Maps of Meaning #6

Study Notes
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Discussion thread for 2017 Maps of Meaning - Lecture #6

study group discussions

Discussion as part of our Study Group.

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my notes

  • 2:30 - the current systems for organising chaos may indeed be oppressive, and they often are and may even involve murder - but being alone in the chaos is certainly not better - as such, we are are a lot better with these systems than without them, in fact they are the best systems we have through millions of years of evolution

  • 6:30 - the dominance hierarchy is older than trees, it is one of the oldest things, and arises whenever two things must compete for the same scarce resource

  • 9:00 - creates aren’t making random choices, they are not random at all! everything has an evolutionary purpose that is incredibly purposeful and evolved

  • 15:00 - disagree on conscientious as a female attraction market - there are subcultures where females do not go for that - gangstas, lower class, etc

  • 16:00 - with increased cognitive flexibility - the amount of dominance hierarchies multiply - you can be successful socially (extroverts dominate that), intimate relationships (an agreeable person would do), competition (disagreeable person), open person (flexible creative environment), creative (come up with your game and make your own rules - ponzi and pyramid schemes)

  • 17:00 - what is driving selection now is the ability to be successful IN MULTIPLE types of dominance hierarchies - to be flexible in the games

  • <23:00 - humans have been able to internalise the evolution mechanics/game into our own system - such that we are able to create avatars, send them to battle against the enemy/chaos/etc and have the avatars die instead - brilliant - the future is a place where variants of you exist - where avatars of you exist - it is purely conceptual

  • 26:00 - we react to patterns not object, we think we react to objects but that is not true, objects are a subcategory of patterns

  • ~30:00 - we react to patterns, someone can be blind, but you show them a picture of a face in fear, and their body reacts accordingly, because their cognitive awareness of sight may be blown, but there are other pattern recognition systems that are not - this opens up huge medical options - as nothing is what it seems - we don’t encounter, recognise, process, react - we do, but there are other systems that do it way faster, primordial systems

  • 30:30 - cognition is super slow compared to lower systems, especially lower pattern recognition systems - a cobra that strikes you behind glass, you will still jump back - this is interesting, as it ties in with how our cognitive systems could inadvertently train negative patterns and strengthen negative systems within us, to recognise and act our patterns that we do not want, that override our cognition

  • 34:00 - competitors (all entities, including stars etc) make the world chaotic - as such the outside system is always changing to the systems we know << probably why people desire a heaven in a fantasy finite world of their making, or desire the end of the world to reduce complexity

  • <36:00 - there are parts of you that are quick and dirty, and there are parts of you that are slow and sophisticated (consciousness - hence why consciousness can’t help you out in an immediate emergency)

  • >36:00 - what we are doing with practice, is building new specialised machines in our brain, just like programming - our conscious is continuously programming our unconscious - the purpose of consciousness is to make us functional unconsciously - if you are good at something, you hardly have to be conscious of it at all - so consciousness is something like a error recognition and correction system

  • 38:00 - paying attention to your flaws for error finding, routinely, may collapse yourself, as you get better at finding problems to an extent that’s all you can do

    • << happened to me in 2014 from programming/debugging >>

  • 42:00 - when you know what you are doing, you want to be operating in high resolution - that is filtering out everything unnecessary to make the necessary super detailed - low resolution is when your focus is broad but blurry** (scattered attention vs prolonged focus attention - at times, attention has to recharge and switch, to make sure it can still see the forest from the trees)**

  • <43:30 - a framework specifies; the current condition, the desired condition, and the behavioural manifestations that are necessary to make the transformation

  • <44:00 - motivations are the mechanisms that makes the world manifest themselves to you in keeping with your goals - they determine what is high resolution and what is low resolution, they determine the input you take onboard and the input you discard

  • 45:00 - a tool is a meaningful pattern

  • 47:00 - you can’t derive ethics from facts, because there are an infinite size of facts, so which facts do you use? - by discriminating facts, you already are using an ethic, a process that is not based in facts

  • <49:00 - we see and describe the world in tools - meaningful patterns - knowledge can also be tools

  • 50:00 - when something goes wrong, it is because something from the irrelevant that we dismissed, has contained an indeterminate set of irrelevant things that have now become relevant

  • <51:00 - this all puts perception in the realm of ethics, as you see what you are aiming at

  • >51:00 - we live in a world of relevance, not in a world of facts - they are completely different things

  • 52:00 - what ethic best structures your perceptions? that is the interesting idea

  • 53:00 - if everything matters, then you’re either on a LSD trip, a schizophrenic, or you’re in real serious trouble? - what does he mean? (explains at 25:00 in Lecture 7)

  • 53:00 - the basis of cognitive knowledge is learned irrelevance - what to ignore

  • 55:30 - BOOK: an ecological approach to visual perception - Gibson - fundamental conclusion is wrong, but the book is brilliant, because he came up with the idea of affordance

  • 58:00 - of course you see the world made up of things that matter, because you are the type of creature that cares about things that matter, because you don’t want to die

  • 1:00:00 - facts rarely matter, as people’s inherit ethics makes them select from the infinite amount of facts those that are relevant to you

  • 1:04:00 - value systems, and positive emotions, and motivations

  • 1:07:00 - a positive meaningful event is one that is a success that also increases your probability of future successes

  • 1:12:00 - you are never going to get it together, there are always more problems to solve - so focus on meaningful problems

  • 1:17:00 - things in a room that do not serve the purpose of a room, are snakes, detracting from the purpose of the room

  • 1:22:00 - neurotic people can’t put their map back together, they need outside help

  • 1:23:00 - when our action produces an expected result, then it means our map is correct, which moves us forward quicker

