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Explorations Outside
Ideal # 2: Everyone has a right to safe and sanitary living conditions Questions (focusing on ‘safety’ only): Re-wording ‘safety’ as protection from danger, what types of dangers should we be protected from? What types of dangers should be tolerated? How much danger should be tolerated within each category of danger? ...
The immediate future looms large in human psychology. People tend to care more about near-term payoff or danger than what might be coming down the pike in a few years. This tendency to downplay later rewards or threats – called hyperbolic discounting – probably evolved because prehistoric conditions were too harsh for long-term calculations to be of much benefit. Live for today because tomorrow may never come.
You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand correctly. And you can’t begin to understand a problem unless you see it as a problem. And you won’t perceive it as a problem unless it conflicts with some ideal of what you want the world to look like: a vision of the good (not just a vision of a fixed bad). In that spirit, here’s an outline of my ideal society...
Like scientists, medical doctors appreciate their own limitations. Yet they are tasked with making important decisions – possibly life-and-death decisions – despite not knowing for sure they’ve got it right. Wait and see? Try something? Try something else? All the while observing and thinking and investigating further. Doctors need to be willing to act boldly, willing to do nothing, and willing to change their minds.
Ideology is not a collection of beliefs and opinions. Ideology is a system of beliefs and opinions. The parts (beliefs and opinions) are interconnected and form a complex whole. The whole is organized according to some core principles or themes.
At any given moment the spotlight of awareness leaves almost everything in darkness. People vary in where they point their spotlight. Perhaps some people have a wider or more quickly oscillating spotlight, so they see more stuff. Or maybe it only seems so.
“Being” with the flow of thoughts and feelings, and not trying to cut them off through redirection of attention, can generate good things and bad things. Sometimes it helps to “be” with thoughts and feelings, to let them carry one along for awhile, for them to work themselves out, or for us to become desensitized to them, or for us to learn or change through them.
Making it a general principle to “accept, then redirect” thoughts - that is, to accept the initial manifestations of a thought stream and then redirect attention to the “present” – reflects low regard for what thought streams have to offer. The technique of labeling moods and emotions reflects a similar devaluation of emotional life.
Words point to something beyond themselves. When you “accept” a thought, that means you have not resisted an arbitrary stopping point in the potentially endless signifying.
Some patterns of thought are like family. A few words out of their mouths and you know where they’re going.
Problem-solving when we’re in a good mood tends to be quick, flexible, creative, and intuitive. Problem-solving when we’re in a bad mood tends to be information-based, detail-oriented, systematic, and cautious. Then there’s problem-solving when we’re on the rebound from feeling bad to feeling good ...
The phrase “wandering thoughts” is interesting. Why not call the movement of thoughts “exploring thoughts”? From the outside, exploration may look like wandering. From the outside, you can’t see direction; you can’t see what is being sought. It’s all helter-skelter.
I just don’t see mild –sometimes very mild - stress as “suffering”. Occasional feelings of irritation, guilt, anger, shame, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, chagrin, boredom, and all the rest of the less-than-positive spectrum of emotion are not a cause for alarm. These are not “toxic” emotions, unless you define them as such.
…the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "general principles." There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. (Dewey 2010, p 1)
Mozart, when asked, in effect, "how do you do it?!", responded: "I don't: it just happens - I have nothing to do with it."
Will and self-discipline matter, of course - but they don't generate, they prepare the field for generation. And they know when to get out of the way and when to rein in.
Although “wandering” conveys an impression of thoughts adrift, unanchored and chaotic, it may be more accurate to view such thoughts as triggered by a sense of concern and seeking some resolution. The Wandering Mind is theExploring Mind: exploring the problem space, a few moves at a time.
I've often suspected that one of the appeals of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is the idea that in the ideal society, people would only do what they feel like doing and that people shouldn't feel compelled to do something they didn't feel like doing (a teenage boy utopia). Some think this ideal is about to be realized because work is going the way of the dinosaurs, thanks to robots.
Imaginary conversations and scenarios are like the brain running through hypotheticals and counterfactuals, just in case. The imagined events may never happen but something like them may and the process of playing them out in the brain is a kind of problem-solving exercise that can sharpen one’s readiness for whatever may come one’s way.
We replay moments of accomplishment in our heads to feel something – a sense of pride, confidence, or optimism. That feeling is expansive and diffuse. We also replay bad experiences but even if the motivation if partly to re-experience the emotion, there seems to be something else driving the impulse to go over and over the bad thing that happened. Something is wrong and we’re dwelling on the problem...
“Relishing” triumphs is another way of saying replaying them in our minds. It feels good and we replay these moments over and over to have that feeling again. Our relation to negative experiences is different...