... Perhaps an analogy can help. Let us suppose that we are doing a mountain walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to the top of the a cliff where we are, in space, very near it because it is just below us. We could drop a stone into it. But as we are no cragsmen we can't get down. We must go a long way round; five miles, maybe. At many points that detour we shall, statically, be farther from the village than we were when we sat above the cliff. But only statically. In terms of progress we shall be far "nearer" our baths and teas.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
God-likeness And God-nearness
We are all like God. He created us in his image so we love like He does, of course we don't lust like he does. But in any event we are like Him but not necessarily near him. C.S. Lewis gives an example:
Thursday, January 29, 2009
The Unemployed
So the immediate effect of the bail out is:
Check the whole story
For the growing ranks of the unemployed, it will be more noticeable: benefit checks due to stop will keep coming, along with an extra $25 a week.
Check the whole story
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Ethnology and Personal Histories
Everywhere today I see people saying: This is so and so according to anecdotal evidence. I know 'anecdote' to mean something funny on the street in way. This is wrong since in Anthropology 'anecdotal' evidence is considered a Personal History in Ethnology context where the Ethnologist goes to village, community, or neightborhood and starts learning culture and gathering personal histories of many and different people. Usually, the Ethnologist will spend a year since the year is a cycle for many societies. If you want to study the culture of the World Cup for soccer you might need to spend 4 years tought.
The point is that anecdotal evidence doesn't mean it is unreliable or somehow in the amusement section of evidence. It usually if done right a personal history can be descriptive and reliable just as any type of factual evidence and whatnot.
The point is that anecdotal evidence doesn't mean it is unreliable or somehow in the amusement section of evidence. It usually if done right a personal history can be descriptive and reliable just as any type of factual evidence and whatnot.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Evolutionary Psychology Introduction
Dear Reader, I hear you might like Psychology. Not the apologetic morally degrading free will disallowing theories from such friends as Mr Freud. My psychology, called Evolutionary Psychology, looks into the human mind from a different perspective and does not really involve morality as a core subject into it.
Evolutionary Psychology is really a mix between Anthropology which is the study of everything human, and psychology which is the study of human thinking. This mean, in the end, that we just look at everything linked to our thinking such Biology, Neurology, Psychology And Developmental Psychology, Physiology, Archeology, Genetics, Sociology, Linguistics, Logic, and History.
The way an evolutionary psychologist looks to the subject of human thinking as a sophisticated system made of many modules, whether by design or by chance is not really a concern to us. The system's modules would be memory, or sense, or self-awareness.
And here comes the evolutionary part, the kicker if you will. Here we dramatically depart from the "other" Psychology which to me is more like Self-Help Books that made it into science. It is the variety of human minds. It seems that everyone thinks that we all have the same brain. Evolution tells us different, our brain must be at least as different as our bodies - hair, looks, etc. Or at least as different as our organs - livers and hearts. It seems like a black hole noone is looking at, this difference in our brains but it is everywhere around us - slow and gifted people, gays, alcoholics, pedophiles, serial killers, and the normal Joe who we really haven't met yet. This is because evolution, or genetics, turns on and off and set to a varying degrees each of those modules. So you are pretty much preset with random combination of settings about your brain. Kind a like a table-top RPG where the dice rolls and you assign points to different characteristics, geeks know.
There is another story that Evolution tells us - each successive offspring of particular parents or small community will be more close to a specific setting but this is hardly of a concern in our environment.
Evolutionary psychology does not theorize that there is a "good" or "best" settings even where there are 0s in the scores and that 100 score can also be as a big a malady as a 0 score. There are just as a difference maker as the difference between hair colors. This is where our field of science has failed us, since no serious argument was made against a "murderer" or "pedophilia" setting. A particular setting might make you more prone to be a serial killer just as much as a devoted priest or a regular Joe with a few quirks. This is because the modules are just like an office building a company is moving into. The serial killer claiming a setting's mishmash for his "problem" is like the company claiming abysmal productivity and earnings because of the way their office is laid out. And they are the ones that set it up.
So our science deals in a big part with a holistic view of all the settings. To do that we deal with identifying them. This is easy with the big ones such as memory and intelligence for which the other sciences has provided numerous tests and measurements. But for rudimentary things like Love or Attachment or Self Imaging are not even on the radar. It is also highly humorous in our field how a man can think he biologically wants to have a sexual intercourse with his mother than to think that you just don't have that Love another has. Again, it is like being jealous of someones hair color. And there are people like that and they are crazy and should see our General Psychology friends. I think they can dope you out of it. I'm sure they have the Love pill, right next to the Alcoholism and Depression pills. In the end for us it is only a difference and not in any way a defining factor for morality and a way of life.
