Free Won't

What is the relationship between opinion, the interpretation of experience, conviction and Truth?

Well, pure science tries to prove what's true whether people believe in it or not.

Empirical reasoning and personal observation seems to be at odds with subjective observations. For me, personal research is the Truth - but of course, it's an operational truth that can always be updated.

So - what is "proof" of reasonable, operational truth? Why - it's the sum total of your ability to integrate the conclusions and insights you've gathered and how you are making use of them. Sometimes it's the collection of assumptions you've decided to believe that other people have told you, you've read, and some of what you've decided to believe purely because it sounds like a good idea to you.

MRI brain research comes out and declares that before we know we've made a decision, our body has already prepared itself to execute it! Turns out because of this background preparation, we only have 1/64th of a second to veto what we've already prepared to do.

We don't have that "free will." Instead, we have "free won't!"


Describing reality "seems to be" one of the irresistible assumptions inherent within the structure of English...and the nature of reality will differ depending on perception/attitude/conditioning.
... AND culture!

Well - let's take the saying "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."(For those in ESL, it's an expression implying that carefully equal revenge is justice, even if violent.) But now Wolpert has proven that a judgment handed out of what is equal violence isn't going to be perceived as fair.

This scientist Daniel Wolpert, (self-described "movement chauvinist.") proved how perception mistakes levels of intensity.  He says people hitting each other are going to escalate the payback, all the while intending to deliver "an eye for an eye." How the brain interprets relative force depends on if you're doing it to someone else or if the force is getting it done to you.

Apparently, relative force is just one perceptual misconception that got measured - there are many more that haven't been measured...yet. Here's another one:

http://theconversation.com/fake-finger-illusion-pokes-holes-in-body-ownership-18508

This makes me sort of feel like I'm watching MythBusters... I'm on a roll.

Most of us think in our language. (Actually, that's another way I differ from most people. I don't...think in words all the time. Sometimes, I think in images. When I think in words, they are randomly shifting phrases of words, poetically intermixed and remixed, depending on shifting priorities. I'm a person who intermixes prepositions, the tiny little relationships words.)

I observe one of the culprits for rampant miscommunication is that English doesn't have an adequate way to indicate subjective experience and frame uncertainty. English has... "seems to be," "from my point of view" or "IMHO," but these are examples of qualifiers or frames that attempt to serve this function of describing subjectivity. But these "frames" are scoffed at by the writing professionals. There's a reason for that.

When using those phrases, there's danger that a person's motive will be too easily misunderstood for why they did it. These qualifiers are touted as indicators of uncertainty by editors. Writers will be admonished by editors to come out and dare to boldly say the declaration. But, without these qualifiers, a writer's motive of an open or scientific mind won't be adequately conveyed.

What if the subjective attitude is not meant to be considered a rhetorical point delivered with uncertainty, self-effacement or as a disclaimer? "From my point of view" is not necessarily another way of saying "I haven't taken a poll or conducted my research properly."

For me, using a subjective qualifier is a proud expression of conservatively stating my own open uncertainty toward the possibility of discovery and being wrong.

Readers have reacted to my using language in this way as if I'm obligated to talk this way legally. Because otherwise I'm "making claims" that could be proved false. They imagine I'm afraid that I might be sued for making promises I can't keep.

Huh?

Happiness Sensations

How do I tell when I'm happy? I have had lots of trouble with answering the question for myself. Here's a report on my discoveries.

First problems were my misconceptions about the nature of happiness. From having lots of tragic intense experiences, what I didn't want was obvious - and it was repulsive: a huge NO! I made the mistake of assuming that what I did want would have that same intensity of feeling. The admonishment to "Find my passion" did not help.

Inside of me, it turned out that happiness is subtle. Happiness is absorbing, It is something that I do so naturally it's pretty easy to miss it in action. Something I'm doing that makes me happy doesn't tell me that it is making me happy - only in retrospect does this realization of "I was happy!" happen for me. While I'm doing what makes me happy, I'm so absorbed my it that I am too busy to notice how I feel. It soaks up my attention like a sponge. I'm engaged pretty much completely. In fact, the intensity of this engagement can make me a bit scared. I will surface from doing what makes me happy as if I've been asleep and I've just woke up in a fog. Like Rip Van Winkle, who slept for eons, I'll experience a jolt as I if I'm waking myself out of doing what has been making me happy and wonder what has been going on while I've been gone.

