On anxiety.
Perhaps the worst feeling of all is of inner turmoil and anxiety. It's a gut-wrenching feeling that leaves you alert but unable to address the stressor. It often leads to depression if left unchecked or at the very least a feeling of burnout or apathy after a while. In my battle against a combination of anxiety and depression in my life, I have realized that one cannot address the issue without considering anxiety as the root stressor or cause of suffering, and to be quite honest, I'd rather be depressed than anxious. One can feel as if on trial in some Kafka'esk manner when confronted with persistent anxiety.
I don't like the feeling, and neither do you, I assume. We have ways to distract ourselves from the stressors of life by indulging in various substances, habits, vices, and other material goods. However, anxiety over material goods is surely something that every philosopher would point out an issue of the uneducated or unenlightened. Due to the fact that that which is of the material world is ever changing and not persistent. So, does this make anxiety irrelevant if we realize that it is a feeling produced by an overly desirous mind or lustrious appetite towards things?
This sentiment about anxiety as the source arising from the passions and desire has left me to seriously consider Buddhism as a way of life to reduce my anxiety. Thus, is this professed attitude of indifference towards material goods the right way to address and reduce anxiety? We have already adopted many of the techniques Buddhists use to reduce anxiety in their lives. Such as mindfulness meditation, contemplative attitudes towards our feelings and own thoughts, meditation, and a tinge of nihilism.
I would say that out of all the philosophies, Buddhism seems to be the most effective in terms of reducing perceived anxiety and turning it into a means to inner enlightenment. Would that be something you agree with?
I don't like the feeling, and neither do you, I assume. We have ways to distract ourselves from the stressors of life by indulging in various substances, habits, vices, and other material goods. However, anxiety over material goods is surely something that every philosopher would point out an issue of the uneducated or unenlightened. Due to the fact that that which is of the material world is ever changing and not persistent. So, does this make anxiety irrelevant if we realize that it is a feeling produced by an overly desirous mind or lustrious appetite towards things?
This sentiment about anxiety as the source arising from the passions and desire has left me to seriously consider Buddhism as a way of life to reduce my anxiety. Thus, is this professed attitude of indifference towards material goods the right way to address and reduce anxiety? We have already adopted many of the techniques Buddhists use to reduce anxiety in their lives. Such as mindfulness meditation, contemplative attitudes towards our feelings and own thoughts, meditation, and a tinge of nihilism.
I would say that out of all the philosophies, Buddhism seems to be the most effective in terms of reducing perceived anxiety and turning it into a means to inner enlightenment. Would that be something you agree with?
Comments (247)
Quoting Posty McPostface
Oh wow, when did @unenlightened say that anxiety over material goods is an issue for him?
Quoting Posty McPostface
But surely, the inner aspect is also always changing too.
Quoting Posty McPostface
I don't necessarily think so. One way is certainly the nihilistic, defeatist way. You notice that getting or holding onto things in the world is difficult, you experience anxiety, so you renounce the former, to free yourself of anxiety. But what if instead of meeting the uncertainty of the world with anxiety, you met it with confidence in yourself and your own ability to navigate different situations to your advantage? What if, like a cat, you had the ability to always fall right side up?
Because, you see, anxiety isn't the only way to respond to the problem of lacking control over the external world. Anxiety is only elicited as a response because, somewhere deep down, you believe you may not be able to handle what the world throws (or can throw) at you. If, on the contrary, you could get that self-esteem and inner confidence in your own ability, you would interpret uncertainty as inducing excitement, not anxiety or fear.
Quoting Posty McPostface
Well, you can find the same things in the Christian tradition. For example, you can read what I'm reading now, Into The Silent Land by Martin Laird. It's a book about what Christians call contemplation, which is almost identical to what Buddhists call mindfulness meditation.
As it goes, I'm pretty comfortable, thanks. But if I was on the streets, without health cover, without a regular income, I'd be bloody anxious. I'd say that anxiety and unhappiness on that material level is - natural, functional, realistic, sensible, virtuous. Get your shit together if you possibly can! And if you can't, I might give you a hand, or someone more comfortable might, or else you're screwed.
But what's the relation between anxiety, (and let's notice that some people much more materially endowed than me are still anxious, materially,) and depression? Is it even possible to be anxious and depressed at the same time, or are they antagonistic? Do we even agree what we're talking about?
I tend to think that one de-presses a feeling, that might be anxiety, or anger or some other unacceptable mode of being. So depression might be a response to anxiety, when getting off your arse does not seem a viable option. Depression is in this case the active negation of anxiety.
But to negate, to depress, to deny, is not to ameliorate, any more that the endless accumulation of wealth ameliorates that underlying material anxiety. The Buddhist psychology, as I understand it is that to seek to reduce anxiety is a mistake that perpetuates it. Instead, look at it, own it, absorb it, be it, live with it, and it will evaporate. They call this 'mindfulness'.
You, because the change is sudden. I would imagine people who are used to living on the street frequently experience apathy & depression more often than anxiety.
Quoting unenlightened
Sure, it's pretty much unavoidable, as I said.
Quoting unenlightened
lol, doesn't sound encouraging.
Quoting unenlightened
But see, this sort of ignores the functional role of anxiety, and how things can be turned around. As I said in my previous post, there is a reason why you experience anxiety, and it often has to do with some deep-seated beliefs about yourself and your capacities. I'm not talking about anxiety when you're actually facing a threat, and looking for a way to avoid it - I'm talking about the meta-level anxiety, that seems to be there, out of proportion. Underlying everything, there does seem to be the belief, on a feeling level, that you won't be able to deal with whatever bad thing you imagine might happen. That's what generates anxiety, and you struggle to secure a way that can certainly deal with it. So it seems to be a lack of self-belief.
It seems to make sense (not tomato sense, idiot spellcheck) but one can always imagine that with which one cannot cope, however exaggerated one's self belief - you might get motor-neurone disease tomorrow, just as the economy collapses and... I'm pretty fucking competent, dude, but shit can still happen. No, rather I think that the development of self-esteem is another cover-up of anxiety.
Well yeah, but very unlikely - so unlikely that there is no point taking these possibilities into account in the absence of evidence. I mean, doing so would be quite irrational - it would be like thinking the sun may not rise tomorrow, and taking that possibility seriously. That's again something you'll have to deal with as it happens if it does.
Quoting unenlightened
But anxiety isn't primal - it's developed as a way to respond to threats and guard yourself. If you had no anxiety, you'd be unable to respond to threats. But when your anxiety response doesn't function well, you focus on either very improbable threats, or take relatively small threats as if they were much bigger than they really are - the response becomes counter-productive. If on the other hand you had a sense of security in yourself - just the sense itself will be enough, so that the question of such pathological anxiety would never arise - because you'd understand how improbable such threats are, or how relatively insignificant most of the other smaller threats are.
It seems it would be more apt to say it is the passive negation, or perhaps better, nihilation, of anxiety.
They are both very attractive options so it's always a conundrum: Bleak despair or blazing terror?
Some people seem to experience only depression OR anxiety, but it seems like the two alternate, or combine for many people.
Some people are anxious about their material things, but I think it's just as likely that one will be anxious about immaterial things like love, status, friendship, being isolated, and such. Our immaterial possessions are harder to guard than our tangible goods. A fire alarm, sprinkler system, termite poisons, and the like can protect the dry goods, but how do you protect love, status, belonging, friendship, peace, self-regard, esteem, and so on?
With a big warm hug. Now come over here you big lug.
Quite literally we have to "take our minds off things" to relax. Our awareness has to be limited. We "shut down" a bit.
One of the problems of anxiety is that there are drugs which offer speedy, effective relief: benzodiazepines (Xanax, Ativan, and others; some people still rely on barbiturates. Then there's alcohol and various recreational drugs). They do a good job of suppressing anxiety, but people become acclimated to the drugs; gradually increased doses are needed and eventually they just don't work anymore. In the long run one has to find other solutions. In the long run we're all dead, as John Maynard Keynes observed.
Benzos also work for one's difficult-to-control anger and rage.
The anxious utter cognitive distortion thought tells me: *If only I weren't depressed, I'd be able to do the task at hand.*
The depressed cognitive distortion goes: *If only I weren't so anxious I'd be able to get out of the house more.*
Two sides of the same coin?
That depends, there are some tasks I struggle with. I used to go to the gym almost everyday, and I had kept that ritual for quite a few years. And now, during and after the Christmas holidays, I went only once so far - I experience it as a lack of motivation, I just don't feel motivated. I wouldn't say I'm depressed, it's just lacking in motivation. It is compounded by the fact that it's so cold outside.
Quoting Posty McPostface
I think you need to have goals though, and goals will dictate what you have to do or not do. From my observation some people seem to think "I need to get out of the house more", just for the sake of it, or because others are telling them so. But that doesn't work very well - you need to have your own goals, that you want to achieve for their own sake. For example, one goal could be to achieve physical fitness - that goal would give you reasons to get out of the house. Another goal would be not to rely on your parents for groceries, income, etc. - that could get you out of the house too, but for example, if you work from home like I do, it won't :P .
I'm not sure what you mean by primal? The way I carve it, primal emotion is the immediate response to the environment. So I'm walking, and come across a snake, and there is a response. I freeze, I'm focused on the threat, and deciding what to do. I'll call that fear. Next time I'm walking in the same place, I'm probably anxious, looking out for snakes. And that is secondary, because it is a response to something internal; not a snake, but a memory of snake.
And then I am aware of being anxious, and think how it is uncomfortable, it's spoiling the joy of my walk. And that is a tertiary emotion.
Now all of this is perfectly functional, and maybe the tertiary feeling leads me to educate myself about which snakes are dangerous, to wear snake-proof boots, to carry a cleft stick, and so on, and these precautions reduce my anxiety, and also my fear, the next time I meet a snake - I am prepared. But maybe I have another response, that is not effective in reducing anxiety and fear. I might just try and stay away from snake country. Then I have deprived myself of that walk, but I have also made anxiety the dictator, and given it control of my life. It may seem that I have avoided the anxiety, but actually I have increased it.
How depressing! That is to say, my response to my failure to deal with my anxiety, is to then pretend that I don't really want to go for a walk at all, and that is I suppose, a quaternary feeling.
Well, wouldn't such a response be appropriate in certain cases? I mean, some activities really are very dangerous, and danger is frequent, and not rare in them. If it's at all possible, without compromising your goals, wouldn't it be wise for you to stay away from them?
The only activity where I have partially adopted this attitude is driving. Quite honestly, because of the traffic here, violence on the road, serious accidents or legal issues some of my friends had to face due to driving, and just the general stress of it, I avoid it if I can. Some situations, it's not possible to - like, for example, one time I had to take my dog from the vet, and there's no way to do that except by car - so then I did drive. But normal going to and fro in the city, I use public transport or sometimes taxi. Would you say that I'm being irrational in such a situation and governed by anxiety? To my mind, it just doesn't seem to be worth the psychological effort, given the relatively small benefits.
And all this goes back to my initial point that whether the "anxiety" response is appropriate or not is circumstantial - if you are capable to adequately judge the risks and benefits, then I would say that your anxiety response isn't off.
In the example you gave about the walk, you have to consider the probabilities. Maybe you went on your walk using the same route for more than 100 times, and it was only once that you met the snake. So then you might consider the probability of encountering a snake to be quite low. And the event of encountering a snake, failing to see it, AND getting bitten by it is even more rare. So you take some precautionary measures with boots, and you're careful on your walk, not absent-minded, that should be more than enough.
So in that case, avoiding the walk seems too extreme of a response. There are certain benefits from going on your walk - exercise, fresh air, helps you have a clear mind, etc. And it's not worth forgoing these benefits because of a relatively rare threat, which you can take some measures to protect yourself against.
BUT - now suppose that your country was at war, and there was active conflict going on around where you usually walked. I think it would be insane to argue that if your anxiety makes you no longer enjoy walking, that would be a pathological response. In that case, I think it would be an absolutely normal response to cease your walking, since the dangers you'd expose yourself to in the activity now outweigh the benefits.
Sure. But isn't interested so much in those situations, but finds himself in the situation where his anxiety feels constricting, unreasonable, and unnecessary. Feelings are functional in all sorts of ways, but one can take a wrong turn, and then they can be dysfunctional. I'm using a simple example to illustrate where one can go wrong. In the case of the primary response, the shock, the fear, is unavoidable and probably appropriate - the snake might be harmless, but better safe than dead. So the anxiety from the memory of that is inevitable too, that's learning. The problem comes when one reacts to anxiety as if it were fear.
Snake -> fear -> avoid.
But:
Thought of snake -> anxiety -> approach.
Approaching the thought of snake, one learns about snakes, and perhaps one concludes that snake pits are not worth walking in, or perhaps one concludes that snakes are wonderful creatures that one can happily interact with, given a few precautions. So my conclusion is very simple: Do not avoid anxiety, approach, investigate, find the source.
Well, Posty hasn't outlined what exactly he's trying to achieve that the anxiety is stopping him from achieving. So it's difficult to understand what it means that the "anxiety feels constricting, unreasonable, and unnecessary" - that seems to be our assumption, and certainly what he's telling us, but we can't decide that without understanding the context in greater depth.
Quoting unenlightened
How does one learn about snakes by approaching the thought of snakes?
Quoting unenlightened
Well, in the example you gave, wouldn't the source be the encounter with the snake? That's where the anxiety originated from - but I have a feeling that this is not what you mean. So what is this "source" that you're referring to?
I would not agree with this. I would think that anxiety is deeper seated than beliefs. Having an anxious condition, or disposition, leads one to feel anxiety toward certain beliefs, not vise versa. Anxiety is probably developed directly from the condition of one's metabolic system, and manifests, or in some cases festers as anxiety concerning specific beliefs.
Quoting Hanover
That is what I think, but I also think that anxiety itself, properly exposed and described, is of the generalized variety. Situational anxiety is just the particular manifestation of general anxiety. And if this is the case, then anxiety in general can in principle, be dealt with through channeling it toward appropriate situations. Maintaining numerous objects of anxiety may help to maintain a high level of activity, and avoid obsession. Inactivity and depression may feed off each other.
Quoting Bitter Crank
One ought not consider anxiety to always be an evil to be suppressed with drugs. That, as you imply, is a problem. Anxiety is very closely related to things like anticipation, and ambition, which may be beneficial. In other words, there are probably more productive ways of dealing with most instances of anxiety, than the attempt to suppress it. Suppressing anxiety may lead to depression. The issue being one of maintaining balance. As the metabolism of each individual human being varies, so does our need for activity.
Buddhism is a fundamental philosophy of how excessive desires creates unhealthy spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical lives. It is simple and straightforward. Desiring a "solution" via Yoga, Buddhism, Tai Chi, or otherwise is counterproductive. What is productive is the advice of the Eight Noble Advice Wich is to seek the Middle Way, moderation.
I've observed long-time Buddhist practitioners who are every bit as stressed out as anyone else. Too much desire. Too much obedience. Not enough variety in Life.
What I have done in my life is study many forms of health practices including Tai Chi, Qigong, Mediation, Yoga, various sports and arts, etc. At times I've been stressed out. That is part if learning in Life. However, I've learned that it will pass and if I am in good health I will be fine. So far, so good. I'm 66, in terrific health, and very active. I practice moderation in everything.
So in your opinion, anxiety is biological, and the anxious person cannot do anything involving the alteration of beliefs, to reduce anxiety?
If so, why is it that cognitive behavioural therapy, which effectively focuses on addressing and questioning the patient's beliefs, is so successful as a first-measure treatment of anxiety?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I disagree with you - a belief is what translates in a way of acting. If I act a certain way, then that is what I really believe. Beliefs go deeper than what one is conscious of - we can have beliefs we're not even aware of.
Indeed. Anxiety may not relate to any knowledge, belief or information. It can come seemingly uncaused, but due to chemical factors in the brain, or can even be induced electromagnetically.
Coffee and other stimulants can cause anxiety. Other drugs can make it go away.
Feelings are always deeper that thoughts. Thinking can offer the conscious mind a reason for the feeling of anxiety, and can help to alleviate those feelings; but there is a good physiological reason that the passions are more fundamental.
Anyone whose been in love with the wrong person knows this. Reason can cure the feeling, but it can take a long time. And there is no way you can simply decide with reason to fall in love.
No. that's not what I said. I said that anxiety gets directed toward particular beliefs, so the anxious person can, with conscious effort, direct the anxiety toward various activities, aiming for a balanced life.
Quoting Agustino
I do not believe that a belief translates into a way of acting. I think that's a simplistic notion. It is very clear, that we cannot deduce, in a necessary way, the existence of any particular belief from the observance of any particular action, nor can we demonstrate that any particular belief will necessitate any particular action. Life is far more complex than how you make it out to be.
And, since "belief" is commonly defined as an opinion, or acceptance of an idea, I think that your claim that we can have beliefs which we are not aware of, is contradictory.
Quoting charleton
Right, that is my experience with anxiety. it always comes on as a general feeling, over my entire body, especially in the chest area, almost like an extreme form of anticipation, as if my whole body is prepared to act, but with no particular act being imminent. This inclines me to think about what needs to be done. I may experience it day after day, but if I manage to maintain a high level of activity, directing my mind toward this and that, as important objects, and things already determined as needing to be done, this is effective in expending the energy build up, subduing the anxiety and the urge to think about what needs to be done. If I allow the anxiety to well up, I may be overcome by irrational thoughts and beliefs.
Yes this can be most debilitating.
When I lived in the US near my Dad in the 80s, he would all of a sudden just get anxious. He found himself gripped by utter panic, and for no apparent reason. These got so bad that he consulted a doctor who suggested that his addiction to speed (that he was prescribed for weight loss), 20 years earlier may have been to blame. It seems that it was a well documented response.
Other's I have known have got the same response to heights, crowds, and some animals.
I invited a friend to follow me in his car to my local University. Despite leaving at the same moment as me, the journey of 2 miles took him at least five more minutes. When I asked him what happened he said he had to avoid the overpass as he was scared of heights. The same guy disappeared one day when us a group of his friends went to the end of Brighton pier. I was left with strangers since he could not stand to see the water through the cracks in the boardwalk! Panic had made him flee!
For each of these examples no belief had any bearing, they being rational persons, whose fears were contrary to reason.
The anxiety is unreal.
Does that mean that it's all made up in the head and has no real cause or need to be alarmed? If someone has all their basic needs taken care of, then is there any real cause or need to be anxious, or does Maslow's hierarchy of needs actually represent the needs of people?
I find regular doses of Vitamin D3 to be very helpful.
When I had a major car accident, this feeling was ongoing for months after and it was a long while later that realised it was PTSD from the accident. Just prior to the accident, I was being harassed with indirect threats and it re-surfaced some childhood memories to add to the anxious confusion and I was always physically shaking. I could not sleep, eat, and for some weird reason was terribly afraid as though everyone and everything was 'bad' and because I was out of work and on my own together with an injury, the severity got worse that in the space of four months I lost 15kg.
All I probably needed was a bit of a hug at that time and someone to say it is going to be OK but some of us don't have that luxury.
Physical reactions were from an increase in stress hormones including glucocorticoid and where the amygdala (limbic system) that forms our emotional responses remains activated for a long time after the trauma and so one continues to feel like they are identifying threats and risks when there is actually nothing there as though that moment of shock and anxiety you feel from the accident remains long afterwards. Because of the elevation of glucocorticoid, the hippocampus is also interrupted and this area of the brain is where new memories are formed and stored as something past-tense. So, the person cannot make a memory past-tense and the experience - though not present in the physical world - remains and so the anxiety remains amplified. This is why I could not sleep and all the chemical imbalances altered my mood dramatically, making me terribly afraid.
I recovered from all of that by communicating it, talking about it as psychotherapeutic treatment that enabled me to bring up to consciousness things I was unable to articulate with language (since we do not understand or know it). It is a massive task and mine was extra huge that it took years of work to really overcome it all and my awareness of the process now has enabled me to block/ward off any potential threats of anxiety in the future. Mostly, my eating habits, working life, building a new environment and space for myself and in particular the removal of toxic people helped me get my shit together.
This gives me perfect peace. I have not experienced a moment of anxiety for over six months and I doubt that I ever will now that I understand it.
No, not at all. It is in the head in the sense that it is a response to memory, but the memory is real. Snakes are real, fear of snakes is an instinctive reaction. Anxiety about snakes is a natural response to traumatic experience of snakes. There is good cause to fear snakes, they can kill.
The problem is that the memory is not just of snake, but of the smell of grass in the sunshine, warmth at one's back, the glittering of hot stones, the flapping of wings of a passing bird. And any of these becomes a trigger for anxiety too; not just that place, but anywhere remotely like it. This is why avoiding anxiety is debilitating; it's too global.
So if the smell of grass makes you anxious, stay with it and find the traumatic snake memory behind it. When you find the snake memory in the smell of grass, learn about snakes; look at pictures of snakes and desensitise yourself a little; learn the habits of snakes, which ones are harmless, and get used to being with them, and so on.
You understand that when I say 'snake', for you it might be your mother, or school, or whatever.
This sort of procedure worked for me with regards to health anxiety. As I learned much more about health, my anxiety effectively disappeared.
So, can you experience anxiety without a brain?
The body is in every way and manner a complete, holistic, living embodiment of the Mind. Anxiety can spring as much from a poor diet as from rigid thinking. There is no magic bullet. To moderate it one must investigate oneself, one's habits, one's perspective on life.
Click here for idiotic rant
Too bad some good ideas are lost in the chaotic presentation. Still, she presents magic bullets and there are none. Everyone is different as are the approaches. In my experience, there is always a habit that had to be changed whatever it might be. In her case, she is working to hard for Likes and it shows.
Well, no, not really. A poor diet can result in excess energy or high arousal, such as from refined sugar or too much caffeine, but it takes a mind and it's concepts and past experiences or conditioning to turn the internal perception of high arousal into fear or panic.
It takes a human mind and its concepts to fear things like death, or imaginary things like ghosts or whatever. We can even learn to fear fear, or rather fear our interoceptions of high arousal in particular conditions.
If you want to know what sugar can do to entire emotions, just observe children who are in a Big Mac diet.
SO is pain. It's all in the head - what's your point.
People still get anxious when all those needs are met.
I can tell what effect sugar has on emotions by consuming it myself. The affect sugar induces is nevertheless just internal sensation which doesn't necessarily trigger fear or panic.
I've had panic disorder when I was younger and I would be the first to agree that the first thing anyone should do to overcome the condition, or just to generally get hold of their emotions, is to focus on diet and exercise. After all, the purpose of emotions is to regulate energy.
It affects emotions. Everyone is different.
I think anxiety is a heart based condition rather than brain based.
No, that would be a life controlled by anxiety masquerading as a balanced life.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, not in an absolutely necessary way.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you grant a specific context too, then we could, in some cases, demonstrate that a particular belief will lead to a particular action.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's not contradictory at all. We don't consciously know everything that we believe. That's why we have things like unconscious drives, or why in CBT the therapist tries to get the patient to become aware of deeply held beliefs that he's not aware of on a conscious and linguistic level. Someone, for example, may have internalised that he is inferior to others, and so, every time he sees someone laughing, say at a party, they assume that they must be laughing about them, and then they will start feeling bad, unwanted, etc. etc. So the therapist has to show the patient that he actually believes, on a feeling level, that he is inferior. Bringing this belief into consciousness allows the patient to dispute it, or to practice cognitive distancing for that matter. This is standard CBT practice, I really don't understand why you're not familiar with it.
That's not anxiety, that sounds more like a panic attack. Not the same thing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Exactly - so your way to "keep it in check" is actually to give free reign to the anxiety to structure your life. You got to keep yourself busy, or else... That's a terrible situation to be in imo, since you lose control, and your anxiety controls you instead. It keeps you continuously on the move, giving no respite.
Isn't there a reason why emotions are said to be "of the heart"? I wouldn't say that anxiety is an emotion, but it's likely more closely related to emotions than to thoughts. Emotions have great influence over the thoughts. The reason I said anxiety seems to be of the heart, is because of the way it feels, like it is centred in the chest, and radiates outward through one's whole body.
You can assert this all you want, but it would take a lot more than that to convince me that unconscious drives are beliefs. I think that's a simple misuse of the word "belief".
Quoting Agustino
Again, I think that to characterize an inferiority complex as a belief is to misuse the word "belief".
Quoting Agustino
This is not a case of bringing the belief into consciousness, it is a case of the therapist diagnosing the patient, such that the patient now believes that the symptoms are caused by an inferiority complex. This is no different from when I go to my doctor with symptoms, and the doctor diagnoses me as having the flu. When the doctor tells me this, I then have the belief that I have the flu. It is not the case that the doctor is bringing my already existing belief that I have the flu, from my unconscious into my consciousness.
Quoting Agustino
Yes Doctor. But isn't a panic attack a case of anxiety in your medical textbook?
Quoting Agustino
..
Exactly - so your way to "keep it in check" is actually to give free reign to the anxiety to structure your life. You got to keep yourself busy, or else... That's a terrible situation to be in imo, since you lose control, and your anxiety controls you instead. It keeps you continuously on the move, giving no respite.[/quote]
Ha, ha. I'll take this as a joke. All you're saying is that I'm in a terrible situation because if I loose control of myself I'll be in a terrible situation. Doesn't this apply to anyone? You loose control of yourself and you're in a terrible situation.
Edit: It's good to be active.
That would seem to depend on the kind of anxiety you're referring to. A prey animal may get anxious after catching the scent of a predator, but it's not going to imagine getting attacked and eaten or its children becoming orphans or any other mental simulations that may heighten its anxiety. Ruminations that bring anxiety don't require any external stimuli.
In the sense that heart sensations and rate are part of the interoceptive network emotions could be seen as heart based.
All emotions are primarily generated by the brain.
This may will be the case. Ancient cultures pretty much all agree that the Heart is the seat of Life being that the beat of the heart provides the impetus of life. Here is one instance where science is catching up to what had been pretty well established for thousands of years:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain
"scientists were shocked to learn that about 90 percent of the fibers in the primary visceral nerve, the vagus, carry information from the gut to the brain and not the other way around. "Some of that info is decidedly unpleasant," Gershon says.
The second brain informs our state of mind in other more obscure ways, as well. "A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut," Mayer says."
I agree that there is much brain activity associated with emotions. But emotions are feelings, and feelings involve many aspects of the nervous system as well as the associated organs. So I think that you hold an overly simplistic opinion to say that emotions are generated by the brain.
Quoting praxis
I think it is a simple case of reversing the symptoms with the illness, to say that anxious thoughts cause anxiety rather than to say that anxiety causes anxious thoughts.
Quoting praxis
Are you suggesting a brain in a vacuum scenario? Are you saying that a brain in a spacious vacuum would be anxious? Anxious about what? Where did the rest of the world go?
Maybe that was poorly phrased. I should have said that thoughts can lead to anxiety without any external stressors. Conversely, high arousal and unpleasant affect could induce anxiety and anxious thoughts.
My understanding is that emotion, including the anxious variety, is basically comprised of interoception (nerves connected to internal organs), our conditioning, emotion concepts, and thoughts, and of course whatever is going on in the world around us.
While there is an intimate relationship, what is questionable is whether anxiety disorders contribute to heart disease or the other way around. PTSD symptoms, for instance, where there is a persistence of anxious thoughts, poor and irregular sleep, poor eating etc could be the factors that cause heart problems and so anxiety contributes to the overall health of your heart, but it is not the heart itself that causes anxiety. It is no different to other risk factors including smoking, eating foods in saturated fats and not exercising etc., and I assume that regular episodic experiences of anxiety can elevate blood pressure. The risks either way are multifaceted as there is no doubt that bad health can lead to somatic sequelae just as much as psychological vulnerability can cause bad health.
It is centered in the chest and radiates outwards likely because of blood pressure; anxiety, I believe, is caused psychologically and it effects the body that likewise prolong the anxiety because of bad health such as sleeplessness and a poor diet.
{{{TimeLine}}} <
Severe anxiety is marked by, what is known as isolated systolic hypertension - meaning, you have something like 150/75, with a widening of normal pulse pressure. Long-term (and long term it really means over 10-20 year period), this will have negative consequences.
I have had high blood pressure on and off since I was 15 or so, and never took any medication for it (still don't). I'm somewhat borderline 140/90 or slightly below. Doctors are reluctant to give medication in such cases, especially for young people. And mine doesn't seem to be related to diet, though it is positively affected by aerobic exercise (running) when I keep up with it in the summer (winter's just too cold to run).
Blood creatinine, cholesterol, tryglicerides, etc. are all okay for me. No excessive salt intake. But that blood pressure just doesn't want to decrease!!! >:O Maybe stress has something to do with it, I'm usually a very stressed kind of person :> lol
In fact, let me take it right now...
What did I tell you... 138/88...
You can easily purchase guanfacine or clonidine online if it becomes an issue. Or even propanolol.
I've tried that propranolol once before, and it slowed my pulse to about 50-55, gave me ectopic beats, made me urinate a lot, and made me feel dizzy upon getting up from a chair, and other sudden movements, so I discontinued it.
So if I tell you I believe the key is on the wardrobe, but then I go and search for it under the cupboard, wouldn't you conclude that I probably lied about what I believe, and my actions indicate better than my words what I truly believe?
Belief cannot be divorced from action.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
An inferiority complex is a belief. Unless we are to go by your silly notions that an inferiority complex is some mysterious thing that causes beliefs that one is inferior *shakes head* :-}
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
*facepalm* - no, an inferiority complex does not cause the belief, it IS the belief. This is a clear case of reification of the worst kind on your part. There is no other entity or thing that you can call inferiority complex. If you remove that belief, then whatsoever we called the inferiority complex before would also have been removed.
Otherwise, I will ask you to tell me what is this inferiority complex? An inferiority complex does not function the way a virus functions, when we say that your cold is caused by the flu, etc. It's a false analogy when we're talking about the mind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, panic attack isn't the same thing as anxiety. One can be anxious without having a panic attack. And people who are generally not anxious at all may have, all of a sudden, a panic attack. But prolongued anxiety may lead to panic attacks or make them more likely.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nope, that's not what I said. I said that if you have to keep active in order not to be anxious, something is wrong inside your mind, and you ought to address whatever that issue is so that you don't have to keep yourself active for the sake of combatting anxiety.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:-} - no, I don't see how it's good to be active for the sake of being active. It's good to be active if you've got problems to solve and things to do. But if you have neither problems, nor things to do, then you ought to just be relaxed and do nothing. If in that state, you get anxious, there's something wrong with you, since it's a psychological reaction aimed at preventing you from becoming aware of something. That's why when you have nothing to do you get anxious - to prevent your mind from thinking or becoming aware of certain things.
