserted is incorrect.

Freudianism shows how powerfully and massively wrong we often get meaning and how wrong our analyses of human thought, emotion, and behavior can be.

At the macro level of trends like Freudianism, we can and should have asked for evidence.

At the micro and meso levels of human psychological understanding we can and should ask for evidence or confirmation from the person or persons about whom we are asserting psychological meaning.

If you do this frequently with a trusted partner, you will begin to see that many of the “meanings” you append to that partner and to yourself are false.

False macro meanings like Freudianism can be corrected through science. At the micro or meso levels of the individual, wrong meanings can only be fully corrected through a practice like FIML.

In future we may be better able to understand micro and meso levels of interpersonal meaning through the use of brain scans, but even brain scans need interpretation and will be difficult to use during real-time, interpersonal interactions.

See Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding for more on what is meant by these levels.