For Those People Who Take Their Selves Seriously...

When I think of selfishness, I mean a person invested in maintaining a structural power difference between himself and others.

Anyone who does this - or lives a life which supports this, is by the nature of the physical reality we live within, taking advantage.

If such a person says "I'm not selfish", or more complexly (complex thinking gives powerful people a sense of being even more powerful i.e. they think they're smart for being able to justify injustice to themselves by making it complex, ironic, or "beautifully irrational") thinks about their selfishness in terms of a shared "trans-subjective" fantasy, such as go-to cliches like: "were animals", or "were born this way", or "this is what animals do", or "chaos is the essence of things": they are merely kidding themselves. They do not realize how their existing social relations (which they are HEAVILY INVESTED IN) is probabilistcally determining their affective focus. Cause and Effect truly control us in the present; the only way to get some sort of hand on the subject is through science - through realizing, and then becoming shaped by, the knowledge of your existence as a physical phenomena. Talk about avatar? Nothing will make you feel more like a "microcosm" of the macrocosm than a study of the Human beings causal integration with the physical things around us.

Consciousness Ignores

For people who talk about the "now", this world isn't made for you or your kind - indeed, you and your kind are precisely the sorts of creatures that suck order out of reality at a viral-infection like pace: consume, consume, and dissociate all knowledge of the effects you create: what a blessed fantasy! How wonderful you must think existence will always be for you.

Occultism must be so much fun, and Daniel Kahnemans "Thinking, Fast and Slow", dull and boring, yet its work like Kahnemans that qualify as fact - and qualify as the ever-present reality of how Humans actually function: we lie to ourselves, particularly when we inhabit a social-context where everyone lies to themselves - lies become spoken, people hear, and are glad to hear those lies: they need them to feel better about the dysequilirium that inner-lies create within our system. But socializing? In the "now"? People who love the present NEED THEIR MONEY TO HOLD OFF REALITY. Harsh.

I don't Like Antagonizing

My posts are directed at multiple sorts of people, an undeniable part of whom are people who think Donald Trump is great, the end of the world and chaos will be awesome - and their own naive arrogance in thinking that one day reality wont come crashing down on them too.

I see religion - God - and speaking about our relations with one another in terms of an eternal third party's "watchful eye" to be a problematic delusion that dissociates people from the actual - action-based - responses, our reflexes, and our affective-vulnerabilites, which actually organizes everything we say and do: our minds exist through the motion of matter, and the matter of our bodies is integrated with the matter of other bodies: like centripetal motion, any two Humans-in-interaction mutually determine one anothers orientations by the feelings they speak from. Invoking God, or internalizing hatred of your God for the other, is DEMENTED NONSENSE which distances ourselves from the facts of what's happening: every one of us were born in a context which shaped our biology and sense of identity. To attack and hate someone for doing what his environment literally mad him do is fundamentall unfair: we are energy-being potentiated by the environments unconscious (to our conscious mind) continuous action upon us. Nothing will be resolved - and we will likely destroy ourselves - if we can't accept this reality and assume a more compassionate, patient, and understanding stance in our relations. Such a response is rational - reasonable - and coherent - because it correlates an internal mental-affective organization (positive, caring) to the complex, utterly resistant other who needs the very same things you do: to be true, right, strong.

If you really want to understand yourself and others, personalize what is happening between the two of you, and don't seek to impose metaphysical biases (your own trans-subjective belief-needs) into the conversation with the other. If you can actually respect the other by relating to him as you yourself would need to be related to (to be understood),then conversation can happen.

Otherwise, elitist power structures will play out their dynamics as they always do in Human history. Notice: end-time beliefs have been concomitants at other major structural changes i.e. see the 30 year war in Europe, or during the crusades. Nothing is different this time around besides a) nuclear weapons, and b) climate change.

If we destroyed ourselves, it would only go to show how incredibly fallible reality can be.

Of course, for me - and my own sense of the awesomeness of reality - such an end is painful to think about, although it is not logically prohibited from happening if we don't make ourselves more aware of what is happening between us.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I guess I am alredy condemned by your thesis.

a reply to: Egoismyname

Who is "condemning" whom? Do you want to throw the blame on God? On yourself? On your family? On history? On the nature of physical reality?

No one is condemning anyone, I am merely combining two interests of mine - science, and politics - and addressing the elite class who is presently holding Humanity itself over the fire.

Thousands of other people with my sort of interest - science and society - have come to the same conclusion, although no one (as far as I know) have addressed the sorts of beliefs which sustain the elite-class.

As far as I see it - and you (despite what you've done in your living) were all one; some of us do bad stuff because we (or our environments) fill us with bull-#, while the majority are denied knowledge and therefore a means to find equality.

I can understand both sides. I understand how we work. You too, I'm sure, probably detect a plausibility in this sort of scienctific, biological and physics based account.

a reply to: Egoismyname

Yes, some of us do take ourselves too seriously.

Those that interject a condemnation of Trump into the most basic of their discussions are tending to that quarter. And if they also condemn any god for everybody else, then they are making themselves almost godlike in their pronouncements denigrating others that do have a spiritual faith.

a reply to: Astrocyte

thinks about their selfishness in terms of a shared "trans-subjective" fantasy, such as go-to cliches like: "were animals", or "were born this way", or "this is what animals do", or "chaos is the essence of things": they are merely kidding themselves.

Might not be so 'structured'. Denial (not me), ignorance (don't know any better) and arrogance (better than) can all play a part. Cover with selective memory gravy.

...thinks about their selfishness in terms of a shared "trans-subjective" fantasy, such as go-to cliches like: "were animals", or "were born this way", or "this is what animals do", or "chaos is the essence of things": they are merely kidding themselves.