You describe anxiety in a person who is in an abnormal state, a condition of illness, PTSD. I think that you would agree with me that anxiety within a person, to a certain extent, is normal. What I suggest, is that we look at anxiety in its normal state, to get a true understanding of what it is, because the abnormal state is a complex, and therefore complicated situation, rendering examination or analysis of individual components nearly impossible.
I have been an anxious person all my life, for as long as I can remember. This is not to say that I have been diagnosed with any anxiety disorder, but that I have been consciously aware of my anxiety for a long time, such that I could look back at my young childhood in a way that I could see how anxiety influenced my psychological response to many different events. Do you agree that to be anxious is to anticipate and to anticipate is to expect? So anxiety exists as a relationship which one has with the future. There are two distinct classes of things anticipated, the good and the bad. We might be able to say that anxiety related to these two types of events is normal anxiety because it is reasonable to be anxious in relation to an impending good thing and to an impending bad thing. But then there is anxiety when there appears to be no such impending good or bad event, and this anxiety is unreasonable. Let's just say that an event is anticipated but it cannot be distinguished as a good event or a bad event, because it is completely unknown.
Now let's take this unreasonable anxiety and see if we can expose it. It cannot be created by thoughts in the brain, because there are no beliefs about any impending events, good or bad. If an impending event was apprehended by the brain, then a judgement could be made concerning this event. But no such impending event is apprehended, and that's why the anxiety remains unreasonable. This is how I would classify unreasonable anxiety, anxiety which is not supported by the brain's judgement of something impending. It cannot be the brain which is creating this anxiety because the anxiety is completely unreasonable to the brain, and the brain's response to that anxiety is one of confusion.
Quoting TimeLine
Now consider what you've said here. Your anxious condition preceded your car accident. The accident intervened as a significant event which would alter your psychological condition Therefore you ought not attribute your post-accident condition directly to your anxiety, as the post-accident condition may have come about due to the accident, and the anxiety preceded the accident.
What I have found, by examining my childhood experiences with anxiety, is that I was very prone to high anxiety when I anticipated something good. The anticipation of something bad caused significantly less anxiety. The anticipation of something good created a looking-forward, an expectation, which caused the anxiety to build as the time of that good thing approached. Then, when the event occurred, there was a release from that anxiety. The release consistently manifested in some form of disappointment, a "let down", because the event itself could never match the expectation of it, or so the posterior "down state" seems to suggest. Depending on the magnitude of failure in the actual perception of the anticipated event, the disappointment could be significant, with effects that were much more significant and lasting than the actual anxiety prior to the event. Thus my strongest "bad feelings" were associated with the failure of some anticipated event. The bad feelings could progress in any direction, leading to anticipation and anxiety concerning more impending bad things, or perhaps even the completely irrational production of anxiety in relation to no impending event. The condition of anxiety being the preferred condition over the disappointed condition.
So I am suggesting that you differentiate anxiety, which is by its very nature something which is an anticipation of something significant, whether or not the significant thing ever occurs, from the mental conditions which follow from anxiety. In a complex situation these feelings will get all tangled up in a complicated and confused manner, such that a person may not be able to distinguish one from the other.
Quoting TimeLine
I would ask you then, what causes anxiety. Let's put anxiety in its most raw, naked condition, and see if we can determine what it is. I think it's just a feeling that something is going to happen. As I explained above, it cannot be produced by the brain's thinking that any particular event is about to happen. Can we say that the passing of time is like a force upon us? The future is always impending, and the things which are coming must always be dealt with. Anxiety is how our bodies are disposed toward this fact that the future is impending.
Quoting Agustino
This is not relevant. You have not disclosed any unconscious belief, only the fact that you can consciously hide your belief from me by being deceptive.
Quoting Agustino
WIKIPEDIA: "An inferiority complex is the lack of self-worth, a doubt and uncertainty about oneself, and feelings of not measuring up to standards."
According to Agustino, doubt and uncertainty are belief. You are scaling a wall of contradiction. Be prepared to fall when the reality that there is nothing but contradiction supporting that wall hits you.
Quoting Agustino
Right, doubt and uncertainty "IS the belief". Wall of contradiction falls on your head.
Quoting Agustino
Of course one can be anxious without having a panic attack, but a panic attack is a condition of anxiety. You said: "That's not anxiety, that sounds more like a panic attack". Here's an example of your ridiculousness. Suppose having a "fever" is defined as a particular level of high body temperature, say above 38 degrees. This allows that one can have a high body temperature without having a fever, but fever is still a case of having a high body temperature. Then I refer to someone with a body temperature of 40 as someone with a high body temperature. You object and say "that's not a high body temperature, that's a fever". See how ridiculous your argument is?
Quoting Agustino
This is clearly false because the anxiety is not directed toward any specific object of thought, so it is not my mind which is creating the anxiety. I would call it a state of hyperawareness, similar to what some might call hypervigilance. It is a condition attributable to my entire body, and therefore not something "wrong" inside my mind. Have you ever consumed caffeine and felt the effects of this drug? Would you characterize the condition produced by caffeine as something wrong inside your mind?
Your an odd sort, if you think that the need to stay active indicates that "something is wrong inside your mind".
Quoting Agustino
What I've described is the need to stay active for the sake of being healthy. Again, I say that your an odd sort if you think that the need to stay active for the sake of being healthy is indicative of something wrong inside one's mind.
Anxiety is a different medical condition than panic attacks. Why is that? Are the doctors idiots?
I don't drink coffee no... except when I drank 12 espressos in one day >:O
I didn't feel effects to be honest apart from not being able to sleep, and fast heart rate - but it wasn't troubling since it also gave me a lot of energy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So if this is so, why do the hyperaware Buddhist monks, or Christian contemplatives not experience anxiety while meditating, but rather a profound sense of joy and inner peace? These people work to cultivate and heighten awareness, so I'm not at all convinced that anxiety is hyperawareness.
Nor would I say that the sort of "high" you get from caffeine is hyperawareness OR anxiety for that matter, but rather maybe focus and energy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, if your "monkey mind" to use a Buddhist expression, forces you to stay active, cause otherwise you experience anxiety, then I think there is something wrong with it. One should be able to be inactive, without experiencing anxiety - that is called relaxation, and it's important.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Only if you equate "not being anxious" with "being healthy". And your little subterfuge doesn't actually do anything, except attempt to escape what I've been saying. Namely, if it is possible to be inactive at times without being anxious, that is what "being healthy" would qualify as, not distracting yourself (being active) so that you avoid experiencing anxiety.
Being active in a physical sense (exercise) is good - in moderation. That reminds me that I haven't gone to the gym for a long time in this new year :/
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So through my actions, I'm not disclosing my belief? You can't infer, from the way I act, what I believe about the location of the keys?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right. So does one who experiences an inferiority complex not have the belief that they fail to measure up to whatever standard is under question? Or at the very least the belief that they MAY very likely fail to measure up to it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Doubt and uncertainty are founded upon a series of beliefs. Beliefs are foundations for doubt and uncertainty.
Where do I write that I believe the doctors are idiots for making the dichotomy?
Quoting Agustino
?
Merely because a panic attack is its own medical condition doesn't mean it's not caused by anxiety.
No, anxiety isn't necessarily the cause of panic attacks, it can also be a symptom if the panic attack occurs seemingly randomly, in a person who does not suffer from an anxiety condition.
And I never said that anxiety and panic attacks aren't related, so I don't see why you're chewing so much on this. You should read what I wrote in greater detail before commenting.
One can suffer from anxiety, such as a panic attack, without being subject to having an anxiety disorder. It's the same as someone who can be depressed and not suffer from capital d Depression.
They would suffer from situational depression then.
Quoting Buxtebuddha
Those are different conditions. One is either diagnosed with anxiety, or with panic attacks, or maybe both.
The brain is sometimes referred to as a 'prediction machine'. On a subconscious level it's continually predicting what will happen next, based on the situation and memory, in a kind of a Pavlovian conditioned response. A stressor, or something that causes anxiety, doesn't need to be an explicit memory. That's why in many situations anxiety may have no apparent cause and seem unreasonable and be maladaptive. So this is brain activity, conscious awareness of this activity is after the fact, though only a fraction of a second behind.
They are not different "conditions". They stem from exactly the same source, only one more extreme than the other. Usually occurring when one does not change oneself appropriately, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, or physically - there has to be a real change. Drugs are suppressive and will ultimately make things much worse. This is not theoretical, it is demonstrated from real life experiences.
Yeah, I don't know why you're telling me this. In medicine, they are classified and diagnosed as different conditions. That they are related, I never denied.
As for drugs not being effective long-term, I obviously agree. I very much consider the drugs to be merely a crutch that must be let go of at some point, as the patient grows stronger.
Sorry Agustino, but I will not engage in this childish bickering.
Quoting Agustino
Do you know what anxiety is? I mean, know it by having experienced it, not by having read a definition. What makes you think that anxiety is "troubling"? As I explained in my post to TimeLine, my anxiety is not at all troubling, so long as it can be associated within some identifiable future event. It is only if it is allowed to exist as an irrational sort of anxiety, that it might become troubling.
Quoting Agustino
If a Buddhist deals with the threat of irrational anxiety through inactivity, and I deal with the threat of irrational anxiety through activity, then unless I am engaged in bad activities, by what principle would you claim that the Buddhist technique is better than mine?
Quoting Agustino
I truly belief that irrational anxiety is a form of unhealthiness. So if I can avoid irrational anxiety by being active, then I can truthfully state that I am being active for the sake of health.
Quoting Agustino
If you, Buddhists, or whoever, find that you can avoid anxiety altogether, by being inactive, and you believe that this is a healthy state, then you might maintain a condition of inactivity for the sake of health.
I however, find that anxiety of the normal variety, that which is not irrational anxiety, is completely healthy, so I have no desire to kill my ambition altogether just because it is associated with some degree of anxiety. In other words, I find most anxiety to be beneifical, and good, because it is a "looking forward" to something, a positive outlook, therefore I encourage this anxiety. Anxiety can be a very encouraging experience, and this is very uplifting, joyous, pleasant, and good. What needs to be avoided is the "let-down", which is often associated with a higher level of anxiety. Since anxiety is such a joyous, uplifting, and encouraging experience, it seems very rational to increase it as much as possible so long as this may be accomplished while still avoiding the associated let-down.
Quoting Agustino
No, your example clearly indicates that you have acted in a deceptive manner by telling me something you know to be false. Why would I believe that any of your actions are anything other than contrived deception?
Quoting Agustino
As the Wiki definition states, the person with an inferiority complex experiences doubt and uncertainty. This is a condition of not knowing what to belief. You construe this as a person who believes oneself to have a certain condition. Your construction is contradictory to the condition described by the definition.
Yeah, I have suffered from and been diagnosed with anxiety at one point in my life. Both hypochondria and generalised anxiety disorder. Have you? Because it seems to me from your descriptions that you have an entirely different understanding from anxiety than I do. It's true that we can sometimes call the feeling one has before having to go on stage for a musical performance as "anxiety", and it involves a fluttery feeling in the chest and stomach, and heightened focus. But that's not what I mean by anxiety when I talk about anxiety the medical condition.
The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as:
I agree with their definition. That's what I mean by anxiety. It absolutely is troubling. So have you experienced that sort of anxiety?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, are you happy about always having to be active in order to avoid anxiety? Many people who experience this aren't happy about it. It's not optimal since it doesn't permit adequate rest and relaxation, nor is it rational to be active just to avoid anxiety - that's just allowing yourself to be controlled by it. Though I'm not sure what to say now that it seems to me you have an entirely different understanding of anxiety than I do.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not for the sake of health. And the point isn't that anxiety can be avoided by doing this. On the contrary - the person who practices meditation can avoid being troubled by anxiety (cause you can't eliminate feelings, just be detached from them) when they are active and when they are inactive. This is clearly superior to merely being unaffected by anxiety while being active, since such people are unaffected by it through both inactivity and activity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I will wait until you clarify what you mean by "anxiety of the normal variety"?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Oh dear!! :-O :-O :-O I would never describe anxiety as a joyous, uplifiting and encouraging experience, so I take that you're joking?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If my actions are also deceptive, then what is the truth and how can you find it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Doubt is grounded in belief (cf. Wittgenstein's On Certainty).
Depending on what you mean by anxiety, it may be possible that you are avoiding the situation of being inactive "out of worry" as the quote says.
I think your idea that you can treat the brain as separate is simplistic.
But worst than that you seem to be suggesting that you can do without the brain is some way.
Anyone who has lost an arm only to find that it still itches, and feels pain knows only too well what a unique and all encompassing role it has.
OK, I thought we were discussing anxiety as anxiety, not a defined medical disorder entitled "anxiety". Yes I've experienced anxiety which was troubling, most of us probably have, but as I said, I've never been diagnosed as having an anxiety disorder. So even though I've experienced troubling anxiety, I've probably not experienced "anxiety" according to your definition.. And, as I've explained to you, I've managed to maintain my anxiety at a non troubling level. I've learned to respect it, and I've actually come to enjoy it for it's ability to uplift me.
If you want to restrict this discussion of anxiety to your definition of "anxiety", then you'd better count me out of that discussion.
Quoting Agustino
I think your wrong here. Maintaining a reasonable amount of activity tires one, and helps one to rest and relax, as well as sleep better. Without an appropriate amount of activity, your efforts to rest and relax may be futile because you have no exertion to rest from. Then your effort to rest and relax will be your only form of exertion. And that's not a good situation because all you are doing is making things difficult for yourself. Have you ever had difficulty getting to sleep, and found that the harder you try to get to sleep, the more difficult it is to get to sleep? Your arguments on this subject are completely illogical.
Quoting Agustino
As I said, being active allows me to avoid being troubled by anxiety. So, if as you say, meditation allows one to avoid being troubled by anxiety, I don't see the basis for your claim that meditation is a better approach. As I've explained, I get enjoyment and pleasure from my anxiety, and being active. So not only do I avoid being troubled by anxiety, I also get benefits from it.
Quoting Agustino
Since I've just demonstrated that your claims here are contradictory, your appeal to authority is of the fallacious type. You need to address my demonstration that what you have said is contradictory. I've argued elsewhere that it's very clear Wittgenstein is wrong on this point, due to contradictions such as yours, which arise.
Quoting Agustino
No, I don't maintain activity out of worry of being inactive, I truly enjoy it and I find that I get much benefit from it. Sorry Doctor, but I think you're reading too much into this.
Quoting charleton
I'm not treating the brain as separate. It is those who say that the brain is the cause of anxiety who are treating the brain as separate.
Panic attacks are an example of how those temporary spikes in blood pressure can impact the overall health of your heart but it needs to be persistent and regular. I had several of these the first few months after the car accident and it was terrible and terrifying in addition to other symptoms. The biggest problem for me - and I suspect many others - is this alienation from any self control and awareness and that makes it tremendously difficult to know what to do both you and for others around you. I did not take any medication and in a way I kind of appreciate your understanding of this 'fight' because you really need that to overcome it.
Quoting ArguingWAristotleTiff
I am fully at peace, healthy and content now as the accident was three years ago, but it took a very long time to overcome because I had a number of other things that I needed to face and overcome along with it. Which I have. So thanks you lovely and sweet thing, but the worst time in my life only made me stronger. And I sleep like a log.
Thanks MU - I will respond to you this evening when I get home as I am only on my lunch break at the moment.
I know you are stronger now but you can tuck this away for a day when we are not as strong or brave.
I think it is more fear and this fear is divided into two; fear of the known - something physical - and fear of the unknown, something we cannot consciously ascertain and so we experience an emptiness that we cannot control. I am attempting to interpret your suggestion using Heidegger's angst, which is to become aware of ourselves and in doing so we become aware of our separateness, of being independent, alienated and such individuality is frightening because we are compelled to identify with the external world using our own perceptions. That would mean that everything that we once were, the perceptions, the ideas, the opinions, are not concrete because they are not actually our own, which means that our identity is not our own and we would need to start from a clean slate, start creating our own language. It is first-person experience and such intentionality enables our mental acts to be directed outwardly to the external world (rather than inwardly by the external world through others).
This is initiated by this relationship with the future and the future is death; you have free-will, existence precedes essence, purpose, and one is thus enveloped by an existential crises. We can save ourselves by conforming to patterns of social behaviour, by forming a symbiosis to a partner or our mother or friends and allow them to think on our behalf (by doing what they want) or we can have the courage to learn to articulate and develop our own language authentically, by understand Sein. Anxiety is that point between one becoming aware or conscious of their separateness and being able to articulate our own language and this point between or 'limbo' is nothingness where one has not yet reached that level of consciousness. They are aware that something is really wrong with their perceptions or identification to the external world but cannot yet think for themselves.
Transcending to that next level of consciousness is where most people fail because the angst itself, the anxiety - whilst subjective - is nevertheless painful because the mind is using the body to express this fear. It is evolutionary in that when we feel fear - say we encounter a deadly animal - our body reacts with the same surge, but that is a physical response to a physical experience. The mind, however, reacts the same way to a non-physical fear. In addition to this, our cognitive processing from an evolutionary perspective always attempts to alleviate pain and is drawn to pleasure and so one is drawn to give up, to submit to the masses or conform or refuse to think for themselves, because it takes away that anxiety and therefore is pleasurable. This is why people stop questioning and conform to the masses and choose to lose their self-hood.
To distinguish between what is real and what is not real takes courage because the anxiety is a type of dread where one realises that they are drawing away from reality and so their significance becomes unheimlich and our mind is the instrument that unlocks this capacity where we completely transform our thoughts from being a subject to our environment to being empowered to use free will.
So, I think anxiety is caused by fear but I agree with you that this is due to a consciousness of 'looking forward' and that anticipatory reaction. It is particularly potent existentially when we look forward enough to become aware that we are going to die, ultimately raising the most important question relating to 'significance' or our very significance existentially.
My secret, as Krishnamurti said, is that "I don't mind what happens" >:O
This is where introspection of one's own spirituality path enters.
But you ought to understand that all experience is received by the brain. This has to include anxiety.
If you agree with me, that anxiety is concerned with "looking forward", then you should also agree with my designation that anxiety is not always bad. After all, "looking forward to" generally has the connotations of something good. If anxiety is not necessarily caused by fear, but could be caused by other cases of looking forward, then anxiety may in some cases be good. Even fear in some instances is good. Perhaps we can take Plato's model, and class anxiety as a passion. In Plato's description, the passions in themselves, are neither good nor bad. If they are aligned with reason then they are good, but if the person's disposition is corrupted and they no longer align with reason, then they are bad.
Quoting TimeLine
Let's say that fear is directed toward something perceived as bad, so that anxiety due to fear is not a case of looking forward to something, not a case of being anxious about something good which is impending (in the sense of "I can't wait..."), but a case of being anxious about something bad impending.
You divide anxiety due to fear into two classes, fear of the known, and fear of the unknown. Let's look at fear of the known. If the impending bad thing which is feared, and causing anxiety, is known, then we proceed toward determining ways of avoiding, or mitigating the bad thing. These things which we determine as ways to avoid the bad thing, are "goods". Under the Platonic-Aristotelian ethical tradition, the desired end is the good for which any action is carried out. So the actions determined as required for avoiding or mitigating the bad thing, are necessary for obtaining that good. In this way we use reason to transform anxiety which is directed toward an impending bad thing, into anxiety toward particular goods. That is fighting the bad thing.
This leaves us with fear of the unknown, which is probably where we will find truly bad anxiety. The "unknown" gives us no specific future event which the anxiety may be directed toward. The anxiety cannot be aligned with any principles of reason and it would seem like it can only be associated with a corrupted disposition. This is the emptiness which cannot be controlled.
So I am rereading your post, and trying to see if there are any hints as to exactly what "fear of the unknown" is. I described this anxiety as irrational, and bad, but some other intuition tells me that it's completely natural and reasonable to be afraid of the unknown. I tell myself it is completely unreasonable to be afraid of the unknown, but at the same time I know my intuition, and it is extremely difficult to approach the unknown without being afraid. There is something important about the solitude which you describe, because approaching the unknown is not frightening if I am not alone.
Death is not entirely unknown either, there is much we know about death. To begin with, we know that others will continue to live after we die, so those others whom we commune with, will continue after we die. This brings me to what you call losing one's selfhood, conforming to the masses. Isn't this necessary, in order to avoid the anxiety involved with death? If one lived life with little communion with others, then as death approached wouldn't anxiety build? These are difficult subjects because so much concerns the unknown.
Quoting TimeLine
So I really wonder about this point. Thinking is our approach to the unknown. In order for an individual to think for oneself, and be refusing to conform, this person must always place oneself in a state of anxiety, confronting the unknown. Thinking is produced by approaching the unknown. But this type of anxiety, confronting the unknown is what I described as bad anxiety, above. Clearly, confronting the unknown, and thinking for oneself cannot be completely bad. There's an element missing here though, and that is fear. Approaching the unknown without fear is different from approaching the unknown with fear. So it's not the approach to the unknown, nor necessarily, the anxiety which goes with it, that is bad here, it is the fear itself.
Is fear a form of anxiety, or is it something distinct? Suppose someone is so overwhelmed by fear, that this person could not think straight. Things like this happen. I assume that what causes this fear is the apprehension of danger. Is this a real danger though? If not, then is it real fear? If not, is it real anxiety? All this is an hallucination. Can anxiety be hallucinatory? If so, what would you call it?
Quoting TimeLine
I admire you for this, not taking medication. That is a strong will and a tough fight. An event like that will change your life, and this cannot be avoided. The easier route is the medication, but far too often the medication becomes lifelong. To be on medication for the rest of your life means that the event has changed your life for the worse. But if you can fight back without the medication, in time you will overcome, learn from the experience, and perhaps become a better person from it.
Quoting praxis
I appreciate what you are saying, but what is the "stressor"? It appears to me, like all you are saying is that there must be a cause of anxiety (stressor), but since that stressor can't be identified, let's just assume that the brain is the cause anxiety.
Quoting charleton
We were looking for the cause of anxiety. That experience is "received" by the brain does not mean that it is caused by the brain.
The brain is the source of all experience. Although some hormones are generated in other parts of the body the brain is where anxiety happens.
You can even experience an arm and a leg without an arm and a leg, but you cannot experience anything without a brain.
I totally agree that it is not always bad, I would even go so far as to say that since anxiety is using both our emotions and physical responses to articulate a subjective concern that we are not aware of, that it is in fact good that we have these responses despite the negative sensations, because we are trying to speak to ourselves without words or a language. There is that saying most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them, and people who feel anxiety don't like something but are not conscious of what it is that they do not like. It is like the emotions and body is trying to tell them.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
(Y) Spot on.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
From an evolutionary angle, this schism in fear can be biological - a natural mechanism of our brains in order to protect and preserve ourselves, but also the psychological, which is socially constructed where we are taught to believe in one thing, but we reason rather quietly that something is wrong with this belief. We don't think when we speak, language is so much a part of us that it naturally flows, and the things that we are taught when younger form the same bond with our perceptions; children can hate really intensely someone from another race because they are taught to believe that. That is an extreme case, but the point is that our perceptions could be flawed because of what we have been taught or our environment; we need to articulate it, bring to consciousness using reason but most never reach that point because we instinctually want to alleviate the anxiety, it is a natural reaction to want it to end and so we go on avoiding this all-important conversation we need to have with ourselves.
The problem with anxiety and it's cousin depression is that they are highly individual because it is dependent on a number of factors, predominantly your experiences and why articulating it or reasoning why it has manifested is the only way to really understand and overcome it. This is why communication is the key, whether in writing, to a friend or psychologist, through art. I found that talking about it - despite it being broken and problematic - allowed me to eventually piece the puzzles.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have a saying to explain this. There was once a young man who went hiking and he fell off the side of the cliff. As he was dropping, his jacket got caught on a rock and he managed to grab hold before his jacket tore completely. As he was hanging onto his life, he could not see below him because of the mist, and suddenly he heard a voice telling him that if he let's go, he will live. But, because of fear he refused to let go and instead he died that way, only if he did let go, he would have dropped only a couple of meters to safety. People hold onto this fear and so afraid to live that they live and ultimately die having experienced nothing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Thanks. It really took a lot of out me, but I have indeed become a much stronger, more affectionate and loving and indeed far more happier person then I ever was before, even before the experience. This peace is only recent, so I can imagine how the continuity of this improvement will grow over the coming years. When you get that clean slate and start writing your own language that you use to interpret the world and not the one given to you, nothing is greater.
I think that this is a matter of philosophical debate. It all depends on how you define experience. If you define experience such that it requires conscious noticing, and remembering of something, then it requires a brain. If you define experience simply as being affected by something, then it does not require a brain. To me, "experience" might mean a memory of being affected, but this only defers the problem over to what is meant by "memory". There are many living things without a brain, plants, which seem to have some sort of memory of how they have been affected.
Regardless to that, this is not what is at issue here. Anxiety is the thing which is being experienced. Your argument is based on the assumption that the thing being experienced, (in this case anxiety), could not exist without the thing which experiences it. And that's a false premise. I agree that the experience itself, requires a thing which experiences, but what we are looking for is the nature of the thing which is experienced, anxiety, not the experience, which is the noticing or remembering of anxiety. There is no reason why we should restrict ourselves to the thing which experiences, and the experience, when we are looking for that which is experienced.
Quoting TimeLine
Right, I like this way of looking at anxiety, your body is telling you something but you do not know what it is. I like this better than saying that a specific part of the body, the brain is telling you something, because the worst cases of anxiety seem to be the ones when the brain isn't in control of the anxiety. Perhaps what the body is saying, is really simple sometimes. When I'm sitting, sometimes anxiety will give me the urge to get up and pace the room. Maybe my body is just telling me to get active. Other times, it's not so simple, like if I am doing something and I feel like it should be getting done faster. Sometimes if there's more things in my mind which need to be done, than I can logically order, the anxiety builds. Perhaps my body is saying that my brain is losing control. Because if the brain isn't exercising proper control, then what is controlling the body. Anxiety may be a state of the body when it is not properly controlled by the brain.
Quoting TimeLine
This is the problem I have had with "good anxiety", which I pointed to earlier. It is always directed to a future event, something looked forward to. There is a strong desire to end the anxiety because the end is the good which is sought. But the good is quick, gone in a flash, and there is a sudden hole which is left. This, I would call melancholy. In some cases I might avoid the melancholy by focusing on the anxiety itself, making the anxiety the good rather than the real good which is the end to the anxiety. So I've learned to enjoy the anxiety, and the "leading up to" period of the anticipated event But this is somewhat delusional, elevating the anxiety to an unreasonably high esteem, giving it a false position, as if the means to the end were the end itself. But I find that there is a balance to enjoying the anxiety, and enjoying the thing looked forward to, which makes the end less of a "flash", lessening the melancholy.
Quoting TimeLine
I don't think we've properly addressed "fear" yet, and its relation to anxiety. There are different approaches, you suggested the division between fear of the known and fear of the unknown, but I find this difficult because the so-called known fear may often be mistaken such as misapprehension, and hallucination. And anxiety in respect to fear seems to more associated with an uncertainty as to whether the feared thing is real or not. I would like to class all fear as fear of the unknown , such that when the future thing is known, despite it being bad, we will not "fear" it. "Fear" would then be defined as an irrational view toward the future, necessarily involving the unknown. If the future were known, no matter how bad it is, we would not fear it. But fear is related to that part of the future which is unknown. It's like if we could assume determinism, thus know our fate, we'd also know that it is impossible to change that fate, so there'd be no worry or anxiety.
Quoting TimeLine
Here's something to consider. As you described the situation, your anxiety preceded your accident, so it was not caused by the accident, if anything the anxiety contributed to the occurrence. It may be the case, that you are like I am, just a naturally anxious person, and your level of anxiety is prone to rising. Your experiences in the recovery period are not so much related to your anxious personality, but experiences which any person might incur, though the anxiety would contribute to the appropriate degree. But your anxious personality might be related to the incident occurring in the first place. And if this is the case you ought to determine how anxiety contributes to what you do in a negative way.
Sometimes I am worried about some particular bad thing which may happen if I am not careful. There is anxiety. I will look for anything I can possibly do to prevent this bad thing from happening, taking as many steps as possible related to anything I think might lead to the bad thing happening. This is not always good, because I am messing around with the things which might lead to the bad thing happening. When I am not extremely careful and methodical in choosing what to mess around with, and how I proceed in such messing around, I have actually caused the bad thing to happen by making a mistake. I am a little bit prone to causing the thing which I am afraid of occurring, to actually occur, because I am so afraid of it occurring. It's odd how trying too hard to prevent a particular occurrence, can actually cause it.
Anxiety has a transgressive character in Heidegger - transporting a person into a state in which normal categories of thought and the normative structures enmeshing them loosen and fray as a person ties themselves in knots over their capacity for decision. It's a useful segue for him in Being and Time between the inhibiting realm of everydayness and normal functioning to action that concerns the person and their own status as a living human; made finite by an engagement with death; which is always apparently a person's own death. The predilections specific to anxiety are glossed over and, rather quickly, amalgamated in and subordinated to the proper metaphysical study of finitude and its underlying temporal structures in human life.
The phenomenological segue from the everyday and the inauthentic to the specific and authentic only has a superficial resemblance to actual anxious thought and effective strategies to anxiety's resolution. To be sure, anxious thought is typically scattered and fleeting. It fears failure and disappointment as a moth flees a bulb. It obsesses over death through fascination with disempowered and afflicted fantasies. The maxim to realise your finitude and use it to shape your decisions falls on all too willing ears.
An anxious person realises their finitude, they are consumed by it.
An anxious person uses it to shape their decisions, they are paralysed by it.