Another characteristic of happiness for me is that it's an unnoticed, irresistible action. I can't resist not doing it. Of course I'm going to do things that way, silly. Doesn't everyone? It was a shock to realize that "everyone" didn't value what I thought was "obviously valuable." I began to realize that I needed to consider that other people might wanted to be treated differently than I did, and act accordingly. I also needed to find positive ways to tell other people what I wanted, valued and enjoyed so it could come true for me and them.

For instance, it turns out that I have some big opinions on how I prefer to be touched. As a kid, my brother used to love to have me scratch his back. He wanted to scratch my back in "payment" for getting me to scratch his back, but that didn't work for me. I really did not want to be scratched - it doesn't do anything positive for me. People tend to scratch me too hard. Being touched "softly" is also an issue for me. If someone "tickle touches" my skin, it is slightly irritating because my skin becomes numb rather quickly to the creepy-crawly surface sensations. It feels to me as if a bug is crawling on my skin! In Hawaii we call this sensation of goose pimples, "getting chicken skin." It is as if my skin is too sensitive for such pastimes. But if another person makes calm or firm contact with my muscles underneath my skin, it's heavenly. I love to be massaged deeply. I love to feel someone's body warming my own. I love to feel contact with another person and have them relax and lengthen their muscles, taking contraction away from themselves while they are in contact with me.

One time in my early life when I was first struggling with this question of how to feel what I wanted and what made me happy, I tried a radical, time consuming strategy that worked well for me. I went back to a time when I really wanted something. As a kid, I constantly wanted a horse. At one point in my early twenties, even though I didn't want a horse anymore, (because I'd grown up and my priorities had changed radically) and *because* I didn't know what else I wanted...I got a horse. Clearing the time it took to have a horse helped me to have something to give up when I finally did get a "real yes" about happiness.

There was another more serious problem about recognizing happiness for myself. Decisions that didn't involve considering external circumstances or other people just did not register on my radar. Having someone in front of me who had an opinion one way or another about what made them happy completely outshone any emotions I did have by a mile. Other people's wishes distracted me so completely, that I did not experience my own emotions. Not know what you want is a real deal-breaker in relationships with other people, because they can't tell what to to expect that you might do.

So I had to work on drawing a curtain between me and them to experience what I really wanted to do, irrespective of what they wanted me to do. This meant at first actively seeking solitude - and it was hard to sense my own emotions even then. On top of everything I was even rebellious with myself. I had a hard time picking something I knew I enjoyed doing that didn't take but five minutes a day and doing it every day regularly because I had so much resistance about setting any deliberate routine in place. But with practice, (this took five years or so) I became much better at checking in w/myself and getting an answer. Now I'm almost sixty. All I need to do to find out what I feel is to look away from someone's face for a bit or excuse myself from their presence.

But the way I worked out deciding what I feel is a bit odd too. I only discovered this by taking a poll about how other people determine what makes them happy. I discovered that my own feelings and emotions did not "rise to the top" like cream does, in a hierarchy. This was the most common way most people have access to their feelings. They can merely ask themselves "What would make me happy here?" and they get an answer that is their first priority.

Discovering my own feelings is more like a two step process. It's as if I'm fishing in a mysterious cauldron of potential, pulling up what comes out, describing it. Then I must draw statistics on the results of how I feel about it, after having described it for myself a number of times. I have learned that it's not a good idea to narrate this process in front of others. Because they might assume that because I dredged it up and mentioned it to them, it must be my first priority for wanting it...and that's just not true for me. Many things I want come up, irrespective of "time of arrival." I have learned for myself that when it comes to emotions, it is an important consideration for me to compensate for "time of arrival."

How does feeling what makes you happy work for you?

Where's the Music?

 Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

 I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.


Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

What do you think?

Hunch or Prejudice?

