Psience Quest

https://theconversation.com/humans-are-hardwired-to-dismiss…

The article is about how people make decisions based on selective use of facts. In “motivated reasoning” we find our truths through selectively accepting or rejecting facts in a way that makes us fit into local society in or that conforms to our previous beliefs.

Here is a good quote from the article: “Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one’s tribe required assimilation into the group’s ideological belief system. An instinctive bias in favor of one’s in-group and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology.”


The message is that, without conscious, mindful intervention, our cultural training and human’s instincts work to reinforce our false assumptions about our world. We just saw this in the Trump impeachment. We see this in what I refer to as “hyperlucidity” when working with paranormal phenomena. We see this in our beliefs about how the spiritual world works.

Understanding this concept is central to developing a community that culturally, has a coherent view of reality and not just a lot of magical ideation as we see now.

Oh, and I also write about these concepts in under the Blog Tab of https://ethericstudies.org/opinion/.

Also from the article: “Unwelcome information can also threaten in other ways. System justification theorists like psychologist John Jost have shown how situations that represent a threat to established systems trigger inflexible thinking and a desire for closure. For example, as Jost and colleagues extensively review, populations experiencing economic distress or external threat have often turned to authoritarian, hierarchicalist leaders promising security and stability.”

From the Motivated Reasoning article “—nevertheless, they are also rooted in and subject to influence, or bias, by emotions and deeply ingrained instincts. One of the most significant ways information processing and decision-making becomes warped is through motivated reasoning, the bias toward a decision that conforms to what a person already knows, and it occurs outside of awareness that anything sneaky is going on.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/…/basics/motivated-reasoning

This illustrates why I consider it so important to understand that everything boils down to self interest and there is no objective forms of morality, meaning, purpose, etc. It becomes significantly more difficult to fall into the group think trap when you consciously understand that every decision you make, every opinion you hold, is ultimately based purely on your own subjective interpretation of the data you have available at the time and the goals  and ambitions you hold.

It's not impossible of course, buit it is more difficult when you just embrace and own your own biases and hypocrisies. People and learned over thousands of years that there's a massive advantage tin manipulating people to believe that this isn't the case. Once you have someone believing that there's an objective form of morality, for example, it's not too hard to then get them to believe that its the version you tell them it is. Societies are typically run by individualists embracing their own self interest and the chaos of life telling everyone else that those things are evil, thus limiting competition and making others into collectivists and little more than willing and willfully ignorant pawns for their masters.

(2020-02-02, 06:16 PM)Mediochre Wrote: [ -> ]Societies are typically run by individualists embracing their own self interest ....

I agree. While trying to understand what causes a person to begin consciously seeking spiritual maturity, I first landed on the idea that we have an inherited urge to find a greater understanding of the nature of our reality. I figured that was our spiritual instinct.

I still think we exist to gain understanding through experience. But now I think we are having those experiences in the physical so as to enable us to learn how to manage our human's instincts.

In the logical expression of dualism, our conscious self is entangled with our human avatar during the avatar's lifetime. The likely place entanglement occurs is in our perception-expression function which is informed by worldview. It would be in our worldview ... learned truths, memory, instincts and cultural contamination ... that our spiritual instincts and our human's instincts are supposed to combine to inform our perception and expression.

It is pretty clear that at birth, it is our human's instincts that dominate. As we mature, our "higher nature" begins to be more influential. For most of us, that never really happens. Not being a psychologists, I will nevertheless venture a guess that 99% of our population remains almost entirely guided by human instincts.

Sometimes this dominance is hard to notice. But consider the altruistic giving of a rich person. If that giving serves to increase the person's popularity, and therefore influence, the act is likely guided by the genetic predisposition to assure continuity of personal genes ... often at the cost of competing gene pools.

In this sense, I think human nature is something to be compensated for. Since people seldom have the presence of mind to do so, it is necessary to impose external controls.