If someone's anxiety has the character that reading over-long pastiches to 'carpe diem' can dismiss it and help them orient their lives - they are not an anxious person, or maybe they were but are now nearly-not. The intervention that changes an anxious person's life for the better is neither an engagement with finitude nor an engagement with their ownmost desires, it is an engagement with their anxiety itself in the contexts, boring day to day contexts, that it arises. An anxious person faces anxiety in a manner that flees from their ownmost being incessantly, and it is only through grappling with the every day and finding place in it that they begin, anew, to hone their ownmost being; to gain the capacity to flourish once more.
To recover and mitigate its effects is to accommodate yourself to your environment, to challenge those parts of it which are disabling, and to promote those bits which allow you to flourish. Far from 'fleeing into the world', as Heidegger would have it, this is the pattern of recovery.
tl;dr: too much authenticity, not enough eudaimonia
I like him otherwise, mostly!
Duh! You mean like anxiety???
FFS
What is questionable here - for instance through counselling, or writing, or art - is when one learns how to articulate or accurately communicate the reasons for the anxiety, the feelings all but disappear? No one, not even Heidegger, can explain these predilections for you because how you identify the external world epistemically or ontologically is determined by your experience and therefore only you are capable of identifying the impact of these experiences. This relies on the state of your mind, your capacity to think rationally and with common sense. So, Heidegger' attempt here is about those specific knots that prevent a person from articulating or communicating the real reasons, and the primary source of this is fear that prevents us from taking advantage of the cognitive tools as instrument to allow us to distinguish between what is real and what is not real (so something that is not real are those who are compelled to new ageism to overcome anxiety as an example); the inauthentic person who conforms to the morality as dictated by an inauthentic world to escape the angst of freedom.
As we stop questioning and conform to the masses, we lose our selfhood and this one such way of overcoming the anxiety. The other is that symbiotic attachment that we rather loosely call 'love' or that attachment that we have to our partner or our mother, this yearning to attach ourselves to an object to avoid thinking for ourselves. We are striving for harmony but for the wrong reasons and the primary impetus for this is the brain, which seeks pleasure and avoids pain. It is painful to recognise the futility of our existence because we become conscious of death or the existentiality, but if we dedicate ourselves to actually learning or questioning through temporal reflection, we begin to under the 'supreme possibility' of this freedom, of our capacity to produce and so we begin to form our own perceptions of the external world through this awareness of ourselves and our separateness.
Death is about recognising our individuality or separateness but death is not the violence of the experience but rather the fear itself that encourages us to conform to the masses. So, the point is to overcome this authentically and therefore our motivations vis-a-vis moral consciousness will enable us to correctly apply ourselves in love. Anxiety is just a feeling or a sensation without a language - subconscious - that is attempting to tell us something we disagree with or that something is wrong but that we cannot articulate because there is no language, no words to describe this. This is why we become dis-empowered or disillusioned and resort to a number of self-defence mechanisms - including things like disassociation - to try and manage the experience and this is why they either become consumed or paralysed by the experience.
It is about ascertaining the correct - or authentic - way in order to reach this harmony and in my opinion the only correct way is this self-reflective communication, by piecing the puzzles by talking about it, writing it, drawing it and not escaping it by other means as already mentioned. This is the intervention that enables one to engage in existence and ascertain the anxiety, give it a language. So, it is about engaging with genuine truths, confronting aspects to our existence that we may avoid - unhappy relationship, trauma from a past-experience etc - and overcoming them. It is to let-go of our developmental attachment to have reality given or dictated to us when young and to form our own reality.
What such engagement means is self-respect, we begin to respect ourselves, we begin to love ourselves, that our opinions matter, and we start to actually think rather than follow. This takes practice and in so doing we begin to authentically love others and it is all others, a capacity to give love. Love is rational, a practice and not some spontaneous feeling and it is also not about loving one object - like certain people - but about how we give it. The state of our mind and our rational faculty. When one does not transcend this need for others to think on their behalf and remove the toxicity of this fear, their love is superficial at best.
Thus authenticity precedes eudaimonia.
I think anything has the potential to be a stressor in the sense that practically anything can be associated with something negative or fearful. Look at agoraphobia, for example, agoraphobics can withdraw to smaller portions of their own homes.
Of course, the brain isn't the only component involved in inexplicable anxiety. A panic attack can be chemically induced, for instance. Also, caffeine can make a person anxious. No one is suggesting that the brain is the only cause. However, the brain is what experiences and interprets interoceptive sensations. A jolt of adrenalin could be felt as thrilling or terrifying. The base internal sensations are essentially the same. It is only the context and our conditioning that is different. This is a very important difference because stress, when taken as a challenge, can enhance performance, and stress taken as a threat prepares the body for injury, sacrificing performance.
Depersonalisation or disassociation is that ability to mirror your actions and the intensity of this can vary, sometimes even to a point of mental paralysis (ever thought about the universe as a whole? or of God as a singularity, the very nature of existence? You get all fucked up). It is being conscious of consciousness that reality itself almost fizzles away; we usually have this switch that shuts that down so that we can form some benchmark where reality is quantifiable but that does not work sometimes because, in my opinion, of boredom. I work with disadvantaged children and I see those who are very intelligent are often very aggressive because they are not adequately being stimulated intellectually. It is as though the scope of their intellectual capacity and the stimulation afforded to them by the external world is not enough that they become anxious or they shut down. Imagine being in a relationship with someone that you do not intellectually connect with? You become anxious or you shut-down.
So it depends on the way you are looking at the brain and the mind and while they are not mutually exclusive, you do have to network and map the connections by allocating them in the right order. If we strip down the individual, our identification with the external world is determined as children because our brain is not yet developed enough and so our mind relies on our experiences being interpreted for us on our behalf, but the brain is a cognitive tool, an instrument that has - when we are old enough - a intellectual capacity and this enables our mind to recognise ourselves or become self-aware through our rational faculty. But, that pivotal moment often arrives at a point where we have never used this part of our brain and so we are caught in this impasse where there already exists the comfort of a determined reality as given to us and so we have to choose (freedom) whether we want to go down the rabbit hole of the matrix, the very elusive and complex one of our own that has not yet been used or exercised (subconscious). We feel we are alienated from ourselves.
It is easier to go back to that determined state and conform to the masses - hence slave morality - as popular conventionalism alleviates the feelings of anxiety and the feeling itself is painful. It is no different to going back to an unhappy relationship rather than being alone. We are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain and so we confuse the sensation as being painful and attempt to alleviate it all the while our unconscious mind is screaming "no!" - it is like the battle between our brain and mind. When we actually start using this and our anxiety all but disappears, we realise just how easy it is and how much happiness it stimulates, but it is like this gauntlet produced by the fear work hard to prevent us from reaching it. As for fear, have a read of my response to fdrake - it is this mechanism that prevents us from proceeding to or transcending toward the next cognitive stage, to take advantage of the tool or instrument we have to actually think for ourselves.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There were a number of factors at play that I have had many people say that I am extremely strong-minded and willed. I have had childhood issues because my dad was psychologically and physically violent and my mother abandoned any affection for me and so I was pretty much on my own since I was very young. My siblings bullied me a lot and my worth here was only when I obeyed and did what they told me - so I identified my self-worth through this obedience - and therefore never had the chance to really understand what it meant to be 'me'. I never had my own identity both because I had no guidance and my environment forced me to be alienated from myself and to simply serve. That stayed with me as I grew up and though I left home very young, I continued to identify with the external world in the same way, as though my existence was worthless. There was no real angst here, it was that ingrained.
So, when I started this job I became attracted to a guy, but this guy was not normal himself and he was trying to get closer to me but doing a really bad job of it. I did not know what he wanted, he just could not say what he wanted but nevertheless my attraction toward him strengthened because I felt that there was a part of him I could identify with, a part that he himself has shut-away in order to manage his own environment. He was attempting to get closer to me through sexual advances but reacted to my confusion as rejection and therefore became aggressive.His aggression resurfaced those emotions as a child. You love your dad because it is natural to do this, but he treats you badly and you get confused and hurt. You like this guy, but he treats you badly. In addition to this, I started a relationship with my sister and her husband for the first time since I was young and who both swindled me that caused financial loss and reignited those days where I was bullied by my siblings.
This was an adult and so I could actually start seeing the facts, the actuality and so the 'me' or 'I' in this began to develop. It was as Hanover said both generalised and situational, both brain and mind as there was from the accident an increase in stress hormone glucocorticoid and the amygdala in the limbic system that manages our emotional responses is activated and remains activated because the hippocampus cannot translate that into past-tense from the influx of the stress hormone. The chemical imbalances affected my mood and physical experiences. In addition, I lost everything, I had no money, no family or support, no job together with those childhood experiences that I needed to confront and so while I had so many bad experiences hit me in the face in one go, I made every effort to work through them one by one. I got a new job/career, I started saving money again, I started writing, studying (finished a masters degree).
I have not had one moment of anxiety for a while now and I doubt I ever will again because I understand the system now. I have officially recovered and am at peace, but it just took a lot of courage to openly admit to that. I believe wholeheartedly in the honest, temporal communication. Anxiety only remains insofar as we continue to avoid the reason why it is there.
This is a bit like complaining," I thought we were discussion bendy yellow soft fruit; not taking about bananas."
[hide="Reveal"]
>:O
Quoting TimeLine
In my opinion, this is a self-created problem - you hold yourself accountable to living an "authentic" life, whatever that is supposed to mean, and then feel bad if you fail to meet that goal. I don't do that - I just don't care if I live an authentic life or not - I don't even know what it means to live authentically.
I have tried to live in a way that maximises my freedom for self-directedness, which is why I'm not in the corporate world and I can work when I want to - if I want to work at 12 at night, then I will do it. If I want to work in my pyjamas, no problem. Etc.
I am a sort of Diogenes - I play the clown and let people think I'm an idiot on purpose. Afterall, I'm looking for people who can see behind the façade anyway - and it's also good training in helping me deal with insults, which I've been working on lately, since I can sometimes be somewhat too thin-skinned.
So you seem to have spent so much time looking for a way out of a labyrinth that was really of your own making. You gave importance to those events, and allowed them to shape you - but I think you could have cast them off at once. Instead of untangling the knot, take the sword as Alexander did and cut it off!
So I don't see the need for authenticity. In my opinion, and I may be wrong, I think the reason why you're feeling much happier now is simply because your external circumstances are much better - ie, due to Lady Fortune, who sometimes gives, and sometimes takes away. It's easy to be happy when things are going well - most people are.
A phenomenological account of anxiety with no mention of personality, specific moods, a person's social history, their environment, their identity, their sexuality, their desires or even their body is insufficiently rich to account for an affective disorder with somatic components.
Authenticity itself is a behavioural-mental* property of a generalised ontological everyman, again with no development of formal structures for moods, social history, specific environment, relationships, gender, identity, sex, bodies... Even language and expression are essentially 'imperative otherness' - intrusive normativity - for an anxious person in Heidegger. A thou shalt and a call to guilt. Outside of his hermeneutic circle, they are also a means of self empowerment with an end of, at least, basic functionality.
If anxiety is given an adequate account in Heidegger it must be only in a restricted and formal sense. An 'unease within the categories (existentialia)' which 'brings the truth to light (aletheia and essentia)'. This is the sense that anxiety operates within Heidegger's thought. It is not an affective/somatic condition.
Anxiety is an affective/somatic condition, as well as a mood or sub-personality. There is no sufficiently rich notion of anxiety, affective/somatic impairment (no bodies, no passions) in Heidegger to begin to deal with mental health conditions. Perhaps it is more convincing if you haven't engaged long term with people who have severe medical anxiety. In lower anxiety people where, truly, anxiety assails them as a mood among others. Even when they give the mood special status in their worldview for how significant it is to them.
*Please don't misinterpret me as reading Heidegger as a Cartesian.
I can confidently say that the lack of realizing one's will towards some external object is indicative of your level of anxiety about yourself in relation to the world. However, there are two ways to go about this problem. One is to focus on the process of building one's self-esteem by accumulating wealth, property, and other material goods. The second is to focus on nonmaterialistic things, or the 'good'. The first option is much easier to deal with because the progress is seen immediately and is more tangible. The second option is dealing with intangible abstract properties, such as virtue, ethics, morality, and everything else in the realm of what is considered 'the good'.
It's important to realize that it is much easier to display one's willpower with regard to some appetitive attitude of gaining power or prestige or finances. However, the inner truth or the inner realm of the human spirit is much harder to apply one's willpower towards because it is hard to quantify and only can be qualified when there is another to witness this change.
Off on a tangent, this seems true to a great extent in regards to philosophies of Cynicism and Stoicism. The Cynic has focused all his efforts towards the relinquishment of material desire (that which is outside of the self, and that which is good), where the Stoic is one who displays his willpower through achievement or good moral standing with respect to society (an 'impure' mixture as the Cynics would quip, of external goods with respect to good moral standing).
Which makes me wonder, do the cynics admire the Stoics? If not, then why should the Stoics admire the Cynics?
I think you have this the wrong way around. One cannot acquire wealth, property, material goods, etc. if they lack self-esteem and self-confidence. So on the contrary, in order to acquire the external things, you must first acquire the internal ones.
Quoting Posty McPostface
I don't think it's necessarily much easier, because it already presupposes at least some of the virtues.
Quoting Posty McPostface
Because they get the internal aspect right. Stoics have what are known as preferred indifferents (wealth, health, etc.). So the virtue is required to gain (or at least maximise your chances of gaining) the preferred indifferents. Remember what Alexander the Great said upon meeting Diogenes - if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. Because Alexander understood that the internal aspect that Diogenes got right was useful to him, and Diogenes actually did have what it took to be a ruler but chose not to use it.
Yeah, I don't think I need to point out the hypocrisy in this post and whom you seem to admire so much despite his narcissistic and egotistical personality towards everything external.
Please do point it, because I do not see it :P
Quoting Posty McPostface
You mean Alexander? Alexander certainly had his failings, but in many regards, he was a virtuous person.
I had in mind more like the current president of the US.
But I didn't mention him in this thread?
DT has some good sides and some very bad sides, sure. What's your point?
This is an odd analogy. The moth is actually attracted to the bulb, and would only flee the bulb if it touches it and gets burned. Do you think that Heidegger is implying that the anxious person is in some morbid way attracted to failure and disappoint, and only learns to avoid it by having gotten burned?
Quoting fdrake
I find this very agreeable, but it seems to open up a division between the particular and the general. The "day to day contexts" refers to the particular occurrences of anxiety. What is implied is that we cannot turn inward to find a general principle for dealing with anxiety, we must deal with the uniqueness and particularities of each instance of anxiety. This may indicate something important about anxiety. It may itself be, a function of how we relate to the uniqueness of the situations which we find ourselves in, and our inability to negotiate these particularities through the application of general principles. Of course this would be to say something general about anxiety, which would be a turning back toward negating the premise.
Quoting fdrake
So this terminology is a bit difficult for me. The "everyday" must refer to the particular instances of events and occurrences which we encounter in our day to day life. The "specific" must refer to some degree of abstraction, or generality, as in Aristotle's usage of "species" and "genus". In this case, "specific" refers to Arsitotle's secondary substance, not primary substance which would be the particular, or individual, "specific" implies some degree of abstraction. So authenticity is assigned to the abstraction, while the particular, individual occurrences are said to be inauthentic.
Would you say that from Heidegger's perspective, this is the first step to overcoming anxiety, and ultimately the fear of death, and finitude altogether? That would be to recognize the particularities of everyday life, as inauthentic, and to see the abstracted principles, by the means of which one makes decisions, as that which is authentic.
Quoting fdrake
I like this description of anxiety, it avoids the bad connotations handed to it by modern medicine (if a child expresses symptoms of ADHT, then medicate it). Here, Heidegger claims that anxiety is what brings truth to light. This is probably due to the relationship between anxiety and the unknown, which I have been discussing with TimeLIne. Approaching the unknown is what produces anxiety and this produces the will to think. Thinking is what brings truth.
The "unease within the categories" is the source of anxiety. We always proceed in our daily life by applying general principles to particular situations. But the general principles cannot account for the uniqueness of the situations, so there is always an element of the unknown in all circumstances. This produces anxiety. The anxiety inspires us to think. I think that there are two principal reasons for the unknown. One is that the general principles which we attempt to apply are lacking in completeness, and the other is that our perceptions of the particular situations are lacking in completeness.
Quoting TimeLine
As I just suggested to fdrake, death, finitude, uniqueness, and individuality, are all properties of the everydayness of the particular. And this is the inauthentic. When we recognize the abstracted principles by which we act, as the authentic, this encourages us to conform. Conformation is a requirement to understand the vast realm of abstracted principles, and since this is recognized as authentic the will to conform flourishes.
Quoting TimeLine
A recognition of this anxiety, which concerns things which have no words for them, helps to bring about an understanding of the authenticity of the inner world of abstraction. There is a use of words, which is all about naming external objects, and this is day to day communication, the inauthentic. The real, authentic use of words is in describing our inner feelings. This is where we find sincerity, trust, and ultimately truth. So in day to day life, we mimic and imitate others, saying things and using words in the same way as others, because this is what gets us by. But the real, authentic way of using words is to describe things in the way that you personally perceive and apprehend them, not to say what the others want you to say, but to be truly authentic. Finding that there are numerous things which there are no words for, is a part of this authenticity.
Quoting TimeLine
I come at this from the opposite direction as you, but we seem to meet, and have compatibility in the middle. I never had the urge to conform. I never had the appropriate respect for authority, all my life. I was always a free thinker. It wasn't until I started to study philosophy and I realized the power of ideas, that I recognized how ideas are needed, as the tools for thought. Then I recognized the need to conform, in order to understand, such that conforming ultimately empowers free thinking.
You seem to describe the opposite situation, having had the need to recognize authority, and to conform, all your life, and now realizing that breaking away from this authority gives you the capacity for free thought. So we are both in the middle, apprehending the need for a balance between authority and free thought, just having different reasons for being in this position.
Quoting TimeLine
Considering the relationship between anticipation and disappointment, and the fact that you probably wanted a relationship with your sister for a very long time, I'd say that the disappointment here was immense, and unfathomable to me.
Quoting praxis
I think we are pretty much in agreement on this.
Quoting Agustino
Geez, no wonder you identify with DT so well.
Quoting Agustino
And I suppose you think that's a good side?
The analogy with the moth describes the predisposition of a highly anxious subject to fret, and the fretting diminishes their agency in a cyclical and sometimes recursive manner. It was supposed to evoke the following cycle: anxiety diminishes a person's agency; as their agency diminishes, the diminishment is internalised and becomes a spur towards anxious behaviour (including thought) and further disempowerment. It is more difficult to fight anxiety the more severe it is. The more anxious you are, the more prone to anxiety reinforcing behaviours you are. The more anxious you are, the more you are drawn to anxiety. This is both a trap and a site of resistance.
Turning inward has its place in diminishing the pathological coping strategies that attend anxiety, this should be accompanied with behavioural changes. Particularity can be troubling for more than essentially epistemic reasons, it can trouble an anxious subject through modal ones too. Anxious fantasies typically are not just failures of knowledge or familiarity, they are threatening possibilities given more emotive or evidential significance than they are due. They can also take the character of the truly fantastic: looking at a knife and intrusively imagining, or even feeling a shadow of, its potential for you to jam it into your eye socket.
The line between fantasy and reality in those imaginings can be blurred if the subject has anxiety co-morbid with post traumatic stress disorder. In these cases, the every-day can often become a reminiscence of the traumatic. Which if anything is a case of defective generality in thought and action consuming the particularities of life, epistemically anyway. It is the application of the general to the particular which is inauthentic in this case; calcification over crystallisation. A post-traumatic anxious subject's throat may close if they have nearly drowned (when triggered), or they may feel terrible, isolating cold due to an injury obtained from hiking in mountains (when triggered). What abstract story should we tell to exorcise the ghosts raping them? What words alone could suffice? None.
Those of particularly low self worth who have punishment fantasies may find their particularity oppressive - as they are the exceptions to the rules afforded to others. Particularity can be just as stymying as generality. Authenticity is an ally neither of the particular nor the general in the abstract, it is a way a person can learn to set the two in relation and act ('dwell') within it.
Further complications arise from schizophrenic co-morbidity. What generalised principle of action or law of thought leads someone to believe their friends and family have been replaced by dopplegangers overnight? That there is a conspiracy to observe them and control their activities? That they might be a robot or an ambassador to an alien civilisation? How can these fantasies be categorised in accordance with the trauma of the world when now there are many? How can there be many and still one, if the subject has insight? The phenomenological world and the principles of abstraction and grounding that derived it quake if the subject deriving them is pathological.
Living in accordance with principles being equated with authenticity and therapeutic release of anxious symptoms is a bit too strong. To recover from anxiety is to change the range and nature of permissible activity in your life; expand what you do, contract your abuses; to be forgiving and understanding of yourself and your impact on others, to afford yourself whatever choices allow you to accommodate to life again, and to bend but not break when life pushes back.
An intellectually consistent and driven life is not a necessity for the treatment of anxiety and the promotion of agency - sometimes resistance and recovery means that you washed your clothes, showered and ate within the last two days.
Why are you people obsessed about DT in a thread where I didn't even bring it up?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What's a good side?
Now addressing your previous comments:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think Posty was quite clear that he was referring to anxiety as an illness...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah, that's because you have an unruly mind which doesn't obey your commands. I used to have that as a teenager, and God was it a pain. If you didn't tire yourself during the day, you couldn't sleep at night. Always like a slave on a leash, I had to tire myself out by playing football, etc. Now that doesn't trouble me anymore - because I gained control over that aspect of my mind. I don't care anymore if I don't fall asleep, so it doesn't trouble me. No more switching from one side to the other, getting up, moving around the room, etc. etc. Just stay there, and not care - then you are at peace, even if you don't sleep.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah, so I don't give a damn, and I just sit in bed not trying to do anything >:O - and sooner or later I do fall asleep. So I changed strategy ever since I was a teenager, and I used to try very hard to fall asleep.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, meditation gives you control over your mind, not just avoiding to be troubled by anxiety. Being active gives you no such control - it just keeps you a slave. Control - like this:
Capisci? >:O
I don't like being a slave to my mind and its desires and so on so forth. I like being free. If I can't sleep and my mind is pestering me with thoughts, that is annoying. And I get it to stop by ignoring it and not caring what it does.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Wittgenstein is right. In order to doubt something, I must believe something else, since doubts have to be grounded - you must have a reason for your doubt. Why are you unsure about where the keys are? Is it not because you believe you don't remember where you put them for example? I don't see how your little sophistry avoids this.
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PM me about it if you like.
I don't agree that anxiety necessarily diminishes a person's agency. This depends on one's approach to anxiety. As I described to Agustino, a healthy response to anxiety would increase one's agency. Therefore it is only in cases of unhealthy response that the individual spirals downward as you describe.
Quoting fdrake
Now you've gone beyond anxiety itself, to describe fantasies. We ought to maintain a separation between these two. The appearance of such phantasms are more likel a cause of anxiety than to be caused by anxiety. Therefore we ought to maintain a separation between the conditions which cause such fantasies and the conditions which cause anxiety.
Quoting fdrake
Again, the subject of our discussion is anxiety itself. We ought not talk about co-morbid situations in which the symptoms of anxiety might be confused with the symptoms of some illness. This blurring of the line between fantasy and reality might be a cause of anxiety, but we ought to maintain a separation between the cause of this blurring, (perhaps some form of illness), and the anxiety itself. To deal with anxiety is a different matter from dealing with an illness which causes hallucinations, unless the anxiety we are dealing with is caused by that underlying condition.
Quoting fdrake
I agree with this, but if the anxiety is caused by an illness which produces phantasms and hallucinations, then the approach is not to address the anxiety itself, but to address the reason for this other condition which may be an illness that is causing the anxiety.
Quoting fdrake
I agree again, dealing with anxiety may be very simple if the cause of the anxiety is simple, and well exposed. But if the cause is deeply hidden, or some underlying illness, then it is necessary to address this further condition.
Quoting Agustino
Your interpretation of what is "quite clear" is very far from mine. I think Posty proposed this as a matter of debate. Although it is clearly indicated that Posty thinks anxiety is something to be avoided, as the root cause of suffering, and says "I assume" that you do too, there is no indication that Posty is using "anxiety" to refer to any condition of illness. Suffering ought not be equated with illness.
Quoting Agustino
I don't know what you could possibly mean by "an unruly mind which doesn't obey your commands". This statement appears completely contradictory and the whole paragraph is nonsense to me.
This description you have provided, whereby a person is a slave to one's own mind is all incoherent nonsense. And so is this:
Quoting Agustino
Doubts do not need to be grounded, they exist for no apparent reason whatsoever, just like anxiety. Certainty is what needs to be grounded, otherwise your certitude is nothing other than false confidence.
Quoting Agustino
Don't be silly. I am doubtful about where my keys are when I remember where I put them but I am unsure if my memory is correct. I think I know where they are, but I'm not sure, that is doubt. If I believe that I do not remember where I put them, then I am sure about where they, i.e. sure that I don't know where they are. Doubt is when I think I know, but I'm not sure whether I really know or not.
Your false confidence doesn't allow you to experience doubt. When you think you know, you're sure you know, and when you think you don't know, you're sure you don't know. Therefore you've never experienced doubt. However, I'm quite sure that you've been wrong before, so you'd do yourself a favour to be more doubtful.
I will try to overlook the fact that you write annoyingly like Heidegger that it makes his Being and Time seem like a children's book. The development of our personality as children - due to our cognitive limitations - largely forms our identification with the external world and how we perceive and ultimately interpret our experiences that largely affect meaning. Our mind contains the instruments that enable us to think consciously and independently and thus as we mature, we begin to sense autonomous experience, but most often this experience shifts from our dependency on family or our immediate environment toward an identification to social experience such as friends and partners. How we identify experience is dependent on the quality of our mental states and how much we understand of ourselves, and thus anxiety manifests as this conscious alienation from any sufficient relatedness to our own being.
The phenomenological account of anxiety is a physical and emotional response to this alienation, from a capacity to fully recognise the 'self' and I believe the response is an attempt to direct us to this understanding as a thing as it is in itself, so where our perceptions are direct, realistic, rational and non-representational. Our understanding is relational and unfolds through social experience, but we each have the cognitive capacity to transcend this and become empowered to identify independently with our own understanding of our social history, environment, sexuality and ultimately identity - which is this authenticity - and thus human agency becomes autonomous.
Anxiety is an emotional and physical reaction where the authentic self is trying to communicate to the inauthentic self; becoming aware of why one has anxiety is really just unfolding and articulating something you already know but could not put words to it. It is not to abandon otherness, neither is it to deny it - free-will and determinism are not mutually exclusive - but to put it simply, authenticity is to interpret one's experience both past and present as one genuinely would want to and not through the lens given to them either from childhood or society.
What does "illness" mean to you? You are aware that doctors classifying something as "illness" is just that - a medical classification and nothing more. It doesn't mean it "really" is an illness, whatever that means. For example, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, hypochondria and OCD in my teens. According to the medical proffession, it is not possible to "cure" these illnesses - so according to them, I must still be suffering from them, but I'm not. A doctor would now say that I was misdiagnosed probably. So as you can see, this entire system of classifying mental illness is really meaningless crap - just putting a label on something and then adding a bunch of metaphysical assumptions to it (like it's "uncurable"). It actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for many - doctor tells them they are depressed, and they stay depressed their entire lives, because it's "incurable" >:O ! So I don't have to think anxiety is an illness to agree with the definition given by doctors.
I also don't like your naive view of saying "oh that's an illness, it's something different, let's not talk about it" - I don't see how these things are "illnesses", except that they are STATES OF MIND - or HABITS OF MIND - that decrease quality of life for those who have them. There is no illness beyond this here. So this attempt of yours to avoid talking about these things (which are actually relevant), is just that - you're avoiding because you know it will become clear that your views are wrong when we investigate these aspects.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I can't really take you seriously when you claim to be so uneducated that you haven't heard phrases like "unruly mind", or being a "slave to one's own mind" before - and even think they are contradictory.
https://www.pocketmindfulness.com/understanding-monkey-mind-live-harmony-mental-companion/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_monkey
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bj-gallagher/buddha-how-to-tame-your-m_b_945793.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Bulls
So try as hard as you want, but if you really are surprised at the claim that you must tame your mind, then quite frankly, you're not very well read, and you should read more, because it seems that you identify yourself with your mind, which according to many philosophies is wrong.
You are still stuck entirely in the discursive mode, and know of no other kind of existence - completely stuck in your mind, and using all these strategies (tire yourself out, etc.) instead of identifying the problem - you have a monkey mind that you need to bring under control. In Buddhist thought, we say that the mind is like a bull, and you must tame that bull. It seems that you have taken the opposite approach and have allowed the bull to tame you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Anxiety is also grounded in beliefs. Doubts cannot exist "for no apparent reason whatsoever". We cannot doubt until we first learn to believe. How can you doubt something before you have a belief structure in place?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"I am unsure if my memory is correct" points to a belief that your memory may be wrong. You must believe that statement in order to be able to doubt your memory. Unless you believe "my memory could be wrong", you cannot doubt your memory.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Funny you say that to someone who has experienced OCD >:O - so, when you close the door, and then go back to check it 10 times to make sure it's closed, that, according to you, isn't doubt no? >:O >:O >:O
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is contradictory nonsense. You are NOT sure where they are - "I don't know where they are" isn't a place where they could be.
Picard will not guilt me to change my mind you small-headed rodent.
Quoting Agustino
Quite.
Quoting Agustino
Are you someone who takes the blue pill?
Authenticity is about how we identify with the external world and interpret representations and this is dependent on the quality of our mental states. The alienation from any relatedness both to our own being as well as to the external world largely causes this anxious experience, because something autonomous or individual within us is telling us - without language but with physical responses and emotions - that something is wrong with an experience in the external world. We are just unable to articulate it.
There are numerous ways one can overcome this. One of these - which most often occurs - is through conforming, by allowing others to think on our behalf until we reach a point where we silence the anxiety - which is 'our' voice - that we ultimately lose any identification to our own self-hood. Others drown it with drugs and alcohol, or suicide, or even losing their minds. Small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.
My way is through authenticity, which is to be brutally honest with oneself about their past, the present, interpretations and trying to ascertain the difference between 'my' opinion and conditioned beliefs that have been given to me; it is a process of practice, like recognising that you are thin-skinned. To learn a new language of my own, giving sound to my voice by re-wiring the brain and so it is a lengthy process. It is basically about being subjectively honest to yourself and to have your own autonomous voice. I think you know what I am talking about since we've had this discussion like so many times before, don't be a Diogenes shmartypants.
