Do your best. Speak the truth.
“…The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
Link to study: A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7
This is interesting.
From these maps we can see that word groups have idiosyncratic arrangements, associations, and emphases.
And from this we can understand how analysis of interpersonal communication details can lead to beneficial changes in word group arrangements and thus also human psychology.
It is very likely that other aspects of communication—gesture, tone of voice, accent, and so forth—will also present idiosyncratic arrangements and emphases; and can be beneficially changed through detailed analyses of their components.
More here: A map of the brain can tell what you’re reading about
…Here’s the crucial part: This expectation is likely to extend the effects of stress-induced pain relief beyond immediate cold exposure. If such an expectation – “I confronted the cold and feel invigorated” – is fulfilled, it will lead to the release of additional opioids or cannabinoids from the periaqueductal gray. This release can affect the levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine, further enhancing a feeling of overall well-being. This positive feedback loop is implicated in the well-known “placebo effect.”
More generally, techniques such as those Hof uses appear to exert positive effects on the body’s innate immune response as well. We expect them to also have positive effects on mood and anxiety because of the release of opioids and cannabinoids. Though these effects have not yet been well studied, by evoking a stress-induced analgesia reaction, we think that practitioners may assert “control” over key components of brain systems related to mood and anxiety.
At present, millions of people use drugs to help with feelings of depression and anxiety. Many of these drugs carry unwelcome side effects. Behavioral modification techniques that train users in ways to influence their brain’s homeostatic system could someday provide some patients with drug-free alternatives. Efforts to understand links between the brain’s physiology and its psychology may indeed hold the promise for a happier life. (Cold comfort: exposure to chilly temperatures may help fight anxiety)
This article describes a very interesting finding that seems to explain why some people like intense sports such as rock climbing, motorcycling, free diving, skiing, and so on.
It also seems to explain why toughing it out is often the best medicine for what ails us or the best method for moving forward with our lives.
Intense religious practices, chanting, long meditations, silence retreats also seem to be drawing on stimulating the periaqueductal gray area of the brain stem.
To some extent, FIML practice does something like this by stopping conditioned and instinctual responses as soon after they have arisen as possible. Doing this requires a mental toughness and perceptual acuity that frequently carries over to other activities.
…Synchronized oscillations were first noted as far back as the 1600s, when the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, known for discovering the Saturnian moon Titan, noted that two pendulum clocks hung from a common support would eventually come to tick in unison. Through the centuries, mathematicians and other scientists have come up with various ways to explain the strange phenomenon, seen also in heart and brain cells, fireflies, clouds of cold atoms, the circadian rhythms of animals, and many other systems.
Something along these lines must be happening in human communications systems, from the smallest—a single human brain/body—to the largest, the entire planet.
Paul Feyerabend (b.1924, d.1994), having studied science at the University of Vienna, moved into philosophy for his doctoral thesis, made a name for himself both as an expositor and (later) as a critic of Karl Popper’s “critical rationalism”, and went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most famous philosophers of science. An imaginative maverick, he became a critic of philosophy of science itself, particularly of “rationalist” attempts to lay down or discover rules of scientific method. (Source)
In my opinion, “personality disorders” are more easily understood as signaling problems.
All types of personality disorder involve dysfunctional signaling with other people. Signals are both sent and received in ways that result in suffering.
As currently defined, personality disorders “develop early, are inflexible, and are associated with significant distress or disability.”
Thus, if there are no significant brain injuries or other biological problems, all personality disorders (PD) develop through experience.
This means that during childhood the PD sufferer has received many bad signals (and/or interpreted many signals badly) resulting in their failing to form a coherent well-functioning internal signaling system.
The way to fix this is work with the signals. And the best way to do this is FIML practice. A professional psychotherapist cannot possibly provide this level of treatment.
This brings me to a second point: is there anyone who would not benefit from improving their signaling?
Why do we view psychotherapy as treatment designed merely to make us look and feel “average”? Why don’t we instead work to optimize our psychologies every day?