We study what the module's functionality and how and what works at different settings. So a high score in long term memory results in what? It can make the subject to remember incredible details of events but not affect his remembering his own thoughts. So he will be forgetful about chores as a "normal" person but will remember every detail of doing it. Of course in such a situation we must look at the modules he uses to perceive the self and identify whether the input is of poor quality.
And this is where we get to the hard part. Just as some settings can be "comfortable" in some environments others can be "uncomfortable." For instance in a culture where the schools test excessively with written tests of long-term memory you can get in a lot of trouble if you are with a low long-term memory function. But there are many ways to deal with pretty much any setting. For example many children with dyslexia, look at written text the the letters start dancing around and you can't read them, are rarely diagnosed before 10 in developing countries and most rural ones never even get diagnosed because if none in the village reads then you would never even notice. Not a whole lot of a difference in the big cities. The real shocker is of course all those kids felt very different long before they knew, and they were uniformly a trouble maker. We believe that there is an inherent check sum module that constantly checks if our point totals are "good." It does internal checks, environmental and social ,etc. etc. If anything is out of the ordinary it sounds an alarm. The alarm turns off when it is recognized and the problem is fixed.
When the alarm is sounded we need to identify the module sounding the alarm. Sometimes there might be a temporal malady that has been cause by external factors and we can just explain how the module works and terminate the external agresors. This is rarely the case. Most probably we stumble on dyslexic, or the alcholic, or any other of the hundreds of examples of a module or two that are not working in that person. Surprisingly there are many people with those. But some of them are more minor than others. But uniformly we have fall backs as to how to handle a module failing here and there.
So this is ultimately our task, to find ways for the dyslexic to "read" and "write" when he cannot see written text. For the alcoholic who cannot see others point of view nor his own to see. For the homesexual and the pedophile, for everyone whose malady can be described as BEING DIFFERENT.
Evolutionary Psychology is really a mix between Anthropology which is the study of everything human, and psychology which is the study of human thinking. This mean, in the end, that we just look at everything linked to our thinking such Biology, Neurology, Psychology And Developmental Psychology, Physiology, Archeology, Genetics, Sociology, Linguistics, Logic, and History.
The way an evolutionary psychologist looks to the subject of human thinking as a sophisticated system made of many modules, whether by design or by chance is not really a concern to us. The system's modules would be memory, or sense, or self-awareness.
And here comes the evolutionary part, the kicker if you will. Here we dramatically depart from the "other" Psychology which to me is more like Self-Help Books that made it into science. It is the variety of human minds. It seems that everyone thinks that we all have the same brain. Evolution tells us different, our brain must be at least as different as our bodies - hair, looks, etc. Or at least as different as our organs - livers and hearts. It seems like a black hole noone is looking at, this difference in our brains but it is everywhere around us - slow and gifted people, gays, alcoholics, pedophiles, serial killers, and the normal Joe who we really haven't met yet. This is because evolution, or genetics, turns on and off and set to a varying degrees each of those modules. So you are pretty much preset with random combination of settings about your brain. Kind a like a table-top RPG where the dice rolls and you assign points to different characteristics, geeks know.
There is another story that Evolution tells us - each successive offspring of particular parents or small community will be more close to a specific setting but this is hardly of a concern in our environment.
Evolutionary psychology does not theorize that there is a "good" or "best" settings even where there are 0s in the scores and that 100 score can also be as a big a malady as a 0 score. There are just as a difference maker as the difference between hair colors. This is where our field of science has failed us, since no serious argument was made against a "murderer" or "pedophilia" setting. A particular setting might make you more prone to be a serial killer just as much as a devoted priest or a regular Joe with a few quirks. This is because the modules are just like an office building a company is moving into. The serial killer claiming a setting's mishmash for his "problem" is like the company claiming abysmal productivity and earnings because of the way their office is laid out. And they are the ones that set it up.