Quoting Agustino
Wrong. Indeed, I was given the opportunity to work and develop a career in an organisation predominately with women who were very warm and protective of me during those difficult early stages - particularly following the harassment from men I had in my previous job - that I felt safe enough to start healing, so I was fortunate I got such an amazing job. I was also fortunate that I got an opportunity to holiday to Italy purely by luck, which rescued me from that alienation because it reminded me about culture and arts that I dearly love and allowed me to re-connect with myself.
However, what was 'fortunate' here was that I was rescued from the severity of that existential crises at a time where I was incapable of thinking correctly and not the anxiety. It stayed with me for quite some time as I slowly began to articulate 'my' voice and so slowly but surely the way that I started living my life changed because my interpretation of the external world changed, along with my perceptions and consequently my mental states. I transformed from a fragile, emotional mess who almost died and my happiness is now solid because I removed all the toxic people from my life and started a clean slate being aware of both my vulnerability and my capacity, and being proud enough to say that I respect who I am especially for never giving up on my virtue.
It is impossible to feel anxiety now; I have encountered numerous difficulties since then and I have had nothing affect me because I have formed a permanent environment for myself that will ensure this peace, just as much as I am now flexible and fluid enough to work with the ebb and flow both with positive and negatives, meaning that when I encounter a bad experience, I work at resolving it and not getting anxious about it. Sorry, buddy, but this peace is permanent and I know that from experience.
I wanted to add the clinical dimension of anxiety to the discussion, please read my posts in that light. Someone who is mentally healthy deals with anxiety as a mood or as a response to stressors. Someone who has anxiety disorder has a much different, but related in some ways, experience of anxiety.
The dimension of fantasy is something which is very common in people with anxiety disorder. People without anxiety disorder typically do not have anxious fantasies of the same sort. People with it need to learn to cope with the anxious fantasies as part of learning a 'healthy response' towards anxiety.
The reason I brought in co-morbid conditions is that they matter a lot from the perspective of how to deal with anxiety. The things you would do to steel yourself against an anxious fantasy that you are a robot (believed sincerely with no insight) are a lot different from more generic paralysing fantasies of failure and self harm, which differs again from someone being transported back to their trauma if they have PTSD and anxiety. It makes a big difference in how the problems should be (and are) addressed.
It's entirely possible that 'one's ideal self' still has anxious coping mechanisms - in these cases anxious behaviour can be egosyntonic. Someone who relies upon their anxious behaviour to obtain their version of normalcy and safety - 'what would happen if I wasn't worrying all the time?- is a lot different from someone who experiences their anxiety intrusively - intrusions from normativity (like 'das man') or from obsessive fantasies (which have no Heideggerian analogue). If an anxious person experiences their anxious coping mechanisms and general anxious behaviours as something bad to be worked on, it's egodystonic and approached differently. This is to say whether anxiety (or subsets of anxious behaviours) is part of the 'real' or 'ideal' self depends on the person!
As I said to MU above, treat my posts as descriptions of clinical anxiety and based on it, not from people who have lower levels of anxiety, or from the usual anxiety mentally healthy people get.
Like this?
Quoting TimeLine
:s I don't think anxiety actually manifests like that - this seems like an embellishment. I get that everyone's mind tries to find rationalisations, and you must explain the anxiety in terms of your past, etc. etc. To me that is nonsense. You are giving in to the anxiety when you're doing that, and fueling the same ruminative behaviour that is at the basis of anxiety. The mind may be diseased, but there is a place beyond mind, and that is where you can find healing.
Quoting TimeLine
You are wrong, those people drown in drugs, alcohol, violence, hatred, sadism, and all the rest as a respite from their mind, which does not leave them alone, but constantly harasses them. If they could get a few moments of peace... But that psychological peace is nowhere to be found. Their mistake is in looking for peace outside of themselves, instead of inside. They look towards the wife, the drug, the violence, etc. etc. But the problem comes from inside, it comes from an unruly mind, which must be brought into submission.
You seem to have gone down the path of trying to untangle the Gordian knot from within, but it cannot be untangled - all you can do is hide it and forget about it for a little while. The knot must be cut off, with the sword. The mind may not be rescued, because old consequences will play on, but that is not relevant.
There is a story of Angulimala and the Buddha. Angulimala was the most blood-thirsty serial killer of Buddha's time - everyone feared him. He killed people in cold blood and not for money, or any other reason, but just for the sake of it. And he would take their index finger, and he strung them on a garland he would wear around his neck, to keep count of all his victims. He had acquired 999 fingers, and was finally looking to acquire the 1000th finger.
And when he heard the Buddha was around, he set his mind that his 1000th victim will be the Buddha. And so he jumped in the Buddha's way, with his sword out, and yelled "STOP!". But the Buddha just kept walking towards him. And he thought "This man must be crazy... Even my own mother doesn't know where to hide from me, everyone is hiding, and this man is coming towards me! And he is completely unarmed!". So he said to the Buddha "You should STOP! Do you not see this sword?! Have you not heard who I am?! Have you not heard that I have vowed to kill 1000 people, and behold you are the 1000th! Turn around!" But the Buddha did not hesitate, and said "Forget it - I have never changed my mind, and as far as stopping is concerned, I have already stopped long ago. It is you who needs to stop. And as for killing me, you can do it, that doesn't concern me. Anything that is born must die"
And behold that Angulimala dropped his sword and fell at the Buddha's feet, finally stopping his mind.
Quoting TimeLine
The past is irrelevant - it doesn't matter if I was thin-skinned or not, all that matters is how I act now.
Quoting TimeLine
What you call "healing" seems to be nothing but the passage of time, all the while being in a good environment. You have just forgotten the problems, if you just wait until fortune changes her whims, you may rediscover them. What you call authenticity is nothing but a game of the discursive mind - it is a running away from the real problems, which are structural limitations of discursive thought itself.
Quoting TimeLine
The mind can never be at peace for long.
To be ill is to be sick, unhealthy. A physician may diagnose a person as having a particular form of illness, unhealthiness. So an "illness" is a particular, diagnosable form of unhealthiness. I agree that doctors are sometimes wrong in their diagnosis.
Quoting Agustino
I agree that a person with a decreased quality of life does not necessarily have an illness, nor would we say that this person is ill, because to say someone is ill is to imply that the person has a form of illness. Otherwise we'd have no standard whereby we could say one is ill. We'd just say that the person with any decreased quality of life is ill, not knowing what qualifies as a decreased quality. Instead, we assume that if the person has an identifiable form of illness, then that person is ill.
Where we disagree, is whether anxiety necessarily causes a decreased quality of life. I believe that anxiety is a very normal part of life, and adds to one's quality of life by increasing the fullness of one's experience. So for instance, if a person such as yourself has been misdiagnosed with anxiety disorder, but then medicated to the point of eliminating that person's anxiety, this would be a decrease in the quality of life for that person. The person really had normal anxiety, which is a good and fundamental aspect of living as a human being, and the medication removes this anxiety thereby lowering the person's quality of life. Therefore I belief that anxiety is necessary to enhance one's quality of life.
You seemed to be intent on proving me "wrong", in my claim that anxiety may be good, with a positive contribution to one's quality of life, so you moved to define "anxiety" as an illness, proving me wrong through a restrictive definition.
Quoting Agustino
You are working off the premise that the "monkey mind" is bad. Until you prove this premise, that the monkey mind is misbehaving, your insistence that I ought to tame this monkey mind, bringing it under some form of control, is just meaningless babble to my monkey mind. Sorry if this disappoints you, but that's just reality. All you are doing is insistently claiming that my way of thinking is inferior to yours, and I ought to conform mine to yours, but that's ridiculous. Who is really being childish here?
Quoting Agustino
Again, baseless assertions. Doubting is a condition of unknowing, so clearly one can doubt without having any knowledge, therefore without having any belief structure in place.
Quoting Agustino
This is what you've been doing all thread, taking a condition which is described as a lack of belief concerning something, then interpreting it as a belief that one has a lack of belief. It is simply my expression to you, in words, which allows you to do this. When I describe to you, in words, a condition of doubt, lack of belief, it is necessarily expressed as a belief in this, through the words. But in the real condition, not the representation of the condition, there is no such belief.
Quoting Agustino
As I said, it's certainty "about" where they are. I didn't say it is certainty as to exactly where they are.
Quoting fdrake
This I think is a key point, the assumption of "stressors". To begin with, the term is very ambiguous. But beside that, anxiety is related to our perspective toward the future, so to say that there is something past, or even present, which causes anxiety, as a "stressor", is to misrepresent anxiety in the first place. We ought to dismiss this idea that anxiety is a "response to stressors", and replace it with the idea that stressors one's response to anxiety. Anxiety predisposes us to what we may incur, and to what is perceived as impending, if it is misplaced, the result is "stressors". In this way, we can understand the true beneficial role of anxiety as preparing us for potential stressors, thereby reducing the negative impact by allowing us to reduce the actualization of those stressors..
Quoting fdrake
The point though, is that the so-called "anxious fantasies" are probably not caused by the anxiety at all, but by the underlying co-morbid condition. The anxiety is probably just a symptom, like fever is a symptom of some illnesses, and swelling is a symptom of some physical injuries. In some cases, the symptom itself, swelling, fever, or anxiety, becomes a problem on its own, needing to be dealt with, but in many cases these symptoms are just the body's natural reaction to the underlying illness, and the proper procedure is to identify and treat that underlying illness, not the symptoms.
Wait, wait, wait - if you get kidnapped, taken to an abandoned warehouse, get hooked to the ceiling like the carcass of a dead animal, where you then have to watch as someone takes a jagged meat cleaver and disembowels you - you won't feel anxious? You'll be smiling and laughing and preaching to the serial killer how permanently at peace you are? Your palms won't be shaking or sweating, your brain won't be in a tangled, panic-induced hysteria?
Sorry, bish, but you're fulla shit.
[hide]
You're not thinking very deeply about this. To be ill is to be sick, unhealthy - that's a tautology. My point is just that a doctor - meaning a person - just decides that these symptoms/behaviour correspond to an illness. The illness doesn't exist out there, the doctor calls it an illness. So take anxiety - a bunch of medical professionals have decided that these symptoms should classify as a mental health illness. So what? It doesn't necessarily mean that it is an illness. It's just what the doctors have decided to call it.
These classifications are man-made - they don't exist in reality. A doctor once classified me as having a pilonidal cyst - that thing is usually only treated by surgery. But I thought practically about it - I said, what is a pilonidal cyst really? It's just an infection located around the buttocks. How do you treat a bacterial infection? Antibiotics. So I went and found a doctor, and I told him, I want you to give me antibiotics for this, not surgery, otherwise I will go look for another doctor until I find one willing to treat me as I want to be treated.
So just because something is a "diagnosable" form of unhealthiness - that really means nothing. So we should treat conditions of health and conditions of unhealth the same way - if you're willing to speak about the one, you should also speak about the other. It's just a matter of categorising them - this one goes in that box, this other in the other box - but doctors could also decide to categorise them differently in the future. The categorisation is irrelevant.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are talking nonsense, and you don't agree with what I said at all. I said on the contrary, having decreased quality of life in this circumstance is all that having an illness means. Otherwise having an illness is just a bloody stupid categorisation, that doesn't mean anything. Why do I care if someone says this is an illness and this isn't an illness?! If my doctor tells me that I laugh too much, and he thinks that's an illness, and I should take a pill for it, I'll tell him to go talk to the hand. He can show me all the medical textbooks in existence, and even if all of them say that laughing too much is an illness, I will refuse to acknowledge it as such.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's a silly assumption.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I actually had pathological anxiety. There was no doubt about that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah, if you mean that some level of anxiety is good and useful, no doubt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:s
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
>:O - wow wow wow, so until now you did not recognise even the possibility of "taming your mind", and now you finally recognize it. Well done, that is progress.
But to say more about this, it is self-evident. Having a monkey-mind is restrictive, and lowers your quality of life. You have to tire yourself out before you can sleep. I can just jump in bed even if I'm not tired, and I will sleep. I think it's clear that one is superior to the other.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, having doubts isn't the same as not knowing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
LOL - what obfuscation! You would make even the Sophists blush!
Language merely reflects in words the underlying condition. Only creatures capable of belief can doubt, and not all of them can do it. It's a function that is built and predicated upon the possibility of belief. And that's precisely because there is a relationship between belief and doubt, which is what I was pointing to when I referenced Wittgenstein, which you didn't really like.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is what you said:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Agustino
There was no mention of certainty above.
The point though is that in such dire situations, everyone would be anxious and afraid. Even the Buddha would experience anxiety in his mind - he may not react to it fully, and internally may maintain some sort of equilibrium, but the mind will keep on doing its thing, which is being anxious in that situation. So anxiety (and the negative emotions) cannot be eliminated, but one can gain cognitive distance from them.
Nonsense MU.
See here for less technical bollocks and a much briefer overview. Rumination, preoccupation, obsession, frequent disturbing and uncontrollable intrusive thoughts are a cluster of incredibly common - near universal - pathological thought patterns in anxious disorders. Far from being isolable from anxiety, they are one of the core constituents and present themselves as a commonality between these disorders and their tightly correlated comorbids.
I don't really see the relevance of all this.
Quoting Agustino
So you give me a long lecture above, about how any illness is nothing more than a doctor's opinion, and this doesn't mean that there is any real illness there. Then you go and contradict all that here. I really can't understand what you're trying to say.
Quoting Agustino
I disagree, and see no self-evidence. As we agreed, the monkey-mind allows one to increase one's activity. How is that in anyway restrictive? Thanks for your opinion anyway, though it is most certainly wrong.
Quoting fdrake
You seem to be trying to change the subject, to "attention" this time. Can you not stay focused on "anxiety" itself? You keep heading off toward all these different conditions which are sometimes, but not necessarily related to anxiety. This only clouds the picture.
Quoting fdrake
You haven't addressed my post, which was to argue against the notion that these forms of thought pattern are pathological. Rumination, preoccupation, and obsession, are all common and normal thought patterns, which in an increased level may be symptoms of illness. That illness is not anxiety, because anxiety exists with these thought patterns in normal and common situations. Therefore anxiety itself is not an illness. But increased anxiety, if it is pathological, is a symptom of another illness.
You're no different from Agustino, insisting that these normal thought patterns (rumination preoccupation, and obsession), forms of thinking which are practised by many highly functional human beings, is somehow inferior, unhealthy, leading to a lower quality of life, and therefore ought to be controlled. But this premise, that these thinking patterns necessarily lead to a lower quality of life is false, and therefore the conclusion that they ought to be controlled is also false.
And that rumination, preocupation and obsession are treated as part of psychotherapy for anxious disorders doesn't dissuade you that they often have pathological forms?
As I said, as symptoms they are pathological forms. And. like my examples of fever, and swelling, it is sometimes beneficial to lessen the symptoms.
I am not arguing that your way of dealing with your anxiety is any worse than my way of dealing with my anxiety. I am arguing against your claims that my way of dealing with my anxiety is worse than your way to deal with my anxiety. And, your claim that I ought to conform to your way as a better way to deal with my anxiety, as if conforming to your way would raise my quality of life.
The relevance is that you should not say "I only talk about normal anxiety". You need to talk and understand both to understand each one individually - it is only by understanding the extremes that you understand the normal kind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, fundamentally every particular case of mental health issue that does NOT involve hallucinations or memory issues (Alzheimer's) is pretty much the opinion of the mental health community of doctors.
In my case, the anxiety was pathological because it lowered my quality of life and disrupted my day-to-day activities. I would, for example, have to return home to check if I closed the door multiple times, and you can imagine that generated a lot of tension, anxiety, and wasted time. I wouldn't necessarily call it an illness - it was just a symptom that I wanted to get rid of since it disturbed me. I don't think the illness categorisation is useful.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because being always active is restrictive - it means that you don't have control over when you rest and relax. Here are the benefits of conquering your monkey mind through meditation:
What highly functional human beings practice rumination, preoccupation and obsession? I see none of them - these traits usually lead to dysfunctionality. Seneca, Alexander the Great, Marcus Aurelius, George Soros, etc. are all highly functioning (or were) and that was largely because they could focus their minds and not be controlled by their monkey mind.
Yes, I think your way is inherently dysfunctional, and while it may work within a limited set of circumstances, if you go out of that set, you will see it fail.
You can speak directly to me, I am right here. I would also appreciate if you actually read what I have wrote previously rather than continuously force me to repeat myself. As I mentioned earlier, stressors caused by an accident or an incident is not the subjective anxiety that we are discussing; the responses by the brain to those stressors as one would experience from PTSD is clear, the hormonal imbalances that cause a lack of sleep and disable or dysfunction the correct cognitive processes of the limbic system. We get that. My place got flooded recently, it was stressful, I had to move into a new place, but equating stress with anxiety is no different to equating nerves to anxiety. Those temporary stressors can be overcome, which is why it is temporary.
We are talking about the subjective anxiety that is not temporary caused by an inability to articulate our identification to the external world. It is actually you that is engaging in self-deception so I am going to ask you one last time before I stop responding to you, read what I am attempting to convey and respond accordingly.
In response to you saying that I said that, I can only say, you're very strange and you're a liar.
Quoting Agustino
I didn't say, nor imply that I was talking about "being always active". Portraying this as "always active" is just a lie. Being "always active" would mean not getting any rest or relaxation. Since this is not the case, then by what logic do you conclude that being active produces "no control over when you rest and relax". I don't mean to offend you Agustino, but I feel a duty to tell you that there appears to be no bounds to the ridiculousness of your very strange logic.
Quoting Agustino
I see what you might call benefits of meditation, but I don't see any comparisons to the benefits of the monkey mind, so I think that your little advertisement is rather pointless. If we went to compare the benefits of the monkey mind, we'd come up with a completely different list of benefits. By what principle would we compare one set of good qualities against another set of good qualities, to say which is better, unless one set beat out the other hands down. But it all depends on the particulars of the person.
Quoting Agustino
That's not surprising, because you don't seem to be a highly functional human being. I, for one, practise all of these, preoccupation being very similar to obsession, which means highly focused. And rumination means to be thoughtful. So by experiencing these simple mental practises, I have eliminated the first four of your supposed benefits of meditation as being no different than the benefits provided by the monkey mind. The only thing left is the final one "less stress and anxiety". I remove stress by converting it to anxiety. Now the only benefit you show from meditation is the removal of anxiety. Why would I want to remove anxiety when it's a good which provides me with all these benefits that you have listed, plus a whole lot more, such as all the things which I accomplish with my increased activity, and the joy I get from this. I think your meditation is beaten, hands down.
Quoting Agustino
Yes Doctor. You know what I think of you now don't you? Your a very strange liar.
It is about ascertaining the seed of the anxiety and not the strategies to cope such as mindfulness or meditation or even medication; if we return back to when you mentioned that there are a number of factors that form our identity and perceptions of the external world including our developmental and social environment, a person could form something like Body Dysmorphic Disorder or Depersonalisation and become obsessed with intrusive and negative thoughts to a point that they are incapable of functioning correctly and even in the process isolate or withdraw themselves that ignites ongoing anxiety. It is about ascertaining causes and not about strategies to deal with it - which is merely a temporary solution - such as telling yourself to be strong or ignore it.
By focusing on the authenticity, the actuality of why it exists in the first place, one would need to acknowledge and articulate that temporal influence because meaning is formed by our interpretation of our experiences and if our interpretations of our perceptions is a result of learned behaviour given to us and if we have not yet learned how to articulate our autonomous understanding of these experience, then coping mechanisms are usually enforced to manage the physical and emotional responses. So, a person could have BDD because of verbal or psychological abuse, they could have been shamed or other social and environmental factors, maltreatment or childhood neglect, and all this while taking into account biological and genetic personality traits (which is why some people can be more affected than others).
It may perhaps be coping mechanism, but if they were aware of why they were miserable, they would consciously recognise and reform their environment that would ultimately refine their behaviour and responses.
Okay, then the conversation can end, I don't have conversations with people who threaten me :D
I was having lunch with my sister yesterday (as part of my process of forgiving the past) and we were discussing this very topic (I had read what you wrote and wanted to give it some more thought) and our personalities are very different, despite being close in age and witnessing similar experiences. She has anxiety and it stems from a continuity of these intrusive thoughts - particularly of dissatisfaction - where she consistently believes that she is not good enough. For her, doing well in her studies is an example of being satisfactory - this inauthentic influence portrayed by our social environment - and so prior to submitting an essay and the weeks following, she would experience anxiety and when she would receive her results for several days she will continue to feel that C or a B was not good enough. She was never satisfied. She identified what was 'good' and 'bad' according to socially constructed expectations and the cognitive and behavioural processes that followed identified 'reality' for her to be nothing else other than what was given to her.
While her voice is essentially trapped in this social network, her anxiety is evidence of this inner voice calling out to her that she still does not know or understand how to use. We both had bad parents, but her response was to obey and that is how we differ. No amount of coercion works on me because I only obey when I respect and admire the person asking - which is why I was compelled to philosophy - but while I never had those intrusive thoughts on an everyday basis, the reason was because I was vastly more deluded then she was. I processed my identification with the external world in a more fatalistic manner, whereby if I am not good enough then I would give up completely; the belief that I was unworthy was so entrenched that I literally believed it. I did not experience that anxiety as I identified with the world around me by normalising my alienation perceptually. It was only when I got harassed and then had the car accident that the anxiety surfaced because my identification started changing; it became the impetus to recognise this 'voice' within me that something is wrong.
I am going to think about this a bit further today as I have purchased a book I want to read on this subject and because I trust in you and my sister that your experiences of this - including those who experience disassociation and depersonalisation - is real, I want to be able to realise the difference before continuing.
Ascertaining 'the causes' is a bit misleading, as what started the anxiety and what keeps it going ontically aren't necessarily what structures anxiety and its necessary features ontologically. It may be that an anxious person can address their issues by eschewing the inappropriate application of some norms to their lives, or it may be that they can lessen the harsh distinction between their real and ideal selves based on inauthentic adherence to those norms.
There are people who develop schizophrenia and anxiety through persecution fantasies largely from hereditary predisposition, it would be strange to equate self administered or clinical psychotherapy with biogenetic intervention, no? The 'root causes' are not necessarily the things that keep the disorder going - and all the things that keep the disorder going are not necessarily all the things that keep their sufferer from functionality. There's even a relevant distinction between root causes, mechanisms of sustenance, and manifest symptoms. EG: it's possible to work long term at an office without the symptoms of PTSD based on a boating accident impeding day to day function or drastically reducing overall life satisfaction, despite clinically still suffering from the disorder.
On the contrary, the autonomous articulations of symptom causes for anxious subjects can be anything from 'they really are persecuting me' to 'if I don't worry all the time something bad will happen', or 'my house will burn down if I don't go home and check the gas'. Being earnest about pathological behaviour and mental states is probably required to enter into a therapeutic relationship with yourself or another, but its negation - delusion or lack of insight depending on the specifics - are epistemic properties of a sufferer and their capacity for articulating their symptoms, not ontological ones. IE, the ontology of Dasein is silent on them.
Further, the kind of therapy that aides a sufferer in producing any narrative around their symptoms and the disorder's causes is a specific therapeutic style and loses some its relevance when the sufferer either has the complete incapacity to develop such narratives or already has great skill in doing so. Self articulation in the minimal sense of ascertaining your needs and desires and how they are impeded by the disease - and how these impositions are reinforced through your thoughts and behaviour is definitely helpful, and is usually a part of treatment plans for such disorders. But they are a starting point; addressing the lack of a self affirming narrative is not necessarily removing a root cause.
This is also ignoring the relevance of pathologies being ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic, ego-syontic pathologies can be part of a person's ideal self - truly, authentically - and no amount of discussion without concomitant behavioural intervention is likely to produce recovery.
tl;dr: there're a few reasons why clinicians don't throw Being and Time and Basic Problems at patients. Not that it always stops them.
tl;dr2: exercise: derive why a person continues to suffer from a persistent delusion they are a robot using only existential hermeneutics of the general experiential character of humans. No one will freakin' be able to do this.
Yeah, you threatened to stop talking to me, so I stopped first just to annoy you ;) ;) ;) After all, it would be a shame if TimeLine can stop talking to Agustino, but Agustino can't stop talking to TimeLine >:O
I fail to see what you're trying to express here in regards to 'developing schizophrenia'. I know of no such cases, based on pure belief, that a person is schizophrenic, perhaps exempting the ingestion of compounds that could elicit such a state of mind.
There's nothing about schizophrenia and the resulting thought disorganization and delusional beliefs that can be ego-syntonic.
What does pure belief mean? I don't think mental disorders are just epistemic states...
Yet, mental disorders can be treated by addressing thoughts with facts and reality testing against cognitive distortions. However, I agree that more serious disorders like schizophrenia would be more difficult to treat on a purely intellectual basis of cognitive behavioral therapy.
No disorders are treated with pure intellection, you have to do stuff that makes the disease bugger off as well as think stuff that makes the disease bugger off - and both of those things help the other.
But, CBT, is effective as a standalone therapy for depression, anxiety, etc.
How do you explain that?
CBT isn't just a set of thought exercises. It's literally cognitive-behavioural therapy. You are given mental exercises as well as actual activities that are aimed at making whatever disorder you have bugger off.
EG, someone with social anxiety is questioned on how being in a crowd makes them feel. They say they have extreme anxiety in a crowd and feel very threatened. The therapist asks them if they know what they find threatening about it. If they know or don't, they could be asked to, say - sit outside a coffee shop and listen in to passing conversations. If they have a narrative about what makes them threatened about it, or they have a repeating pattern of thought about it, they will be given exercises to interrupt the mechanisms that make it repeat, as well as being given activities to expose them to and reduce the perceived risk of being present in crowds.
I think you're mistaken here. To address a disorder, what comes first is addressing the distorted thoughts and cognitions arising from some set of circumstances. Once the patient has been convinced about the irrationality of said core beliefs about themselves or in relation to the world or other friends and family, then behavioral therapy can begin.
That really depends on whether the subject has insight or not. If they have insight - they'll already know that their beliefs about crowds being threatening are usually unfounded. Regardless, the part where the subject actually goes out and does things which give a middle finger to their disease is a necessary part.
I don't think it's a matter of insight, as long as the person isn't living on a stranded island in isolation.
So you tell me, you tell TimeLine, you tell fdrake that we ought not to talk about the pathological anxiety, because that's a complicated phenomenon, we ought to talk about the normal one, and I'm the liar? Yeah right...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah, you're always active, until you have no energy left, and you can relax. That's what I meant. That's not good.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There are no benefits to monkey-mind - what makes you think there are? Why do you think people work so hard to get rid of it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Put down the crack pipe. I honestly have no clue what you're smoking now, but it must be potent. So according to your silly logic, highly functioning human beings like Steve Jobs, Admiral Stockdale, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Miyamoto Musashi, and so on aren't really highly functioning because they have taken control over the monkey mind. What nonsense. You should read some more.
Insight has a legal/technical definition, it means the subject recognises their pathologies. Someone who believes they're Jesus sincerely does not have insight, someone who experiences intrusive fantasies of being Jesus but knows they're completely unfounded does. With social anxiety, someone who knows that being in a crowd is generally ok and non-threatening would have insight into their condition, someone who didn't might not.
I see. The only cases I know of where a person does not have insight into their own pathology or disorder are unmedicated schizophrenics and psychopaths. Kind of nitpicking here; but, I don't think there are that many cases in general.
As to CBT, one has to already know that they need help or at least want to feel better to begin therapy.
That also depends on the person's legal status. Someone can be put into psychiatric treatment involuntarily, at least in the countries I'm familiar with (UK,US,Norway). This usually includes psychotherapy.
Impaired insight is most common in schizophrenics, yes. But it generalises to most psychotic conditions. In fact, it's possible to have a caveat put onto a diagnosis of a usually psychotic condition that the person has insight - and thus doesn't have to be treated, legally, as a psychotic! (I'm one of these people). In some senses insight is the distinction between suffering psychosis and exhibiting related symptoms.
Regardless, CBT still uses behavioural therapy as a component. So does the related and more abstract metacognitive therapy, which resembles your description of CBT more than CBT does. Someone doesn't need to know why crowds are scary and track their anxious response analytically to do CBT, but they do in metacognitive approaches.
People can certainly formulate a normalcy of negative thoughts through ideals as our brains are naturally compelled and captivated by stories and story-telling, only in this instance our imagination is not alleviating but rather prolonging the problem. That is because the stories are given to us and our relationships to characters - including real people - become representative of what shapes these values, particularly those of a dogmatic nature. When we listen to great figures of history or biblical stories, it activates our sensory cortex and we are enabled with a contrast that allows us to interpret memories or experiences because our brain organises these memories and articulates it into stories; the puzzle is piecing the bits and pieces of these shattered memories to formulate an actual plot, the person that you are.
There is a biological dimension of why we like the experience and why stories form some semiotic representation that can explain our relationship with the external world; the Ottoman Empire had it's roots in stories about prophetic dreams, wolves, supernatural concepts that compelled mobilisation. Nazism compelled mobilisation through fictional Aryan ideology (for which Heidegger himself was drawn like a moron). Don't get me started on Catholicism. These narratives organise our experiences but they are nevertheless given to us and so we are not articulating our own story, authentically, as it was and is experienced but our experiences are interpreted by these social constructed narratives and thus the conflict begins.
I would not call it persecution fantasies but rather clusters of socially constructed spaces - whether in the home or in the community - that broadly educate this identification to bad behaviour as normal. There are clusters of women in parts of the world that experience hysteria, for instance, and their behaviour is aligned with high levels of gender-based violence and so they are physically and psychologically responding - albeit in a more pathological manner - to the social conditions. Hysteria becomes a responsive way to articulate 'no' or 'bad' and any consideration of the mental health of these women in these environments are non-existent. Some of these women from these cultures have arrived as migrants or refugees into Australia and the idea of even communicating about domestic problems to psychologists is very uncomfortable for them as though the therapist is an enemy trying to wreak havoc to the family, the capacity to educate them about human rights is confusing and the suggestion that we have mechanisms here that will protect them from harm such as the police is distrusted to say the least. These responses and behaviours become learned and they see anxiety as normal and are told or taught culturally that they have to be strong and deal with what they get rather than actually say that violence is bad and that they deserve better. They have no independent voice.