    • << although, cynics do this too, to their own detriment (1:26:00) >>

  • 1:24:00 - you want to constrain the anomalous event to the minimum necessary domain

  • 1:27:00 - solution to depressive patterns: what’s the narrowest framework of interpretation which which I can understand this that will require minimal behavioural change to decrease the probability that it will happen again

  • 1:27:30 - what you do today, scales to what you’ll do tomorrow, to what you’ll do next week, to what you’ll do on and on - it also scales socially, what you do today, will have an effect on those around you, and those around them (the community), and so on

  • 1:29:00 - what it could be in psychology, is that your sense of meaning is a orienting force, to keep us balanced - and alternative philosophies compete with this

  • 1:34:00 - image of the framework

  • 1:36:00 - if you are free, you cannot make predictions

    • << as nothing is holding you in place, no continuity of narrative >>

  • 1:40:00 - when you run out of answers as to your motivations, you step away from the rational domain and enter the metaphysical domain

  • 1:43:30 - relation to Trichotillomania-style thinking, an anomaly occurs and start questioning our map

  • 1:44:50 - how to argue with someone for improvements - the sandwich technique done well

  • 1:46:00 - your emotional response should be proportionate to the level being assaulted by the anomaly

  • 1:47:00 - don’t have just one plan to get you where you want to go, so if one fails, you can survive on your path, rather than be thrown back to the start

  • >1:47:00 - the arguments for balance are incredibly feminine arguments, as they destroy competitive excellence - the more balance you optimise for, the less likely you will be fantastic at any single one thing you balance for - Jung: men go after perfection, women go after wholeness - I want one thing in my life to be 150% versus I want 5 things in my life to be 80% - the more you strive to optimise balance the more you won’t be fantastic at any one thing (except balance)

  • 1:51:00 - most women in their thirties bailout of multidimensional careers, as they don’t consider it worth it, socioeconomic status does not make women more attractive on the mating market (and it lowers the mates they want), but socioeconomic status for men does make men more attractive - women’s timeframe are compressed, they can only have kids by 35

  • 1:52:00 - one of the most common routes to extreme unhappiness is to want children and never have them - 1 couple in 3 over 30 have fertility problems (inability conceive after 1 year of trying) if that happens to you, you are in the medical mill for 10 years

  • 1:53:00 - recap of the lecture, should quote this, as it will be a useful resource for adversity

  • 1:59:00 - serotonin and satiation recap

  • 2:00:00 - being at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy and being depressed are the same thing biologically -** so are you depressed, or just at the bottom of a dominance hierarchy?** - the symptoms are pretty much similar, the the cause are cure are not the same at all

  • 2:01:00 - if you do not have a value hierarchy you are lost, and if you are lost, you pursue impulsive hedonistic rewards, rather than satiation rewards, as satiation rewards require a value system to climb - if you are lost, you can only consider the immediate timeframe, which keeps you lost, a value system is the only way to consider the future and your place in it - to maintain and climb your value system, you need to pay attention to a lot of things at once, it is a complicated waltz, it requires responsibility - part of the reason people drink alcohol, is to get rid of their responsibility

  • 2:04:00 - conservatives and liberals don’t get along, because conservatives do bind themselves to a particular frame (low in openness, high in conscientiousness)

  • 2:05:00 - peter pan - brilliant - covers porn

    • you can chose your damn limitation (frame), or you can let it take you unaware when you are 30, or even worse when are 40, and then that is not a happy day - people can put of maturity today without immediate penalty, however the penalty accrues, so when it hits, and it wallops you - don’t be an old infant - don’t just be potential, be potential manifested into something, that will make the world open up to you with opportunities and possibility - respect for blue collar work - jung: the proper path of development in the last half of life is to rediscover the child you left behind as you were apprenticing - you get to be something, and regain that potential at the same time - you get to pick your damn sacrifice, you don’t get to ignore sacrifice as you will make one whether you want to or not

  • 2:10:00 - on the culture of old infants - universities facilitate it by enabling you to go to university to not be something - they rob you future self with debts, to provide you the illusion of an identity - it is pleasure island

  • 2:12:00 - on the culture of old infants - technology also complicates this, as before the rough patch use to be 15-18, now it is 18-25 - before the hippies would complain about having to work at a corporation and then get a pension - at least they had jobs! - there is now a void in our culture due to technology and whatnot that facilitates the adolescents journey to adulthood - how to fix this?

  • 2:13:00 - when you go to university, you should learn 3 things - how to speak, how to think, how to write - that’s what the humanities are for, they are meant to make you deadly, in a complex job you will dominate it, in any complex job

  • 2:14:45 - the students are saying they are not learning a damn thing in law, it is all social justice nonsense -** it’ll do them in anyways, as lawyers are being replaced by automation - **a lot of what they do is dig up information

  • 2:15:45 - on the culture of old infants - people don’t have to be married to have sex - horrible accounting of lower-class single mothers

  • 2:17:00 - the best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them how to write

    • << perhaps this is why good programmers dominate >>

    • marking should be about teaching people what they did wrong**_ and how_**** to address it - _there is no difference between writing and thinking - good thinking/writing/speaking makes you win the battles you undertake - it is the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with - if you can formulate your arguments coherently, formulate a presentation, and speak to people, lay out a proposal, people give you money, opportunities, influence - teach people to be articulate, it is the most dangerous thing you can possibly be - it is your sword and your bullet proof vest _- it is like there is a conspiracy to bring people into the education system to make them weaker, perhaps it is because it keeps the competition down, if your students are stupid they won’t be able to challenge you**

  • **2:22:00 - divorce, with kids, is like having non-fatal cancer - bad stepdads **

  • 2:23:00 - one of the things you have when you age is the continuity of your life

    • << perhaps this is why I have such an enticing story on balupton.com >>