segunda-feira, 6 de julho de 2020

House metaphor to explain behavior, limits and potential

In times of quarantine and social isolation because of the new coronavirus pandemic, a metaphor of agreement to explain behavior ...

Imagine that you can only move around inside your house, that you cannot go outside, ever. Your house has a balcony, three bedrooms, a backyard, two bathrooms, a living room, a TV, a corridor between them, a kitchen, reasonable in size, and a garage. All of this is where you can go. It is practically a house arrest. But, at least you have your own space. You have clear limits on how far you can move. But, there is a relative space for that. Others also have their homes or apartments ...

Now think of the house and the space within it as the limits and potentials of your behaviors. The limits of the house are equivalent to those of your comfort zone. The potential is as far as, circumscribed by these limits, you can reach, change or do within them. You cannot leave the house but you can choose where you will be staying in the morning or afternoon as well as what you will be doing. It is also worth mentioning that your house will grow in size, it will be renovated to a point where it will no longer happen.

Contextualized example to personality: shyness

A shy person, like me, tends to prefer family environments and a low density of people to be able to move. This is one of the limits of my personality. I know that my organism, especially my nervous system, tends to react badly, overload itself, in noisy places, and / or with little space, full of unknown people, especially if it is a type of people that I perceive hostility or difference regarding the my way of being. If I were just from the nerd tribe, maybe I wouldn't care so much about the density of people in the environments but more if most of them were nerds like me.

Shy people also often have a phobia of speaking to crowds as well as initiating trivial conversations with strangers. These are some of its limits contextualized to situations that we experience in our lives. Their reactions cannot be attributed solely to their environment, but also and especially to their intrinsic personality tendencies and memorized experiences.

 "When you leave your home", then, you are expected to experience discomfort reactions, and you may even run the risk of this being psychosomatized.

The behavioral pattern of shyness is repeated so much that there is no way to think of it as a mere attribute of the environment or how people react to you, but also how you respond. Shyness is an adaptive expression of escape from confrontations. It has its dose of logic. It cannot be defined as a pathology. Of course, its very intense expression is configured in a pathological picture, of imbalance, but more as a case of disorder than of illness, in accordance with my concepts for these terms.

We all have potentials and limits. Our potentials are not only our limits, how far we can go, but also what we can do "within them". For example, my way of dealing with my shyness or social phobia in the past 6 years. The fact that he accepted me as a homosexual at the beginning of my adult life helped me a lot to stop, even if weakly, trying
socialization with straight people, for having discovered one of the "tribes" with which I have more affinities, even if they are not significant, if I have always been an outsider. I could not have been able to go beyond my limited limit of sociability, but I managed to expand it in quality due to this awakening that I had about myself, failing to insist on following an artificial path, redirecting me to
one of the true ways where I can live more freely or naturally.

One question: where did my shyness come from?

If I draw on my oldest memories I can only conclude, even without being able to prove in the most scientifically possible way, that I am more averse to random human contact since early childhood, even though I remember, at that time, being less. Moving to another city when I was about 8 years old, a cold and variably hostile reception in the new location and the decline in my family's standard of living, which lasted for a long time, until recently, affected me significantly, helping to shape my strategies of existence (and resistance). My stuttering and my homosexuality also had an important impact so that I decided to exile myself as much as I could / I can from human coexistence, knowing that it is expressed by the predominance of frictions, conflicts and irrational hierarchies. I have used the tactic of self-conscious prey that recognizes potential predators and starts to establish strategies of social isolation and behavioral restraint, when the first is not possible. That was the most logical way and I also think that, rationally, to react or survive a world that has changed a lot and is less inviting to me.

domingo, 5 de julho de 2020

Irrationality or intellectual hallucination and one more irrational

Mental or sensory hallucination

See, feel, smell or hear things that don't exist.

Example:

It has a box with colored balls.
That guy says he is seeing a ball with a face that starts talking to him.


Intellectual hallucination or irrationality

Perceive and interpret information reaching conclusions or untrue statements, which do not exist or do not match reality.

Example:

Generalize a diverse group of people (race) especially when they are more vague or broad categorizations (black race).

A type of hallucination in which the psychological (feeling) overlaps the cognitive (perceiving / analyzing) ...

Subjective and objective

The irrational cannot differentiate what is subjective and what is objective in his thinking. As a result, their instinctive opinions are confused or treated at the same level of veracity as objective facts, even after they are perceived.

Mythology / '' religion '' is the literal domain of the arts / literature in human societies

By the domination of the metaphorical / connotative language over the denotative,

from the fantasy of his narrative over the sobriety of facts, with gods, demigods, angels, demons, metaphysical dimensions ...

An artistic domination, however, historically pernicious.

Covid, plane and human irrationality

They say that traveling by plane or helicopter is much safer than by car (bus, motorcycle). Okay. The problem is that this comparison is not complete, because post-accident survival statistics are missing, not to mention differences in use, since we travel a lot more in land vehicles. Another difference is the level of human factor involved since many land vehicle accidents happen due to sheer negligence or lack of attention from the driver. Well, the numbers show us that the survival rates are logically higher, even in the case of serious car, motorcycle, etc. accidents, and the opposite for those of airplane, helicopter .. But, the majority, many times for necessity or convenience , conforms to half of this risk history and security level. And that is irrational, of course.