So our science deals in a big part with a holistic view of all the settings. To do that we deal with identifying them. This is easy with the big ones such as memory and intelligence for which the other sciences has provided numerous tests and measurements. But for rudimentary things like Love or Attachment or Self Imaging are not even on the radar. It is also highly humorous in our field how a man can think he biologically wants to have a sexual intercourse with his mother than to think that you just don't have that Love another has. Again, it is like being jealous of someones hair color. And there are people like that and they are crazy and should see our General Psychology friends. I think they can dope you out of it. I'm sure they have the Love pill, right next to the Alcoholism and Depression pills. In the end for us it is only a difference and not in any way a defining factor for morality and a way of life.
We study what the module's functionality and how and what works at different settings. So a high score in long term memory results in what? It can make the subject to remember incredible details of events but not affect his remembering his own thoughts. So he will be forgetful about chores as a "normal" person but will remember every detail of doing it. Of course in such a situation we must look at the modules he uses to perceive the self and identify whether the input is of poor quality.
And this is where we get to the hard part. Just as some settings can be "comfortable" in some environments others can be "uncomfortable." For instance in a culture where the schools test excessively with written tests of long-term memory you can get in a lot of trouble if you are with a low long-term memory function. But there are many ways to deal with pretty much any setting. For example many children with dyslexia, look at written text the the letters start dancing around and you can't read them, are rarely diagnosed before 10 in developing countries and most rural ones never even get diagnosed because if none in the village reads then you would never even notice. Not a whole lot of a difference in the big cities. The real shocker is of course all those kids felt very different long before they knew, and they were uniformly a trouble maker. We believe that there is an inherent check sum module that constantly checks if our point totals are "good." It does internal checks, environmental and social ,etc. etc. If anything is out of the ordinary it sounds an alarm. The alarm turns off when it is recognized and the problem is fixed.
When the alarm is sounded we need to identify the module sounding the alarm. Sometimes there might be a temporal malady that has been cause by external factors and we can just explain how the module works and terminate the external agresors. This is rarely the case. Most probably we stumble on dyslexic, or the alcholic, or any other of the hundreds of examples of a module or two that are not working in that person. Surprisingly there are many people with those. But some of them are more minor than others. But uniformly we have fall backs as to how to handle a module failing here and there.
So this is ultimately our task, to find ways for the dyslexic to "read" and "write" when he cannot see written text. For the alcoholic who cannot see others point of view nor his own to see. For the homesexual and the pedophile, for everyone whose malady can be described as BEING DIFFERENT.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Every day I write no matter what
Today has been one of the hardest days in my recovery. I had the ignition interlock device installed in my car. Beside from the people installing it pissing me way off with their short-sighted ignorant suggestion that "maybe I should change my lifestyle a little." You think, Sherlock?
The device itself is monstrous and it will be hard to hide in traffic. Absolutly horendous. It is big and you got to blow on it for 3 seconds, and then hum "WHO" on it for another 3. And you do that every 15 minutes or so.
I keep thinking what it will be like to take a girl out with that car. Crazy! I mean just imagine you go out with someone and they are taking you to some restaurant and humming and blowing in tubes every 15 minutes. At least it is real funny. But what about valley parking? I guess I will be sticking to my motorcycles but I might still face the problem with taking girls out... unless God is sending me a suga mama with a pimp car...
The device itself is monstrous and it will be hard to hide in traffic. Absolutly horendous. It is big and you got to blow on it for 3 seconds, and then hum "WHO" on it for another 3. And you do that every 15 minutes or so.
I keep thinking what it will be like to take a girl out with that car. Crazy! I mean just imagine you go out with someone and they are taking you to some restaurant and humming and blowing in tubes every 15 minutes. At least it is real funny. But what about valley parking? I guess I will be sticking to my motorcycles but I might still face the problem with taking girls out... unless God is sending me a suga mama with a pimp car...
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Every self-respecting alcholic can stop for a month
There was a Bulgarian song in which there was this young girl in the begging saying: "Every self-respecting chick in my school wears a thong." It was a cool song.
Anyway, back to the alcoholics. Many people that I meet that are clearly in an an early stage of alcoholism. Problem is they believe everything is honky dory because 10 years ago they didn't drink for a month. Or maybe they got really drunk one day, with the hangover and everything, and then didn't drink for a whole week or a month - until the wedding they just had to drink at.
What they fail to see is that alcoholism doesn't really manifest itself by quantity and by how often one partakes. It manifests in the effects alcohol has on the afflicted.
A normal person drinks but they do not develop a craving. The alcoholic drinks and he wants more. Now in early stages that is as far as it gets. He just wants more but he might stop after the first one or get drunk after thinking it over and deciding it is OK.
