While the article doesn't state it explicitly, this seems to imply that there exists a level of feedback from our body to our state of mind that we might not be comfortable with: we think our thoughts are always our own and our thoughts give rise to our emotions, but sometimes our thoughts may actually be the result of something happening in our gut, heart, lungs or skin. We can never fully be sure because our mind seems to maintain a perfect illusion of executive control.
I think emotions often do arise from non-cognitive parts of our brain, and those parts are likely influenced by our physical body.
I'm not a neuroscientist -- and am interested in opinions of those better informed than I am -- but I've read that executive function is controlled by the "upper brain" (cerebral cortex) while our baser flight/flight instincts are controlled by the "lower brain" (amygdala).
While most of us think that the executive part of the brain is always in control, in practice we are very much influenced by the lower brain, especially in conflict situations -- we have instinctive responses around whether a person is someone to nurture, to attack or to run away from. And this is all occurring at sub-executive levels.
In couples counselling, the goal is often to mitigate interpersonal conflict by employing techniques to quickly move the interaction from the "lower brain" (fight/flight) to "upper brain" (executive function). The usual techniques prescribed are to slow things down by mirroring the other person's words (i.e. restating and asking if they got it right), validating them without agreeing, etc. By doing this, the interaction turns from an antagonistic one to a cooperative one. (I've personally tried applying these techniques to heated online discussions and have had some success).
This might also explain why when folks are under stress or under threat, their executive function is impaired -- possibly the brain is spending all of its "budget" on the lower brain.
//> emotions are strongly connected to our physical body - most emotional episodes are initiated by physical stimuli (see danger - fear) and also our internal states influence our emotions (that 'hangry' feeling)
//> most theories on emotions argue around what role the cognition plays; secondary and social emotions require cognitions, but most primary emotions are rather independent
//> there are 2 kinds of neural networks guiding behaviour - approach and avoidance networks - that span wide. The distinction between the 3 brains is not necessarily supported by physical evidence, other than the fact that avoidance nets tend to stay in the lower brain, while approach start there and end up in the upper brain
//> decisions are mostly taken by the subconscious, our conscious mind is mostly a witness with some influence.
//> spot on the counselling - the goal is to move from avoidance schemas to approach schemas.
There's a great book, The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, that covers a lot of this. From what I remember, experiments have been done that show your body can react to stimuli before there is actual neurological activity, seeming to indicate that a lot of our rational thinking about reacting to things is an illusion, and is actually outside of our conscious control. We only justify our actions after the fact. I highly recommend the book; it was quite eye-opening to me when I read it.
I would argue that is more than sometimes. Ever get hangry? Or depressed 3 hours after you finish your coffee? Or irritable when someone wakes you up at 4am?
Those thoughts you have (“WHO THE HECK calls at 4am?”) is driven by a physiological need (sleep) not logic, as it might be during the day.
In the age of cell phones - is the old adage of 4am calls a dying thing?
Speaking for myself I can remember when that was a thing and now that you mention it, it’s no longer a thing because my phone is on silent all the time.
What’s counterintuitive is that in the age of instant access to everyone, always connected living, it’s significantly more difficult to get my attention at 4am than it used to be.
Yes but I don't know how interesting it is, it will soon be forgotten.
Basically I see a lot of observations like this, where people reminisce how things "used to be" based on the technological limitations of first gen tech. One guy was complaining on my Facebook about how the battery went dead on his car remote and he misses the day when you could start the car with a physical key. Well, from a UX perspective, the key was never intrinsically desired. What is actually desired is that "only authorized users can access the car and start the engine, and without any delay in doing so". Unfortunately for him, his new car didn't have as expensive of tech as mine. In my Lexus even if the battery is completely dead, you can hold the key fob close to the steering column and it can still read the chip. The ultimate version of the technology will have no flaws or caveats and just always work for authorized users without them needing to remember to carry an object or have batteries.
So yeah the first versions of phones had terrible UX, they sounded when the owner shouldn't have been disturbed. But what we must remember is that this state of affairs should have never come to exist in the first place. It's just at the time, no one knew how to remedy it.
This type of thing will soon be forgotten except for an obscure reference in history books explaining why some time period story makes sense (why the father got enraged at being woken up). Meanwhile, until then, bringing it up in conversation will be a good way to signal to young people that you are "really, really old". It is barely a blip no the radar once humans have had phones for 1000 years.
Good response and cool feature on the Lexus! Every problem is the result of a previous solution.
What I’m curious about here is the fact that I can’t be woken up at 4am now. It’s an interesting artifact that I kinda see as a missing feature. Do I want to wake up at 4am for the right call, yes. But unless I’m missing something the caller priority can’t override my default silent mode. Before now, we trusted known and sometimes unknown people to not call at 4am unless it was critical, now I can’t do that. Maybe the unknown people broke the social contract for known callers but I kinda miss it. As my kids age, I kinda feel like I’ll need it at some point.
I distinctly remember in the 90s thinking there should be a voice prompt for a password to incoming callers after a certain hour heh
This actually has been solved on my phone at least, there is an option that it will ring through on silent if the caller attempts multiple times within a certain interval. This will result in you being 15 mins late to the emergency, but is pretty much guaranteed to work since in any big enough disaster they're sure to try multiple times. :)
I think the phone should just explain to the person "press 1 to override silence", then you could enable it for known callers only.
Happens so often. Every parent probably understands on some level that there's body»mind feedback happening. Oh they're cranky? Did they eat enough? Need to drink water? Not sleep well?
Personally I find myself in a bad mood if I ate something too spicy the previous night.
