Tag: thought

WTC 7 Evaluation Concludes: Fire did not cause WTC 7 collapse

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The money quote is at 29:20.

“Did Building 7 collapse from fires? The answer is no.”

—Dr. Leroy Hulsey , the University of Alaska Fairbanks

 

From YouTube: Dr. Leroy Hulsey presents the findings of his WTC 7 Evaluation study at the Justice in Focus 9/11 Symposium in New York on Sep 10, 2016. The WTC 7 Evaluation is a study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks using finite element modeling to evaluate the possible causes of World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse.

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Anyone who has followed this issue knows that NIST’s explanation of thermal expansion of a floor beam causing Column 79 to become dislodged leading to the symmetrical collapse of the entire building, including 2.2 seconds of free fall, is unscientific.

Thanks to Dr. Hulsey for his detailed analysis of why this is so. We need more analyses like this that use real data and that do not treat weak hypotheses as scientific conclusions.

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning

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The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance. (link)

The notion that Chomsky is wrong is not new, but the linked article still a good read.

See this for a rebuttal of the above: Don’t believe the rumours. Universal Grammar is alive and well.

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The following is only tangentially related to the above articles.

The key point in FIML is that messages (language, semiotics, etc.) are often misunderstood and that these misunderstandings can have large psychological effects.

Messages can be misunderstood on many levels, but the level that is least appreciated today and thus has the greatest unacknowledged implications for human psychology is the micro-level.

The micro-level is the level of the short-term memory (time component) and the psychological morpheme (emotional component). Psychological morphemes arise as brief (short-term memory) associations are made with other semiotic and thought systems in real-time.

If errors at this level are not corrected, large effects can ensue. Errors at this level are best corrected in real-time as quickly as possible (while the contents of the short-term memory are still fresh). This is why the FIML technique is done the way it is and why it works as well as it does.

A psychological morpheme is:

The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

Google and FIML

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Google has helped all of us upgrade our info about the world around us, whatever we are interested in, etc.

In the past, people had brains as complex as ours and a love of good information as great as ours, but they had to make do with less.

Somewhat resembling Google, FIML practice upgrades interpersonal information shared by (usually) two people.

Rather than guess and fill our minds with superstitions about the people we care about most, FIML allows us to “look up” the info we need when we need it.

This has a dramatic and beneficial effect on both the self and other(s). The foundations of human psychology are exposed in FIML practice.

Once you see how FIML works and what it does, you will be doing it as often as you jump on the computer to look up something you want to know.

FIML is advanced interpersonal technology that makes first-rate psychological information as readily available as a computer search. It does take some practice, but is emotionally even more valuable than Google.

Dalai Lama: Putin Is Right, U.S. Created ISIS

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“I believe the crux of today’s Middle-East problem is laid in Obama administration policies and the Saudi interference in Syrian crisis. When Saudi clerics fallaciously claim they represent Islam and they side with cutthroats in Syria; thus they give the radical groups a plausible excuse for their heinous crimes against innocent civilians,” AFP quoted the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader as saying.

“…several times I importuned President Obama to end his catastrophic support for Saudis and their terrorist proxies in the Middle-East but my appeals fell on deaf ears,” said world’s most famous exile. (Source)

Triggers and microaggression

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I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.

Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.

I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.

My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:

The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.

It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.

The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.

Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.

I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.

Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.

Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.

If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.

Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.

When a sign becomes a (wrong) symbol

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Signs become symbols all the time. What you want to be careful about is wrongly making signs into symbols.

A sign is a simple element of thought or communication. Symbols are signs with extra meaning.

Here’s an example. My partner spends a lot of time at her job working outside. She works hard and sometimes it bothers me. This morning I noticed that a sign in my mind had become a symbol.

The symbol was an imaginary image of her at her job with rain falling, wind blowing, and her in a panic to finish. It was one of several images I have of her at work.

As it floated into the foreground of my mind, I simply asked her, “Tell me this image is not true.”

I described it and she said, “No, that’s not true. Sometimes it happens, but generally I enjoy what I am doing.”

My imaginary sign (her in the rain) became a symbol (her being worked too hard) that she corrected with a few words (“no that’s not true”).