What is the difference between an intuitive hunch and a prejudice? This is one of my virtual questions that I enjoy asking.

It's curious to me how each and every perceptual attitude that someone can adopt seems to have alternate ways of describing it. These descriptions, definitions and interpretations seem to color how the subject and person is defined to express another bias or prejudice. Some can get quite...colorful, with pointed accusations.

For instance, students often stop themselves from asking a question of a teacher out of respect for that teacher. But from the teacher's point of view,, "why don't my students ask ANY question?" In my culture, you can have rapport or you can have respect, but not both.

Another instance, it's obvious from my posting here that I enjoy to take the time to offer the benefit of my observations to other people. I've taken the time to learn to write to do this, which has been an effort for me because my talking style isn't easily translated into the forms of writing.  But now others are coming to recognize my investment of being able to write. Whenever there is recognition of "talent" or ability, people inevitably wonder why you do such a thing. They assign a motive to your actions - sometimes these motives are not what you would answer if they had asked you. In some cases, they react as if the person who has invested value in an opinion must be a proselytizer or a salesperson.

But sometimes, people complaint that I am being "too" helpful. They seem to not appreciate my motives or my open-mindedness because I don't communicate that very well.

If I come up with creative thinking ideas on their behalf without warning them or getting their permission to do so, they react strangely. They're slightly intimidated. They don't know why I can do it or why I would do such a thing for them. Perhaps they assign nefarious motives to what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I've been accused of "co-dependence," but I just don't have the vested interests and addictions to go along with the profile. Demonstrating my ability to think has also often gotten me defined me as "analytical," as if I am an inflexible one-trick pony.  Am of the opinion that everyone has multiple talents, often undeveloped.

I've learned to actively refuse to defend myself and instead invite participation. But sometimes it just doesn't work. People misread my communicating as being upset. They don't dare to confront or engage, fearing they might offend.

Would love to open a conversation to suggestions on how to better this state of affairs, because I think this same issue affects many, many interactions with many people. Perhaps I just need to joke about it more often.

Anyone have any suggestions or explorations...stories? Probably not. Somehow, the way that I write doesn't invite comments. Not sure what to do about that.

Give and Take Collection

    One of my ideas about blogging on so many subjects has been that themes would emerge by themselves. As I saw this happening, I reasoned that I could sift out the posts related to a certain theme and use them to start a targeted blog subject. A new subject seems to have emerged!
    Having written so extensively on this subject, I have decided that I should collect these posts into a separate blog that specializes in this subject alone. This post is a collection of the various posts on this subject, collected for your pleasure. 
     I've decided to collect these into the subject of a new blog - to be announced. I've been exploring this phenomena for some time now. I have previously written about the different aspects of the problem quite a bit, as you can see here.

    The subject of giving and taking is important. It's going to get to be a big factor as the baby boomers get to the point where they need to accept care gracefully during aging. For that reason alone, this issue could become a really important one to discuss.

Would you subscribe to a blog on just this subject as a way to allow yourself to free up the acts of gracefully accepting and learning about well-placed giving?

Here's where I ask questions about the different style of how gifts are offered, http://is.gd/5JfL6  asked around the gift-giving fervor of Christmas time.

Tacit Obligation http://is.gd/bMfhY
If someone has difficulty accepting, many times if you can vary the style of how the gift is offered, it will result in making it easier for them to accept. Making light of it's value is sometimes effective, because the best situation between giver and "givee" is when the thing is of great value to the givee and is easy for the giver to offer. But sometimes an action carries much more weight than anything they might say about it. Thus, accepting a gift incites obligation that may be only tacitly guessed. Why can't people accept a gift? A mystery part of a person is not sure what is the (sub)culturally tacit agreement about this gift; talking about it probably won't help.

Random Acts  http://is.gd/bMeST
Some people feel a need to remove themselves from the act, so that the receiver has no idea where the gift came from. It becomes impersonal. Thus we have all of the organizations that specialize in accepting tax charitable gifts and doing the messing actual giving to others.