The Buddha said we are all crazy. We are. We all need to work on our signaling—our personality disorders—all the time.
The distinctions between one PD and another and those who have PDs and those who don’t are vague. This is because all PD problems (absent significant biological deficits, which may include intelligence) are idiosyncratic varieties of signaling malfunctions.
If signaling is the core problem, it should follow that all acquired PD will be classifiable as some kind of signaling malfunction. And that is precisely what we see.
Narcissism is a too simple signaling system. Borderline is an unstable signaling system. Compulsive, passive aggressive, histrionic, avoidant, and so on all are variations of a poorly formed internal signaling system.
The way to study this is through interpersonal semiotics; that is interpersonal semiotic analysis of real-time, real-world communicative signs and symbols.
All people need to do this to optimize their psychologies (their internal signaling systems). Why would anyone not want to do this? Maybe not wanting to do this is the surest sign of PD there is.
The hardest part about doing FIML is finding a willing and able partner. To me, this shows how pervasive bad signaling is. Most people will do almost anything but examine their own signaling with the help of another person.
I propose that we largely discard all other paradigms for human psychology and replace them with one based on signals. Humans are semiotic entities who signal constantly internally and externally. No need for personality or self.
Signals are objective, measurable, quantifiable, and analyzable. And they are at the heart of everything we call “psychology.”
The most basic psychological paradigm still current today is personality. This concept should be greatly demoted, relegated to broad-brushing some genetic tendencies or matters involving personas.
Signals cover all psychological territory without exception, including everything we can now say based on personality. Bodies signal, brains signal, organs of perception receive signals, thoughts are signals, language is signals, biology signals, as does everything in physics.
No matter how you look at psychology, you will find signals. Using signals to describe psychology is almost always clearer, more succinct, and more precise.
Another basic paradigm for describing/explaining psychology is matter; psychology comes from the brain and the brain is matter. But then you get mind-matter problems, problems with top-down behaviors, loss of spirituality as an actual probability, and many problems with scale or behavior. Besides all matter signals!
So much simpler to describe how biological signals lead to thought and behavior. Or how top-down psychological signals affect biology.
Instead of “personality disorders” being vaguely defined and understood as ghostlike ephemera that seem to inhabit sufferers, we can define them as signal malfunctions that have arisen due to previous signal malfunctions, either biological, experiential, or semiotic.
A signal-based paradigm of human psychology would view individual psychology as a complex of signals, a semiology unique to each individual.
Narcissism has been discussed in this way. A signal-based analysis of other disorders can similarly make our understanding clearer and more efficient.
Borderline personality disorder, for example, can be viewed as a poorly integrated internal signaling system, a poorly functioning individual semiology. Due to the centrality of signals to all aspects of human psychology, we can expect borderline people to search frantically among others for the cohesion they lack in themselves.
If we understand psychology as a complex of signals, it becomes easier to categorize problems and discover treatments. It also becomes obvious that we can and should optimize this system even in healthy individuals by clearing up confused signals while removing bad ones.
“Interestingly, alcoholics who heavily used cannabis enjoyed an even lower chance of suffering alcoholic liver diseases than non-dependent cannabis users and patients who did not use pot. For example, while all alcoholic cannabis users were less likely to get cirrhosis than non-cannabis users with a history of alcohol abuse, dependent cannabis users were 82 percent less likely to develop the condition than non-dependent users.” (Source)
Abstract: Recent research argues that the United States is secularizing, that this religious change is consistent with the secularization thesis, and that American religion is not exceptional. But we show that rather than religion fading into irrelevance as the secularization thesis would suggest, intense religion—strong affiliation, very frequent practice, literalism, and evangelicalism—is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States. We also show that in comparable countries, intense religion is on the decline or already at very low levels. Therefore, the intensity of American religion is actually becoming more exceptional over time. We conclude that intense religion in the United States is persistent and exceptional in ways that do not fit the secularization thesis.
link
In Buddhism the idea that consciousness is reality and reality is conscious is called “mind only” or Yogachara.