The past few days my roommates have been gone, and my cat always talks my ear off when someone's not around that he thinks is supposed to be. And it's like, he probably has no grasp on why he's upset--he doesn't really have "thoughts" like we do and he's oblivious as to why he's having the emotional response he is... he just knows he's antsy and he wants to stop being antsy. Anyway, only mentioning it because I realized that's how I likely am a lot of the time: oblivious to myself but obvious on the outside.
I have the opposite feeling of not having control over my thoughts, they seem to bubble up into my consciousness as if by magic. My best ideas and most deeply felt epiphanies have always felt like gifts to me rather than as personal accomplishments.
Of course this is true. There are more neurons in the gut than the brain. That "gut feeling" is exactly that. And the vagal response is the most underrated thing ever
I've heard it explained in other settings that "explanations for feelings" are almost always just plausible guesswork by the executive function of the brain, no matter how certain it feels.
The story that I remember was of an awake portion of a brain surgery, where doctors were stimulating parts of a patient's brain to make sure not to cut anything too important. The doctor stimulated one spot and the patient suddenly laughed. The doctor asked "why did you laugh just then?" and the patient replied "well, you all just look so funny standing around in your doctor outfits!".
It was the best explanation the brain could come up with for the laughter, the closest thing to "funny" or "things that might explain my laughter" in that moment. But the guess was completely wrong, even though the patient felt certain it was the truth.
There are approaches that would draw a distinction between the parts of your mind that are under your conscious control, and the other parts of your mind (which would likely include gut etc as described in this article but also a big part of "the mind-meat between your ears") which influence a lot of your behavior and decision making, clearly are part of the "whole you" but are not part of the "conscious-you".
I.e. the thesis of such approaches (or at least some of them) is that if you define "you" narrowly as the things exposed to and controlled by your consciousness, then "that you" does not include a lot of your behavior and there is a bunch "decision-making hardware and software" both in your brain and your gut that is less "you" (for that definition/understanding of "you").
I can recommend a pop-sci overview of some of these ideas in a book by R. Kurzban "Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind" - there's a bunch of speculation, and we don't have a consensus on many (most) consciousness-related things, but it raises some interesting ideas that seem reasonable from that perspective.
To your point, a human is a complex and highly integrated system. The separation of mind from body makes study convenient, but it is unfortunately a false paradigm.
> We can never fully be sure because our mind seems to maintain a perfect illusion of executive control.
People that believe this have the hardest time with psychedelics. There is a reason so many people other people accept an interconnected network that doesn't have a central nexus, only nodes. [1]
[1] If you want a source for that, you will need to advocate for the studies or even sponsor one yourself to the standard of review you prefer.
The same feedback is also implied by the mainstream consensus of depression as resulting from "chemical imbalance", and more prosaically from sentiments like "I can't control whom I find attractive" etc.
Personally I don't think the feedback exists but it's a very powerful view
> sometimes our thoughts may actually be the result of something happening in our gut, heart, lungs or skin.
Where else would they originate? I can't imagine a brain without any senses having any thoughts at all. I think it's more that a lot of us are secret dualists.
So the main point of the article is that mental and emotional processes, especially stressful, take a toll on the body, in terms of energy and other resources used up?
How do you live a good life past like 10 years old without knowing this? Isn't this a basic understanding of your own body that you get after your first stressful moments and notice that you don't feel as sharp or energetic, even though you didn't do anything physical?
Isn't that the same exact thing that all the doctors talk about whey they say "less stress" to recovering patients etc.? What is the new thing here?
What you've written is indeed obvious, but IMO that wasn't the point of the article. Consider this quote:
"Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood."
IMO the point she tries to convey is that the budget doesn't track actual, objective resource use, which also means that individual budget constraints are not only constrained by the actual physiology, i.e. with training (mindfulness and so on) one can move the baseline and thus e.g. stress resistance.
Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.
>but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings.
Probably grew up in abusive-ish households where the parents didn't respect the child's emotions. I only found out I have severe anxiety when I was like 27 years old. It took me a year of having full blown panic attacks to realize what it was. I thought I was just being "weak", because that's what I was taught my whole life.
It's not even that. It's that we don't teach people what a lot of that stuff feels like. You don't need to go through some big trauma to be ignorant of your own feelings.
Sure, but in a healthy upbringing, it only takes 1 panic attack for a normal person to realize "oook, something's not right". Messed up people think "I'm being weak".
Being a new father, I disagree. It's pretty clear most of the time what's happening with the kids: something happens they don't like, they cry. Something happens they do like, they laugh and smile. Pretty simple. Yes, as infants sometimes they cry without an apparent cause (although it always seemed to turn out to be a bubble of gas!), and certainly toddlers seem to melt at the slightest provocation. But the process is hardly random, in ourselves or in others.
Of course, it gets trickier as you get older, accumulate experiences. Now the same event can carry a unique meaning for every unique individual that experiences it, and that meaning is sometimes very difficult to infer by simple observation.
Yes, but the irony is you're making the same mistake by calling them "messed up". Something is not right with them, too. It's almost like attacking people is the wrong thing to do, no matter what they do to deserve it!
Most of the time what's wrong with them is simple. They are being lazy in their thinking, or they are ignorant of the importance of empathy and acknowledging people's experiences, and helping them through it, even if we don't approve of (or even understand) why they are having that experience. That's not an obvious lesson, and its not "written on the tin" of any baby I've seen!