Our years of FIML practice allowed me to allow the symbol to lose all meaning and the simple sign to become a sign again. My bad feeling about her going to work and the conditions of her work changed immediately.

To become symbols, signs must be invested with meaning and feeling. Sometimes signs are symbols and sometimes not.

We all turn signs into wrong symbols all the time. Observing how that happens in you with the help of a trusted partner will do more to clear your head than anything else I can think of.

In this respect, FIML is a form of analytical psychotherapy that removes wrong symbols from the brain’s semiotic networks.

Since humans are fundamentally semiotic animals who react instinctively to symbols, it is essential that we have a way to clear out wrong ones. FIML, or something similar, is an absolute must for clear thinking and rational psychology.

You cannot clean up most wrong symbols (or signs) by yourself. You absolutely must have a trusted partner to help you because signs and symbols function as tools of communication.

Since they are also the building blocks of human psychology, clearing up wrong signs and symbols also clears up human psychology.

Repost: Linguistics and psychology meet in FIML

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FIML is a practical technique that optimizes communication between partners by removing as much micro ambiguity as possible during real-time interpersonal communication.

FIML will also greatly improve meso and macro understanding between partners and discussions of these levels are of significant importance and cannot be ignored, but the basic FIML technique rests on micro analysis of real-time communication. Please see this post for more on this topic: Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding.

Real-time micro communication means communication within just a few seconds. If we are reading we can focus on a word or phrase and think about it as long as we like. If we are listening to someone speak, however, we normally cannot stop them to analyze deeply a particular word choice, a particular expression, a particular tone of voice, or anything else that happens rapidly.

This missing piece in the puzzle of interpersonal communication is of great—I would argue massive—importance because huge mistakes can be and often are made in a single moment.

FIML practice corrects this problem. In other posts we have referred to psychological morphemes, which we have defined as:

The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

The theory of FIML claims that psychological morphemes arise quickly and if they are not checked or analyzed can have massive influence on how people hear and think from that point on. This is why the practice of FIML focuses greatly on the initial arising or manifestation of a psychological morpheme. The morpheme may be habitual, having origins in the distant past, or it may have first arisen in the moment just before the FIML query that seeks to understand it.

The important point is that the person in whom the psychological morpheme has arisen, or has just begun to arise, realizes than it has arisen due to something that seems to have originated in the other person, their FIML partner.

This is the reason a basic FIML query is begun—because one partner notices a psychological morpheme arising within and wants to be sure it is correctly based on objective data shared with the partner. If the partner honestly denies the interpretation of the inquirer (who need not say why they are inquiring), then the inquirer will know that the morpheme that has arisen in their mind is baseless, a mistake. By stopping that mistake, they further stop a much larger mistaken psychological or emotional response from taking hold in their mind.

The stopping of a much larger mistaken psychological or emotional response from taking hold in the mind is the point at which FIML practice greatly influences psychological well-being. If we can see from the honest answers of a trusted partner that some of our most basic emotional responses are not justified—are mistakes—we will in most cases experience a rapid extinction of those responses.

In some cases of deep-seated mistaken interpretations, we may need to hear many times that we are mistaken, but extinction will follow just as surely even though it takes longer. FIML can’t cure everything but a great many people who are now dissatisfied or suffering with their emotional or psychological conditions will benefit from FIML practice. With the help of a trusted FIML partner it is easier to extinguish mistaken interpretations than it may seem upon fist hearing of this technique.

In addition to the above, FIML practice itself is interesting and will lead to many enjoyable discussions. Furthermore, FIML practice can also find and extinguish dangerous positive mistaken interpretations. A positive mistaken interpretation is one that feels good but that can lead to dangerous or harmful actions due to overconfidence, false assumptions, and so on.

FIML cannot remove all ambiguity between partners. That may be possible one day with advanced brain scans, but I suspect that even then ambiguity will still be part of our emotional lives. FIML can, however, remove enough ambiguity between partners that they will feel much more satisfied with themselves and with how they communicate with each other. When micro mistakes are largely removed from interpersonal communication, meso and macro emotions and behaviors will no longer be undermined by corrosive subjective states that cannot be analyzed objectively or productively.