Giving Back The proper way to "give back" is not always to do the exact same gesture, because needs are different. The mistake many people make in selecting what to give is they assume their value system of what is valuable is identical to the givee. This is not true. Being able to put oneself in the shoes of the givee is a thoughtful, compassionate act. So this is often a good reason to reject the offer of help - because what is being offered is misplaced and not of value from the point of view of the givee.

Gifts That Fit http://is.gd/bMeDi
In the small town of Bolinas, CA, we have a "freebox" where mainly articles of clothing are dropped off to be made available to anyone who wants them. The proper way to give back for the value of what you have gotten from it is to clean and organize the Freebox. Many people focus on the stuff itself; they mistake that the proper way to reciprocate is to bring more "stuff." Actually, having a place to bring your stuff to get rid of it is also a significant benefit. So the proper way to reciprocate is more like assuming the role temporarily of a "shop-keeper." A person who wanted to reciprocate would make the good stuff available to those who stop by looking to get something, (like pairing up shoes,) glean out the trash and every once in awhile, clear out the Freebox of all of it's donations so it's empty again to accept more stuff.

Allowing Benefits of Being The Giver  http://is.gd/bMeMk
 The Hawaiian spirit of Aloha is a wonderful template. It observes that you must allow someone to give, even if what is being offered is not of value to the givee. Being able to give is a human right, and by gracefully accepting, you are allowing this pleasure of giving to be exercised.

Consequences of Acceptance Generally with people who have trouble accepting being given to, it's important to ask what the accepting of gifts symbolizes. To some people, accepting what is offered is a "one-down" position in a competitive sense.  To others, they are fearful that accepting the gift will make them obligated to play the role eternally. They fear they're going to lose their independence as they learn to rely on the gift being provided routinely, and will act to prevent the source going away.

Independence Declarations Causing a Split I've also seen repeatedly a situation that seemed to be a direct result of mistaking the roles and pleasures giving and receiving. The situation was where a partner was forced to accept help because of a temporary injury. Evidently after recovery, the person who had been injured wanted to reject help from their partner to re-establish their independence and self-respect. ANY help was rejected entirely, so often and completely that even the "normal" pleasures of doing things for one's sweetie symbolized infantile dependence to the person who was in the process of recovering. If this was not purposefully addressed, it caused a breakup!

Respect http://is.gd/aTqdM 
Giving and receiving seems to be connected to how respect is shown. In our culture, you must choose between respect and having rapport. Here's a post where I explored it's application in how respect is signified in the context of speaking in a group interaction.  It's curious how listeners are valued socially, (which is a receptive role) when in the situation where the gift is tangible - suddenly the giver becomes the authority.

Suspicious of Greed It's also curious that when someone is in a situation of getting or having gotten a personal benefit, somehow what they offer or receive is suddenly suspect, because there's now a "invested interest." This is what happens when a person is really passionate about a belief in how something works for them and wants to communicate the benefit of their experience to others - everything they say about what they are passionate about is suddenly considered in that light or frame. They're proselytizers, rather than merely sharing their experience. I'm not sure why people believe that someone who is enthusiastic about something is self-involved or selfish. I would imagine the love of something would be an even higher recommendation of it!

Bonding http://is.gd/aTspT 
Some people take the giver/givee challenge to the point of refusing to establish the bond of a relationship entirely. I talk about that here: There are many rituals of establishing a bond as there are subcultures.

Entitlement http://is.gd/aTtf1
Here's another post where I talk about the anger that results when the givee decides they are "entitled" to what the givers are offering before they're getting it. This talks about greed.

Compliments http://is.gd/aTsR9 
Complimenting is also an interesting way of giving back that some people feel strange about accepting. Of course, it's a benefit to find out that what you do easily is notable for others - because it signifies what could be a valuable talent. Some people automatically reject them out of hand as an expression of the deadly sin of pride or ego. Some people regard compliments of the possession of an item as a way to ask for the thing to be offered by the person who has it. Here's a story about why I believe that complimenting is an important thing to do. In my culture, handing out a compliment implies the person was (like a puppy) explicitly seeking your approval, which may or not be true. Rejecting the gift implies that you would prefer to give yourself the approval. There are many other values signified by accepting a compliment that have people have reacted negatively to it.