(Caveat: A very tricky case is when someone seems congenitally devoid of empathy or self-reflection (e.g. NPD, or generic sociopath). In that case you're better off not engaging them emotionally at all, and treat them as a rational actor responding to incentives. A variant, the rational actor who clearly understands the power of emotions, who can learn to simulate them, and has no scruples about doing so--this is the nightmare person because not only are they "manipulative", their existence makes life harder for the rest of us with real emotions, who sometimes get accused of being them. BTW I've read some really interesting stuff about successful psychopaths who are totally open about their qualities, good and bad, and have decided to integrate with society in a classically healthy way! So even here, there is hope.)
> Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. Why would anyone instinctively know the terms a psychologist would use to categorize their feelings?
That’s like saying you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know the key of their favorite song.
The examples of my prof were way more basic: It's fine that they didn't know the term panic attack, but they should be able to know how fear feels. The person in my example said they started so sweat, had high heart rates and was feeling somehow unwell every time they had to enter an elevator. An adult usually is able to verbalize that experience as fear, though the actual trigger may not be known to them. The person in question first went to a general practitioner, who found no physiological cause and transferred the patient to a psychologist.
> It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood.
We have learned over the last decade or so that there are some rather significant direct connections between gut and brain via direct neural signalling. Chemical signalling can occur within about 60-90 seconds--ask a smoker how quickly nicotine can hit their system.
It is not proven/disproven AT ALL that the brain isn't responding to direct neural/chemical detection of the water by both the mouth and the stomach.
That's most likely true, and there are probably a lot of people like that. It is just hard for me to understand how they live and why it has become like that. And maybe there are some ways in which I am in the same way, perhaps regarding other obvious things?
Absolutely, I myself am obviously procrastinating right now, I know it doesn't exactly help me achieve my goals for today, yet here I am, replying to you instead of doing the work I should :)
The problem I see is that there is no institutionalized way to educate about emotions. For abstract knowledge and training rational thinking we have schools and universities. For feelings/emotions, though, we were are all effecively just getting homeschooled: We can learn from our parents etc., but that's pretty much it.
Perhaps there should be something like a school for feelings. This obviously is a hot topic, though, with different cultures having different ideals etc., especially when it comes to things like purpose in live, like we could already experience in another thread :)
It might be a good idea to figure out how to teach something like that before making a school for it. How would you teach different feelings and emotions?
I find one of the fundamental ones is pain. It's not an emotion, but it's not that easy to classify what is actually painful and what isn't. Holding a phone in my hand isn't painful, but at some point I managed to do it so much that it did become painful. I don't know how to describe the pain, but I know that I am apprehensive of holding a phone in my hand for extended periods of time.
Another one is stress. People might not know they are stressed, but they are. They just can't recognize what stress is.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of things aren't taught explicitly. We don't even know how to teach some of that, because we don't have a good classification system for the feeling/emotion.
Good points! The research and practical experience for many of these aspects is already there, though mostly only in the context of therapy, i.e. in cases where people already experience problems to a degree that it negatively affects their personal and/or professional lives.
What I mostly meant was similar to your stress example. Many people don't actually know what stress is, how it manifests, and most importantly, what you can do about it. Many also don't know that people can have very different thresholds of tolerable amounts of stress, and that those thresholds can siginificantly differ for the same person doing different kinds of work/studying etc. (e.g. some people have very low tolerances for arguing/discussions in work groups but can effortlessly dig themselves into research for 8 hours, others can do meeting marathons but have problems with physical work affecting their mood and so on).
In these cases many aspects of both the basic knowledge, ways of prevention and methods of coping with stress are well known, they just aren't taught in regular school. There is slow progress, though. In my country there often are e.g. social pedagogues in primary and secondary schools, helping with these kinds of things - though often only when they already manifest themselves as problematic behaviour.
When I was 10 years old there was a copy of "the sky is the limit" lying around the house.
In this book you could read that "your thoughts are your own and your feelings come from your thoughts and nobody can think for you and you may have feelings but it's ultimately your thoughts about it that matter and that you control so you control how you react to everything and anything under the sun, thus your feelings are entirely under your control and your responsibility. Isn't that liberating ?" You are a musheen, Harry.
Being exposed as a kid to this kind of reasoning can distort things. It was written by an adult and read by adults.
There's a lot of coaches out there who still put out those kind of reasoning. People try to behave like cold machines and then they break down.
Big expensive machines, which require training to operate, and have big manuals full of pages and pages of "Danger: failure to follow correct operating procedures may lead to injury or death."
I would really love to have a custom manual showing correct min/max/optimal operating parameters for sleep, warmth, hugs, food, etc. Especially if people would have to keep to it.
And then instead of getting angry when someone doesn't do what they want (or getting angry at themselves for failing) , people would have to accept that they violated the commonly accepted operating procedures -thereby exceeding the tolerances of the system- and should do better next time.
Wouldn't that be a huge improvement over how things work now?
For a lot of us here, I think so. The downfall is that this approach assumes the reader already understands systems and how they often play together, which our community takes for granted as a skill.
I do personally like it, though. Explaining how, for instance, your food intake has tolerances which can be exceeded in either direction temporarily but will eventually catch up to you is exceedingly useful.
I'm always surprised how many adults think they can "just push themselves" to get more out of their life, whereas studies are pretty clear you only get a few weeks before regressing not only to the mean, but below it.
Do you not believe that feelings come from thoughts and that your thoughts are not your own? Or do you believe in a more connected and behaviour based approach?