Many people have also treated covid-19, a disease caused by the new coronavirus, in a pandemic course in this year 2020 "dc", as less dangerous than it can be, based on ignorance or misrepresentation of facts.

Like: if the majority who get it present asymptomatic or mild symptoms, being potentially more severe in the case of people with comorbidities and old age, I'm sure I won't have complications ...

But, as long as there are no tests that detect, with any precision, the risk of your immune system showing an exaggerated response, the main death factor of the covid, then there is no way to say that if you take it, you will not end up in a hospital bed or even die. I don't have a crystal ball and if I want to preserve my life, I need to follow reason and not the intuition to find myself invincible without having any concrete proof of it. In most cases there are no complications, but you will only be sure of what can happen to you if you get the disease. Not to mention people, spouse, friends, relatives, strangers who could become contaminated because of you and become in a serious condition or even fail to resist the infection.

The illusion or intellectual hallucination that makes people exaggerate about the safety of traveling by plane is the same that makes them underestimate the dangerousness of the covid-19.

Most of the time when we fly, it is safe. But in the bad luck of having an accident, the chances of dying are very high.

Most of the time, covid-19 is not lethal. But, this does not mean that there is 100% certainty that, if you take it, you will follow the trend of this majority. Nor that the same will happen to the people around you, if you become contaminated and a vector.

The human sciences ARE exact//'hard''


The human sciences are basic and, therefore, fundamental. That's why everyone has their own opinions about them. That is why we have become accustomed to calling them "non-exact sciences". Hence, bizarre features such as (bluff of) "neoliberalism" and "leftist Nazism" ...

Let's see the level of rigor of the "human", quickly:

History: historians look for facts or real perspectives on events or periods of the past as well as those that happen in the present and will be material for the future. For example, regarding the "discovery" of "Brazil", it is true to say that it was a discovery, according to a European vision, but that it was also an apocalyptic invasion, according to an Amerindian view, of the peoples who lived here before this event. nothing "subjective" or "free of interpretation" there. The least apparently objective point in history would be moral criticism. For example, to say that slavery was normal in ancient times, and therefore morally acceptable. It never was, especially when we become aware of the most important truths of all, that we are all the same, in essence, doomed to the same final destination, as well as the existence of a range of possibilities on how to organize a society without needing a regime. of slavery, whether it is essential or not, precisely what I called the essential concept of morality (which is a natural intersection with the field of philosophy).

Geography: knowing about the space where you live, its physical, climatic, hydrographic, cultural, political, economic and historical characteristics, as well as other places, etc. There is nothing "absolutely inaccurate" in geography, is there?

Social sciences: seeks to understand human relations from a social and historical perspective. They are also far from being inaccurate or under the full judgment of subjective interpretation.


Psychology: observation, analysis, descriptive and comparative, of human behavior ... just to mention some aspects of this knowledge and its "exact" character.

Philosophy: the field of human thought, one of the most important and, at the same time, also the most gluttonous, is not based on opinion beliefs, but on the theoretical and practical accuracy of wisdom, for example, by the list of fallacies or misunderstandings of reasoning in debates / confrontations of ideas.

We must not confuse troubled ideological disputes within the field of human sciences and their consequent and multiple factual and moral distortions, which greatly affect the efficiency of their scientific method, with its nature, which is intrinsically accurate.

What do the humanities really look for ??

Like all science, they search for their respective truths, and this also means that, ideally, they do so in order to maximize the well-being or survival of the human species, history as a record of "our" trajectory and source of learning so that mistakes made in the past, do not repeat themselves; geography as a way of politically organizing human beings' means of existence and also of knowledge about the characteristics of the environments in which they live, aiming at a better adaptation; social / political sciences // sociology as a method of understanding social dynamics, their individual and collective impact and solutions seeking to maximize harmony between human beings and the means or cultures that create, sustain, dialogue and adapt; psychology as a way of delineating the complexity of the human mind, also proposing attenuations and solutions for its dilemmas, philosophy as a beacon of maximum sanity, always pointing to the most fundamental (existential) truths as to enlighten us about who we are, what we are, to "where" we will go, to then emphasize what is most essential in life, in addition to teaching us about self-knowledge and rationality, high virtues of human potential.

The most important truths

Cake's recipe is less important than knowing that we are all the same, in essence;

The rain cycle is less important than knowing that life is finite;

The history of the Roman Empire is less important than knowing that there are no gods or metaphysical dimensions;

Quantum physics is less important than knowing that each moment is a farewell ......

Hyperreality

We are not in the year 2020 after Christ. The age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old;
-For us, there are only rotation and translation movements;
--Every day is a unique day that will never return;
--- There are no months, years, hours, just now, which is a constant goodbye;


Everything we do is to distract us from the relentless time;
We are naked. Clothes are '' shame '', disguises;
We are not our names, but what we feel, perceive and learn;

Our only goal is happiness;
We live in societies dominated by parasites and their "useful idiots". Hence the persistence of hatred and alienation;

We are essentially equal, blood relatives, fruits of the same tree, life. We have the same root, which germinates, grows, and dies;

We are not the children of the creator of the universe, but of the universe itself. There is no creator, but a creation;

We are tiny points of existence in the midst of immensity ...