Or excuses, justifying some behavior on their or others part.

Some times we pretend we care to save face, amoral behavior out of convenience.

I am convinced some people really don't have a conscience, are unable to empathize with others. Thats hard for those that do empathize to believe. And precisely what predators count on.

One point I heard someone say: Only 15 percent really care, another 60 percent are amoral, obeying rules when its convenient to do so.

Some small percentage of the population are the ones breaking all the rules, that cause all the tragedy. They count on you obeying the rules. By the time anyone notices, investigates, pronounce them guilty, the damage is done and they've since moved on to their next great scam or manipulation.

a reply to: Astrocyte

"For those who take themselves seriously".

More succinct and grammatically correct.



... and your hypothesis that people should interrelate only in an absolute vacuum of external influence is irrational.

a reply to: intrptr

I am convinced some people really don't have a conscience, are unable to empathize with others. Thats hard for those that do empathize to believe. And precisely what predators count on.

If you don't lose sight of the body - physical reality - in helping constitute what we think, I have to disagree with you.

The VERY MATTER of our bodies i.e. the brain which forms when the environment permits - has a natural tendency towards affirming shared-intentionality i.e. affirming other people.

The reality is, sociopaths have suffered trauma - which is most often relational in origin, but may also have a neurodevelopmental cause.

There is much to be known about us when we understand what "living processes" actually are.

When we apply this logic to ourselves, it makes sense of everything we know and feel in being Human. It follows the exact same principles of all other complex adaptive systems. Thus, the most sane and rational thinking should be framed in terms of the way matter influences us, so that we may intelligently respond with our consciousness.

a reply to: Astrocyte

The reality is, sociopaths have suffered trauma - which is most often relational in origin, but may also have a neurodevelopment cause.

But your applying reason and constraint to predation. Ever see a cat play with a half dead mouse?

Imo, some people are born predators. They enjoy the suffering they impose. They rise to the top of society because of it.

"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition." --Monty Python

a reply to: chr0naut

care to explain?

We respond i.e. we have agency. But the options we are given are determined by the elements of the system which makes you up. You're agency is real, but it is embodied and biased. Free-will manifests as the power to inhibit and select more consciously.

When you don't forget that your body is the history of a biological system-in-an-environment-filled-by-countless-large-and-small-systems, you'll realize and be okay with the reality of things: there is no "outside". To be outside is an illusion produced by being pushed off your material body's biodynamical attractor (its 'teleodynamism') - creating this "dualism" effect.

The dualism is real - phenomenologically - but it excludes from awareness the objective reality that your biodynamical system is 'out of balance' with the systems it has adaptively evolved around.

Look at the world today, and see what the effect of this process is: eventually, the Earth will hit a new attractor - and thus manifest radically new behavior. This change will incrementally degrade the environments we extract value from, which means that sooner or later this approach to living will amount to nothing more than a Human version of what biologists call 'viruses'. Viruses have no power to propagate by themselves, although they are potentially living processes in their pre-viral state, they grow and proliferate when a cell with the molecular machinery to reproduce itself (the ribozome) and without a molecular defense against the virus, come into contact.

Knowledge - or a perspective which constructs the world into a logical representation - is like an antibody: it defends against an 'entropy' dynamic that extracts energy from the naturally occurring dissipative system i.e. the cell, or the Human being (multicellular organism).

So how is the above irrational? The above is a sort of 'topological' representation of reality. It doesn't posit that anything is possible, because 'things' i.e. matter, seems to exist only in symmetrical forms, although its entanglements with other forms makes matter incredibly complex, all things tend toward symmetry, and so away from entropy. Entropy is a loss of useful knowledge - not just any possible knowledge.

Psychopaths and Sociopaths fit the definition.

a reply to: intrptr

So you don't think neurodevelopmental injuries don't happen?

The reality is, this is science. Introduce a foreign molecular compound into an animals development early on and all subsequent development will be "disturbed" from its usual behavior. Cerebral palsy is the classic example of this.

Many scientists believe that neurological damage incurred in the late 2nd trimester or 3rd trimester leads to malformed connections between the brain-stem, the limbic brain and the forebrain. Upon birth, the infant's brain eventually learns how to handle the over-stimulation of its environment by closing off certain channels of information flow. This 'turning down' is determined by evolutionary history: when consciousness, or the 'social self', is being overwhelmed by a dysregulated nervous system which cannot metabolize environmental signals properly, it turns off molecular connections with the 'newer' system (i.e. forebrain) as a way to regulate the dynamics of the system to a state of low-entropy (i.e. anxiety 'sucks' energy).

There is a very obvious relationship between such early-life damage, a mismatch with an external environment, and the affordances presented by the societies we live within.

Themselves. Not "their selves" .....
I'll check back in tomorrow. Been having a hard time myself.

a reply to: Astrocyte

What is the meaning of your ATS avatar Astrocyte. What are you attempting to convey to ATS members?

a reply to: carewemust

Obviously, they are trying to tell us that they have four synapses working.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Have you seen the third zeitgeist? "moving forward" as it's called.
It mainly deals with epigenetics and environments influence on a developing human, but I suspect you may already know a whole lot about that subject.

Human personalities become long term victims of past trauma that was never reconciled, and in turn, causes more trauma to other individuals.

So the circle repeats... Only through mindfulness, caring and compassion will we be able to raise a generation that does not suffer under the results of deeply ingrained trauma.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Wait for it....wait for it.....

Donald Trump

Score!

a reply to: Astrocyte

So you don't think neurodevelopment injuries don't happen?

I didn't address that. Thats one reason.

I'm talking about complete narcissists, you can spot those because they kill to protect their interests, mindless of others plight.