I more than believe that it depends on what your definition of "own" is. Both feelings and thoughts go hand in hand. Chemical state in your body causes negative feelings and also negative thoughts. You could inject anyone with heroin and they would feel happy and have positive thoughts. Same you could inject anyone with something negative that causes feelings of horror and same with thoughts. Same with external situations causing certain chemical releases in your body, for instance you see someone attractive and then you feel aroused and think "wow they are attractive".
"Feelings come from thoughts" is pretty much the basis of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Fairly well-understood.
Of course it's not a universal technique but it's often very helpful.
I think both come from chemical state, but can influence each other to an extent. There is clear evidence in anyone's life for that. Can you think yourself to feel absolutely anything?
If you are in love with someone did your thoughts cause that love? Or did feeling of love, arousal cause those thoughts?
The chief purpose of the article is to remind the reader of these connections and encourage them: “ We’re all living in challenging times, and we’re all at high risk for disrupted body budgets. [...] it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it.”
Secondarily, the article lightly advocates for holistic medical care, using the negative example of the same pain being treated by different specialists depending on the circumstances. I do not believe that approach is obvious to many people, or agreed with by most people aware of it.
I'm surprised the article didn't mention 'Central Governor Theory'¹ which proposes that exercise fatigue is not a physical sensation but more like an 'emotion' created by the brain to prevent over-exertion.
While her book doesn't mention this phenomenon by name, it does reference this exact concept. She mentioned that this is something marathon runners have to learn.
When they're getting fatigued, it doesn't mean that they're out of energy at all, it's just a warning sign.
If interested to dig in further I recommend Antonio Damasio's work. I think his is the main contribution to this new way of thinking about the mind's connection to the body.
Do people really think the collective functioning of organs that have evolved to cohabitate in a given lump are not subject to constraints so that the lump doesn't all apart?
The fact that each subsystem evolved in that environment to get cues from common signals does not mean there is a thing that is aware of the fact that it has communication lines to, say, kidneys, and lungs etc.
Given that every single thing is subject to constraints, the things that evolved to work together must be, by necessity, relying on a signaling mechanism so one part does not fall apart trying to fulfill the demands of other parts.
Otherwise, the thing we are looking at, in this context, brain in a body, could not have existed in this arrangement.
One the one hand, I take some satisfaction when this kind of self-care housekeeping occupies my mind in times of distress, but on the other hand, the fact that my brain is so capable (and then some, unconsciously) doesn't necessarily imply that these are my brain's exclusive capabilities, and so the title (and the thesis) aren't usefully accurate.
> A bad stomach ache that follows an indulgent meal may send us to the gastroenterologist, but if we experience that same ache during a messy divorce, we may head to a psychotherapist instead.
This certainly echoes my experience, but can just as easily speak to the difficulty of deduction.
I found that discussion of the gastroenterologist and the psychotherapist odd too. The writer says:
> In body-budgeting terms, however, this distinction between mental and physical is not meaningful.
But surely going to a gastroenterologist for help with your (non-existent) divorce or a psychotherapist for (unnecessary) diet ideas, means you are not fixing the underlying problems. That just suggests that obscuring the distinction between mental and physical is not so helpful.
Article was really interesting until final few paragraphs revealed that it was about "how to gaslight yourself". That said, it is important to have a checklist of basic needs that you constantly remind yourself to recalculate. If you aren't getting enough sleep, and experience symptoms of depression, the first solution is to try and get more sleep. Never sulk in your condition. Iterate and see if it helps, and repeat.
It seems we like to put mental models of things we easily understand and can control on our complex human body which we don't understand. The brain like a computer, the body has a budget. If only biology was so simple, or well maybe it's better, it seems a lot more robust and dynamic then our straightforward human creations. Anyway moral of the story if you are tired or stressed take some rest.
I think the brain-as-computer metaphor is actually a really poor one. Our conscious, linguistic mind is a lot like a single-threaded computer, but the brain as a whole has a lot of fundamentally different properties, and the metaphor often leads us to misleading conclusions.
If you’re comparing hardware you’re probably right. Our big blob of neurons has a completely different mode of operation compared with the silicon circuits in the computers we know.
However, if you go higher up the ladder of abstraction the story changes I think. Thinking in terms on software design and architecture you can start using a similar vocabulary.
We can talk about systems and sub-systems, foreground and background jobs, interfaces and telemetry, sequential and parallel processing, latency, efficiency versus accuracy, overfitting, etc.
The underlying implementation might be completely different there are similarities and thinking about them can be useful.
> Thinking in terms on software design and architecture you can start using a similar vocabulary.
But I think that's exactly the example of where the metaphor starts to give us bad information.
The biggest difference between the brain and a computer is that the brain is fundamentally parallel. Not more threads in a GPU parallel, but rather the processing the brain does is the manifestation of the parallel actions of a mass of information processing units interacting with one another.
To give an example of where using the computer metaphor gives rise to very misleading assumptions because of this: in many cases with a computer, more data equals more cost. If you need to iterate through a million data points to get a result vs. a thousand, it's going to take a lot more time to reach the answer. But with the brain it's precisely the opposite. More data points means a denser network of interconnections which can give a better answer sooner.
While as of late I try to avoid drawing this metaphor - what your last sentence describes is the act of using a deeper neural network model trained on a larger/cleaner/more representative dataset.
ANN's are a better metaphore (well they should be, they are biologically inspired) but are still woefully inadequate as analogies for what the brain is actually doing.
FWIW, I think (no pun intended) that the unconscious mind (whatever it is) operates in many ways like a (massively parallel) computer. It's precise, highly reliable, and it doesn't seem to have the same "personhood" as the conscious, linguistic mind. (Although I think it would be wrong to consider it an "it", without any personhood. You don't want to go around offending your unconscious mind, eh?)