Even if my logic is wrong, the effect reasonably reflects our situation. We have a Lord of the Flies-kind of society in which our identity is masked by our affiliation with a group we hope will dominate and help further our gene pool. Spiritual and social education, the rule of laws and tightly regulated law enforcement seems our only way forward.

(2020-02-02, 07:36 PM)Tom Butler Wrote: [ -> ]In this sense, I think human nature is something to be compensated for. Since people seldom have the presence of mind to do so, it is necessary to impose external controls.

Absent objective morality as Mediochre postulates, why would it be necessary to impose external controls? To allow men to be controlled by their animal instincts is just as good as the opposite, and if we are inherently only self interested, then it may be in our self interest to increase the ignorance of our fellow man towards their 'higher' instincts.

(2020-02-02, 06:16 PM)Mediochre Wrote: [ -> ]This illustrates why I consider it so important to understand that everything boils down to self interest

How do you explain altruistic acts within animals such as the one mentioned in this article? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...l-altruism
Is it really so impossible to include the possibility of altruism in your worldview?

(2020-02-03, 07:30 AM)letseat Wrote: [ -> ]How do you explain altruistic acts within animals such as the one mentioned in this article? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...l-altruism
Is it really so impossible to include the possibility of altruism in your worldview?

Good Questions!

This essay expresses my point to some extent: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-risky-is-it-really/201501/the-greatest-threat-all-human-instincts-overwhelm-reason

"External controls" was perhaps a little too arcane. My intent is that we have laws imposed by the community on individual behavior to protect the community from individual excesses. Laws are an external control.

In the physicalist perspective, dualism may be correct but only means that we have a biological brain that produces nonphysical consciousness. In that point of view,  we are our human and our conscious self is our only perspective. In that case, we should probably encourage individuals to do whatever it takes to dominate their community. That is the human thing to do. We would still need to have laws to protect society from excesses. Since our society is based on the assumption that we are our body, that is what we try to have now.

Frankly, our current model is not working, I think because it only seeks to regulate and makes little effort to educate about ethics, which is a code word for spiritual nature.

All of the characteristics of our nature that help me model reported paranormal experiences suggest that the dualistic model is largely correct. I am not trained in the human sciences but when I model what causes a person to have a paranormal experience and what shapes it, I find that the model seems to work for other aspects of human nature as well.

If dualism is taken to mean that we have a nonphysical aspect that existed before this lifetime and will after in a sentient, self-aware form, then it is necessary to model our human influences apart from our  ... I will call it our spiritual aspect for lack of a more academic term. That is the survival hypothesis. In that case, we have a spiritual nature and a human nature that combine in our mostly unconscious mind to form our perception and expression.

Other than external regulation with laws, we can also learn to promote the influence of our spiritual self to moderate our human nature. An assumption I make, which is based only on my personal belief and sense of logic, is that we have entered into this lifetime to learn to live with our human while honoring its nature without surrendering our spiritual nature. It is clear that human instincts are not bad, just sometimes self-defeating. My most recent essay, Becoming Lucid addresses this to some extent.

As for altruism, if dualism is understood to mean mind is not body, there is more reason to think that other life forms are qualitatively the same as us but quantitatively different. Our pets, for instance, have the same dualistic nature as do we. The major difference is that humans have different psychological capabilities to express thier nature. That is conceptually modeling the life field as a fractal. https://ethericstudies.org/avatar/

Altruism is experienced in two forms one is altruism inspired by our spiritual nature and the other is altruism inspired by our human nature. Since our expression is formed under the influence of both our spiritual and our human nature, and since our human nature generally dominates, most expressions of altruism will be (mostly) in some way linked to furthering dominance of personal genes. For instance, a rich person may give away a lot of money in an altruistic manner, but on closer examination, the motivation might be to assure offspring have a higher stature in the community and thus better assurance of gene dominance. This would be a mostly unconscious motivation and the person might insist that the act is only for the highest good. (We are our worst witnesses.)

