The Bent Mind

Why are human beings so vulnerable myths?

Yesterday, I had an 'interesting' conversation with my aunt, who shared with me - in a way that was certainly full of zest - how, she "knew", that behind ones ears lies a 'particular frequency' by which human minds are being controlled.

While listening to her, and trying to be respectful, I attempted to disabuse her of this belief, which, to me, is without any justifiable evidence for anyone to spend intellectual energy on. The issue is understood by me to be a function of what the human mind does. Spiders spin webs, and human spin stories. There is a very essential design to the way our minds work and operate that is appreciated by people committed to the epistemological standards of the scientific method. The method is exceedingly simple, and offers humankind the best we can muster to distinguish fantasy from reality.

I know what my aunt was referring to, and I am near-certain that this "ascension" literature is simplistic garbage that people educated in philosophy, logic, semiotics and the various sciences - physics, biophysics, psychology - are quick to notice.

This is a matter of cause and effect, and so ultimately, how things work. The most damning evidence - or the most significant idea I can brig against this emerging mythology taking in the minds of gullible humans, is self-organizing systems.. Evolution is the simplest and most plausible explanation for the origin and nature of human beings in the universe. Psychologically, this should serve as a centralizing "internal referent" that orders how your conscious mind should think, so, for example, if you find yourself being entrained to a particular view that may be opposite from a principle you hold, the very sense of "something wrong" that one senses, is, in ultimate truth, a reaction from the psychoneurologically self-state 'gestalt' that is embodied in the structure of the brain and phenomenology of the experiencer, against the fact that the self is currently being 'sucked in' to a perspective on reality that is entertaining, yet glib, sparse on details, and even arrogant in its careless approach towards persuasion i.e. making claims to which no logical evidence deriving from human philosophy/science can be given.

The problem with the people who believe in this tripe is that they are essentially naïve to the idea of self-organization - and in particular - to the inherent limits of human perception. Writing in a time and place is a context. Every person is contextualized, and every human era, to be honest, had their own BS fantasies for how the world worked. These fantasies, like everything that has ever occurred or will ever occur in a human mind, derive from REAL, pragmatically based, interactions with external systems. This pragmatism is merely to say that a certain state of affairs defines the way and manner our world operates, which is to say: each living being strives for survival. Knowing how this survival works entails starting at the beginning of the "story of life", when cells first emerge, that way people can better appreciate how molecules become cells, and so, better appreciate how the life process NEVER LOSES its dynamical continuity with the outside world. Always, the self moves between "that which supports its internal coherency/symmetry" and "that which undermines the internal coherency/symmetry".

Real dynamical structure within the organism is modified by external events, in a way that occurs beneath cognition, by directing/orienting attentional processes through affective biases and the concomitant perceptual images that persuade attention. I term these "non-conceptual signs" which channel awareness according to the "logic" of the semiotic structure that preceded it.

The straight mind, unlike the bent mind, doesn't seek to prematurely "jump to the end" with fantasies about aliens from draco, orion and other such stories, preferring instead a more healthy skepticism that never loses sight of the psychoanalytic facts which make human beings such complex animals - story-tellers that need stories to regulate their affective states - yet, of course, none of this means there is no ultimate meaning to reality, or that the ontological existence of mental signs is unimportant, but only that reality is far more complicated at a sheer thinking level - in terms of reasoning, sign processes, and understanding how embodiment precedes thinking (as Humans) in the evolutionary story.

The Bent Mind

The bent mind is usually bent very early on, like the trees in the above pictures. The bent is usually (as in, not when done by humans) by snow falls where early seeding plants are bent and begin to grow with a "J" shape.

The bent is a metaphor for how early growth contextualizes later growth. A person who is willing to accept bad-reasoning and unwilling to acknowledge the logical points made by others is not addressing the nature of the human condition. The story-telling that we do, or, for that matter, the story-telling told by fortune tellers and others who are "visited" by spirits or noumenous "others", are merely interacting with the emergent attractors of their own biodynamical functionality. These attractors are ontologically real - hence the facts of paranormal reporting. But ascribing or accepting ontological status to these occurrences is NOT THE SAME as ascribing an independent ontological existence to an interacted with object, inasmuch as everything humans think, feel or imagine has its origin in a past interaction. Because our brain self-organizes our perceptual processes, we must always recognize that "units of selection" are being brought together in a way that is congruent with an immediate environmental situation, such that our thinking and feeling semiotically "fits" the needs of the present situation.

Why are Humans so afraid of uncertainty? Why must they think they "know", when there is such overwhelming evidence showing that much of the time - not all of the time - we are being duped by unconscious effects on our functioning.

Existence is real, but the trauma of humankinds history still produces bent minds that take their every thought with an undeserving amount of trust.

Instead of trusting their observations - and learning from it - and thus linking self with the world, they have instead gotten into the habit of believing that they, as a self, pre-exists the story, even though all the evidence suggests that the story we live is emergent.

What you have to do is realize the truth.

What truth you say?

There is no spoon.

a reply to: Astrocyte

she "knew", that behind ones ears lies a 'particular frequency' by which human minds are being controlled.

I attempted to disabuse her of this belief, which, to me, is without any justifiable evidence for anyone to spend intellectual energy on.

And yet common sense and a quick few minutes spent looking would show you that such experiments have been carried out without consent on people.


en.wikipedia.org...

Although the Supreme Court sided with the CIA that sources' names could be redacted for their protection, it nonetheless validated the existence of MKULTRA to be used in future court cases and confirmed that the CIA for 14 years performed clandestine experiments on human behavior.
Between 1953 and 1966, the Central Intelligence Agency financed a wide-ranging project, code-named MKULTRA, concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behaviour

a reply to: Astrocyte

Once there was a tree that was bent, and it did not get any sunlight, because all the other trees were straight and strong, reaching up towards the sky,

One day a some people came,and they hacked all the straight trees to pieces.

Today, all that remains is that one bent tree, growing stronger as the years go by.

-just a fun metaphor.

An interesting thread full of mystery and intrigue, however, I'll have to dive in another time.

Solve needs to make one on mushrooms being actual life forms.

Spent all that time putting things in materialistic terms only to talk chiefly about "mind" the most un-materialistic mystery in existence.

Your aunty might be a little daft, then again she might have a better grasp on reality and consciousness than yourself.

You fail to see that to her it is a reality; not a belief. You do not see it as a reality; so it becomes a belief. Relativity you have your world of concepts you grasp at and she has hers... both of you live regardless of what either of you grasp as "real" so the reality is that you are belittling her to a large audience to support your own group think borrowed as reality... what is the difference in hers? When both are conceptual constructs that can be grasped and experienced as reality?

If you care about her; you would not force your reality accepted or not on her; if you think she is suffering? Why may it more so by ridiculing her in the public eye?

Sure a debate forum... but how is she going to debate you in her defense unless she is a member here?

I think you owe her a nice bag o loose leaf tea... if she wants to read the leaves other than when the seasons change with them? Her choice aye...

Error

Op, you say "human perception is limited," yet you speak of philosophy, self-organization, et cetera, as though we know anything with any degree of certainty. I find that ironic. I really do.