One of the fascinating and useful ideas I was exposed to early on was the concept of self-programming the mind, using hypnosis and various techniques.
In a sense, reading an article like the OP is priming the brain for higher-order functioning, by self-reference.
Absolutely. Our body works with lots of gradients, that’s what I know. I once talked to a human movement specialist, and he told me you could study the nervous system all your life and still not know everything. Same for a lot of other systems in your body.
It's as well to remember the brain isn't a Turing machine, but the brain is an information processor, and it makes to sense to use the language and concepts of information processing to talk about what it does.
I think a better analogy would be a like a flock of birds self-organizing into a cohesive whole, or a river finding the most efficient way to carve itself through a landscape
All models are imperfect, but most models are useful. It's counterproductive to criticize an imperfect model unless you have a better one at hand or you can demonstrate a critical flaw. "That's an overly simplistic view" is a low effort statement unless you have an alternative to present.
Not necessarily. We make big decisions based on our flawed models of the world, where the difference have real effects. Sometimes people forget the difference and need to be reminded.
That's how humans think, we often can't fathom abstract ideas directly at all.
Consider the idea of "time". We only think of time as movement in space, with either us moving or the time moving. I left that experience behind me. Looking ahead to the future. She has a great future in front of her.
Although this article was adapted from the author's newest book, she also has an older book[0] where she writes more about this topic and how it relates to emotions. I thought it was a little longer than it needed to be, but it was still the most interesting no-fiction book I read that year.
As the above linked article points out, "Keep in mind that this is just one way of categorizing emotions."
Some emotions don't have English names!
It's been said that each muscle in the body has a corresponding emotion in subjectivity. Look up something called "Body Scan" meditation, it might help you get more in touch with your emotions.
I live with a chronic condition that is slowing my metabolism and I don't think that metaphor is really apt. If it were an energy budget I could cram it in a few hours, or doing only a few things and feel well all the day. This is not how it works, it's more like a hard cap on the number of hours a day I can do things, and a cap in the intensity as well. What I noticed recently is that it creates a very effective negative feedback loop: since keeping things going on is taking all my energy already, I have no energy to consult with would improve the situation.
I don't think it would. It sounds more like each additional simultaneous spoon costs more effort than two spoons at different times. A cash flow issue, where you only have one spoon available each (time unit), spoons saved from the past are worth less and you can borrow spoons from the future at a high rate to be paid back within the day.
> Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.
No. This is such a dreadful, and terrible and empty perspective that disembowels life of deeper meaning and of true purpose. It’s another one of those sad perspectives that tells people that they are nothing but automatons, that their lives are fundamentally meaningless, and that they are a product of “accident or chance”. It’s a highly depressing, and a dark and empty way of looking at life. (For full disclosure, I’m a Christian and believe in God and in a higher purpose for all that exists in this universe.)
Realising that you are a product of accident or chance is not depressing or a dark and empty way of life.
It's quite incredible.
You are born out of stardust, your life in its beginning is indeed free of any deeper meaning and true purpose. You are a brain fighting for survival, against the monstrous odds.
What you now choose to do with that shell is up to you. You can train that brain, you can choose habits that are good or bad, and you can decide how to apply the bag of random accident that is you and your life to deliver on a purpose.
You may have certain privileges over others to help you on your way - richer family, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. can all make certain doors open or shut for you - but your meaningless life, born with no purpose, is yours to shape as you see fit.
You don't need God to find purpose. In fact, defining your life as being in service to a deity narrows your potential. You might be happy with that, and I won't try and convince you otherwise.
But your stance that not grabbing life for what it is and needing to believe in God to give yourself a sense of meaning and purpose - that's the dark and depressing version of the story for many of us.
>Realising that you are a product of accident or chance is not depressing or a dark and empty way of life. It's quite incredible. You are born out of stardust, your life in its beginning is indeed free of any deeper meaning and true purpose. You are a brain fighting for survival, against the monstrous odds.
I see this argument used, but it always feels forced to me, trying to make lemonade from the lemons given. Or stardust, in this case.
I don't think it's necessarily "depressing", but neither it's "incredible". It is what it is.
>You may have certain privileges over others to help you on your way - richer family, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. can all make certain doors open or shut for you - but your meaningless life, born with no purpose, is yours to shape as you see fit.
Well, in this version, you still age, decline, and die forever anyway, so one can argue there's no much meaning into this "shaping". Temporary struggle (and often hard struggle) for no great reward, just ultimate old age and death.
A touch that I think would help this argument: It was evolutionarily beneficial for our brains to demand a sense of purpose or higher meaning, which explains why we consider these questions important, which explains why we have generated fantastical narratives to fulfill these desires for purpose/meaning, and continue to use these narratives even after we have created new narratives that have better predictive power — because we haven’t explained the feeling in a way that resonates.
I mean, maybe it was just important for the brain to have a model of threats. Once we created models of obvious threats, the human capacity for abstract thinking generated abstract super-threats and then began to model such potential threats in the manner to which it was accustomed — via personification in the beginning, and then mathematically.
Really, physics replaces God as the dominant belief system because physics is scarier than God.
Yes you do, or at the very least some higher axiomatic meaning that people refer to by "god" and you demonstrate it with your own post: it's just that instead of using the word "god", you use the words "stardust" or "good habits".
Implying that stardust is somehow a good thing (which is your own interpretation, which you assume for some reason is obvious to everyone else? Why exactly is stardust a cool thing, and not a dead meaningless dreadful thing?), and that "good habits" is a meaningful thing to pursue. Those become your deities. There is no difference except for which words are used.