Not everyone has the intellectual capacity to rationalise their circumstances utilising phenomenological or philosophical themes since our understanding of the world is largely dependent on language, but ideals or stories enables this comparative that we begin a process of communicating our history and experiences through the memories that we have. Those women that I have encountered would never understand me if I were to just straight-up say that violence from men is bad and so in order to get them to understand, I could write a song or create a television soap opera or use some historical figure that would explain human rights and gender-empowerment using fiction.
Essentially, there is only one root cause and that is the 'self' or the 'I' or 'me' that is autonomously or independently attempting to communicate a thought or opinion, but that the social and environmental conditions have never enabled them with the capacity to understand how to do this. It is a part of the human mind to have the capacity to become self-aware, but with the continuous bombardment of how one should think and behave - inauthenticity - is consistently given to us, for us to give back or communicate back as an autonomous agent - authenticity - becomes very difficult.
Quoting fdrake
Introspection is difficult to say the least, it is a process and a lengthy one at best where one consistently encounters perceptual inadequacies but this very process is articulating ones own narrative, to start building a language in what is a very empty mental space. Thus epistemically knowledge and language is social and that much of what we understand is given to us in a shared space and this forms our identity and how we perceive the external world, but the process of being able to take that knowledge or language and reverse it and thus to start using it autonomously from the 'self' directed outwardly to the external is the very interaction that is absent from our experience and what we need to learn to do. Our pathological positions or ego or self-defence mechanisms that stand as blockages to prevent one from ever reaching this capacity is entirely unique and dependent on the individual.
Quoting Agustino
I never said that, that's why I called you a liar. I said that if you define anxiety as a pathological condition, then count me out of that discussion of anxiety. I do not object to discussing pathological anxiety, I object to restricting "anxiety" to being a pathological condition.
As I said, I consider anxiety to be the result of normal bodily functions. And, like things such as body temperature, and blood pressure, etc., we might determine a normal range of anxiety. But also like things such as body temperature and blood pressure, I believe that when anxiety goes out of the normal range, it is a symptom of an illness, it is not an illness itself.
Quoting Agustino
As I said, we as the monkey-minded, do things, we get things done, and this is very satisfying, extremely enjoyable. And then there is the wide ranging, and extremely important fact, that being active is the only way that we can serves others. If you insist that these are not benefits, then I can't help you. Go meditate yourself, (pleasure yourself), because you are obviously ill if you don't see activity as a benefit.
Quoting Agustino
Consider the people whom you have just named. Do you think that these people have never ruminated, been preoccupied, or obsessed? These are the symptoms of anxiety, which you seem to associate with the monkey mind. And you think that these are symptoms of illness?
Quoting Agustino
That's contradictory,coming from the one who keeps telling me to do philosophy from experience rather than from what I have read. Now I am doing philosophy from my experience, and you tell me I should read more. Get a life, and quit criticizing for the sake of criticizing. It will get you nowhere if you don't at least think about what you are saying.
Quoting TimeLine
I think you might do well to recognize that this "inner voice" is not a voice within you, it is you. Otherwise you're like Agustino, seeing a need to suppress it. That is authenticity, the voice that comes from within you. the most trustworthy source. It is necessary to recognize this in order that there is a whole you, unified. We, as members of society are urged to suppress the inner voice, to parrot the others, what Plato called the mob. But the mob is a false unity, an inauthentic sameness of individuals, created by those who desire similar pleasures. You will not understand unity until you grasp the authentic unity, yourself. Then only you can tell yourself what you really want, and sometimes this is not easy to determine.
Where did I say anxiety should be restricted to a pathological condition? I recall multiple times in this thread when I told you the opposite.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It may be the illness itself, not a symptom of it. I have always had borderline high-blood pressure of no identifiable cause - the doctors ran all possible tests. Do I have an illness according to you that is different from the high-blood pressure itself?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What makes you think those who control the monkey-mind don't get things done, and do so faster, with greater ease, and with higher spirits than you?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure - I didn't say don't be active. I said don't be active just for the sake of tiring yourself out so that you can rest.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's not that they have never done it, since we're flawed human beings, all of us have failings. But yes, those people did make it a priority to avoid rumination and obsession. Preoccupation on the other hand is usually a good thing. Rumination and obsession are most often negative (though in some very limited amounts they could be seen as indifferent or even good).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think for the most part rumination and obsession are symptoms of illness (or illnesses themselves), yes. This article talks about the benefits of breaking free of rumination, which is clearly treated as a disorder:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201508/the-brain-mechanics-rumination-and-repetitive-thinking
So no, someone cannot be superior to another because of ruminative behaviour or obsessions. Where's your evidence that ruminative behaviour and obsessions are productive, healthy, high-functioning or good?! That seems to be only YOUR idea, not the idea of scientists, doctors, and researchers. Really, your lack of knowledge in this area seems to me to be appalling.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I said you ought to do both, not just rely on the one.
Quoting Agustino
Here:
Quoting Agustino
Quoting Agustino
My OED defines ruminate as "meditate, ponder". And you insist that meditation is so good, and rumination is so bad. How do you spin "rumination" such that it is suddenly something bad?
You say so much without even having a clue as to what you are saying, constant double-talk, just spouting out words in a critical manner; criticizing everything you come across, merely for the sake of criticizing, without understanding the thing you are criticizing, or even your own criticism itself. That's the form of the inauthentic, an individual nervously spouting words without even knowing what oneself is saying. If you would direct that energy inward to actually think about what you are saying (ruminate), then you might learn to avoid putting your foot in your mouth
Have you read the article I linked? What are your remarks about it?
Looks like a very twisted description of rumination. Rumination is not repetitive in the negative sense described, as if the exact same thing is gone over in the exact same way. It is to look at the same thing over and over again in numerous different ways, to find minute differences which constitute the key to resolving the problem. If, through rumination, one never resolved any such problems, then it would be negative. Rumination is what gets you out of that vicious circle, it is not the vicious circle itself.
I hadn't realised eliminative materialism was an actual mental illness, I always thought it was just bad philosophy.
I don't understand the joke, sorry.
And in addition to that, I obviously agree that if we define rumination as:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then it is not at all a negative thing.
How would you describe the case of a person (it happened to me when I suffered of anxiety/OCD) who spends 2 hours trying to remember if he has closed the door to the house when he left, and questioning every detail of his memory, while he has other work to do at the same time, and therefore doesn't get on with that work?
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, seems quite unlikely.
I'm not interested in debating whether we're all robots in some unspecified sense which will inevitably retreat to a broader and more abstract sense until we're all living in the Matrix. We're certainly not like current robots that are made, even sophisticated learning ones are too highly constrained and task specific.
Eliminative materialism = we are all robots is pretty specious too.
Nor am I. I simply wonder, since it is a widely discussed notion of biology, neuroscience and philosophy, why you bring it up as an incontrovertible delusion and symptom? Perhaps philosophy is indeed the disease for which it should be the cure?
I'm asking, in a particular context that you brought up, a more general question that is problematic for psychology, which is, 'on what island of sanity does one stand from which to define the difference in others, between delusion and reality?' From my point of view, I would say that psychology is at least as mad as philosophy.
I brought it up because I spoke to a schizophrenic recently who had that delusion and it troubled him greatly. More generally, I brought that up to say that the way different people have function-impeding anxiety differs a lot.
There's something troubling me about all this, that I'm having a hard time articulating. I wonder if I can say, that to be anxious about being a robot is not to have fully accepted (the delusion) that one is a robot. Like I might be anxious that my leg is going to fall off, but once I am convinced that it really has fallen off, I have to move on and start worrying about how I'm going to ride my bike or whether I can fix it on again, or something.
By the sounds of it it wasn't like an intellectualised belief like the kind you find on this forum, it was an intrusion that overwhelmed him sometimes. If someone held an intellectual position that contended that they were a robot - like generalising Descartes' comments about animals, or viewing a mind as 'software' in some sense, that would be a lot different from the belief of the bloke I spoke to.
I think what matters is how the position is held, and in some cases how that belief integrates their believers into a society. Like the difference between imaginary friends telling you to burn things and divine beings telling you to burn things.
But at this point 'delusion' seems almost redundant as a descriptor. There are purveyors of this sort of stuff, promising, the year after next, to upload our consciousnesses to a computer, and so on. And shit does intrude on one, and can feel overwhelming. I might even suggest that the social function of the schizophrenic is to manifest the social anxieties of the time. If the 'belief' is an intrusion, perhaps the anxiety is also an intrusion. "What? You think you might be a robot?" we all say in unison, mechanically, as though such a notion has never crossed anyone's mind, ever.
I don't think it's particularly ridiculous. People feel they have different amounts of control over the intrusive thoughts or delusional fantasies. There's an attempt to ascertain levels of perceived control in CBT and metacognitive therapy, too. The therapeutic questions usually being 'how could you act to diminish the effect of these intrusions on you?' and 'what circumstances bring these intrusive thoughts to you?'. An attempt to disarm them, not necessarily eliminate them.
I see no reason based on what you said to throw away the distinctions between snake-oil salespeople, weird philosophical positions, delusions and intrusive thoughts. This isn't to say that in a different time, schizophrenics weren't (generally believed as) 'touched' by God or spirits and perhaps were afforded more formal respect by some. On the other hand, it's probably better that modern medicine isn't trying to treat autism with exorcism.
Well of course they do, and some of them may have it about right. But a lot have the illusion that they can control the intrusions, yet find themselves drinking coke and eating Mcdonalds, because they're worth it, or something. Talking of snake-oil...
But I'm standing on the island of sanity, and making the same distinctions right alongside you, because there's nowhere else to stand, and we need to know the differences between idiots, assholes, weirdos, and loonies
Did they do that? treat autism with exorcism? I have the feeling that in simpler, smaller societies there would be more tolerance up to a point, and beyond that point, more intolerance.
Still happens today, un. But not from doctors.
That certainly is exactly what I mean; ever had those dreams where you need to move or get out of somewhere, but you physically just cannot go and try all you can, your body will not move? Or, say you are afraid in this dream and want to scream but there is no sound to the scream? Is there any direction or energy without the arrow of time? We all each have - as part of our mind - our own individuality formed through our cognitive capacity to store memories, something that computes and creates decisions and opinions and ideas independently because we are capable of becoming self-aware; but if this consciousness has never been used, its function lacks the stimulation needed to actually work and so it appears to be some sort of an abyss.
I do not agree with the suppression of this voice, but really to simply transcend the noise that makes it hard to hear what it is attempting to convey. Like a muscle that requires exercise, we need to build a new language as an autonomous agent, similar to synaptic pruning where we begin to selectively discard what is unnecessary and keep what is necessary.
Hmm when that happens to me, I just give in to it and accept it. It takes some time though to move from state of panic to state of acceptance. Then usually I wake up.
I don't claim to be a doctor on this matter. You, not I, seem to think that there is a clear distinction between anxiety of the healthy type, and anxiety of the ill type, so perhaps you should offer your expert opinion. I would say though, that if one consistently ruminated on some problem, and failed to ever resolve that problem, the person's failure to recognize one's own inability to solve the problem, might be a problem itself.
It would be like an issue of trial and error. How many times can you keep trying to have success in relation to a particular endeavor, before you realize that it is time to quit trying? Notice though, that an athlete never gives up, by initiating a strategy of practise, with increments of success as goals. The athlete keeps trying and trying, and in so doing, betters oneself. I would say that the same thing is probably the case for mental activity. The more you ruminate, the better you get at it. So if one can discipline oneself to ruminate over the same problem for a very extended period of time, without suffering negative consequences (frustration, panic, etc.), this would be very good. But if an individual without practise in ruminating suddenly found oneself to be immersed in it, this might be like a person with no experience in skiing suddenly finding oneself in the middle of an Olympic slalom course, with skis on.
Quoting Agustino
That is an issue of determining one's inability to solve the problem, knowing when to quit. If you are driven toward attempting to resolve problems which cannot be resolved, and you cannot recognize your own inability to solve that problem, that is an issue. It is a case of trying to do the impossible, setting yourself up for failure. And the more time you spend trying to do it, the bigger the disappointment when the reality hits you. Imagine someone hands you a jigsaw puzzle in which each piece came from a different puzzle, so that no pieces fit. How long would you work at that puzzle before you realized, something's wrong here, I'm trying all these different things with no success, this is a waste of time? If something drives you to continue, thinking for some reason that you can actually make things fit, by sheer willpower, then you've got a problem.
Quoting TimeLine
Recently, in a dream, I climbed onto a high roof with someone else, to do some repair. Suddenly, I started screaming as if for help, like a little child. This surprised me, even in the dream, because the roof wasn't extremely steep and I'm not afraid of heights. Then I was going down the sloop of the roof as if I was being drawn toward the edge. I was panicked with fear, but at the same time, I knew that this is not difficult, the roof is not too steep, I must just keep away from the edge, and I will not fall. For some reason though, I could not control the fear. And the fear overwhelmed my power to do what I knew I could do, stay away from the edge. The fear overcame me to such a great extent, that I was ready to give in and let the thing I feared take me. It was like the fear was so strong that it forced me to give in to the thing that I feared, when I knew that I could avoid it. This dream very much surprised me because that is not something I would normally do. In a dangerous situation, such as driving a car which has gone out of control, I'll fight it to the end, trying to regain control.
The only real life thing which I can find to compare this to, is falling asleep when I'm driving. As I get mesmerized by the monotony of the road, my eyes want to close all by themselves. I know very clearly in my mind, that I cannot let this happen, and I believe that I have the power to prevent this from happening. However, the more I concentrate on, or focus on preventing my eyes from going closed, it is such a singlized, simple, boring thing, that it produces an inactive mind which actually increases the urge for my eyes to go closed.
I suppose this is just like death itself. It's one of those things that you try to avoid, and we can usually avoid it by being in control of ourselves. However, eventually we have to face the decision. Am I going to resist and fight it to the end, in which case, the fear, panic, or even just the effort, might actually bring it on earlier, or should I just go with the flow?
Quoting TimeLine
The synaptic pruning is to throw away all the errors of trial and error. The inner voice may be very excited in fits of passion, and that's why those passages need to be pruned, to ensure that we don't mistakenly go back to what was already been determined as the wrong way. But that does not mean that we cannot continue to seek new ways, continue in our method of trial and error, long past the days of childhood.
No one here does.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Interesting.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, let's take a condition where rumination is one of the primary symptoms. What would you say about the case of a man who, for example, thinks that there is some government conspiracy against him and continuously ruminates on that? It's something called paranoid delusions, thinking that someone is out there to harm or hurt you, and often people ruminate on such issues to no avail, since these problems cannot be solved.
It seems to be a problem with thought itself, with the very nature of possibility. If you really want to, you can interpret any event so that it fits with the story. The man smiling on the street was really giving you a secret sign. The taxi in front of your house was really a government agent spying on you. The popup you got while navigating a website was designed to be there and give you a virus so the government can have access to your computer. Etc. These are all thoughts that can occur in the mind of a person who suffers from this condition.
So since according to you, there is no difference between the healthy type and the ill type of rumination (or anxiety, they are somewhat associated), how would such a man go about extricating himself from such habits of thought? It is the nature of possibility, that no matter how much evidence to the contrary you get for something, you could always interpret it as actually confirming evidence! The less pathological cases of this, we refer to them as "being in denial".
So it seems that it is the nature of thought itself that such a person does not have means, through thought alone, of extricating himself from that condition.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Personally, I would say it depends on why you're ruminating, what's your goal? If you are like the person with paranoid delusions, then ruminating on the subject of your delusions is definitely a bad idea - the issue cannot be solved.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree with you somewhat, however, the point is that you can never be 100% certain that the so-called problem cannot be resolved. And you never know if what you're trying to do is really impossible - maybe you've missed something, etc. So the mentally ill person will generally find refuge in this - not being able to be certain. Not to mention that if a problem is very very big - let's say that their survival depends on it - even if it is just a teeny tiny bit short of impossible to succeed in it, it is still worth trying to solve it! So as you can see, for these two reasons, the approach you suggest is problematic when it comes to pathological types of anxiety and rumination. Now you claim that there is no clear distinction between the healthy type, and the unhealthy type - so does this mean that the unhealthy type can switch over to the healthy type, and how would this happen?
For me personally, in dealing with anxiety, I found meditation and Stoicism helpful - not ruminating more on it, since there was no end to the rumination, nor could an end be rationally determined.
I think that such a person has an illness which makes him feel like there is a conspiracy against him. The rumination itself is not the problem, it is what he is prone to be ruminating on, that is the problem.
Quoting Agustino
No it isn't a problem with thought itself. It is a problem with what the person is inclined to think about, the person's attitude toward thought.
Quoting Agustino
As I said, I am not a doctor. The man in your example has an illness which affect his attitude toward thinking. Preventing him from thinking (ruminating) may address the symptom, but it doesn't address the problem.
Quoting Agustino
Right, the man is ill. The man cannot cure his own illness "through thought alone". Would you expect to cure a flu by thinking about it?
Quoting Agustino
I don't see the "problematic" you refer to. The healthy person has a healthy attitude toward what to think about, and what not to think about. The attitude does not come from the thinking itself, it comes from elsewhere. So the thinking itself is not the problem.
Quoting Agustino
Yes, the unhealthy type can switch to the healthy type if the reasons for the unhealthy disposition are determined and cured. And vise versa of course. Imagine for example, a person who uses psychoactive drugs habitually, for recreation. That person might suffer delusions similar to what you have described. That person can quit using the drugs and develop healthy thinking.
Why is the illness different than just the thinking there is a conspiracy against him? I would say the illness is the thinking itself. That has certainly been my experience with anxiety - there is nothing behind the thinking that causes it as it were.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
These conditions are self-perpetuating habits of thought if you prevent the thinking, you prevent and many times improve the problem. For example, meditation allowed me to become detached from the anxious thoughts. They didn't disappear at first, but I went around no longer caring that I had them. Over time they slowly decreased in intensity, and then disappeared (for the most part, I still get a pathological kind of anxiety if I am super stressed).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is a very very big problem with what you're saying here. You assume anxiety is like having the flu, and that's NOT the same thing, not even close. The flu is caused by something that is clearly biological - namely a virus, which we can find and identify in people who have the flu. There are no such things in the case of anxiety.
The brain has what is known as neuroplasticity, and it can alter its own structure, it can alter what substances and in what quantity it secretes, etc. The thoughts you have and the habits you have influence this greatly. That is why CBT - which is basically curing your anxiety by thought - is one of the most successful methods.
So I don't see why you find "curing pathological anxiety through thought alone" so hard to get your mind around. It seems to me that you just don't have solutions to the problems I raised earlier.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The thinking itself is the illness, and quite possibly contributes to the persistence of the illness.
I think the deeper and more perplexing question is in regards to what scares the schizophrenic the most. It seems that the diagnosis itself is the greatest source of frustration and compels one to be anxious. Paradoxical. Some would rather have cancer than be schizophrenic. Such is the amount of fear and stigma associated with the process of labeling the patient with a diagnosis.
In other words, diagnosing seems to bring more hard than good.
I've done my fair share of reading about schizophrenia and there's a decent amount of evidence that points towards better patient outcomes for people off antipsychotics.
In general, people ought to be told how to live with a 'disorder' and not fight against it. I don't see much utility in telling a patient that they'll be better off if on a medication when the majority of evidence points towards better outcomes (in specific cases) when the patient accommodates or changes their lifestyle to accommodate for the disorder.
We all think, thinking is not an illness. What is "behind the thinking that causes it" is the person's interests. We all have interests, and we all think. Our interests determine the objects we direct our thought toward What makes the thinking that there is a conspiracy theory against him, different from normal thinking, is that it is an odd and unsubstantiated object, produced by an unhealthy form of personal interest, paranoia.
Quoting Agustino
No I don't assume anxiety is like having the flu. We've been through this already. I assume that anxiety is a normal aspect of a normally functioning human being, just like body temperature. Raised anxiety is a symptom of illness just like raised body temperature is a symptom of the flu. You just can't seem to grasp the concept that normal, highly functioning human beings have anxiety. You want to insist that having anxiety is not normal, that it's an illness.
Quoting Agustino
I think it is clearly false to say that there are no biological causes of anxiety. The human body is a very complicated biochemical system. Adrenaline for instance is known to be associated with anxiety, as a cause. And, there are many other chemicals which are known to influence anxiety.
Quoting Agustino
CBT is not curing anxiety with thought, it is activity. It is a therapy of coordination between thought and behaviour.
WIKIPEDIA:"Instead, CBT is a "problem-focused" and "action-oriented" form of therapy.
I already told you that I deal with my anxiety through the means of activity, and you scoffed at me, saying that I had a monkey mind and that I should meditate instead. You still persist with your double talk.
Quoting Agustino
If CBT is your evidence of curing pathological anxiety with thought alone, then you haven't got a case. As I said in the last post, I haven't seen these "problems" with my position, which you keep alluding to, yet. I think you're imagining things.
Quoting Agustino
Wow, thinking is an illness which contributes to the persistence of itself. Now I've heard everything. Are you sure you're not suicidal?
Sure, please make an effort to read what I write charitably, trying to understand what I am actually telling you. My statements are made in a certain context, I do not understand why you take them to be blanket statements about thinking in general.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, you're reading uncharitably. Obviously I was referring to the unhealthy type of anxiety. Do I really need to specify that, can't you make an effort to understand based on the context what I'm telling you?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is false. Of course everyone has anxiety, I can cite you multiple statements from me in this very thread saying that anxiety itself cannot be eliminated and is a normal part of life.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right, and guess what, the relevant part of the biology can be changed since the brain has neuroplasticity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it is the activity of thinking in a certain way :-} - not through thought, right...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What else is the activity that you mentioned above if not thought?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the context of unhealthy anxiety, sure! What's wrong with something being self-perpetuating? Have you ever heard of positive feedback loops?
And, that is rather miraculous in my opinion. That intervention without the need for (costly) supervision can alleviate one's suffering and pain in regards to depression and/or anxiety.
My only question that remains, is why aren't we handing out these books for free to people who need them the most based on the efficacy of treatment on said disorders.
Quoting Posty McPostface
Then who would be paying to go to the therapist, or even better have the state pay for them to go to the therapist?
Yes, it's sort of a dialectical therapy with one's self. Just that you have to train your inner therapist to identify which feelings are a result of what thoughts and vice versa. It's hard at the start; but, pays dividends with time and practice.
I would say that CBT is primarily empowering. A patient feels like they can address an issue once they draw out the tables of initial thought, then analyze the cognitive distortion, and then engage in the cogntive distortion through a sort of REBT method. I think REBT and CBT are twins in some sense.
Quoting Agustino
Well, unenlightened posted a while ago about Open Dialogue in regards to more serious disorders like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. So, there's room for therapy. Just that CBT can be done at any time or moment of crisis for an individual.
Are people inherently irrational? And, if so, doesn't CBT show that people can be less irrational if not more rational in regards to how they perceive themselves with respect to society and the world?
I merely brought up synaptic pruning as a comparative analogy to show how the brain - when a person' cognitive maturity reaches the right age - sheds useless aspects of our developmental learning in order to make it more open and sophisticated for adulthood; so when we reach this transcendence and begin to think as an autonomous agent, we shed or prune our reliance to conform to society or those close or around us, removing toxic people from our life, having the courage to experience the things that we want and not what others want from us. We shed those things in order to start improving our own language and identification to the external world.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You know, while Jung did have rather ambiguous theories, I am compelled to believe that our subconscious does speak to us in a language that we understand and does this through stories. When I think of the bible, for instance, it is attempting a moral education through stories, or like parables where we seem to understand or interpret aspects of our deeper, subjective self in them. In a way, this consciousness of our own being is really attempting to piece together and articulate our own story. It is as though you are reasonable and conscious enough to see the absurdity of this fear and yet you are still somehow afraid, that while not that high up seem to be overcome with the idea that you were in danger and this somehow epitomises the angst that prevents those from letting go of the irrational fear to reject our former, given identity and to start creating our own. It is interesting that it appears to be at home, as though there is a fear of independence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Heidegger does not speak of overcoming death - in the sense of 'death' being one actually dying physically - but rather overcoming the death of this given identity; as mentioned, when we are young, we are given the translations of our perceptions and experiences by others, that they tell us how to think and behave and we form our reality based on these given themes, but when our brains reach that cognitive maturity, it begins to translate these experiences autonomously only we do not understand or cannot articulate what they mean since we are brand-new at the experience. We suddenly become conscious that we are shifting away from that given identity or that given language that we use to translate reality and that is frightening, it is like everything that you are is untrue or false.
This is the 'angst' this moving away from what we thought was reality or the truth and most are unsuccessful in reaching that level of autonomy; they often retreat back to conforming, back to doing what others tell them whether it is friends or parents or partners, and with capitalism and the social media or network, it is becoming easier and easier for people to think that they are autonomous or independent, tricking themselves and others alike, this idea that they are individuals when they blindly move in masses. Changing your hair colour or wearing different clothes does not make you different. As we have the capacity to be self-aware, we have the capacity to recognise our separateness and this detatchment is the very anxiety that overcomes us.
Yes. It is a process of learning to think through your problems in a manner that is actually productive, as opposed to ruminative. It's also very similar to Stoicism. Only MU likes to introduce sophistry by inventing new categories ("activity, not thinking") that are actually irrelevant to describing what is at hand.
Also being slightly nihilistic helps, nothing really matters so why get anxious over it...
Quoting Agustino
You expressed a complete misunderstanding of what I said, and then went off to criticise that misunderstanding. What I 've been trying to tell you over and over again, is that I don't agree with you that there is an unhealthy type of thinking, and I don't agree that there is an unhealthy type of anxiety. I think that the unhealthy person practises the same type of thinking (rumination, etc.) as a healthy person. I think that the unhealthy person has the same type of anxiety as a healthy person. Consider my analogy with body temperature for example. You wouldn't say that an unhealthy person has a different type of body temperature from the healthy person. It is the same type, the same quality, but the quantity differs.
Quoting Agustino
Good, we agree.
Quoting Agustino
Again, we agree, thinking is an activity. So if thinking is the therapy, then the goal of the therapy is not to put an end to the thinking itself, but to practise it in a more healthy way.
Quoting Agustino
Thought must be initiated. Activity is good for initiating thought, because we need to think about what we're doing. Like a hobby for example. Remember, I didn't criticise your way of dealing with anxiety, you criticised mine. I only replied to your insistence that activity was not a good way of dealing with anxiety.
Quoting Posty McPostface
You ought to write more clearly Posty. You say you read "a book on CBT", then you say "no mention in most CBT books". How would you know about most CBT books if you've only read a book? Have you read about CBT techniques? There must be an interaction between the patient and the therapist in order that there is a technique. This is where activity is involved, in the actual therapy. Even reading the book is an activity. So if you got therapy by reading the book, that was the activity involved. If the patient has to see the therapist, and interact with the therapist, that interaction is the activity involved.
Quoting Posty McPostface
See, you have adopted it as a practise. It is therefore an activity. Agustino would not classify meditation as an activity, desiring instead to create a separation between the meditative activity and the monkey mind activity. One being a good "type" of activity, the other a bad type.
Quoting TimeLine
I agree.
Quoting TimeLine
I would say that it is questionable how much of this we actually "understand", and that is cause for anxiety. The human body has many systems which appear to be quite mechanical. One part of the body "understands" another part through these systems. But this is not the same as conscious understanding. So if we turn conscious understanding inward, in an attempt to understand the stories which the subconscious is telling us, we get stymied because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because it is a completely different system of communication from what we use to communicate with each other.
Remember what I said about real unity? Within each of us there is a real unity, which is not duplicated between us. This makes the communication between us inauthentic compared to the communication within us. The inauthenticity is built in, inherent within the languages. So when we turn inward there is an incompatibility between the language within, and the outward language, which makes understanding of the inner impossible from the perspective of the outer. The subconscious cannot be understood by the conscious.
This is expressed by Wittgenstein's private language argument. If there is a private language, it cannot in principle, be understood from the perspective of a public language. If we assume that there is a private language, then we must conclude that it cannot be understood via the public languages. The only resolution, to establish compatibility and "understanding" between inner and outer, is to allow the inner to take control of the outer, twisting and shaping the outer in an attempt to forge authenticity.
Quoting TimeLine
This would be that process. We learn the outer when we are young, the experiences of others. As we mature, like you describe, the inner as 'the brain" is working on these, translating it into the inner. That's the only possible way of understanding, because the outer cannot translate the inner.
There is something important missed here though, and that is that we are born with only the inner language. So all of our learning from others, as children, can only proceed to the extent that the inner may translate the outer. This, "being born with" is like a preconditioning, to accept the identity which will be given to us.
Quoting TimeLine
I think that the way our society is now structured, we are taught that the authentic is the external. Then, the internal is incomprehensible to the external, as described above. This results in a denial of the reality of the internal voice. So we get lost in this external world with no capacity to understand ourselves. Anxiety is the internal voice reminding us of what is really the case. The only way to proceed is to maintain the natural balance which is to allow the inner voice to keep control over translation of the outer. To invert this, and attempt to control the "unruly mind" (as Augustino says) is to induce confusion.
Okay, I can grant that. What does that change though?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Why can't thought be initiated by directing our attention towards a problem we want to think about?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
According to your usage of the term, pretty much ANYTHING one does is an "activity" - the term becomes meaningless since even not doing anything is an activity.
The question I think is what attracts one's attention. The way you ask the question, the issue of why do you want to think about this particular problem, is left open. And that might be an issue of mental health. If there is a problem which you want to think about, then your attention is already directed in that way. That thing interests you, and I need to know, why does that interest you. If there is something which you want to direct your attention toward, then there is a reason why you want to direct your attention in that way. That thing, which provides the reason why you want to direct your attention in that way is the thing which interests you.
This is the principle which Aristotle outlines in his Nicomachean Ethics, the good, the end, that for the sake of which. You have an interest in that particular problem, and therefore your attention is directed in that particular way, because you apprehend some good to be obtained. But that good is wanted for the sake of a further good, and so on. To assume an infinite regress of goods would not provide a proper end, so he posits "happiness" as the thing which is desired for the sake of itself, the ultimate good. If one adopts that principle, then the desire for happiness is what directs one's attention. So if you ask why do you want to direct your attention toward a particular problem, the answer is because it is through some means, conducive to your happiness. If it is not conducive to your happiness, then do not direct your attention toward that particular problem.