I didn't drink every day, hell there are times that I didn't drink for weeks and even months. I thought that was me in control. I would go and drink when the circumstances warranted - club, dinner, BG church - I might go with just one or a few. Again I could do it for weeks and months.
But the day will come when I will get plastered. And for a few years I thought I wanted to get plastered. So it was OK. I got drunk when I went to the club. Or when with friends drinking. After a success or failure I would get drunk by my own choosing. I would get drunk for or at work just so I can prove to myself that I can be better than the others - even drunk. Or so I thought until the day I decided I don't want to get drunk. But I still did.
It is like living with a very jealous girlfriend. While you are staying home and calling her every 10 minutes you only get the occasional fit from her. You usually even think it is quite cute or silly. It is not until you decide to get a new hobby or maybe take a class at the local college that shit really goes up in the air. She starts stalking you around campus, maybe even will take the same class as you just to keep you under control. She will nag, beg, cry, lie, and everything in between for you to go back to the way things were. And you can try reasoning with her, you will try explaining, pleading, begging even. But she won't back down until you are safely locked at home and call her every 10 minutes when outside.
My experience with alcohol was the same. I thought I had it all handled. I thought I drink more and at weird times because I CHOOSE to but I didn't. I just didn't put up a fight which in the end weakened me and almost destroyed my life making it even harder to deal my recovery.
Anyway, back to the alcoholics. Many people that I meet that are clearly in an an early stage of alcoholism. Problem is they believe everything is honky dory because 10 years ago they didn't drink for a month. Or maybe they got really drunk one day, with the hangover and everything, and then didn't drink for a whole week or a month - until the wedding they just had to drink at.
What they fail to see is that alcoholism doesn't really manifest itself by quantity and by how often one partakes. It manifests in the effects alcohol has on the afflicted.
A normal person drinks but they do not develop a craving. The alcoholic drinks and he wants more. Now in early stages that is as far as it gets. He just wants more but he might stop after the first one or get drunk after thinking it over and deciding it is OK.
I didn't drink every day, hell there are times that I didn't drink for weeks and even months. I thought that was me in control. I would go and drink when the circumstances warranted - club, dinner, BG church - I might go with just one or a few. Again I could do it for weeks and months.
But the day will come when I will get plastered. And for a few years I thought I wanted to get plastered. So it was OK. I got drunk when I went to the club. Or when with friends drinking. After a success or failure I would get drunk by my own choosing. I would get drunk for or at work just so I can prove to myself that I can be better than the others - even drunk. Or so I thought until the day I decided I don't want to get drunk. But I still did.
It is like living with a very jealous girlfriend. While you are staying home and calling her every 10 minutes you only get the occasional fit from her. You usually even think it is quite cute or silly. It is not until you decide to get a new hobby or maybe take a class at the local college that shit really goes up in the air. She starts stalking you around campus, maybe even will take the same class as you just to keep you under control. She will nag, beg, cry, lie, and everything in between for you to go back to the way things were. And you can try reasoning with her, you will try explaining, pleading, begging even. But she won't back down until you are safely locked at home and call her every 10 minutes when outside.
My experience with alcohol was the same. I thought I had it all handled. I thought I drink more and at weird times because I CHOOSE to but I didn't. I just didn't put up a fight which in the end weakened me and almost destroyed my life making it even harder to deal my recovery.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
The real first entry
I've must of started a new blog every other month for the last few years. They never went on for more than a couple of posts. This time I will keep this one up "no matter what" which is one of my new slogans. And as they say every journey begins with a first step and this is it.
On this blog I will share my growth as a man first and foremost. It's because I found out I didn't grow up after some point in my life which it seems was pretty early on. I mean I grew up physically but my mental growing up was in a very wrong direction. So now I am becoming a man at 26.
My writing has really withered during the years of my alcoholism. Writing has never been my strong suit. I can think well but I can't express my thoughts on paper. They race ahead too much. So with this blog I also hope to remedy that and maybe be a little bit more coherent and start having fewer arguments and premises in a single sentence.
On this blog I will share my growth as a man first and foremost. It's because I found out I didn't grow up after some point in my life which it seems was pretty early on. I mean I grew up physically but my mental growing up was in a very wrong direction. So now I am becoming a man at 26.
My writing has really withered during the years of my alcoholism. Writing has never been my strong suit. I can think well but I can't express my thoughts on paper. They race ahead too much. So with this blog I also hope to remedy that and maybe be a little bit more coherent and start having fewer arguments and premises in a single sentence.
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