The stardust itself doesn't give you any meaning. It is you that fill those words with meaning. People do exactly the same thing with the word "god".
As gods obviously don't actually exist[0], this is just a reframing of the idea that humans give meaning to their own existance.
[0] Don't want to start a flamewar here, but there are so many contradicting ideas of god out there that at least most of them must be wrong. So regardless of some conception of god being true, the purpose is still felt by all the faithful.
It's funny that you would write something like that as if it was a useful statement. Reducing that much complexity in such a nonchalant way... But nevertheless...
> that humans give meaning to their own existance.
If you have time can you share what you think is the reason for why humans have a capability, the will to give their life meaning? Where does it come from? Why is their ability to give life meaning able to produce actual tangible results in their lives and lives of other people? If that ability even implemented through some genetic mechanism, why does the world work that way that it produces this type of genetics, that can create meaning? Genetics could have worked in any number of ways, why this one?
Would you say that love "exists"? Would you say that an integral "exists"? What about if there are no mathematicians that know about it or use it? Does it still exist?
I had no intention to offend, sorry if I came across like that. But this is actually illustrative to the point at hand: Neither in my family nor in my whole social environment do I know a single religious person, yet most of those people feel some kind of purpose or meaning in their live.
Why humans actually do this is of course a hot topic in both philosophy and psychology, for at least a few thousand years now. I think the cognitive root lies in us being social animals. Being social means needing to keep the group together, which makes communication necessary, to align individual actions to a cohesive whole. Communication is hard, though, misunderstandings lurk everywhere. We therefore have to interpret the signals we got from the others, fill the gaps of the unsaid. We necessarily have to infer intentions, meaning, relations to us and so on. If we couldn't to that, we couldn't form cohesive groups, and therefore cease to exist as a species. We could become some other species, but not the current one, having discourse over the internet, sitting in different parts of the world.
All higher order concepts like "love", "purpose" etc. are more elaborate functions to sucessfully and peacefully live together. They actually exist, even physically, as processes in our brains and bodies. But they aren't necessarily ojective. If we as a species would have originated in a physically different world, say as spherical creatures living in the oceans of Titan, we would also have different sets of feelings and emotions. The idea of "love" of such a species could be a completely different one than our human concept.
> do I know a single religious person, yet most of those people feel some kind of purpose or meaning in their live.
Ah well yes, :). Being religious - vs - having an inner meaning/{what some people call god}/aka being spiritual - is like having gone through a CS program in an expensive university - vs - actually knowing how to code.
You are quite right about stardust and good habits. It seems to me, though, that many people use "god" (and especially "God") to refer to something quite different from "some higher axiomatic meaning".
If that's all we're talking about then there are barely any true atheists.
A lot of people utter things like "I love my partner", without actually having a clue about what that means, and living miserable lives destroying each other... But why talk about that? ;) I want to focus on the best meaning of the words, the useful meanings, the ones that matter. Not about how there are a lot of people that use the words in weird ways and who don't mean what they say.
That's quite the reach. I didn't read their comment to mean stardust is a good thing. It's neither good nor bad. In any case, remove the sentence about stardust from their reply and their point still stands.
If you remove all the words that give meaning from their post, it will just become something like:
"I do this thing, it's very important, and this thing, it is awesome, and this thing, and you should all do the same - but I have no idea why I do them, they are just good". - Which doesn't make a better post. It makes it a statement of someone who is not aware of their deeper inner workings. It doesn't remove "god/meaning/stardust" from the equation, it just makes it look like the person is not aware of where their meaning comes from.
And if you define "god" to mean "whatever gives your life meaning" then of course God gives your life meaning. But it's a completely meaningless statement.
The way I've been thinking about thing is that - yes, life is (relatively) short and meaningless and there is no point or purpose to the universe, from an outside viewpoint (this is important).
However, a deep understanding of that gives you freedom. Because if everything is objectively meaningless, then just by virtue of finding something interesting, you have just given that something MORE meaning than everything else. Thus, whatever you find interesting is almost infinitely more meaningful than anything else.
That's pretty cool - your choice changes the entire universe, for you. If you manage to be persistent enough, then for others as well. Kind of makes you all-powerful ;)
Don't worry winter_blue. Your soul is not your brain! Life begins for us when we don't have brains after all. God also exists outside our brains and bodies. God has given our souls tools (brain, body) which work in marvellous ways. What motivates you and gives you meaning isn't something that is conjured up by your brain to just to budget energy in the body.
For those who don't believe in souls: Your heart is not your brain. Love is not your brain. What you feel deep down to be right, good and true is our heart. What motivates you and gives you meaning isn't something that is conjured up by your brain just to budget energy in the body.
To those who don't believe in (one or more of:) heart, soul, love, meaning, motivation, or anything higher: Assuming your thoughts are that humans are a bio-robot, the system itself creates meaning and motivation. The system, as if in a simulation, creates these sub-systems which for all intents and purposes are designed to be as if they are real. These sub systems are present in nature also to a lesser (or at least more opaque) extent. If you believe that X is not real because your body, brain and the robot you are in, simulates X, then X is at the very least functionally real if not fundamentally. Thus, similar to the question about what we should do if we were in a simulation, it's probably going to be best to go along with the ride.
That isn't really a problem, that is how most in Scandinavia thinks about it, and we are among the happiest places on earth. See this article for example, it is based on the book "Society Without God".