If the altruistic act has no direct genetic benefit, then it is more likely motivated by the person's spiritual nature. It will not always be a cut and dried difference, as dominance in worldview does not mean the obliteration of the other.

I think it is safe to say that the very large majority of decisions in our world are gene-dominance oriented. Even a minion makes decisions that will possibly promote offspring in the eyes of the dominant actors. This makes it very difficult to argue that dualism means dual influences on behavior. I refer to the difference as a body-centric verses a spiritual self-centric perspective. One must have the presence of mind to look behind the curtain.

Even if we do not accept dualism, it helps to model human behavior as having two natures vying for dominance--a spiritual observer and a human avatar. Of course, other names would be better.

Thus, the world according to Tom :-)

(2020-02-03, 07:30 AM)letseat Wrote: [ -> ]How do you explain altruistic acts within animals such as the one mentioned in this article? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...l-altruism
Is it really so impossible to include the possibility of altruism in your worldview?

The article itself provides the answer:

Quote:Activity in emotional brain structures like the amygdala, insula, and striatum, support empathy, which is the ability to understand when others are in need or distress, and caring, which is the desire to alleviate that state. These processes may suffice to motivate altruism in humans and non-humans alike. Our own research has linked variations in the size and activity of the amygdala to empathic sensitivity and extraordinary acts of human altruism, like donating a kidney to a stranger. The amygdala has also been linked to prosocial behavior in bonobos and rats.

In other words, the emotion hit and/or the removal of emotional discomfort is the reward. If those things\ didn't happen, you wouldn't see the behaviour, its that simple. It's an incredibly well understood aspect of psychology across species, if you lesion the brains of monkeys so they stop feeling fear, they do things they previously wouldn't, like handling poisonous snakes,. If you hook an electrode up to the pleasure center of a rats brain and connect that to a lever, it'll push that lever until it dies, which other rats who don't get that hit of good feelings will not do. If compulsions like that counts as altruism, then I guess taking heroine must be spiritual.

The better question though,is why isn't that enough for people? What, do they need the universe to pat them on the head and tell them they're a good boy before its worth doing things? The desire to defend altruism itself demonstrates that it doesn't really exist.

I am not scholastically equipped to give you an intelligent response. The passage you quoted is based on the mind is produced by brain argument. I agree that there are apparent physiological changes associated with mental changes, but all of my reading indicates that is a cursory relationship.

The brain = mind model appears to fail when such characteristics as nonlocality and noncontact acquisition of information are considered. It completely fails when it comes to psychokinesis. 

Clearly there is a mind-brain relationship. In the dualistic model, it is necessary to have a physical-nonphysical interface for the mind to impress movement commands on the body. Conversely, there must be a means by which signals from the body's senses are interfaced to mind.

I submit that the article you cited leans on an incomplete model.

(2020-02-03, 07:33 PM)Mediochre Wrote: [ -> ]The article itself provides the answer:




In other words, the emotion hit and/or the removal of emotional discomfort is the reward. If those things\ didn't happen, you wouldn't see the behaviour, its that simple. It's an incredibly well understood aspect of psychology across species, if you lesion the brains of monkeys so they stop feeling fear, they do things they previously wouldn't, like handling poisonous snakes,. If you hook an electrode up to the pleasure center of a rats brain and connect that to a lever, it'll push that lever until it dies, which other rats who don't get that hit of good feelings will not do. If compulsions like that counts as altruism, then I guess taking heroine must be spiritual.

The better question though,is why isn't that enough for people? What, do they need the universe to pat them on the head and tell them they're a good boy before its worth doing things? The desire to defend altruism itself demonstrates that it doesn't really exist.

Its an argument certainly but it falls short of being a definitive response in my view.  Considering how little we actually understand about consciousness I would consider it premature to declare altruism as solely an emergent property of brain matter.

The brain matter part is irrelevant. What matters is the emotional hit. I could just as easily use variations in reported nde scenarios.