David Ray Griffin, a process theologian, has come to similar conclusions—that reality is fundamentally conscious.
As has Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine.
Hoffman came at this subject from a mathematical angle, but arrived at a similar conclusion to Yogachara Buddhism. Hoffman says:
As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. (The Case Against Reality)
I tend to reach similar conclusions when I think about everything in terms of signals.
The advantage of thinking in terms of signals is we get a good picture of “reality” without needing to say what is real beyond the signal itself.
This kind of thinking is helpful for metaphysics but it is also extremely practical when it comes to human psychology.
Rather than posit personality types and what goes wrong or right with them, we analyze how people send and receive signals instead.
In thinking along these lines, I have come to the conclusion that most psychology as most people understand it uses “arms-length” language, the language of meso and macro signals rather than the much more precise language of the micro signals that actually comprise our shared “realities.”
The difference can be illustrated in this way: Rather than explain your most recent signal (sent or received) in terms of personality, explain it by accessing the micro-signals of short-term memory to find its true antecedents.
If you do this again and again by using a game such as FIML, you will probably come to conclusions similar to the above—that there is no deeper substance to psychological reality than your consciousness of it.
Disgust is a primary emotion.
The others are anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise. There is some controversy about how to group these basic emotions, but generally, expressions associated with primary emotions are recognizable across all cultures and are experienced by all functional human beings.
A new study has found that stress, which is probably interpretable as disgust in this case, was experienced by all of the (heterosexual) men being studied when viewing male-on-male kissing.
From the study’s abstract:
The results of the current study suggest that all individuals, not just highly sexually prejudiced individuals, may experience a physiological response indicative of stress when witnessing a male same-sex couple kissing.
The study is here: What do two men kissing and a bucket of maggots have in common? Heterosexual men’s indistinguishable salivary a-amylase responses to photos of two men kissing and disgusting images.
Co-author of the study, Karen L. Blair, says:
It is difficult to specifically state what this means. It could mean that participants found the images of male same-sex couples kissing to be equally disgusting as the disgusting images. It could mean that they had an anxiety response to the male couples kissing and a disgust response to the disgusting images, but that physiologically, we could not tell the difference between these two emotions. (Straight men’s physiological stress response to seeing two men kissing is the same as seeing maggots)
Make of this data what you like.
Just two months ago another study found that disgust plays a significant role in how people respond to people from other cultures or who look different.
An article about that can be found here: Multiculturalism fails due to “behavioral immune system”.
In my view, it is hard to argue with primary emotions. Our neocortexes may want us to be perfectly tolerant and judiciously blind to all human differences, but maybe that’s not actually possible?
Edit 07/22/17: “Yuck, you disgust me!” Affective bias against interracial couples
Error, ignorance, and disproportionality are important factors in all forms of human communication.
They underlie and often dominate all individual psychology, all interpersonal communication, and all social arrangements, including economics, politics, science, media, societal norms, and so on.
We can see these three factors—error, ignorance, and disproportionality—in the recent revelation that the opioid addiction catastrophe was based on a single misconstrued sentence.
That single sentence was interpreted erroneously due to ignorance of its true context and then blown out of proportion.
Many thousands have lost their lives due to those mistakes.
Yes, science did eventually notice and will eventually correct this error, and that is good, but medical science also messed up prescriptions for dietary salt and fat based on even worse information.
For many years, and probably even still today, an obese person could go to a doctor’s office for a sore knee and be prescribed addictive opioids while also being advised to eat less fat and salt while increasing carbohydrate intake.
If even science can do this, how much more can it occur in politics, economics, and social norms?
When error, ignorance, or disproportionality happen outside of us, there is usually little we can do. Usually it is best to be stoical or Buddhist about it.
When error, ignorance, and disproportionality happen within interpersonal relations, there is much we can and should do. FIML can completely fix these problems when they arise between two people.
As mentioned, science eventually fixes its own problems. That is a foundational reason for the success of science and why humans admire it.