> Social conformity or not, Mr. Zuckerman was deeply impressed with the matter-of-fact way in which many of his interviewees spoke of death, without fear or anxiety, and their notable lack of existential searching for any ultimate meaning of life.
> A long list of thinkers, both believers and nonbelievers, have posited something like an innate religious instinct. Confronted by the mystery of death or the puzzle of life’s ultimate meaning, humans are said to be hard-wired to turn to religion or something like it. Based on his experience in Scandinavia, Mr. Zuckerman disagrees.
Believing in that you were born already with a purpose means that you're just a servant of another entity. Sometimes we call servants as bots, or, "automatons".
I'm sorry to break your feelings, but your belief can't survive the logical analysis, even if we accept the existence of higher conscious entities.
It's more reasonable to believe that we are free to pick a purpose.
I'm not a Christian, and I generally disagree that mechanistic approaches deprive the life of meaning, but I have to say that "Your brain is not for thinking" is a remarkable level of contrariness rarely attained even on the internet, and also of course complete hogwash.
If you believe in theories and falsifiliability, then you have even less reason to doubt "just my opinion" and think that the universe "cares for meaning/purpose".
What exactly falsifiable indications do you have of that?
I don't know why you would phrase it that way. What does "believe in" mean?
That they are a tool that can be used for some purposes? Yes sure.
That they are the only tool that has any meaning, the only one that matters, or even the one that produces most truth? In that case - no, not even close.
I wrote that your original statement is more of an opinion/spiritual statement than a falsifiable scientific statement. Then by extension and simple logic, of course the exact opposite of your statement (does care vs does not care) is also obviously an opinion/spiritual statement. As such, it of course doesn't neither have falsifiable indications. How could it be any other way?
It just didn't sound like you realize that what you wrote is an opinion, and not some hard-cut proved and obvious statement, so I was wondering whether you realize it? Or do you have an illusion that you have provable grounds for it?
>I don't know why you would phrase it that way. What does "believe in" mean?
It's just a casual way to say "If you're all for theories and falsifiliability".
(It's also pedantically correct. In the end everything comes down to believing it).
>I wrote that your original statement is more of an opinion/spiritual statement than a falsifiable scientific statement.
It's also empirically consistent. The observed universe is mostly gas, rock, nuclear reactors we call stars, and so on. Where are the proofs that it has a "purpose" or "meaning"?
>It just didn't sound like you realize that what you wrote is an opinion, and not some hard-cut proved and obvious statement, so I was wondering whether you realize it? Or do you have an illusion that you have provable grounds for it?
No, I have the certainty that it's the only empirically matching to observables conclusion, and that it's the less extraordinary claim (and the simplest one).
It's any further claims that need to bring proof. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, Occam's razor, and all that.
> The observed universe is mostly gas, rock, nuclear reactors we call stars, and so on. Where are the proofs that it has a "purpose" or "meaning"?
Where are the visible proofs of love? Of mathematical formulas? Of radio waves? Where is the tangible visible obvious proof that the earth is not flat? Where is the tangible proof that your life has any future that makes any sense for you to get up in the morning and do any work?
"There is no meaning because I can't physically see an old guy in the sky" has to be one of the least developed arguments in this sphere...
Physiological changes in the body/brain consistently assosiated with said self-reported state.
>Of mathematical formulas?
We can reproduce most of their results with physical objects (adding 1 and 1 rocks makes 2 rocks, the shortest line between two points we can draw with less ink on a piece of paper is the straight line, in a sphere it's the geodesic and it indeed saves planes gas, and so on...)\
>Of radio waves?
Err, plenty of visible proofs of radio waves. You can very easily scan a room with a portable scanner, not to mention we hear the sound they carry.
>Where is the tangible visible obvious proof that the earth is not flat?
Photographs from space?
>Where is the tangible proof that your life has any future that makes any sense for you to get up in the morning and do any work?
There is a difference between spirituality and religion.
Spirituality is a system built up inside every individual that fills their life with meaning and expands their consciousness. The common spiritual texts, including the new testament are a good tool to build up this spirituality, inside each particular individual, that works for a large number of people. It has been selected by the group consciousness as a particularly good tool, good aid in helping people this way. It is not the only tool, and for a particular individual might not even be the best one, but it is a good one that has stood the test of time.
The religion on the other hand usually refers to the outside structure that is often built on top of a spiritual tradition/text. It includes structural elements like the network of churches, some additional practices, political movements, attempts to control population, hierarchy systems between priests, reputation etc. It is this additional structure that much more often gets corrupted by the natural human corruptive forces, just like governments, corporations or large open source frameworks do. When people get power, they sometimes corrupt, and they do it with whatever the underlying structure was.
Religion fundamentally gives you a set of rules that you must follow to achieve acceptance, or the ultimate goal of a particular "religion", usually getting to their definition of "heaven", after life on earth.
The law of Moses in the Old Testament for the Jews was such that if you broke one law, you broke all, essentially making it impossible for anyone to achieve salvation by following the law or by working for it.
The Gentiles (non Jews) who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it
Enter New Testament: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfil it, such that every man (being) receives the FREE gift of salvation, and eternal life.
Now this life bears good fruit in all that believe.
Free, conditioned on believing it -- if you get called and pulled in the first place, which isn't true for most. They just get preached the Gospel, so people can say "hah, now it's your fault for not believing it".
Image you owe someone else money. An anonymous stranger pays your debt. Why would you have to acknowledge that, for that someone else to receive said payment?
God in the form of Jesus paid your debts you have with God, but unless you believe that, God won't recognize that, will still kill you at best, torture you forever at worst, depending on who you ask. You can call that love or salvation, but I won't.