Political signals from the president

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Why is Obama the first president to campaign “…strongly for his chosen successor in at least 100 years”?

(Why President Obama Campaigning For Clinton Is Historic)

One explanation is corruption in his administration is so widespread, he fears exposure under a Trump presidency.

An example is Clinton’s emails. Obama both sent email to and received email from her illegal server. A worse case is emails to or from the state department involving pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation. Matters could be even worse than that.

In my view, it is demeaning to the office of the president for Obama to use his time (paid for by the American people) and resources (Air Force One, ditto) to do run-of-the-mill huckster campaigning for a successor we have every reason to believe has yet more to hide.

Obama’s very unusual campaigning for a former rival whom many believe he actually dislikes makes it fair for the rest of us to wonder whether he might be hiding something himself.

The persistence of nonrational social norms

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Very concrete examples of persistent nonrational social norms can be found in consumer science.

For years, we received medical advice on fats and salt that had little scientific backing. Yesterday, an article appeared showing Medical benefits of dental floss unproven.

I had had my suspicions about the fat and salt though I did lean toward reducing intake, but the lack of evidence for dental floss surprised me.

Imagine tens of thousands of hygienists and dentists repeating the advice to floss over all those years. Dental floss is a multi-billion dollar industry.

I don’t blame hygienists or dentists. They were faithfully doing what they were taught—transmitting a social norm that seemed to be science-based (but was not).

That’s how societies hold together. Common beliefs and norms are typically transmitted by authority figures at the top. After the authority figures, come parents, news media, teachers, etc. in a long chain of transmission. Each in turn repeats what they have learned.

Could be about dental floss or it could be about keeping the sun in the sky by cutting out people’s hearts.

You can see something similar at an individual level. Much of human psychology is based on habits transmitted internally from one day to the next in long chains that sometimes can be traced back to infancy.

Much of what we think and feel is nothing more than habit transmitted faithfully from one moment to the next.

Psychological habits, like social conformity, work according to rules that we can understand in terms of reason but that often are not themselves reasonable.

Decision-making mental states

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Pretty sure most of us have deep mental states wherein significant personal decisions are made.

I am thinking especially of significant psychological decisions, life decisions, and social decisions.

An example of such a deep state might be being drunk.

Some people make important decisions about themselves and others when they are drunk.

Often those decisions are dark, even immoral. And often the drinker forgets making them though the decisions remain in effect.

In subsequent days, those decisions may seem to be obvious truths, not conclusions they reached while drunk.

This sort of psychological alcoholism—depending on the drunk state for decision-making though not otherwise alcoholic—can be very destructive because it fosters self-deceit and bad decisions.

Dark plans occur while drunk that are capably acted on while sober and unconscious of them.

This is a very effective form of self-deceit and may even be selected evolutionarily due to that.

I know someone with a strong trait like this and several others with milder versions.

OK, so that’s one thing and if you look, there is a good chance you will know someone who does this. You may even do it yourself.

Now, the second thing is I suspect there are a lot of deep decision-making mental states, not just the drunk one.

Some of them are dark and bad like the drunk one. Some are good. Some are idealistic. Some moody, some effective. Some analytical.

If you can see the drunk one, you can probably see others.

It’s interesting that we seem to reserve some mental states for deep psychological positioning or repositioning.

And like all things human some of those states are used for good, some for bad.

Some are inherently bad for making decisions (being drunk, over-confident, etc.) and some are inherently good.

Brain optimization

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Optimize your brain by optimizing broad-spectrum communication with at least one other person.

By optimizing broad-spectrum communication with at least one other person, signal sending and receiving is optimized both externally and internally.

“Broad-spectrum” communication means communication involving  a wide range of brain activities, including perception, speech associations, emotion, memory, subjectivity, narration, and so on. The only limits are what can be imagined.

When broad-spectrum signals are optimized in the brain and between that brain and another brain, the apparent structure of the mind or personality will change because clarity and depth are increased as mistakes are removed.

Many brain activities based on mistakes will cease, freeing brain energy for other tasks. At the same time, many broad-spectrum associations and functions will become clearer, allowing the brain to imagine new things.

FIML practice is designed to optimize brain activity in these ways.