FIML is a kind of scientific inquiry into interpersonal psychology and functionality.
When people do not do science, they become even worse victims of error, ignorance, and disproportionality. When they don’t do FIML, the same bad things happen interpersonally and within individual psychology.
Error, ignorance, and disproportionality are often exploited for financial or emotional gain. If you know anything that someone else does not know, you will probably be able to exploit that knowledge to your advantage and their disadvantage.
And if you don’t do that (thank you for your goodness), you can be certain that many of the people around you will.
That is the world we live in. You have to be philosophical to accept that and to change that.
Thought alone tells us that removing error, ignorance, and disproportionality when we can is a good thing to do. Thought alone also tells us that in many cases we will pay a price for doing that as our good will will often be misinterpreted or used against us.
I see much of this as what the First Noble Truth is all about. A lotus grows out of mud much as our minds grow out of and beyond these kinds of delusions.
Signs are units of thought.
A single sign is central to the ongoing opioid addiction catastrophe in the USA.
The single sign is a 40-year-old misquoted sentence taken out of context from a letter written to the New England Journal of Medicine by a graduate student.
Here is the sentence:
We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction. [emphasis added] (Source)
What was taken out of context is the letter was about patients who were being treated for pain while in hospitals.
On Wednesday, the journal published an editor’s note about the 1980 letter and an analysis from Canadian researchers of how often it has been cited — more than 600 times, often inaccurately. Most used it as evidence that addiction was rare, and most did not say it only concerned hospitalized patients, not outpatient or chronic pain situations such as bad backs and severe arthritis that opioids came to be used for. [emphasis added] (How a 1980 letter fueled the opioid epidemic)
The deep significance of this misinterpreted sentence shows the incredible power of signs and how even a single sign can influence an entire society for decades, even centuries.
That this massive mistake occurred within the medical community, which is science-based, shows that blind consensus can overrule reason even among the brightest and best trained among us.
Add similar mistaken consensuses within the medical community concerning dietary fats and salt and we have even more evidence of the human tendency to believe in and act on nonsense.
I mention this because it is interesting and also because it shows how irrational or non-rational we humans can be. All of us are susceptible to making mistakes of this type.
While most of us cannot do much about large-scale mistakes in medicine or politics, most of us can do a great deal about our own individual psychological mistakes that harm our ability to function. We can do this by practicing FIML.
Basic FIML practice corrects small mistakes (misinterpretations) in real-time. FIML focuses on how our minds are actually functioning in real-time.
If the entire medical community can make such a huge mistake based on so little evidence it should be obvious that as individuals we are just as susceptible to error.
Consensus works only when it works. When it doesn’t it can be very dangerous.
I believe the lion’s share of “delusion” in Buddhism is stuff like the above—individuals or groups getting something terribly wrong and then acting on it with little or no self-reflection.
We should be looking for ways to effectively use drugs people already like and seek out on their own rather than ban them.
There is good evidence that psychedelics like psilocybin can do good things for people. A recent study confirms this.
Lead author of the study, Kelan Thomas, says:
This therapy has also demonstrated large effect sizes for improving symptoms on validated psychiatric rating scales, which suggests psilocybin-assisted therapy may be significantly better than the current treatment options only demonstrating small to moderate effect sizes. The other important distinction is that participants experienced dramatic improvements and higher remission rates after only a few psilocybin-assisted therapy sessions, which also appeared to persist for a much longer duration than current treatment options.” (Clinical review: Psilocybin therapy could be significantly better than current psychiatric treatments)
The study is here: Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy: A Review of a Novel Treatment for Psychiatric Disorders.
Psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD change awareness for several hours by changing brain connections. This brief change is the “high” many people enjoy.
This change provides dramatic evidence, or a dramatic example, to the brain of how it can be. Positive new connections can be formed while negative old connections can be extirpated.
At lower doses, psychedelics seem to make people both feel and act more creatively and positively.
American Buddhist Net 