You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
Look, If your debt was paid, and no one told you that the debt was paid, or you had no knowledge of it, would your conscience be free of that debt? No.
The Gospel is preached to bring man to the knowledge that they are free, and live freely therein.
> The law of Moses in the Old Testament for the Jews was such that if you broke one law, you broke all, essentially making it impossible for anyone to achieve salvation by following the law or by working for it.
I know next to nothing about Christianity, but I know a few things about Judaism. And I've never encountered this idea in Judaism. Do you have a source for this? Is this actually a teaching of the Law of Moses, as you call it, or just something Christians think Jews believed?
Seems like a straw man.
> Enter New Testament: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfil it, such that every man (being) receives the FREE gift of salvation, and eternal life.
Pardon my cynicism but this seems kind of ridiculous. God made a bunch of laws about how people should behave, presumably because there's right and wrong and the particular things God cares about matter, and then Jesus renegotiated the deal on behalf of everyone? So we can all do whatever we want, like rape, steal, homosexuality[0]... it's all cool. Jesus paid your debt, go sin.
[0] Intentionally grouping murder and gay sex together because the Old Testament calls these things bad behavior. If Jesus renegotiated the deal by arguing that some of these things are not really bad, so maybe some of the rules should be changed but others should be kept, I'd get that. But that's not the claim you're making.
>Do you have a source for this? Is this actually a teaching of the Law of Moses, as you call it, or just something Christians think Jews believed?
Well, If you are familiar with the book of James (a Jew) in the bible, he says this, "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it." The law is a single unit.
> God made a bunch of laws about how people should behave, presumably because there's right and wrong and the particular things God cares about matter
Sin precedes the law and not the other way round. The law was given because of transgression. Look at the law as a guardian, a schoolmaster, to protect, and to preserve for a time, till the Saviour should come. God did not intend to relate with man through the law because by the law, is the knowledge of sin.
>... it's all cool. Jesus paid your debt, go sin.
If anyone is living in sin and claims that he or she is living under grace, let me be the first to tell you that this person is not living under grace. How can he or she be when God’s Word clearly states that “sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14)? Based on the authority of God’s Word, a person who is under grace will not be dominated by or want to continue living in sin.
> Well, If you are familiar with the book of James (a Jew) in the bible, he says this, "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it." The law is a single unit.
The book of James is not part of Jewish canon and is not read by Jews. It's a Christian book. That James was a Jew is irrelevant, Jesus was also a Jew, does that mean the teachings of Jesus are Judaism? Woody Allen is Jewish too, but you can't quote his movies and call them Jewish teachings.
> Sin precedes the law and not the other way round. The law was given because of transgression. Look at the law as a guardian, a schoolmaster, to protect, and to preserve for a time, till the Saviour should come. God did not intend to relate with man through the law because by the law, is the knowledge of sin.
Ok, I can kind of understand this. It's a fundamentally different idea of the purpose of the rules and the nature of right and wrong. Seems foreign to me because I thought the law was to protect people from doing inherently bad things, and sin is just a fancy word for bad things. So I didn't understand how Jesus could make doing bad things suddenly ok. But this sounds like a more relativistic approach. Ok, I can get behind that I guess.
> If anyone is living in sin and claims that he or she is living under grace, let me be the first to tell you that this person is not living under grace. How can he or she be when God’s Word clearly states that “sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14)? Based on the authority of God’s Word, a person who is under grace will not be dominated by or want to continue living in sin.
I have no idea what this means, sounds like a lot of jargon that I'm sure makes sense to someone who is familiar with it but I don't get it.
> Enter New Testament: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfil it, such that every man (being) receives the FREE gift of salvation, and eternal life.
The obvious question is: why? Why was it ever necessary, if God is omnipotent? Why was it so late, so that people living earlier had no chance? And so on.
The Gnostics, Marcions and so on came up with another interesting idea: there were two Gods, one from the Old Testament, and another from the New Testament. The former was the creator but wasn't really caring for his creation. The latter was the God of Love and he sent his son in order to save mankind - Jesus was a kind of ransom paid to the former. This theory has slightly more sense than the one presented in mainstream Christianity.
> The obvious question is: why? Why was it ever necessary, if God is omnipotent?
To answer this, God is a just God. If the penalty of sin is death, then surely someone had to die to pay the price. God could have just swept all mankind's sins under the rag, and acted like nothing ever happened. But such would not be considered integrity or righteousness on God's part.
Also if by one man (Adam), sin came into the world, and all men were considered sinners, then justly, by one man (Jesus Christ)'s death and resurrection, the price was fully paid, all men (mankind) can now freely claim the gift of righteousness.
>Why was it so late, so that people living earlier had no chance?
Well just like you stated, God is omnipotent, and not limited by time and space. It's never late or early in God's eyes. We would not explicitly say they had no chance, then or now, goes back to God being Just.
True, although I do think that in the Old Testament, this relationship was based on works, and on what you did to fulfil and not break the law. In the New Testament, this relationship is based on Grace, the free gift of God.
But Abrahams righteousness was accounted to him by faith and not by works. The entire premise of the book of Hebrews is centered around the idea that Gods covenant with man has always been by grace. In the Old Testament looking forward to the promised Messiah from Genesis and in the New Testament looking at and back to the manifested and risen Christ.
True, great point! thanks. Also key to note, Abraham was, before the law was given. Paul in the book of Romans, does explain that by considering Abraham the father of the Faith or Forefather, the point is missed when we forget that Abraham was justified by faith and not by works.
