Friday, June 18, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
ramble on
I perceive myself as amiss, I perceive everything as amiss. I seek to improve myself, I seek to improve everything. To do this I must try to know myself, and to know myself I must know everything.
Thus a drive for expansion in experience, understanding, and knowledge.
If we do not experience new phenomena, we cannot judge their value, and thus we will not gain insight and knowledge of how to go about improving ourselves.
The extent to which I perceive myself/ my world as discordant will thus determine how much I am motivated to expand my understanding through exposure to new experiences.
If I have no sense that my life is wrong, then I have very little motivation to discard my established values and seek new information about living well.
Thus, an inflated sense of contentment, such as occurs when "in love" will lead to a marked decrease in motivation to expand the scope of potential behaviors and the value systems that arise from reflecting on the consequences of these behaviors.
Contentment slows and restricts the process of moral evolution. There is very little chance to make a revolutionary change in one's own value system (let alone in society's value system) if one is content/comfortable with one's self.
Thus our society ought to have structured itself to avoid such dalliance and to encourage a sense of discomfort with the state of the world. This is a delicately balanced process of social evolution. Cultural values strike a discord with certain people, who then rebel by creating new behaviors (and new values). These values offend other members of the society, so much so that they try to dissociate themselves from the group, or purge the controversial values and their promulgators.
If everyone were shielded from perceptions of discord, then values would be accepted exactly as they had been given by the powerful. This cognitive discord arising from value conflict can be seen as nature's way of mitigating the extent to which individuals succumb to group interests which undermine their evolutionary success (more in the sense of ideas rather than physical offspring).
If we all went around in life blissfully unaware of any anxiety or anger, then human consciousness would lose much of its dynamic potential for progress.
Happiness leads to extinction. The self-satisfied man has no incentive to branch out, change, and through his inspired work, influence the future of human consciousness. His ideas come to rest within him, and the potential of humanity fails to expand. He holds back potentialities because he is not impelled by anxiety to share them.
Perhaps he is malfunctioning, and brain damaged.
Perhaps he is selfish and trying to deprive others of the same pleasure he feels.
Perhaps his thoughts have their right place inside his mind, and will do more harm than good outside of this systematic context. His ideas, used instrumentally by people with different values, will cause the destruction of his core values, rather than propagating and expanding them in their richness of meaning.
The thought of sharing these ideas with others who will interpret them differently is what causes the most anxiety for this man.
sharing his ideas will be possibly to the detriment of the creative potential of future individuals, since his ideas are so powerful that they demand a homogenous acceptance and thus hinder the "biodiversity of ideas"
The man does not want to influence anyone until he has been adequately influenced himself. And the wise man knows that he does not know, so his values must take the form of confession, rather than doctrine.
RAMBLE RAMBLE RAMBLE... hindered by systematic logic and working memory malfunction, as well as tangential thinking patterns. This is one dirty, dirty sandbox.
Thus a drive for expansion in experience, understanding, and knowledge.
If we do not experience new phenomena, we cannot judge their value, and thus we will not gain insight and knowledge of how to go about improving ourselves.
The extent to which I perceive myself/ my world as discordant will thus determine how much I am motivated to expand my understanding through exposure to new experiences.
If I have no sense that my life is wrong, then I have very little motivation to discard my established values and seek new information about living well.
Thus, an inflated sense of contentment, such as occurs when "in love" will lead to a marked decrease in motivation to expand the scope of potential behaviors and the value systems that arise from reflecting on the consequences of these behaviors.
Contentment slows and restricts the process of moral evolution. There is very little chance to make a revolutionary change in one's own value system (let alone in society's value system) if one is content/comfortable with one's self.
Thus our society ought to have structured itself to avoid such dalliance and to encourage a sense of discomfort with the state of the world. This is a delicately balanced process of social evolution. Cultural values strike a discord with certain people, who then rebel by creating new behaviors (and new values). These values offend other members of the society, so much so that they try to dissociate themselves from the group, or purge the controversial values and their promulgators.
If everyone were shielded from perceptions of discord, then values would be accepted exactly as they had been given by the powerful. This cognitive discord arising from value conflict can be seen as nature's way of mitigating the extent to which individuals succumb to group interests which undermine their evolutionary success (more in the sense of ideas rather than physical offspring).
If we all went around in life blissfully unaware of any anxiety or anger, then human consciousness would lose much of its dynamic potential for progress.
Happiness leads to extinction. The self-satisfied man has no incentive to branch out, change, and through his inspired work, influence the future of human consciousness. His ideas come to rest within him, and the potential of humanity fails to expand. He holds back potentialities because he is not impelled by anxiety to share them.
Perhaps he is malfunctioning, and brain damaged.
Perhaps he is selfish and trying to deprive others of the same pleasure he feels.
Perhaps his thoughts have their right place inside his mind, and will do more harm than good outside of this systematic context. His ideas, used instrumentally by people with different values, will cause the destruction of his core values, rather than propagating and expanding them in their richness of meaning.
The thought of sharing these ideas with others who will interpret them differently is what causes the most anxiety for this man.
sharing his ideas will be possibly to the detriment of the creative potential of future individuals, since his ideas are so powerful that they demand a homogenous acceptance and thus hinder the "biodiversity of ideas"
The man does not want to influence anyone until he has been adequately influenced himself. And the wise man knows that he does not know, so his values must take the form of confession, rather than doctrine.
RAMBLE RAMBLE RAMBLE... hindered by systematic logic and working memory malfunction, as well as tangential thinking patterns. This is one dirty, dirty sandbox.
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