Personality Lecture #12

Discussion thread for Personality and Its Transformations - Lecture #12

study group discussion

Discussion as part of our Study Group.

my notes

  • 0m - reality is not what we know, but what our perceptions tell us it is - reality cannot be what we know, as we can only observe reality from interactions, and know what those interactions produce, but not what unknown interactions produce

  • 01:00 - clinical psychiatrists are trying to answer how to live properly, for themselves, and their clients, so philosophy as well as science are parts of that - philosophy as how to live properly is also about a values system

  • 03:00 - you are surrounded by an infinite number of things to comprehend, but that isn’t the world you live in, you live in a very constrained subset of those things, what is the nature of that subset, as that is what you inhabit and that makes up your experiences, and how is it related to the infinitely complex objects around you - you are in a perceptual/existential/phenomenological/qualia/desein frame

  • 5:30 - slide - dasein - past and future are implicit in the current moment, we bring the past and the future, into our current actions and perceptions

  • 08:00 - university entrance/denial letter, is a not just a piece of paper, that is a narrow perspective, it is a portal to your future, and your body knows that, as it shakes at that paper - your body is smarter than your eyes when it comes to perception, as it sees/includes more than just what your eyes see

  • 09:45 - slide

  • 10:00 - things interact with you, according to how you interact with them - every time you look at a masterpiece you get some different, as you are different, and it reflects different things back to you

  • 13:00 - where does the book actually exist? it depends on how you define the book? << this seems to imply that there is organic living entity, a meme, that jumps from mind to mind, infecting them, through the body of books, words, and thoughts >>

  • 13:30 - too sensitive, or too provocative - entangled dynamic between subjective perception and objective perception << my recent tweets actually communicate this

  • 14:25 - slide - where you are, where you are going, your embodied actions

  • 19:40 - slide - Meaning as primary: phainesthai - “what we perceive are ‘first and foremost’ not impression of taste, tone, smell or touch, not even things or objects, but meaning” — Binswanger L. (1963). Being in the World. New York: Basic Books, p. 114

  • 19:45 - it has been said, that every person, is the exponent of some great philosopher’s suppositions

  • 20:00 - [WRONG: you see an object, you think about the object, you evaluate the objects, you decide how to act on the objects, and you act - object sense, perception, emotion, cognition, action] - what you see in the world is meanings; meaning detection first, object detection second - blindsight; show a angry face to a blind person, they see and react to the pattern, and the meaning of that pattern, even without object perception << a gene pattern creates a neuron pattern that recognises a perception pattern - a propagation of a pattern through patterns that at each instrument of propagation distills more meaning from noise >> << if objects were the reality, then how do books and video games and dialogue have so much impact and meaning to us, when their objects are nonsensical >> - science is the tearing of meaning away, to observe what is objective, true for all observers - but then you are left with no meaning << which is good for science, but not good for a belief system >> - you see the meaning first, then see the objects - baby glass table example, baby will not want to fall, sees a falling off place, despite glass being there

  • 25:00 - what does it mean if you see the meaning first? that constitutes what you determine what is real - if you have evolved to see meaning, and it is what has kept you alive, then is there anything more real than the meaning?

  • 26:35 - mad pen flipping skills

  • 28:00 - slide - meaning as primary: phainesthai - “endowment of meaning; Binswanger: the revelation of exploration” you create the perception of beauty - “Disclosure of meaning: Boss: the revelation of the object” the beauty comes out to you from the object itself - you pursue the things that shine forth - the snitch in quidditch is a symbol of reality before it is fractionated into its parts, a symbol of what makes your curious - when you are curious about something, is it calling to you, or is something you are interpreting, Peterson says it is both - the thing that is to be perceived shines forth with its potential manifestations << this can be true if we consider reality separate from us, but wouldn’t manifestation also be what we consider useful in the object, rather than what it considers useful about itself - a iron ore won’t change into a skyscraper unless through human potential >>

  • 32:00 - schizophrenia

  • 33:00 - you are not in control of the thing that makes you interested in things - if you are not in control of that, then what the hell is directing that??? it is alive, it is dynamic, it has an orientation of something (jungian self)

  • 34:00 - slide of snitch

  • 35:00 - Peterson’s dream, 37:00 slide, 37:50 slide, 38:50 slide, 39:00 slide - when something goes catastrophically wrong, you can opt to descend level by level by level into the levels of your own stupidity to find out what you did wrong and what you can do to fix it << Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged, in this book, there is a battle between those who produce material things as well as courage and spirit, and those who loot it - when a spectator tells to a producer that he hates that the looters benefit from the producers, the producer responds - do you doubt that we cannot carry them on our shoulders? – it seems to me that that the more producers make society better, the more we can protect people from discomfort, making their choice to go to their depths of their soul, optional, keeping them adult infants – this quote from Ayn Rand, seems to imply this is inevitable, and also, that the producers are so strong (or can become so strong) they can carry more and more infants on their shoulders >>

  • 40:50 slide of pipe, the representation/perception is not actually the thing, it is only your perception/representation of it << makes sense, as where does the boundaries of a human actually begin and end? are we creatures of society, is society part of us, what about all the organisms that live on us, and in us, and are part of us - to perceive humans as only human, is true from a social perspective, but not true entirely from a medical perspective, and so on >>

  • 42:20 - slide, all men thinking the same way, blinded by their own perceptions

  • 42:40 - slide

  • 43:00 - you do not see objects, you see potential

  • 44:00 - dreams, the creative imagination, are the forefront of thinking, they get there before you do - the art is beyond what is articulable, if they knew what they mean, they would write it down, otherwise it would just be propaganda - dreams can take you places you didn’t even know - it is like the figuring out manifested itself inside you - you had a dream, not made a dream

  • 45:30 - slide

  • 45:33 - slide

  • 46:18 - slide