Quoting Agustino
Right, anything one does is an activity. Why do you find this to be a problem? No matter what one is doing, it requires the same sort of mental procedure. We determine our goals, or ends, then determine the means toward those ends, and proceed. As we proceed, we must deal with all the difficulties, obstacles which confront us, the problems on the way, and adjust the means, and sometimes even the goals, along the way, accordingly. Any instance of doing anything follows the same basic pattern, such that anytime we are doing anything we are engaged in the same sort of mental activity. It is a simple process of getting something accomplished. And, if the thing to be accomplished is desired to be accomplished because it has been determined as conducive toward one's happiness, then there is a joy and satisfaction which accompanies the accomplishment.
This is just the best, however I believe that it may be accessible, only not completely, like a puzzle that you need to work through because if there appears to be that 'alarm bell' feeling we get from anxiety -which is our subconscious telling us that something is wrong - in order to have that, it would need linguistic capacity, there needs to be some meaning to that experience that it merely cannot articulate consciously because there is a lack of understanding. When you teach a child that behaving someway is wrong, they often do not understand at conscious level why it is wrong, but this belief retreats into that subconscious domain as though the voice of this parent remains embedded and echoes doubts that we feel when we encounter similar experiences.
Only our instinctual drives remain completely unconscious, completely without any thought and really, as humans who are capable of identifying or becoming self-aware, consciousness is really the medium or tool that attempts to manage our instinctual drives with our social or moral development that we obtain for the external world.
It is experience that is not yet understood but considering that this moral development is within us, it is about raising it to the surface, to explain it at conscious level. This is a process embedded into the structure of our cognitive system, hence why Kant' formula that we as rational agents are bound by moral law makes perfect sense. We begin to deliberate a philosophical process using our own will or consciousness to begin formulating our own moral laws; which is, basically, adopting our own interpretation of the external world and our experience with it rather than listening to that echo telling us what to think and how to behave.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We are not born with a language, we learn it socially but that the brain itself is a tool, an instrument that - upon maturation - is enabled with the capacity to become self-aware, to identify and calculate experience autonomously but through this very learning or determinism. Again, free-will and determinism is not mutually exclusive but in actually rather compatible, and the only problem is that this develops later and the experience of this 'self-awareness' and therefore this distinct separateness from our environment and the identity that we had formed through it is extremely frightening. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
I am confident that there may be a way in which that transition could be eased with adequate support, but unfortunately society and religion and other institutions seem to do everything in their power to ensure you avoid this independent voice. It equates to libertarianism, vice, even evil and all that really is just a way to frighten you to submit.
I do, however, believe that some people are born with particular - or unique - personality traits, certain attributes that you could say is very individual to that character and not a learned behaviour. I have seen it in some toddlers, and these traits could be genetic.
I read a little bit about it when UN posted that thread, not sure what to say though. I haven't seen a theoretical explanation for how it actually works. Sure, you have open, transparent dialogue with the patient, and you give the patient a driving role in deciding which direction he or she wants to go in. You also involve the family. That's what a lot of GOOD therapists do anyway. I don't think that, in and of itself, is sufficient. Those people in Finland may be keeping some things secret. I don't see how doing just that is enough to solve the problems.
Well, there are two cases you could be referring to here given the context. The person who suffers from anxiety will direct their attention either to the thoughts that cause the anxiety itself, since they want that anxiety to stop, as it is preventing them from fully living their life. OR - they are directing their attention towards seeking a way to prevent whatever bad thing they are anxious about. So those are the two possible reasons.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, I agree with this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I disagree. The miser directs his attention to the hoarding of money because he believes that hoarding money will be conducive to his happiness - NOT because it really is conducive to his happinesss.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, and mindfulness and meditation actually trains this process. In mindfulness your goal is precisely to train your attention. You are supposed to focus on the breath, and maintain full awareness of it. And everytime your mind drifts to something else, and you become aware of it, then you must drop that thing and refocus on the breath. This process of choosing a goal, and then approaching it and not being distracted, this needs you to train your faculty of attention.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not necessarily - joy and satisfaction will only come if that thing is really conducive towards one's happiness, not just if it has so been determined.
I don't know about that. It may not be wise to attempt with the conscious mind to understand what the subconscious is doing. This puzzle might be impossible to solve, causing increased anxiety and frustrated thinking. If it is the subconscious which must "understand" the conscious, as I suggested, then we have to take a different approach. You know how some people argue that ultimately the subconscious passions control the conscious mind, and not vise versa? If this is the case, then the conscious mind might be able to communicate to the subconscious through this avenue. It would not be a case of trying to understand the subconscious with the conscious, but a case of trying to get the subconscious to understand the conscious. This would be saying something to the subconscious which it could understand.
Quoting TimeLine
So this would be what happens with childhood learning. The subconscious is listening to, and in a way, communicating with the conscious, but the communication is sort of one way. The subconscious "understands" what the conscious mind gives it, receiving and remembering, but the conscious mind doesn't understand anything that is going on in the subconscious.
Quoting TimeLine
I don't think that the conscious mind can ever really control the subconscious, because the subconscious is really the higher level. The aspect which we call "free", in "free will" is very deeply seated, so the subconscious itself is free, and will not necessarily follow the conscious mind's attempts to control it. So the subconscious listens, and to an extent understands the conscious, but it will not necessarily obey. We can learn from the history of teaching, and morality, that certain principles appeal to the subconscious, and these are readily accepted. In society, through communion, we use the conscious mind of other individuals to get through to, and affect the higher levels of those others, which are the subconscious, and in this way we can, to some extent manage the instinctual drives of others (education). Our own instinctual drives having been managed in a similar way by our teachers. But we're really very limited in what will be accepted by the subconscious, and this leads me to believe that the subconscious is really very narrowly focused. Trying to go outside these limits is problem causing.
Quoting TimeLine
Again, I'm afraid this might be a backward approach. I really do not think that we can bring the deep levels (subconscious) to the surface (conscious). Our only approach may be to get the deep level to accept what the surface level has to offer. This means that whatever we offer to the subconscious, from the conscious mind, it has to be appealing, or else it will be rejected and the conscious mind will be left frustrated.
Quoting TimeLine
I think there is a degree of understanding of the inner voice which lies behind these institutions. But from your perspective, my perspective, and everyone else's perspectives, these principles of the institutions are always the "other". They use learned techniques to get through to the inner voice to teach and train it in the ways that have been deemed good by conscious thought. The subconscious might be quite focused, as I said above, in relation to infinite possibilities, but that doesn't mean that it is anywhere near as focused as the conscious mind would like it to be. So we keep working to focus the subconscious of others, and ourselves, through conscious reasoning. But even the reasoning must be conditioned with principles which are acceptable to the subconscious or else the effort is futile.
Quoting Agustino
Yes of course, it's all belief. Notice that I said if we "assume" happiness as the desired end. Many people will not even take the time to figure their own priorities, or what is important for them to get from life. These people would not make choices conducive to happiness, nor even choices which they believe are conducive to happiness, because they haven't taken the time to determine that happiness is what they actually want from life. And even if they do determine some ultimate goals like happiness, they seldom would take the time to think about each of the activities which they are engaged in, to determine how these activities would, if they even do, relate to that ultimate goal
Quoting Agustino
I agree.
Quoting Agustino
There will be an immediate joy from accomplishing what one sets out to accomplish. This in itself is a cause of joy. If the thing accomplished is not really conducive towards one's ultimate goals, in this case happiness, then a disappointment or other bad feelings could follow when realization sets in.
I knew this guy who followed his girlfriend and copied her - she would do something, he would do something - but then it was almost like he realised he was copying her and he would retract or stop, as though recognising that he should not follow her or even that he was following someone unworthy, back and forth like that repeatedly over the years. I knew he had attachment issues and I assume that this was formed from an unreliable and yet dominating mother, but whatever the case is he was having a battle in himself that he literally was completely undecided as to who he was. He followed and copied his girlfriend before sharply changing to doing what he felt was right, ossiclating between different behaviours and feeling anxious almost all the time that he resorted to secretive behaviour, playing games, aggressive. He refused to listen to me, consistently misunderstood what I was attempting to say to help him when I tried to get him to understand his anxiety that I gave up on him because it is exactly as you say, the subconscious "understands" what the conscious mind gives it. But, what if what it is given is irrational?
Everything about who we are is dependent on the quality and capacity to reason adequately and fear stands as an obstacle only because of its ability to influence irrational thoughts. To improve is really about ameliorating our knowledge, advancing our experience and ultimately broadening our language and this enables us with the capacity to interpret our past experiences and relate it to our currents beliefs or opinions, to understand the difference between a rational and irrational opinion, and thus form a stronger relationship with our intuitive system. "Since it is reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder."
Everything about who we are is also dependent on the quality of our relationships and connections with others, but particularly during developmental stages when our brains and personalities are beginning to form. Children can also experience anxiety, despite their brains not being fully developed; the anxiety can be caused by a poor caregiver - such as a dominating mother or an absent father - but in particular emotional distance or a lack of responsiveness to the needs of the child can cause significant barriers in the harmonious development of their personality. I knew a girl who had a very dominating mother and although she was in her mid-twenties, even a conversation about her moving into an independent lifestyle was simply unfathomable and evoked such irrational fear in her that one would think her life was threatened. There was nothing of the sort, but her mother's behaviour had taught her to believe that disobeying would be "bad" and made her respond to the suggestion with intense anxiety as though I were "bad" for suggesting it.
When we reach a level of cognitive maturity, we have the capacity to reason and rationalise our responses and so it is up to her to find the courage to analyse her responses objectively and that takes knowledge and experience so that she has the capacity to identify those past experiences and connect them to her responses. Many people resort to other sources to articulate their identity, such as new ageism, religion or dogma, even some areas of metaphysics and sometimes even other people, functioning as a way to avoid this responsibility of beginning this process to rationalise the past. That is a different anxiety, this fear to think independently and there is an element of our learning but also it is embedded into our genes. We respond negatively to the concept of our separateness from others because our attachment to others is comforting; our brains seek the pleasure of this attachment and avoid this displeasure that we are separate, individual and thus alone.
This same anxiety can be seen in children who have attachment issues and other demonstrably negative behavioural traits caused by difficulties to connect to caregivers (the result of poor parenting for instance) such as feeling clingy or needy, desperate, suspicious, emotionally insensitive, all of which are merely responses that form during this pivotal time during childhood. When parents or guardians oscillate between different behaviours or say when there is a divorce or separation, such unreliability confuses and effects the child that they form irrational attachments and these behavioural responses continues through to adulthood. In addition, we are also socially and culturally often told that we are "bad" if we believe our caregivers to be wrong in someway and so we automatically assume some infallibility, but a rational approach in adulthood is to realise that our parents are just human and that we are now grown up and do not need to emotionally rely on them. That would mean accepting and transforming the entire structure of your mode of existence, hence the difficulty.
I think we understand each other sufficiently, and maybe agree on some key points enough, that I could probably attempt another approach to the topic of fear.
We are talking about the type of fear which comes from the subconscious, and is irrational. The conscious mind attempts to quell the fear, perceiving it as irrational. However, the subconsciously derived fear does not relinquish. such that we might say that the subconscious is "unruly" in relation to the attempts of the conscious mind to subdue the irrational fear. When attempts to control the fear in this way are unsuccessful, the inclination for the subject is to attempt to understand the subconscious, and understand the reasons for the fear. However, as discussed, and I think we agree, there is no avenue here. The conscious mind is incapable of understanding the subconscious, and these attempts would only lead to frustration.
So we must adhere to the principle that the subconscious needs to "listen" to the conscious, and not vise versa. If we look back at the childhood learning process, we can see that this is what occurs. The child takes things in, learned from others, through the conscious mind, and the subconscious "listens", and accepts what the conscious mind gives it. By the principle of freedom though, which underlies all these activities, there is no necessity that the subconscious "listen", So we can conclude that the subconscious only "listens" to the conscious mind if it has a certain disposition, which makes it want to "listen". As discussed, we can't really describe the activities of the subconscious with words like I am doing here, because it's actions are beyond those of the conscious mind which we apprehend with words. and that's why I put "listen" in quotations. But this is where metaphors serve us, so I'll say that it's like listening, metaphorically. And the disposition which the subconscious must have, in order that it "listens" to the conscious mind, is like "respect", or "trust". So I'll refer to this as a disposition of respect, metaphorically. The subconscious has respect for the conscious, and allows itself to be told how to behave.
Now we might say that principally this respect is innate, instinctual, genetic. We are born with this disposition in which the subconscious has respect for the conscious, and this is what allows us to learn through the medium of the conscious mind. However, if we look at very early childhood, infancy or babyhood, we might find a period of time where the interaction between the conscious mind and the subconscious, has the conscious mind focused more on culturing this respect, rather than actually trying to tell the subconscious anything. Do you see what I mean? It is necessary that the subconscious has a very healthy respect for the conscious, in order that the child can learn through the conscious mind, so this respect must ne nurtured. At this early time the conscious mind probably isn't even aware of needing to tell the subconscious anything, it knows no words, so it's entire relationship with the subconscious is one of enhancing this respect. Here we find the importance of the unconditional love of the caregiver. The baby's subconscious receives, and benefits from the love given by the caregiver, through the medium of the baby's consciousness. This loving nurtures and enhances the naturally existing respect which the subconscious has for the conscious.
Back to the irrational fear now. If we have an adolescent, or even an adult, in the condition where this respect is compromised, as I believe is the case with irrational fear which the conscious mind cannot quell, then there could be a number of reasons for this problem. First, we might consider that the innate respect, the biological, genetically produced condition might be compromised by some physiological disorder. Next, we might consider that the nurtured, enhanced respect, has been for some reason compromised. The person, as a baby might not have received the required love, or the love might not have been true and unconditional, so as to produce "suspicions", etc.. Furthermore, it's possible that a traumatic experience later in life might even be enough to compromise the respect which previously existed.
Hmmm I disagree with your interpretation of Aristotle here. In my view, Aristotle is making a meta-ethical claim, that ALL people desire and seek after happiness. Even a criminal, for example, commits the crimes he does with the view that they will be conducive to his happiness. Of course, the criminal would be mistaken, but it doesn't change the fact that from his perspective, he is pursuing happiness. He is wrong either about (1) what happiness consists of, or (2) the means of acquiring it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ok, yes, I see what you mean.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think you're taking quite a Platonic approach here, with the conscious being the rational aspect of the soul (which is also the "least numerous" in Plato's analogy with the perfect community), and with the subconscious being the appetitive part of the soul, which is the "most numerous". And reason's job is to "educate" the subconscious, and the subconscious must realise that reason aims at the good of all three parts, and hence will willingly obey.
However, there's also the Stoic approach which states that the rational part retains full control, since nothing gets done without the assent of the rational part. For example, regardless of how afraid or angry you feel, you must still assent, with your reason, to those feelings, in order to act according to them. So per this reading, it doesn't matter how the subconscious makes you feel - what matters is just how you exercise your reason.
Indeed, no clear avenue, but there is a way to reach that 'core' problem or to find out the root cause of those subconscious fears because they mostly exist through past experiences and it is about accessing that repository of memories and reasoning or calculating a number of possible factors that network the formation of this negative feeling. For instance, that girl has irrational fears of leaving home and venturing into independence because of a dominating mother and a normalisation of her behaviour culturally, but she is unaware of that consciously and she clearly ensures or fights any possible access to the truth by getting upset at those who bring it up and pushing them away.
Even so, the avenue remains unclear aside from the fact that we need to find the courage to stop deceiving ourselves, such as forgiving our parents and objectively recognising that they are human beings with flaws and that we need to take responsibility for our own life, ascertaining potential genetic affiliations and predispositions, understanding nutrition, sleep and how the brain works etc &c. For me, the sensation of anxiety all but disappeared the moment I stopped deceiving myself and the transformation was long and very painful. It mostly involved removing toxic people from my life and trying to resolve what being 'alone' actually meant by starting a clean slate. It took years of continuous errors, deliberations, a hefty amount of tears and even existentially wanting to just give up and shut down despite the protestations of reason. I am quite literally at peace and very happy within now, but the process was tough.
There are two types of fear as mentioned; that learned or epistemic fear because of our social environment and this is subconscious, and then the evolutionary, the one in the brain that desires pleasure and seeks to avoid pain and this instinctual prompt is without consciousness so completely unconscious; when we feel anxiety from something we learnt from our social environment, despite reason telling us it is irrational or silly, our brains instinctually mark the experience as a 'danger' or bad and seeks to immediately alleviate the feeling, sometimes even amplifying the anxiety as though attempting to clarify that it is really bad and needs to end. That prompts us to delude ourselves or escape from the feelings - even within mindfulness or new ageism - some people even continue living in a miserable relationship, or having toxic people in their life to stop them from facing the 'quiet' of their own mind. The conflict is really between the instinctual and the learned.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If language - as in reason or rational thought - is not serving us to articulate experience, stories seem to work as that next level of communication, like semiotics in that it provides symbolic connections between our experiences in a fictional story. This is why we dream and perhaps even the purpose of our imagination, that intuitive realm of communication. Sometimes (not all the time) our dreams are showing us those subjective, underlying problems and desires but the actual dream itself is completely fantastical and makes no sense until you attempt to interpret it. This is why writing your own story or painting or other creative arts helps us explain those deeper behavioural feelings as much as parables or allegories can explain underlying moral concepts without actually detailing what.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
(Y) Even just the warmth of presence, to listen, to play, to read and all this nurtures the child to develop correctly and makes the process of transcendence much more smoother. A human being requires love to be full functional.
Though it was not a formalized concept at his time Aristotle clearly believed in free will, as is evident from his discussion of the potential for future acts which must be decided upon. Your claim, that Aristotle believed all people desire and seek happiness is inconsistent with free will. It implies a necessary inclination toward happiness. He actually proposed "happiness" as something desired for the sake of itself, self-sufficient, and that this is self-evident. As a self-evident truth it is only self-evident to those who apprehend and comprehend it. So for those individuals who do not apprehend, and comprehend, with their conscious minds, that happiness is such an end, they will not desire it.
Quoting Agustino
Remember, I consider thinking as an act. This is described by Aristotle when we says that the contemplative life is the highest virtue, virtue being the property of an act. So if an individual has irrational fear, and is inclined toward thinking about the thing feared, without the assent of the rational mind, then this person is acting according to the irrational fear. Since this is often the case, then it is very clear that the rational, conscious mind does not maintain full control over the subconscious. The conscious is clearly influenced by the subconscious to do something irrational, to think about something which it is irrational to think about.
Quoting TimeLine
I have to disagree with you on this point. I think that there is no way to reach the cause of those irrational fears and anxiety from the conscious mind. You suggest that one could proceed on the basis of examining possibilities. This would be like trial and error. However, in trial and error by the conscious mind, there must be a clearly defined "success", such that we would know when the trial has success. In this case, we'd examine all sorts of possibilities with no way of knowing which is the correct one. Furthermore, it is likely that each of the possibilities contributes its own bit toward compounding the problem. So it appears to me, like there are no parameters for judging "success", in determining which of the possibilities is the correct one. Then there is no way of knowing whether any such understanding of the subconscious by the conscious is a correct one.
Because of this perspective, I think that this approach would only contribute to the problem. You mentioned that resolution of the problem requires that one stops deceiving oneself. I think that this belief, that one can get to the cause of the unruly subconscious, by examining one's experiences with the conscious mind, is a case of self-deception. The problem is that consciousness starts to develop when the child is a baby. The first stage in this development would be the development of the "respect" for the conscious mind, by the subconscious. The subconscious must develop this respect in order that it would allow that the conscious mind develops at all. So the relationship between the subconscious and the conscious, the respect which is necessarily there, is a property of the subconscious. No matter how the conscious mind pokes away at this relationship, trying to understand it, it only has a very narrow perspective, and cannot see the vast amount of factors which would influence the subconscious in developing and maintaining this respect.
Quoting TimeLine
It's not that language doesn't serve us in articulating our experience, it does serve us to articulate our conscious experience, but it doesn't serve us to articulate our subconscious experience. What we might do, for example, is produce symbols of expression, artistic forms, etc.. But these are expressions from our conscious mind, outward toward other conscious minds, which are meant to express feelings from the subconscious. When we turn inward with the conscious mind, toward the subconscious, we would have to determine, and translate the symbols of the subconscious, in order to truly understand it. We don't do this though, because these symbols are way out of reach down in the atomic, or molecular level. So we analyze the feelings, memories, and dreams, as how the subconscious appears to the conscious, with the words and symbols of the conscious mind. We like to think that these metaphors and artistic expressions are symbols of the subconscious, but they are really symbols from these lower levels of the conscious mind. This does not give us what is needed to truly understand. To truly understand it is required to determine how the conscious appears to the subconscious, not how the subconscious appears to the conscious.
Consider for an analogy, that the subconscious is a completely different person from the conscious. What we want to do is to determine why this person behaves like it does. To do this we have to get into the person's mind, determine the person's intentions. Immediately we're hit with the problem, what type of a mind does the subconscious have, what type of intentions does it have. We must afford it some form of intention because it can freely choose whether to obey or disobey the conscious. It would obey if there is consistency between what it wants and what the conscious mind wants. But if there is inconsistency, it would disobey, just like a person would disobey the laws if there is inconsistency between what the person wants and what the laws want.
Quoting TimeLine
I'm glad you agree. I think that the importance of true love is often underestimated. It is what is required to create that very special relationship between the subconscious and the conscious, as the conscious mind develops. Even if it has been missed in the early stages of development, it can be useful in later stages of life, but with probably less effectiveness.
I think your notions here are mistaken. Only what is under my control can be conceptualised as my action. If the action isn't under my control, is it really mine?
If I have intrusive thoughts which are presented to my mind without me directing my attention towards them, then these are clearly not "mine". They are something irrational that intrudes upon my mind, and I am free to assent or withhold my assent from them. So an intrusive thought isn't an action that I undertake, but rather something that happens to me. It's the same way that seeing something is only my action if I freely do it, but if someone forces my eyes to stay open and see something, then it's not my action.
There are also other important differences here that may be related that I quote from another thread:
Quoting Agustino
This is nonsense, and contradictory. "I have intrusive thoughts" implies necessarily, through the use of "I have", that the thoughts are yours. To go on and claim that they are not yours is contradictory. Trying to disassociate yourself from your irrational or immoral thoughts, as if the thoughts were not yours, does not absolve you from responsibility for these thoughts.
Quoting Agustino
No, it is quite clearly something you are doing, you are thinking. It is a completely inaccurate description to say that this is "something that happens to me". Even sensing is not something which happens to me, it is something that I do. You are very clearly taking an unrealistic approach here, with an extremely unrealistic description.
Yeah, they are mine by virtue of occuring in my mind, just as my perception of a tree is mine by virtue of the fact that the tree is in my visual field. They are not mine in the sense that I have freely chosen to have them. Because I have not freely chosen to have them, I cannot be morally responsible for them.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The argument here is a sophism. They are mine in one sense, and not mine in another. It is your failure to make the necessary distinctions there.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is very wrong. How can you be responsible for things that are not within your control?! Am I responsible for the thunderbolt outside?
And you are aware that relatively many people suffer of intrusive thoughts and associated disorders (like anxiety, OCD, etc.). Do you reckon that these people are morally responsible for their thoughts? That is almost a grotesque thing to say, that can bring a lot of suffering to such a person. Typically people who suffer of those thoughts do not want to have them, and are ashamed of them - they usually feel guilty about having such thoughts anyways, and part of the process of therapy in their cases is to understand that having those thoughts or not isn't within their control, they are under no compulsion to act on them, and they are just thoughts which happen to them - it doesn't mean they are immoral or sinful.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nope, because I don't want to think, it just happens by itself.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How is sensing something you do? Can you stop your ears from hearing?
No, I completely agree but what I am attempting to convey is that the process itself, of being able to articulate and examine their past and memories, to be able to understand causal connections particularly that of biological - including health and sleep - as well as genetic, of attempting to analyse and ascertain the authenticity of their perceptions, all this is the process that leads one toward the successful and indeed permanent alleviation of such anxiety.
This is because we begin to understand ourselves as an autonomous agent with better clarity and we begin to mature the existential properties that reduce ambiguous mental states, enabling us to exercise better control of our lives. The concept of "being born again" - removing any Christian connotations to this - is really just the ability to start all over again, to overcome the given way to interpret our perceptions and experiences with the external world according to our parents and friends and begin interpreting that independently or autonomously and that often means a complete transformation in their environment and the people that they associate with. A healthy psychology is a person who has achieved that kind of balance, that peace which leads one to happiness.
You can never directly know, but the process maximises our agency, the ability to feel, our moral well-being and virtuous conduct, and so we become distinct and our actions intentional and authentic. This is what 'wisdom' is, which is basically knowledge of our experience.
Praise science! I just love this subject...
Love is the foundation, in my opinion, the very core of who we are and this is clear in children who have caregivers that fail to provide adequate love or care that such neglect often has a massive impact right into adulthood, including anxiety and attachment issues. Our experience of love alleviates this feeling (hence why if you are in a relationship and feel anxiety, you do not love your partner) and for me that is proof that love is the source of all that makes us human; empathy, care, charity, it is moral consciousness.
When we are young, our perceptions have the solidity of something definite until we become aware of ourselves, at which point we lose this solidity and thus the source of our anxiety becomes this inability to acknowledge an indefinite existence, the fact that we are separate and alone. We don't like feeling helpless and so in our desperation we reach out, to a partner or friends or anything in the external world that we can attach ourselves to, conform and finally 'unite' to return back to that same solidity and definite feeling we had when young. But this solution, this union is all wrong, we trick ourselves and falsely fill that void. It is why what is commonly done to explain existence by the masses does not produce anxiety in us when we follow; anxiety is proof that we have a problem following, but we have not yet 'let go' - it is the unity between automatons that gives meaning through common approval.
People incorrectly believe in this idea that they have "fallen in love" when it is really initiated by the same conformism where sexual consummation is really an attempt to overcome the preceding loneliness. Such love fails so often in our society because we do not see the application of love to be rational but rather 'spontaneous' and so we do not correctly examine that we need to learn how to give it. We study courses or subjects over a number of years to gain a basic understanding of a subject, before proceeding further for another number of years working in the field to gain experience. Why is it that we neglect the study and practice of love? And it is not to one person, but to learn how to give it to all people, it is to basically be a friend.
As I said, I find your position here to be contradictory nonsense. You claim some of your thoughts are "in one sense mine", and in another sense "not mine", and you accuse me of failing to make a distinction. It's very clear that you are the one failing to make the distinction of what is yours and what is not yours, falling back onto contradiction, as if you can justify this failure with contradiction.
And you know full well that you are responsible for your own immoral thoughts, as is evident from "covet", "lust", and "adultery in the heart". So you cannot absolve yourself from responsibility by claiming that I haven't freely chosen my thoughts, therefore they are not mine.
Quoting Agustino
When you lose control of yourself in a fit of passion, you are responsible for your actions. Sorry, but that's just the way it is. You may find some legal defence if you have a diagnosable illness, but that's for the doctors to decide. In any case, if the doctors decide that you have an illness, then your thoughts are the thoughts of an ill person, therefore they are still your thoughts. Your insistence that your thoughts are in some sense not yours, is nonsense. In no sense are your thoughts not yours, that's nonsense. You're barking up the wrong tree here.
Actually, I'm not going to let you go on this one. What is this below?
Quoting Agustino
Is that not a distinction? Next time, you should put your glasses on, and perhaps read what is being said to you multiple times.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nope. Again, failing to make the required distinction. Things like "adultery in the heart" involves giving attention to thoughts of having sex with a woman other than your wife - ruminating on them. If the thought just comes into your mind, and you don't give it attention, then you haven't committed that sin. It's giving attention that you control, not always having thoughts.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, but why are you still responsible? Because you could have controlled yourself, through your reason, and failed to do so. Remember, regardless of what impressions you have (such as rage), you must still assent to them in order to take action based on them. That's why you are responsible.
OK, so this would be a process of understanding one's own conscious mind, self-reflection. Further, you seem to articulate that one can understand a relationship between one's biological health, and the health of one's conscious mind. Furthermore, an individual can ascertain that the health of one's conscious mind is dependent on a healthy biology.
Quoting TimeLine
This is a little more difficult for me to understand. I assume you are suggesting a situation where a person has had problems with the conscious mind, that it has not been completely healthy. You suggest that a "start all over again" is required. What does this mean in relation to the biological condition? The conscious mind forms and evolves through childhood, as we develop. It is in the middle between the environment and the subconscious which is the underlying biological condition. It is shaped by these two features. Are you suggesting that we can go back, "born again", and reshape the conscious mind?
If so, consider this. The subject may be able to release the present conscious condition to a certain extent. Also, appropriate environmental conditions may be provided for that person. And this may be conducive to some success. But the serious issue is the condition of the subconscious, which is a property of the underlying biological features. The principle which I discussed in my last post, is that in the early stages of conscious development, infancy, the subconscious, the biological features themselves, must be conditioned to properly accept the conscious mind. Assuming that we can't really understand how the subconscious is molded to properly accept the conscious, how could we properly deal with the subconscious in this rebirth process?
Quoting TimeLine
My proposal was that love is the means by which the subconscious, the biological is conditioned to better accept the conscious in the very early stages of conscious development. If this is the case, then we ought to ask how is it that love can affect one's biological features? This may be very simple, such as through eating right and sleeping right, but there may be other factors which reach much deeper. Consider the adult who needs the rebirth which you refer to. That person needs a reconditioning of the subconscious, the biological features which provide for consistency between the subconscious and the conscious. What are all the benefits which love can give?
Quoting TimeLine
The unity which you refer to here is "all wrong" because it is not the unity of true love. It is a unity of purpose. This person wants to be close to this other person for some purpose, and so on, just like "networking" except that the purpose is often not revealed, disguised as "friendship", or even "love". When the ulterior motive is revealed there is the inevitable disappointment, the feeling of deception. We can't go on living like this, where the appearance of love is just an illusion, a veil covering the ulterior motive.
