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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Saturday, February 18, 2017


4 comments:

Mudpuddle said...

Bolivia, anyone?

CyberKitten said...

Never understood that idea. Australia would've been better. Sail from San Francisco... Piece of cake... and they even speak a variant of English.

Mudpuddle said...

finished with "The Self Illusion", or as much as i want to read of it... the first five chapters give his reasons for the "Illusion"; since he is a behaviorist, the last three chapters are case studies of various forms of gross behavior... anyway, it was delightful to discover that the sudden intuition i had a decade or so ago had some basis in reality... Hood's peroration involved describing the structure of the brain and how it's different segments, composed of neurons, are linked together by fibers which act as passages to convey information to one another. there are a lot of neurons, like five billion, but the real work of reason, emotion, thought is done by the connections, of which some in their thousands connect one neuron to another. the whole system is driven by genetics, which, through the process of evolution, manages through the information received by the senses to create a facsimile of the "real" world... the interpretation of this is that, yes, our reality is illusive, because the one created by the brain is an approximation based upon sensory input...
this is the basis of Hood's hypothesis. he goes on to describe in detail how impressions from birth combine and work with one another, using neuronal pathways, to produce both the sense of an inner "self" and the outside world similtaneously... quote: "the self is a constructed web of interacting influences competing for control."
the following chapters cover different areas of the human experience: the lack of rationality, the creation of a sense of self through interaction with the world, the importance of dealing with other humans in establishing the feelings of belonging, social acceptance, and self-importance...
it was a revelation to me in many ways, the book that is; not only backing up my own "intuitive" discovery, but teaching me some things about myself; the most important being that i've suffered all my life from social anxiety disorder(not working well with others)... anyway, you might take a look at it, but watch out for the last chapters; i scanned them and there's a whole lot of torture, cruelty and like that in them. so i didn't read them... tx again for leading me to the book; i liked it...

CyberKitten said...

A pleasure... I always like to encourage people to read just about anything really but more so things they're interested in. Not only does it widen people's horizons it also keeps brain cells alive. More importantly reading books makes you more resistant to 'fake' news and more sceptical about what our so-called leaders want us to accept and believe.

I'll see if I can get around to reading this book this year if I can squeeze it in. So many books, so little time.....