I find it fascinating that Zen/Tao "teachings" for thousands of years have focused on what seems to be one of the most difficult areas of human existence: "man vs. himself".
Modern cognitive therapy seems to be an institutionalized version of the whole Zen thing which I find amusing. Personally I've never been happier once I realized that the world is literally what you make of it, that is, it is all up to your internal interpretation.
Once you realize that your mind is constantly interpreting everything, you can learn - through practice and meditation - to just be however you want to be and be in complete control of yourself.
Because in the end... you're just being... unless you're not and then it doesn't matter.
I guess more specifically I meant control in that your emotions aren't making the decisions rather your "self" is in control. Its hard to explain with language... imagine if someone is completely consumed with rage... or lust... we don't usually say that that person is in "control" of themselves.
This could get weird if we don't define our terms. If your "self" is your mind/attention, then sigzero is right by saying complete control is impossible; the human mind is too whimsical to ever be fully reined in. But we can consciously course-correct...
Self could be your mind/attention, but there's no reason you can't expand your idea of self to include your ego, mind, entire body. I suppose the question is: will you take responsibility for what goes on within your skin?
I do wonder whether it is better to be more rational. One way or the other though, I'm sure it's better to realize you're an irrational being, instead of clinging to the false belief that most of us have that they are, indeed, rational.
Or you could say that it is because people are rational actors, but that rationality is often itself irrational.
Reason is a useful and important skill, but reason is the manipulation of symbols that exist within our own minds, not autonomously in the external world. If we take reason for granted, apply it without recognizing its subjective nature, and consider its product to be objective knowledge of the world, then we are acting rationally, but it is irrational to do so.
The information presented demonstrates that human beings often do not act rationally. But "people are not rational actors" isn't a causal explanation, it's just a description of a situation. Arguing against such an "explanation" makes no more sense than using such an explanation.
Um, Did you read the article? Did you see how I praised Predictably Irrational? Or did you just jump at the opportunity to call me an evolutionary hack?
I challenge you to provide me with an example of a perfectly rational human actor. How might he live his life? Maybe a human can be rational within the confines of a specific problem-universe, i.e., any claims that he makes are logically derived from inherent axioms. But there are no axioms of "how to live" unless you're St Thomas Aquinas, but even his morality is suspect.
Okay, even if you say that Utility is not just $, but emotional payout, I will 100% agree that we're often irrational in our decision making; c.f. Dan Gilbert and Dan Ariely for more information. BUT IN THE CONTEXT I WAS REFERRING TO, preferring restaurant soup to a bedpan is not irrational because we give more emotional value to positive associated emotions and negative emotional value to the bedpan.
While this post deals with interesting ideas and issues, the writing wanders and leaves out enough detail to make the final product unsatisfying.
The author claims people believe items have essences for cognitive and evolutionary reasons. Fair enough claim but I see no real evidence even after following the links. The Zen story is nice but somewhat tangential to the original claim.
Indeed scanning the links, I gradually get the impression the entire blog involves a stream of appealing ideas lacking details and coherence. The whole exercise seems "not even wrong" but like a wandering between interesting, related but "mushy" ideas, something of a poster-boy for the bad kind of web-generated fuzzy thinking.
One example of a paragraph that in a link that bothered me in it's level of non-communication: "I learned this lesson when I was an intern at a software company in Silicon Valley. I was debating with my boss about what kind of copy should go on our new site, MaviShare.com. This was in the days before data-driven decision making became universally embedded in start-up culture (the correct answer to the debate is really “who cares? Try it and see, and let the results speak for themselves”). Anyway, he asked his MBA girlfriend (now wife), and she said, “People like steps.” It’s a lesson I took to heart." (What "copy" - "ad copy"? The "copy utility". Anyway, the reader simply never discovers where the "steps" come in, in either meaning of "copy", and I found this incompletely expressed idea psychically bothersome enough to complain here. What's the lesson? What?? It's not in the earlier or later paragraphs either). See http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-psy...
I hear you about the confusion there. It's really just shoddy writing. One of my weaknesses as a writer, one that I just recently became explicitly aware of, is that when I write, I do it after stacking lots of "schemas": I understand A because of B, and understand B because of C, but many of my audience might only understand C, and I talk about A without first meeting them at C, graduating to B, and then stacking A. (In case you're interested, I'm planning on writing a cohesive post about this phenomenon soon).
Many of my claims are scientifically backed but I simply do not care enough to go through and cite them; I would like to but it's not a good use of my time at this point. If you are curious about a specific claim I am always happy to point you in the right direction of the research. Other claims are admittedly speculation and I almost always denote them as such. There is a storied history of philosophers engaging in thought experiments so dismissing my actions as part of some NEW pseudoscience born through the web is erroneous. Likely many of the things I discussed (such as the precise nature of memory encoding, storage, and recall) will not be unraveled in our time. But you may be pleased to know though that I have discussed several of these articles with academics and would've hesitated to publish if I'd got strong dissent.
P.S. The lesson is "Actions to achieve our goals are explicit, and prepackaged so we can directly execute on them." The text copy I was referring to was steps for the user to take. Thanks for the feedback.
Modern cognitive therapy seems to be an institutionalized version of the whole Zen thing which I find amusing. Personally I've never been happier once I realized that the world is literally what you make of it, that is, it is all up to your internal interpretation.
Once you realize that your mind is constantly interpreting everything, you can learn - through practice and meditation - to just be however you want to be and be in complete control of yourself.
Because in the end... you're just being... unless you're not and then it doesn't matter.