Quoting TimeLine
That's right, love is not taught. I am not religious, but I believe that Christians used to teach love. I don't know if they still do though, because I've never been to Sunday School.
No, it's an illusion of distinction. That I freely choose to have something in no way provides any real means for classifying whether that thing is mine or not. That assumption is ridiculous.
You accept that the thoughts are yours, but you create this illusion, that because "I have not freely chosen to have them", they are in some sense not mine. But "freely choosing to have them" provides no real means for classifying whether a thing is mine or not. So your argument is absurdity.
You are such a sophist, you should get a prize for it, you know? It will be called Master Cum Laude of the Science of Eristic. (For the mods, don't think anything dirty, it's Latin).
So thinking is an activity (your words, not mine). If I do an activity without my consent - if that activity is forced on me, in other words - am I responsible for it? If a criminal takes my thumb by force and puts my fingerprint on the lock to the bank's safe, am I morally responsible for opening it for him? :s One cannot be morally responsible for things that lie outside of one's choice. Freedom of choice is a precondition for moral responsibility. So clearly, if an action is not freely chosen, it is not mine, in a very important sense of the term.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes it does - you have moral responsibility for the actions that you have freely chosen. So the fact that you do freely choose them is what makes them yours in the moral sense.
Thanks, I appreciate the respect.
Quoting Agustino
You've now resorted to standard determinism. If you believe in determinism, and think that you are not responsible for your acts because of determinism then so be it. That is your belief.
Quoting Agustino
No, even if you are for some reason not morally responsible for your actions, the actions are still in all respects, yours. Being absolved from moral responsibility does not in any way make your actions not yours. You're arguing absurdity.
Can you explain how the position I've outlined is determinism? Also please clarify what you mean by determinism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This makes no sense. The claim is that I'm not responsible for some actions because they are not mine in the moral sense of the term, so I cannot have moral responsibility for them, since I didn't choose them. Sure, my finger may have pressed the button, but it was forced by the criminal to do that - I never consented to it. So the action is "mine" if by that you mean that it is performed through my finger, but it is not mine in terms of its moral relevance - it belongs to whoever forced me in that case.
You continue with your faulty logic. You argue "if an action is not freely chosen, it is not mine, in a very important sense of the term". But you have no premise to support this conditional, it's based in an absurdity. You conclude that because I am not morally responsible for the actions therefore the actions are not mine.
You need a further premise to support your conclusion, and you cannot state that premise without contradiction. "A person's actions are not that person's actions if one is not morally responsible".
You've acknowledged the contradiction already.
Unless you can clear up this contradiction, you have no argument. How do you propose to separate the actions from the person, to support your claim that the actions are not the person's actions? Clearly, it doesn't suffice to say that we can separate the actions from the person on a basis of moral responsibility, because dogs, cats and other animals all have actions without moral responsibility. It is completely absurd to say that a cat's actions are "in a very important sense" not the cat's actions, because the cat is not morally responsible. Your argument is based in this absurdity, that a lack of moral responsibility provides a principle whereby we can separate the actions of an object from the object, allowing for the contradictory notion that the actions of the object are not the actions of the object.
I'll afford you some advice. Actions are attributed to things acting. If you can attribute your actions to something else, then you have a principle whereby you might say that the actions are not yours they are the actions of that other thing. Some for instance, have been known to insist that I am the conduit for God, God is thinking through my mind. Such an argument is commonly dismissed as lunacy though. But if you can explain what it is that your thoughts (as actions) are attributed to, other than yourself, then you provide the basis for your claim that your thoughts are in that sense, not yours.
Quoting Agustino
Again, this is all wrong. The action of pushing the button belongs to you. The action of forcing you to push the button belongs to the other. Even if responsibility for pushing the button is transferred to the other, this in no way indicates that the action itself is the other's. "Responsibility for", and "the action" refer to two distinct things.
If a person is resisting, which means the person's will is moving in a direction away from the button, then this would not be that person's action. The law recognizes intent. What is key is the direction of the intent, and whose force is being applied in that direction. Law, in this regard, understands the nature of human will applied in a specific direction. There is a mind and it is applying force. Outcomes are always uncertain.
Right, the law recognizes intent. But there is nothing to indicate that when a person acts under duress the act is not the person's act. That is contradictory, to say that the person's action is not the person's action, but it is what Agustino claims.
There can be over signs. Certainly the people involve will know who is forcing the act. Admittedly, sometimes motive and actions are unclear to anyone including participants.
It's not a question of who is forcing the act, it's a matter of who is acting, who's act it is. That's why motive and intention are irrelevant. Aqustino is trying to create the illusion that if an individual is not morally responsible for one's own actions, then those actions are not the individual's actions.
Love is a part of our rational faculty and there are conditions that are necessary before it can transcend to a level of authenticity to be rendered as 'true love' where two people embody all the forms of love through one another. Almost everyone believes that love is spontaneous and that if it were to be rationally applied it must therefore be in contravention of this 'real' but that is just an imagined or delusional way we fool ourselves into forming bonds with people to escape from our loneliness. The 'real' here is that the emotional bond or attachment we have and so conversely when people attach for economic or sexual reasons they actually lack 'love' and when you focus on this latter example, it is lacking in humanity or what makes us human. There is no 'love' in a trophy wife or girlfriend, there is no 'love' for a man who works and brings home the money. The question is how can we form this bond rationally and with authenticity?
When I say "start all over again" or "be born again" it is finding the capacity (and the courage) to understand the network of our relationships from social or environmental, genetic or biological, epistemic or instinctual that forms our perceptual interpretations and this is achieved through rational thinking. We begin to choose for ourselves and this autonomy enables us to remove toxic people from our lives despite having emotional attachments to them, it makes us choose people to associate with that are worthy and that you feel good when you are around. We are endowed with the capacity to objectively become conscious of our own existence or to become self-aware and this self-awareness is in part achieved by our relationship with the external world. We begin to use our rational faculty rather than blindly conform to or follow those in our environment.
What makes us human or gives us humanity is our moral substance, this empathy or ability to care for others, so it is about giving love and not specifically to an object but the rational application of being empathetic, caring, desirous to see the negative improve. Love is moral consciousness and this is impossible if one blindly follows the herd, thus being an autonomous agent in order to be rationally self-aware is a pre-condition to this moral consciousness. One cannot love unless they are an autonomous agent and when we authentically and consciously understand how to give love, it reshapes our perceptions of the external world. Which means, we begin to see the world differently that we are no longer what we once were; transcendence from blind conformism.
While there is no exclusive capacity to undertake introspection without there being some limitations since any examination of our mental states are riddled with perceptual inaccuracies, I think that externalism is probably a better way of looking at introspection since the language that enables us to interpret the content in our minds is in part determined by our social environment. The epistemic possibilities thus enables a transmission of information that strengthens a better understanding of our own thought processes.
True love is two autonomous agents who recognise and improve one another by sharing this examination and analysing these perceptual inaccuracies; they form a bond because they are for and respect what is good and right and this bond is an eternal friendship. This love is forever because when two autonomous agents 'connect' they connect rationally and it is rational to accept the entropy of our existence and that nothing is forever. I could meet a man who is also this autonomous agent and we could love one another, share in sexual experiences, even marry, but these experiences will change and eventually end, but the friendship wont (the love itself).
I'm inclined to disagree. I don't see how love could be part of the rational faculty. Conventional wisdom tells us love is of the heart, not of the mind. To me, love is an affection which inspires an attitude of giving toward others. In order that it is true love, this goodwill towards another cannot be motivated by any expectation of receiving anything in return. The motivation for the acts of love is the affection, the love itself. So the reason for the occurrence of loving acts is the love itself, but there cannot be a reason for the love because this would imply that the love was motivated by something else. The love cannot be motivated by something else because it would not be true love to expect that the love would bring something in return.
Where I look to find the exemplar of true love is in the love which a parent has for a child. Does a mother love her baby because she thinks that it's rational to do this? One might argue that the mother rationally apprehends that the baby needs love, and is therefore driven by her rational mind to love the baby, but I don't think that this is the case. I think that the mother is driven by the affection itself, the feeling of love, not by the rational faculty telling her that the baby needs love.
So here's the question to ask concerning the relationship between love and the emotional bond. Is it really the case that love causes bonds between us, or do the bonds between us pre-exist causing love within us. If it's not the rational faculty which motivates us to love, then there must be some sort of pre-existing bond which is the cause of love. We can't truthfully say that love causes the bond because then there would be no motivation to love in the first place. So the bond must pre-exist in some manner, as the cause of love.
Quoting TimeLine
I would say that this is where rationality comes into play. if the bonds which we have toward others pre-exist the love which we have for others, then we would be naturally inclined toward loving every other person as having some type of bond with those people. But the rational mind tells us that this is not good, it tells us that we ought to be discerning in deciding who is worthy of our love.
Quoting TimeLine
I would agree that we are autonomous agents, but at some deep internal level, we are already bound to others, and this bond causes use to feel love for others. So we are free, but our freedom is bounded, restricted by love. The need to love is as deep as the freedom itself and it limits our freedom. So the empathy we have toward others, the need to care for others, the love we have for them, is restricting the freedom of the autonomous agent. The conscious, rational, mind is caught in the middle, trying to make sense of all this, trying to strike a balance between the free autonomous agent, and the need to love and care for others.
Quoting TimeLine
So I would not describe "true love" as a relationship between two individuals. I would describe it as the affection which one individual has toward others. How that person restricts one's loving actions toward others is a function of that person's rational, conscious mind. Each of us must make conscious choices about how we will restrict the love and care which we have for others, using conscious effort to break those bonds that are deep within us, which cause us to love, but also restrict us as autonomous agents.
Love is not something independent of us and while indeed our will or motivation enables concepts to be authentic or genuine, it returns back to our original discussion about anxiety and the heart. What we feel without words is our 'real' self embedded into our subjective or intuitive emotions that we cannot articulate or describe. I believe that the root of all anxiety lies in our unwillingness to accept or understand our separateness or autonomy and when we start to become conscious of our self-awareness, without the right mechanisms to enable a proper transcendence toward becoming an autonomous agent, anxiety is thus borne. The responsibility of our aloneness is too difficult to accept because that would mean that everything - including how we interpret our experiences - are translations that have been given to us and not 'real' (since our will or motivation enables authenticity).
We get anxiety because we simply cannot understand or articulate how to transcend and start learning to think for ourselves, so we escape from ourselves, follow others, do what others expect, form bonds or relationships with people - even if they are shit people - and so give up rational thinking to conform to society. They give up their self. The attachments these people form are what is generally imagined as love, this external, emotional force given to them - and indeed they do form attachments to people who present themselves in the way that is socially accepted - and because it is not there own choice there is no authenticity behind these attachments. These are the types of people who present themselves as normal but do bad things behind the scenes, or who have terrible anxiety or depression, or who lack complete empathy that they see others as nothing but objects for sexual or economical purposes. These people make every effort to be loved by presenting qualities about themselves that are loveable like attractiveness, power, money, popularity.
Yet, none of them know how to be loving, to give love - just like how they cannot think for themselves - because to know how to be loving or to give love, one needs to transcend to that level of autonomy - they need to be able to think for themselves and dislocate their attachments to the people in their environment. You need to accept that you are alone. You are separate and no unity is ever really possible - this is rational - and that in our separateness we are only a part of the overall whole and thus symbolically there is unity. Our attachments should thus be to Forms - concepts like goodness, virtue, righteousness - as we endeavour to improve ourselves through the external world and that is how we learn to give love and not to an object.
If there is unity possible, it is only when you meet someone conscious as you are, who is also independent and autonomous and who understands what this transcendence implies, which is the will or motivation to moral giving. Two such people are capable of giving love and share in this experience of improving themselves through one another. They are not compelled by false or inauthentic drives to conform into society and lose the self along the way. They are both rational, autonomous agents who form a friendship that share the same understanding and this friendship is forever - symbolically - and if they share experiences of sexual, emotional and economical unity together, despite knowing it is fleeting and can end, nevertheless will continue to care for one another because they know how to give love.
They love the other person because they symbolically represent or epitomise those Forms or concepts - goodness, virtue, righteousness - and so you admire them for who they are, just as much as you would feel overjoyed seeing good things happen.
I think it may be a mistake to describe "love" in this one-sided, subjective way, as if it were a part of one's autonomy. In reality love is always two-sided, the lover and the beloved, and this makes love more like a part of something which negates one's autonomy, it connects us. The lover is always loving another, and this creates a connection with the other. Also, if we ask where did the love that a person has, come from, we look back to see that the individual was borne into this world by the love of others, such that the person's existence, one's very being, is dependent on this giving of love, from others before and after birth. So love cannot be an aspect of our "separateness or autonomy", it ought to be understood as an aspect of our connectedness and unity.
Have you read Plato's "Symposium"? If not, you should, it's very beautifully written with layers of subtleties (as is Plato's style), making it a fine read. The participants are reclined on couches, in a particular order around the room, and after having their lips sufficiently plied with wine they decide to follow this particular order, with each member producing a story to describe Love. The duality of love is quickly exposed, and one person produces a myth about people having been cut in half in ancient times, by the god of Love, so people are now always longing to find their other half. When it comes to Socrates' turn, he says I had a teacher Diotima who taught me about love affairs, so I'm not going to tell you myths or stories, I'm going to tell you the truth about love.
First he describes how love is in the middle between have and have-not. This is important because it demonstrates how love is not derived from the rational mind, it is actually contrary to reason. You can see why it is irrational because it defies the law of excluded middle. Aristotle later categorized as "becoming" all those things which defy the law of excluded middle, and characterized these things with "potency" in his biology, and "matter" in his physics. So "love" refers to a person's position in becoming, between not-having and having, and this describes its relationship with desire.
Moving on, Socrates describes what it is that is desired, and that is the beautiful. So there is a relationship between the lover and the thing loved such that the thing loved is the beautiful. Love lies between the subject and the object which the lover apprehends as beautiful. This is very similar to Plato's later renditions of "the good". But "the beautiful" is the raw form, without the implications of utility or pragmatic concerns of 'the good", so the beautiful is more primitive, and more representative of the irrational nature of love. Further, Socrtaes has been taught by Diotima to recognize beauty itself, as something brought about by the creative act of love. The person apprehends the object of desire as beautiful, and acts to bring that object of beauty into existence through creation. An individual may have a desire to procreate, and this act of bringing to life children, creates something beautiful. Also, an individual may have the desire to make something, produce something, or achieve something, and this also creates beauty. The climax of the story is reached when the student of love recognizes that all these acts of creation produce something beautiful by means of being the same type of act, creating, apprehending that all created things partake in the Idea of the beautiful. Then the beauty of all human products and institutions may be apprehended as partaking in this same beauty, the beauty of creation.
For Plato, this describes the relation between our temporal selves, and the eternal, the desire to create. And we can see three levels of the desire to create (love); to procreate extends one's temporal existence through one's offspring; to be an artificer extends one's temporal existence through the artifact created; and to be a creator of ideas extends one's temporal existence through the social conventions and institutions represented by those ideas. The artificial is the authentic, in the sense that there can be no doubt that it is of the author.
Quoting TimeLine
So I see this in the very opposite way as you. Transcendence is to go beyond that level of autonomy, to find the unity with others, that inheres within each of us, which is implied by the existence of love, art, creation, and all that is artificial. It all appears as irrational and unintelligible to the rational human mind which depends on reason for guidance, because love is of the realm of becoming and cannot be comprehended by the logic of the rational mind. But when we turn to love we gain an approach to artistry, production, and creating, our relationship with temporal existence, and the true unity which love is an aspect of.
Quoting TimeLine
Now society with its laws of conformation is itself a creation, created by love. It is created by autonomous and independent individuals who are driven by love, the apprehension of temporal existence, and the underlying unity which is responsible for the creation of their own being and existence. These laws provide us with a created, rational approach to all which lies around us, the natural world. The autonomous, rational human being adheres to the fixed laws, as one's relationship with the eternal, the eternal laws of nature, in its effort at timeless enterprise. But the natural world is a world of matter, potential, and becoming, so the timeless enterprise of eternal laws is not real, it's an illusion, being itself a creation of human minds. So the rational mind may be drawn into a realm of self-deception, unable to pull out from this false conception of the eternal.
The rational mind thinks according to the laws of logic, in terms of have and have not, is and is not, and deceives itself into thinking that this "must be the case", that all questions of truth are answerable with is or is not. In this way it is in complete ignorance of the truth and reality of temporal existence. In reality, what "must be the case" is only relevant to the past. In relation to the future, there is no such thing as what "must be the case". The rational mind of the autonomous self is lost in contradiction, believing oneself to have freedom, yet at the very same time not believing the principle which allows for freedom, that with respect to the future there is no such thing as what "must be the case".
Now anxiety is manifest because the rational mind is trapped within the self-deception of attempting to determine what cannot be determined. Anxiety is the result of a trap which the rational mind sets for itself, by not having respect for the potency and power of time. The rational mind apprehends time as something to be subdued and rendered rational, under the precepts of timeless principles. But being a falsity, this frustrates the mind to no end. By turning to the irrational "love", the rational mind gets a true glimpse at the irrational nature of time through creation and temporal existence, becoming, thus allowing for a comprehension of temporal existence which otherwise would be incomprehensible as irrational. Ultimately, the irrational "love" must be allowed to overrule the rational autonomous mind of the individual, to rid oneself of the self-deception, and provide a true temporal perspective, if the rational mind has become frustrated by these rational principles which are contrary to the truth. Following logical principles which are untrue is a sign of an unhealthy soul. Turning the mind toward love, though it is irrational, is to turn the mind toward truth.
Love can only be possible under autonomous conditions and so many people believe love is somehow unconditional. If that were so, why - realistically - are there so many examples of how unsuccessful love is, of how miserable people can be in relationships, or how obvious it is that it is not lasting? People form attachments based on false perceptions that they have conformed to from their social environment because they are consistently told that love is irrational or illogical, that it is beyond them in someway, given to them and that they must sacrifice themselves and let things be.
How stupid!
This is the same with those who have anxiety or depression; that is our voice and we are speaking to ourselves but we cannot articulate what it is attempting to convey, and while it is all coming from within us, how can you assume that being rational is wrong when it is being rational that would allow us to understand what it is trying to say? Just because we do not understand what we are saying to ourselves through our feelings does not mean it makes no sense, but it makes no sense only because we are not rational enough to understand ourselves independent from the social conditions. Having transcended to autonomous agency, our agility to use our mind and our observations or perceptions of the external world, our identification with it and understanding of it becomes objective, it has that sense of clarity and only then can a person know how to love.
You can only give love to the world rationally or appropriately when you have learnt to love and respect yourself, because only then are you even capable of giving love. Otherwise, how you give love is faux, adapting to the social requisites and indoctrinated perceptions given to you. The problem with your view about this whole negation of one's autonomy is that you assume the latter (to love yourself) to be a type of self-conceit or arrogance, probably because you have mistaken the vast majority of people who are conceited to love themselves, that, and moral worthiness to be a type of self-sacrifice or meekness and solitude.
On the contrary, these are just archetypes and people who are self-conceited actually hate themselves just as much as moral pretenders have learnt to present themselves as meek; liars are incapable of loving. Their identification with the external world is not independent or autonomous, it is just a game or a presentation as they react or identify to the social conditions in different ways. They are mindless in their approach to love and then state love is illogical as though attempting to justify their refusal to accept their own autonomy.
While love is paradoxical, it is a result of the human condition, of us being capable or being aware of our own existence. When we are capable of accepting this existential reality - hence overcoming the fear to let go of all the false perceptions given to us and where we have epistemically adapted to our identification to the world around us - we become rational or objective in our approach and no longer see the world as it is given to us.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, a rational mind thinks according to reason and common sense that includes logic and as Voltaire once said, common sense is not so common.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Let me break LOVE down for you.
When you are trapped in a mind conformed to social requirements as per your learning, one continues to "love" only specific people or objects and it is usually those who "love" them return (which is really just acceptance or a type of social congratulations for following these unwritten rules), and that gives one that sense of unity because such social acceptance alleviates the anxiety we feel since it enables or justifies our conformism and silences our desire for autonomy. Ignorance is bliss. To do this, they themselves make every effort to be loving or to have the qualities that make them loving, such as physical attractiveness, popularity, wealth, even being lovable as a person. All of this is really just a group of people trying to be loving by conforming or following and no one is actually giving love.
They are incapable of giving love and they continue throughout their lives to play games with themselves by trying to convince others that they deserve to be loved, others who can never be convinced because they are doing the exact same thing. They are not rational.
When you are elevated to a level of autonomous agency and begin identifying with the world independently, you are capable of true love and this is love to all things and not objects. This capacity to give love to all things is really defined as moral consciousness, and so that feeling within is real or authentic. What that means is that when you have learnt to give love rather than want love, you are actually being loving and not falsely.
An autonomous agent can see or perceive the world correctly and they can see that most people are blindly conforming. This is very isolating. I have always said that no one can see me for this reason. As true love or moral consciousness is to love all things and not something specific, all things are symbolic of the form of Good. It is our capacity to understand virtue, righteousness, justice and to apply ourselves by giving this to the world around us, rather than attractiveness, power, popularity which is just our desire to want. So, those who are capable of giving love because they are rational or autonomous form another group - albeit a very small one - and so this bond between two rational, autonomous agents is real or genuine because of how they identify with the external world.
Because moral consciousness is symbolic to the identification of Good, our love for a person is really our love for them for adopting the principles of Good. We admire them for being virtuous, righteous, just and applying themselves accordingly. We connect with them because they are autonomous, rational. They actually communicate and understand one another rationally, unlike the cohort who blindly follow.
This unity is symbolic. I have never fallen in love and I am still searching. I believe in this rational, authentic love that I write above so much so that I am waiting rather than attempting to alleviate this isolation by forming faux attachments. My desires are not in control of my motivations neither do I care about societal expectations of what apparently makes a perfect man, but I can rationally determine and can see straight through liars and they make up a vast majority.
I have said earlier that no one can see me because I have yet to meet a man that is not blindly following in some way, neither have I met a man who has the courage to let go of his past as well as his social conditions to improve himself and epitomise this form of Good - to be capable of giving love through virtue, righteousness, justice - rather than focusing his attention to try and be lovable through power, popularity or money.
I have not met a man who I admire and this admiration is what is beautiful. Someone who can think for themselves, who stands apart from society, who understands how to give love to all things and thus is capable of moral consciousness. Someone who can feel the world around him, to be a part of it and improve it just as he would himself.
Someone who is conscious and can see, likewise, who I actually am in return. Only when two people are capable of giving love - rather than wanting it - can actually know how to give love to one another.
>:O >:O >:O
Your theories on love are somewhat hilarious :P
The love is palpable.
Yes, TimeLine has moved to a new form of philosophy, whereby we show what we mean through our way of acting, not through what we say X-)
All right, I can accept this principle. When it appears like love, internal feelings, emotions, and things of the subconscious are illogical and irrational, it is not really the case that they are, what is really the case is that the conscious mind is being irrational by trying to understand them through principles which do not apply. Love is not really contrary to reason at all, it's just that the rational mind hasn't developed the principles required to properly understand it, so it attempts to understand with principles that are not suited. Because love doesn't conform to these principles, it appears to be irrational, when in reality the mind is being irrational.
So for instance, these things in the category of becoming, like matter and potency, which Aristotle demonstrated defy the law of excluded middle, are not really irrational or illogical at all, it's just that the conscious mind would be irrational if trying to understand them with conventional logic. The development of modal logic for example, would render these things intelligible. What about love then? As Plato described, it is derived from this category of becoming, but it has a deeper element which expresses, or displays the beauty of its true essence in creativity. From sexual reproduction through all artistic endeavours, to the creation of mores, social customs and institutions, the beauty of love's creations is there for the rational mind to observe and behold. What kind of principles can the rational mind adopt, to comprehend this seemingly incomprehensible beauty?
That's why Plato turned to "the good", because the good makes all the beauty of creation intelligible. It gives a reason to this creativity, it is good. But by doing this we open up a pitfall for ourselves. Unless we can say what it is good for, then "the good" of all these beautiful creations, i.e. the claim that they are "good", is just deception. Under this guise of deception, love is lost, and all these beautiful things become very ugly.
Quoting TimeLine
If we allow that true love is not unconditional, then we must give a reason for love. As is evident from what Socrates has learned from Diotima, the reason for love is creation. Where love is evident to us is in the beauty of things which are created. So we can infer that love is behind, as inspiration for the creation of these beautiful things. Love creates. Of course that is most evident in the creation of children, but as Socrates indicated it takes teaching to learn to see the love behind all the other created things, right up to the institutions of humanity. They are all inspired by love.
If people are unsuccessful in love, as you describe, then these people misunderstand love, and are expecting the wrong thing from it. As we said earlier, love is not well taught in our society, so our social environment does not really prepare us for love. If one approaches love without the true perspective, which is the desire to create something beautiful, then that individual has no idea of what they want from love, and could get locked into a relationship of forever searching for what love can give, finding nothing, being miserable and frustrated. If one approaches love with the true perspective, then that individual will judge the potential partner for their merits and capacity for creating that thing of beauty which is desired, just like the artist chooses the palette. The artist knows the right and wrong colours, and if the wrong colour has been chosen, takes measures to correct the mistake immediately. But if the artist has no idea of what is being created on the canvas, how could the artist know whether the colour is the right or wrong colour? Likewise, if the lover has no idea of what is wanted from the relationship, the beautiful thing to be created, how can that lover know if the beloved is the right or wrong person.
Quoting TimeLine
Contrary to what you say here, I perceive that in our society there are virtually no social requisites, no indoctrinated perceptions of love. The perceptions of love in the population are so varied and scattered that there is no convention, no indoctrination. Not only does this leave the autonomous individual with no clear approach to relationships with others, but also no approach to what it means "to love and respect yourself". So it is one thing to say that the lover must learn how to love and respect oneself before being able to give love, but if that person has not been taught what it means to give love, how can that person give it to oneself? Where does the person ever learn this, except from the love which has been given to that person as a child? And in recognizing that the love necessarily came from someone else, the person's autonomy must be surrendered in order that the individual can recognize and understand what love is. The person cannot love oneself without understanding what love is. This requires learning what love is. And learning what love is is to see that my very existence is dependent on the love of others. To understand what love is is to surrender one's autonomy. That is where we have to accept as a rational principle, that which appears to the conscious mind as irrational, making the rational mind conform to love instead of doing the inverse which is impossible. If you fail to surrender your autonomy, then you have failed in learning what love is, and you will fail in any attempt to love yourself.
Quoting TimeLine
To be aware of one's own being is to be aware of the conditions of becoming. This is to be aware that one's being has come from something else. Our existence is dependent on those who brought us into this world, so when we consider temporal extension, autonomy is an illusion. Our autonomy, our freedom, is a function of the present moment. Descartes misleads us, saying I am at the present moment thinking, therefore "I am". But this "I am", of the present moment is not being at all, it's just a moment of becoming as described by Hegel. Being, existing, is to have temporal extension. To be aware of one's own existence is to be aware of one's place in time, to be aware that one's self is just a moment of becoming in the temporal extension prior to one's self, and posterior to one's self. Phenomenology is very relevant. Descartes misrepresented his own existence. He wanted to be, so he represented "I want to be" with "I am". But saying what you want, doesn't make it so, and that is why some form of phenomenology is more appropriate for understanding the true human condition.
Quoting TimeLine
You seem to be blind to the true role of love in our society, and that is its creative power. Did your mother not love you? Do you not attribute your existence to the love of your parents? How can you deny this biological unity between you and your parents, as if love were nothing more than a social convention? Is this not a real biological unity to you? And is love not an aspect of this biological unity? If love is an aspect of this biological unity, how can you portray it as social convention and unwritten rules? Clearly love cannot be described in terms of "social requirements", "social congratulations", or "social acceptance", because it is a feature of the biology of the organism, not a feature of society. Social institutions are a creation of love.
Quoting TimeLine
So I would assume that to elevate oneself to the level of autonomous agency is to apprehend oneself as a biological organism. To truly understand love, is to perceive it as a property of the biological organism. So to be capable of true love is to be capable of loving according to what is appropriate to the biology of the particular organism, and this is regardless of social conformities, and social requirements, etc.. Then all these social conventions ought to conform to true love, otherwise they'll become irrational principles, by which we'll be attempting to understand love through principles which are inapplicable.
Quoting TimeLine
And if I understand you correctly, you are saying we ought to follow love, which is a property of each individual biological organism, rather than blindly conforming to social conventions. It would be this blind conformation, to principles which are not necessarily consistent with the love that the individual has, which causes confusion and anxiety for the person.
Quoting TimeLine
The unity is not really symbolic though, it is a real unity of dependence. The created is dependent on the creator. The relationship between them is love, and it is not merely symbolic. Suppose you desire a relationship of love. This is a desire to create something beautiful, a loving relationship. If it comes about, in the future, that you create this beautiful relationship, then the you of the past is still real as creator of this thing of beauty in a relationship with it, which is more than symbolic. it is a relationship of dependence.
Quoting TimeLine
Perhaps you should not include letting go of the past, as a condition. There is always a relationship of dependency between the past and the present, as well as the present and the future, and this makes us who we are. It is not to assert determinism, and deny the possibility of change, but to recognize that we are biological organisms. We cannot change the biology of the person to be according to rational principles, so we need to change our rational principles to be in harmony with the biology of the person.
(Y)
Exactly. So, when a person conforms or follows and has yet to transcend to become an autonomous agent, he is incapable of 'true love' because he simply cannot consciously and rationally understand what that actually is. He instead forms symbiotic attachments to people or objects based on his social environment that enables him to be accepted and congratulated as he seeks only to be loved. This 'anxiety' within him is telling him through his feelings that something is wrong with this, but he just doesn't get it. We are loving or moral by our very nature, but it only switches on or is authentic when we become conscious of our own existence and accept our separateness, thus when we become capable of thinking rationally. That is when we become aware of right kind of person and have the courage to go against our family or friends to follow our heart because we see the beauty in goodness and not what we have been taught to think is beautiful that we blindly follow and accept.
Problem here is that people are becoming better and better at prolonging the blindness, making submission to this conformism more tempting, more trustworthy. Being irrational is appearing more and more reasonable. But I can tell because a person incapable of being a friend is incapable of understanding love. Friendship, to me, is the very symbol of empathy, because those that lack moral consciousness refuse the virtue of happiness and respect in others and only care for themselves and those objects that they need.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Some people think that our memories are recorded and that when we reflect, we are rewinding and playing those moments as they are. This is not true. Our brains are dynamic, improving as we continue to learn and progress and when we reflect, we are reinterpreting, adding to existing gaps, forming connections that were never actually there in the first place. We continuously reconstruct our own memories and history and so, if you really think about it, there is even neuroscientifically an arrow of time that compels us forward as we progress and while our past experiences are embedded in this process, our memories are actually what you are at this very moment. There is no 'past' and 'we' are just symbols of our experiences.
This is why symbols is a very interesting aspect to how we identify and interpret our experiences, the idealism here that makes stories, parables - even dream interpretation - all dependent on this symbolic realm that has a language independent of words. A sign, for instance, holding up my fore and middle finger forward speaks of 'peace' and parables say one thing but mean something else. Meaning is beyond language and that is why moral concepts like virtue, righteousness, justice - love - is all beyond what we can articulate. I mean, we can draw inferences to particular objects or experiences, but we never able to explain the very form of beauty, or good.
So, when you say:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We desire a story that we interpret through symbolic representations that gives us meaning. Our life is just a story.
How sad it is for a vast majority who play minor characters doing the same bullshit that everyone else is doing. They haven't created their own story, they just play a silent, inconsequential part thinking that the applaud is to them.
I see things differently. What you describe, I apprehend as only a first step toward transcendence. This recognizing oneself as an autonomous agent only puts one into a position of selfishness. The person has distanced oneself from the conforms of society in an effort to find one's true position. But that true position will not be found until the autonomous agent manages to establish a relationship back with society. So this maturing process must consist of both of these two steps, to avoid selfishness. Otherwise the autonomous agent who has broken the ties of conformity, to find one's true authentic being, would not re-establish any connections with society, isolating oneself like the Unabomber.
So the person who has broken these ties of conformity and found one's authentic being as an autonomous agent, must now find love to transcend one's own being and re-establish one's position in society. That's what's described in Plato's "Symposium"; Socrates in his education in love is taught to see the beauty in all the creations of humanity, all the institutions of society. What I described is that one has to find love within oneself, as an integral part of the autonomous agent. Once we recognize that there is such a thing as love, that it is real, within ourselves, and cannot be rationally negated, we see that even though it is inherent within our very being, it came from somewhere else. We can see that it came from our parents, and their love is responsible for our being. So the love which inheres within ourselves, as an integral part of the authentic, autonomous agent, came from somewhere else. I, the autonomous agent, did not create the love which is in me. And by recognizing that this love is real, the autonomous agent must recognize that the ties which one has to others goes far deeper than all the ties of social conformity which one is free to break, and which one actually breaks in becoming, and proving oneself to be an autonomous agent. The autonomous agent is the authentic being, but love as an essential part of the autonomous agent is the manifestation of a deep bond of unity which cannot be broken by the autonomous agent without a contrived and forceful denial of the reality of one's own love, which amounts to a deep self-deception.
Quoting TimeLine
Let's say our memory is like this. Each time one recalls a particular event, the event is reconstructed in the mind. The memory serves the self, so the authentic person has a desire to reconstruct the event exactly as it was, each time, thus preserving the event, in precision. The event is remembered much more clearly and precisely in mental images than it is in symbols like words, because the words can't capture everything, and they introduce ambiguity. So the authentic, autonomous agent, desires to remember things precisely as they were, in images, while the inauthentic puts words to the images, seeking a technique to communicate the event to others, rather than seeking to remember the event precisely as it was. So using words or symbols as a memory aid is an element of inauthenticity, and the inauthenticity is evident from the way that people embellish the events by changing the words in small ways.
Once the words are set to the memory, describing the event, the words are easier to remember than the images, and the authentic mind succumbs to the pressure of the inauthentic, giving up the images and the corresponding precision, allowing the event to be remembered in words. This bears heavily on your statement "There is no 'past' and 'we' are just symbols of our experiences.". If we are just "symbols" of our experience, then are we authentic, or are we inauthentic symbols? Do we symbolize our experience in images or in representations of those images, words? This is why Plato dismissed the narrative as unreal untrustworthy, and something to be avoided, because it is removed from reality by two places.
It puts one into a position of consciousness, a unity of apperception or consciousness-self consciousness and that objectively you are separate; transcendence is this awareness that enables your sensibility and understanding to be constructed rationally or honestly. This awareness of your own existence enables you to be conscious of the existence of others in space and time and that is the beginning of being empathetic, that you identify with the world around you and this is the exact opposite of being selfish. A person who blindly conforms does so because they are selfish, unable to give love and even if they technically do nothing wrong or immoral, their 'good behaviour' is only because they follow rather than actually feel, so you have it the wrong way around. An genuine, autonomous agent and this transcendence is the beginning of love - i.e., moral consciousness.
This love or moral consciousness thus unifies us with the world of objects in space and time, we care for all things and this is why I say that an indication of a person who has not transcended is a person who is unable to be a friend.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When we have reached this moral consciousness, meaning is no longer given to us but rather we form meaning of our self as part of objects in space in the observable world simultaneously with idealisms that we construct to understand our experiences symbolically - that we form meaning through a story of ourselves - and this is the unity between consciousness and imagination and why we are even capable of love and morality. The process following the moment we reach transcendence is really about practice, about articulating love and experiencing the 'I' in the 'We'. This is why God epitomises the ultimate and everlasting, the foremost symbol of Good and we begin to adapt our behaviour to explain how to be moral or loving. We are just a story because meaning is ultimately symbolic. So when you say:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is kind of interesting, because our interpretation of these symbolic inferences is really dependent on our understanding since it is about what we experience as a thinking subject, but it nevertheless depends on this unity between our experiences in the natural and observable world and the symbolic construction of our experiences that gives meaning to them. This is why being rational is essential, the absence of fear that causes us to retreat into the safety of conformism. Think of repressed memories and how we are capable of diluting our actual experiences.
Think of a biblical parable; there is a moral symbol in the story - the story itself is just a story put in words but the symbol is not articulated in the written format - and to understand the symbol is dependent on your own state of mind. If we articulate or put words to this symbol and explain that the parable means 'such and such', it loses the purpose of being a parable so to speak because people can believe that this parable means exactly 'such and such'. It is meaning that is given to them and they have conformed to, thus inauthentic. The purpose of the parable is no longer as it was supposed to be - our interpretation - because what is our interpretation is authentic.
This is our main point of disagreement now. I think that being self-conscious in no way necessitates any degree of empathy. This is why it is necessary to posit the existence of love, to account for the empathy which is observed. If the self-conscious being can establish autonomy by freeing oneself from the conformities of society, and this autonomy is authentic, then the relationship between this being and others is not necessarily respectful or empathetic, unless there is something like love within, which guides the autonomous, self-conscious agent in this direction.
Quoting TimeLine
This cannot be the "beginning" of love, because love must already be inherent within the autonomous agent. Having freed oneself from conformity, to become an autonomous agent, produces a position of no social obligation, or obligation toward any other person or thing including the feelings of empathy and respect. As an authentic, autonomous agent, the guiding principles for that individual can only come from within the individual, not society or anyone else. If the person does not find empathy and respect for others, within, then that person might find hate and disrespect, as my example of the Unabomber. The autonomous agent would be equally likely to turn hateful and disrespectful, as likely to turn empathetic and respectful.
But what we observe is that self-conscious autonomous agents are far more likely to turn empathetic and respectful than hateful and disrespectful. So there must be a reason for this, and that reason is love. Love cannot come to the person as a beginning, because that would imply no love already within, and this "beginning" would necessarily come from an external source, because a beginning consisting of something coming from nothing is impossible. But the autonomous agent has no inclination to accept anything, including love, from any external source, so we must conclude that one finds the love (or at least the kernel of love) as already existing within. That is why the person who turns to hate and disrespect can only do this through the means of a deep self-deception. If the love were not already there within, then any autonomous agent could freely turn to hate and disrespect. Instead, one cannot easily or readily turn to hate and disrespect, but must make an effort, and practise self-deception, suppressing the love within, to do this.
Quoting TimeLine
I think that there are two distinct ways of symbolizing things, two distinct forms of intention behind the act of symbolizing. Therefore there are two distinct types of meaning, according to that division. In the one case, the autonomous agent seeks a memory aid, and writes, marks, or takes note of something. This is authentic, because the goal here is to establish a clear, precise, and unchanging relationship between the symbol and the thing symbolized, as the autonomous agent desires a true memory. In the other case, the autonomous agent seeks to communicate something to others. In this case, the meaning is not true, it's inauthentic, because the intent of the agent is other than what is symbolized (meant) by the words. This is what allows for deception, the agent symbolizes what one wants the other to apprehend, not what is truly within the agent's mind. So inauthentic language (communication) works in this way, what is symbolized by the words is not a true meaning, while authentic language attempts to establish a true, precise, and unchanging relation between the symbol and what is in the mind.
Inauthentic language creates ambiguity, as an unavoidable consequence. I believe that the biblical parable makes use of the ambiguity found in inauthentic language, to allow that different people find different meaning in the same words, i.e., different interpretations. This is common in all sorts of artistic expression, like lyric and poetry. What is implied in the nature of the parable is that your interpretation is the true, or authentic interpretation despite the fact that it is different from the interpretations of others, which are also true and authentic interpretations.
Everything is about our will or motivations; our ego, reason and rational thought, knowledge, personality, all of what we are is dependent on our will. The problem is not the ego or the mind, neither is it society, but how our will motivates the ego or mind to act or think. We do not need to remove them completely in order to obtain some purity in our motivations, no annihilation of an ego - the 'self' - will make any difference. All we have is a healthy ego (moral consciousness) or a toxic one (i.e. narcissism) and our motives depend on this transcendence.
The ego regulates the decisions between our instinctual drives (immoral) and our conception of what is correct behaviour (moral) that we learn through our experiences with the external world, such as our family and society. Our instinctual drives are unconscious just as much as conforming to society and so one is not consciously malicious but rather mindlessly driven to act. There is a unity between these two - conformism and instinctual drives - where one has conformed to social expectations and so adapted to present themselves as "good" while underlying all that is a will driven by unconscious desires. This is why so many people do immoral things like cheating or other socially unacceptable acts while still pretending to be good; their "goodness" is just an act, an archetype to save them from getting into trouble (think Ring of Gyges). It is also why people have been driven by "love" to do bad things because their conception of love is wrong and why rational thought is imperative. In this situation, love is not the wrong, just the motivation; so why do we think that our ego is bad?
This love within that you speak of is moral consciousness. What I am saying is that "love" IS "moral consciousness" and one cannot love unless they are morally conscious. Love is not given to us by some gracious external force, it is something we already have but remains dormant until we transcend that mindlessness and where our will is driven by our understanding. There is still "ego" here, an egoism that motivates altruism because you exist and you are the one motivated to act. Altruism can be genuine or authentic because our ego is just the regulator between our unconscious drives and our rational values.
Returning back to symbols and imagination, when we become conscious of ourselves as separate to our environment, that we have the self-awareness and the capacity to think and take responsibility for our own behaviour, we begin to understand that others can experience the same (hence empathy) but the feeling - the feeling of pain or hurt at the suffering in others - is just projection, hence why one begins to give love or becoming morally conscious. It is a closer understanding of your own mental state and the emotional responses that you experience and we merely share in defining the psychological experience. You are mistaking this feeling as authenticating the experience, but feelings themselves are also dependent on our will or motivations; evil people can feel pleasure at the pain in others.
We could become "aware" that we have done wrong long after we have done it, and that could produce feelings of "guilt" and such feelings could arouse a change in our behaviour. The awareness is the key, the consciousness and the feelings follow that leads to moral behaviour. This is what I meant when I said "beginning of love" and the authenticity here is that an autonomous agent chooses willingly and independently to be "good" rather than driven by society.
What the will is, is not an easy question. There is much disagreement between people. We tend to tie "will" to "intention", such that if an act is willful, it is intentional, and vise versa. And intention is tied to purpose. But then people want to tie intention to consciousness as well, such that non-conscious things cannot have intention. However, we observe intention and purpose throughout biological organism, we see that even plants act with purpose, therefore intention. So if intention is tied to consciousness, this would incline some people to assign consciousness to plants. I like to break the connection between will and consciousness, such that will, as the motivation for action, is property of the subconscious. There is however, a from of willing which may be more proper to the conscious mind itself, and this is the will to refrain from acting, what is called willpower. It is through willpower that we resist temptations, and break habits which the conscious mind determines as bad. Willpower, the power to resist, is what I tie to the conscious mind.
Quoting TimeLine
If you accept my proposal, that the drive to act, the will as motivator, is deep in the unconscious, instinctual as you say, and also there is a conscious level of the will which gives us a restraint from acting, willpower, then you will see that the issue is very complex. Augustine, who was probably the first to discuss the nature of free will, grappled with this problem to a considerable extent. Plato demonstrated that virtue exists as the manifestation of a type of knowledge, but this exposed a deeper problem, that one can know what is good, and still do what is bad. So virtue requires more than just knowing what is good, it requires a method for preventing oneself from doing what is bad. As it turns out, this is what we call willpower, and it is necessary for the conscious mind to have willpower if it is going to have any control over the subconscious levels, because to enable morality, immorality must be prevented.
This is why Augustine describes free will as the means by which we free ourselves from the temporal existence associated with the bodily functions of the sensible world, allowing our minds to follow the true intelligible principles of the eternal realm. We do this through willpower. The important point being that we have no proper approach to the intelligible until after we restrain ourselves. Prior to restraint, the mind would be full of confusion and anxiety from the hypocrisy of always doing what one knows ought not be done. This is where Agustino made a good suggestion earlier in the thread, concerning meditation, because meditation is a practise of restraint.
Quoting TimeLine
If this is a function of the ego, then what the ego needs, in order to avoid anxiety and frustration, is will power. I believe willpower is something which can be cultured, encouraged, almost like we can make it a habit to restrain from habits. Meditation was one suggestion, but I'm a very active person, and I like to encourage myself toward doing a large variety of different things to avoid falling into habits. I practise willpower by doing things I otherwise wouldn't be inclined to do.
Quoting TimeLine
So I wouldn't characterize this love within as any form of consciousness. It is right at the core of our instinctual, biological, being. We all feel a need for social relations, companionship, sexual relations, etc.. As fundamental needs, we feel selfish desires like the desire for food and the means for personal subsistence, but we also feel the desire for social relations which is derived from love. I think this love is inherent within all living beings, other animals show love, insects have social relations, and Peter Wohlleben for instance, argues in "The Hidden Life of trees" that trees have complex, and particularly loving, social relations through their roots. This is what I mean by the love within, it's inherent and fundamental to our being, as an integral part of life itself. And that's why I argue that to deny it, and turn toward hate, disrespect, and resentment toward others, in a general way, requires a deep self-deception. This would be similar to denying that being alive has any significance. However, these characteristics which I assert are the manifestations of love, (we might call this the beauty of the living world) are not easily apprehended by us as derivatives of love. So we need teaching and guidance in this direction.
Moral consciousness would be one such derivative, a manifestation of love. But consciousness takes us to another level, the level at which willpower plays a role. And willpower has the capacity, to an extent, to suppress the instinctual, biological activities, whether they are selfish acts of subsistence, or loving acts of social relations. Then the conscious mind may be influential on the basis of decisions concerning what ought and ought not be done. The conscious mind must itself be watched though, because it may be selfish, and this is evident from our tendency to rationalize things. When we find reasons for doing things which we know are bad, we rationalize, to make these things appear to be good. So as much as we might find it necessary to suppress some instinctual actions which are derived from the deep inner love, for the sake of some moral principles, we must be careful not to be falling into a situation of rationalization. If there is not a high degree of consistency between the deep instinctual love, and what the rational principles of moral consciousness dictate as loving principles, then I think there is a problem. This is why I think that ultimately the rational mind must follow the principles of love, rather than vise versa, because the rational mind can make unloving principles appear to be good. But this cannot be good because it is contrary to the fundamental nature of being alive.
Quoting TimeLine
Yes, this is the point. The autonomous agent can apprehend oneself to be completely independent from society, and therefore make decisions based on one's own mind, not based on principles derived from society, what society wants of one. And, there is an inclination for that autonomous agent to choose what is good. But this is "good" in a sense completely different from the sense of "good" given by societal norms, because the autonomous agent has produced independence from the "good" of societal norms, and is free to choose one's own good. So it must be the case that the autonomous agent is guided by a sense of "good" which comes from deep within, intuitive, rather than learned from society. This is the love that is deep within. You might call it "moral consciousness" but I don't think it's a consciousness at all, because we don't really apprehend it with the conscious mind. It's an intuition, which is not molded by the conscious mind, but molds the conscious mind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is problematic; intoxication and criminal liability questions intent different to other crimes (mens rea). There is basic intent, but when someone is not conscious like they are intoxicated, how do we measure intent? While the law would not offer an acquittal for a crime committed during intoxication, the effect of the intoxication does 'direct' the individual to behave immorally that could reduce the sentence. If a person is mindlessly following and unable to ascertain the quality of his own mental state - while still guilty - if he does what everyone else is doing and if they do not see such behaviour as wrong, is it immoral?
What we need to prove there is some unity between action and intention, but if intention is a mental state there needs to be some awareness or consciousness that motivates action because you are doing it for a reason or with a purpose. It is therefore causally teleological. Reason itself is a mental state or a quality - a free choice - and the reason why so many people want to escape into determinism is to safeguard them from the frightening gloom of free-will and making bad choices. The intention therefore needs to be unified and in some way epistemically articulated. Psychologically, however, the quality of these choices can be formed through beliefs - think of ultranationalist political ideology - and determining the quality of such beliefs is even more complex.
Our instinctual drives are natural - a man wants to have sex with a woman - but these drives are unconscious. Like your comparative on plants or other biological organisms, our instinctual drives are a natural part of our biological system and the motivation it assigns is entirely propelled for the pleasure it offers like food to a hungry animal or pollen to a bee. It is evolutionary and beyond reason. This motivation is pleasure; if a man desires a woman because of such instinctual drives, he could try and justify it by forming a 'belief' that somehow his desire for pleasure is 'love' but the unity here is not real. Conformism or blindly following is automaton and the reason why people have this pathology of normalcy is due to the pleasure it gives having people accept you and appreciate you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a good point, but it brings to mind the Aristotlean conception of happiness: There are three prominent types of life: pleasure, political and contemplative. The mass of mankind is slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts; they have some ground for this view since they are imitating many of those in high places. People of superior refinement identify happiness with honour, or virtue, and generally the political life. I am thinking about a man who falls in love - authentically - with a woman that does not 'fit' in a positive category - say she is unattractive - and may impact on his social standing and so he turns his back on her. There is a certain level of courage in virtue, or 'willpower' as you call it that motivates the individual to avoid being "slavish" by seeking the pleasure social approval affords. This, again, depends on the quality of their mental state or their capacity to rationalise adequately and honestly. Reason, it would seem, regulates our behaviour and so it should be our imperative to ensure its adequate function by consistently seeking to improve ourselves.
What do other members think about this? At face value one feels as though he is advocating some form of narcissism or infatuation with one's self; but, if you think about it, then self-love is what the world needs. To love another one has to love oneself to some degree to be worthy of their love.
The internal cynic and critic squirms with unease:
*How can I love myself! I am an 'XYZ' after all!*
*I don't deserve love, that's only for romantics!*
and so on...
The feeling is mutual, it's nice to be engaged in a discussion which motivates constructive thought, and expands one's own ideas.
Quoting TimeLine
The legal system has a rather unique way of defining intention, and it's pragmatic, in the sense that it serves their purposes. But I don't think we want to take the discussion in that direction, because we'll approach the problem which Agustino already brought up. Agustino insisted that thoughts, and actions, which are not consciously chosen by the agent are in some important way, not thoughts and actions of the agent. But that's contradictory nonsense, and leads into a weird dualism where some of your thoughts and actions are your own, and some are not your own. The legal system distinguishes based on responsibility. So even if one is not legally responsible, this does not mean that the person's thoughts and actions are in some way not that person's.
It is because of issues like this, as well as the ones I mentioned already, that I extend "intention" all the way to the unconscious levels of the living being. The motivation for living acts is intention at all levels. Living acts are in general, carried out for a purpose, and this implies intention, regardless of whether the act is freely chosen by a conscious mind.
Quoting TimeLine
What I have defined is not a unity between the conscious mind and intention, but a division. All the activity of a living being is intentional, meaning it is carried out with purpose. The conscious mind has the capacity to prevent activity, through willpower. This defines the division between the conscious mind and the intentional acts of the living being. By preventing actions the conscious mind provides the conditions required to consider options. Therefore "intention" as the motivator of action, and seated deep in the unconscious level, is actually opposed, and therefore distinct from, conscious willpower which is the preventer of action.
Quoting TimeLine
Under the model I just outlined, the instinctual, natural drives, are all intentional, in the sense of the actions being carried out for a purpose. You claim the "motivation is pleasure". But that cannot be correct in this model. The real motivator is the real intent, the real purpose behind the act, at the natural, biological level. The purpose behind the sexual act is reproduction, and this is the real motivator. The conscious mind however, apprehends the sexual act as pleasurable, and therefore sees it as a desirable option.
Notice, that I have separated the way that the conscious mind apprehends the act, from the way that the act naturally comes into occurrence from within the being. There are all sorts of biological processes going on within the living being, and this is where I have located intention. Each process is carried out for a reason, a purpose, and therefore it is intentional. The conscious mind has developed the capacity to observe the actions of the organism as a whole, as well as the organism's inclinations toward action. It has the capacity to prevent actions, willpower. Certain actions, like eating, sex, etc., appear pleasurable to the conscious mind, as a result of the biological processes within the organism. There is intention, a reason, purpose, behind these biological processes, which make these acts appear pleasurable to the conscious mind. So there are biological processes within the being, whose purpose is to make these acts appear pleasurable to the conscious mind. I can conclude that the reason why these acts appear pleasurable to the conscious mind, the purpose for this, is so that the conscious mind will not use its willpower to prevent these acts.
In this way we see that the pleasure which the conscious mind apprehends, is only at the surface of the act. It is not the case that the act is desired by the conscious mind, because of the perceived pleasure. And it is not the case that the conscious mind is the intentional "cause" of the act because it apprehends pleasure. What is really the case, is that there are all sorts of biological activities going on within the organism, which are all being carried out for various purposes. Some of these activities are being carried out for the purpose of making the sex act appear pleasurable to the conscious mind. This inclines the conscious mind to allow the organism to proceed with the activities perceived as necessary to bring about the apprehended pleasure.
That is why I argue that it is not the case that loving acts of the individual are motivated by an apprehended pleasure, making the loving acts consciously chosen acts of the autonomous agent. What I think is really the case, is that some of the biological processes of the unconscious are naturally inclining the agent to act in a loving way, while some are inclining the agent to act in a selfish way. There is an incompatibility here which makes anxiety a completely natural occurrence. The autonomous agent must learn how to maximize one's conscious willpower, and use it in a balanced way
In this way, we cannot say that pleasure is a motivator. All the motivators are the biological processes going on within the organism. Some of these processes make certain actions of the organism appear pleasurable to the conscious mind. The conscious mind thus chooses to allow these actions to proceed from the underlying motivators, relinquishing the willpower that it has over these motivators. Sometimes the conscious mind doesn't even have control and we call this losing control of oneself. But the pleasure which the conscious mind apprehends, doesn't really motivate the action, it simply overpowers the conscious mind's willpower to resist.
The way that I see 'conscious' and 'unconscious' psychologically is the dichotomy between learned behaviour - our relationship with the external world and language - along with our own personal selfhood. So a person could be feeling anxious, isolated and without any sense of meaning (unconscious) while consciously they could consume their energy and time with activities and would have trouble articulating why they feel that way. Like people who have a 'perfect' life - loving partner, nice home, money and security - and yet are still miserable; they cannot articulate why and so to them the anxiety is the problem rather than the mode of existence, that it is somehow not your own feeling and it needs to be ignored. The way that they articulate their identity is based on a type of contrast to normalcy, and Agu is guilty of articulating that in other places by purporting his want of a trophy wife who has specific behavioural attributes, an unrealistic idealism devoid of substance and motivated by his religio-social commitments. For it to work, he would need to find someone living in the same delusion as him.
While responsibility attempts - in the philosophy of law - to rationalise the purpose of the law, intent is the determinant to understand the severity of the crime itself and the ultimate punishment. In the case of self-defence, for instance, the motivation when proven that they subjectively acted out of self-defence confirms that they are no longer liable for the crime because it would not have been committed otherwise. Legally and philosophically there is that conflict between subjective and objective in the concept of mens rea in similar vein to this unconscious and conscious realms or the learned 'I' and the actual 'I'.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree, but not so much the way you have stated here. So, say a person becomes conscious of themselves and feels the angst as we had originally stated, but this subjective feeling of alienation is a phenomenon too overwhelming due to an intense lack of self-esteem that they choose to conform. While they may be mindlessly following, the fact is that they have chosen to do this (hence why I am a compatibilist) and therefore intentional. Only children or one without the cognitive capacity is safe from the moral burden of such intentional activity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have been going round and round with this one and even started a new thread about it. I cannot really come to grips with this, maybe look at my other thread and discuss there.
This is what I disagree with, that feelings from the unconscious, are somehow not your own feelings. And the position that the law takes does not validate this claim. The law simply has a system for assigning responsibility to a specific class of actions. This does not mean that actions which you are not responsible for, are not still your own actions.
In fact, I assign a higher level of authenticity of the self, to the unconscious levels than to the conscious. The unconscious is more foundational, more basic. This is why, as we discussed earlier, the conscious has extreme difficulty to understand the unconscious, because the unconscious is far more substantial. So when there is inconsistency between the life of the consciousness, and the life of the unconscious, despite the appearance that the conscious is "happy", and the unconscious is "unsettled", it is the conscious mind which must change its attitude, to bring stability to the unconscious.
Quoting TimeLine
So the "learned I", the conscious I, is really the inauthentic "I", it is the "I" in the perspective of the legal system, and moral responsibility. The authentic "I", the "actual I", is the composite of the whole, the conscious and unconscious. For the two, the conscious and the unconscious, to live together, in harmony, requires that the conscious has proper respect for its place. The necessity of the conscious mind having proper respect for its place is easily exemplified by "I want to do something which it is impossible for me to do".
Quoting TimeLine
I believe that the vast majority of things which we learn through the conscious mind, social conventions, have been created to be consistent with the underlying unconscious I. They have been created from thousands and thousands of years of effort, and have been formed to promote health and harmony within the individual. This is the influence of love. So to chose to conform is usually a good thing for the authentic self (the union of conscious and unconscious) because the accepted social conventions general promote personal harmony. However, society changes, there is growth, new principles are put forward, new norms are produced, and much of this is in a trial and error fashion, not necessarily designed by true love. Meanwhile, each person is unique, and much of this uniqueness is due to the complexities of the underlying unconscious. So choosing to conform at each instance, is not necessarily the best option for harmony in the individual. However, we generally have many choices even within societal norms, so we can often shape our choices in conformity, so as to best maintain personal harmony.
I am back.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There's nothing absurd with my conditional. If you do not will the actions, then they are not yours, since they occur without your will. If mind control was real, and someone could mind control you and get you to do a nefarious deed, would you say that it is you who did the nefarious did, or rather the person who mind controlled you?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Here's the other premise: actions performed with the body and/or mind of another are not that person's actions if they do not will them. No contradiction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Done.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Based on whether the person wills the actions or not when they occur.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We were talking just about humans. If you want to generalise to other animals, then obviously moral responsibility is not required. But one of the two components of moral responsibility (which are will and reason) is still required. Animals lack reason, but they do not lack will.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Like your hero Socrates right? He claimed to have had a daemon which spoke with him.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, the action is not mine in the sense I've specified above. I do not will the action, and hence I cannot be morally responsible for it. From a moral point of view, the action is not mine. From a biological point of view, or a physical one if you want it, the action belongs to my body as the immediate initiator.
Anecdotal evidence of efficacy.
Yes, if someone controls you to make you do a nefarious deed (the devil made you do it), the act is still yours. The rock breaks the window despite the fact that someone throws it.
Quoting Agustino
But the act is carried out by your body. Despite the fact that someone controlled you, there is no argument here to prove that the act was not carried out by your body.
Quoting Agustino
The problem is that even things without will carry out actions. So the fact that you did not will an act is insufficient to prove that the act is not yours.
Quoting Agustino
An act with moral responsibility is a special type of act. Animals don't have moral responsibility, but animals still act, and those acts are the acts of the animal which performs them. So why would you argue that a human act without moral responsibility is not an act of the human being which performs it?
Quoting Agustino
You haven't yet produced the reasoning for your premise which allows you to say that if you are not morally responsible for an act, then the act is not yours. But of course that premise is absurd, because if it were the case, then animals and inanimate things would be incapable of acting, because they are not morally responsible for their acts.
No, the immediate cause of the act may be your body, but your body is not you. I identify you with the will and the intellect. If your body remains, but the will and intellect are gone, then I would say that you are gone. But if will and intellect somehow remain without body, then you are most certainly not gone.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree with that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Both humans and animals have will.
I don't believe that you can separate a person's body from a person's will and intellect, in this way. It doesn't make sense to say that a person is a will and intellect, but not a body. If you could show me a will and intellect without a body, and demonstrate that this is a person, then I might believe you. Until then, I think you're talking nonsense.
Do you believe in God? God is a person that has no body.
Do you believe in angels? Angels are persons that have no body.
I'm not convinced that God is a person with no body, and from what I've heard about angels, each angel has providence over a physical body. Anyway this is irrelevant because we are talking about human persons. You were addressing me, and the relationship between my body, and my will and intellect, do you believe me to be a god? Perhaps if we were all gods, it would be appropriate to separate the actions of one's body from the actions of one's intellect, to say that if an action of a body is not willed, it cannot be an action of that god. But we're not gods, and we do have involuntary acts.
Sure, but we were discussing:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So apparently, it can make sense for someone to be a person (formed of will & intellect) and without a body.
Not in the sense that I know "person". And this is a big problem which theologians have run into in modern times, a rejection of the idea that God is a person.