How Believing is Seeing

The beliefs we hold about the world affect how we see things, instead of the other way around. That is, we don't see things then believe. We believe first and then see. Our pet theories about other peoples motivations and preconceptions about what happened determine the kind of evidence you look for and the kind you reject. A basic tendency for people to favor information that confirms their existing beliefs.

It explains why two people can have a disagreement even though they are expose to the same evidence (attitude polarization) and how beliefs persist even in the face of contradictory evidence (belief perseverance). The problem arises when people recall information selectively and bias their conclusions.

This "phenomena" is called confirmation bias. It tests ideas in a one-sided way. If more people framed their arguments so they were more persuasive and neutral, and less resistant to opposisiton, more willing to be wrong, this kind of thing shouldn't happen as often. Being able to amicably disagree with people is a fantastic skill to have. I can see no greater intellectual benefit than the kind open communication brings from sharing your ideas in the face of respected adversity. As Aristotle once said:

"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it."

Why Doubt is Better than Faith

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." 
-- William James

When I was about 18 years old, I had one of the worst experiences of my life. I'm not sure if it was a virus or some sickness or disease. It only lasted a few days but it felt like weeks. I remember crawling to the shower, struggling just to move my hands in front of the other. The muscles in my body stiffened to such an extreme to where I had to use concentrate efforts to move. The pain I got from simply moving is almost ineffable. It sort of resembled that warm muscular tension you get when lactic acid builds up from exercise, only a hundredfold, coupled with that prickly feeling you get when your hand goes numb. It was completely debilitating. It was as if some invisible pressure held me there just loose enough not to crush me completely. But it wasn't the pain that was the worst of it. It was the maddening struggle to move. Like boxing someone who outmatches you in every way, every swing a miss, until exhaustion and frustration blinds every subsequent swing, always hitting nothing but air.

Throughout the whole ordeal, every time I felt like I couldn't move another inch, when I was trapped in a shirt halfway up my chest, arms fixed straight up, I did the only thing I could think to do: I prayed. I closed my eyes tight and asked for an inch, just a little mercy, any kind of relief.

This is not faith.

Faith is not the yearning for a higher power. It is not prayer. It is not solely a religious phenomena. And it definitely is not the answer to spirituality. There seems to be a great misconception about faith that says it is a religious statement of belief. A way of saying "I believe because I have faith.," which is equal to "I don't know why I believe." The concept of this faith present a problem.

In order to explain why, though, we must first understand belief as a mental state. Everyone knows what beliefs are. Beliefs are what you believe. It seems self explanatory. It seems absurd there can be anything at all left to say about beliefs. When we believe something we mean every degree of assurance, including the highest possible certainty and conviction. This sums up the definition of a much smarter man than I, William James. There is something, however, that does not have the same intuitive feeling: the fact that belief is actually a mental and emotional state. Much like anxiety, depression, or irritation, belief is a mental state.

"What characterizes belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation [the stopping of a conflicting idea], through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas."

Belief is simply the absence of contradictory thoughts. This means that when we are in a state of belief we are in a state of equilibrium. A stable mental state in which no thoughts contradict each other. Now this might get a little abstract but like all complex ideas, the insight emerges only when grasped.

So if belief is the absence of contradictory thoughts, at what point is something in a state of disbelief? When do we decide not to believe in evolution, God, or Democrat? If belief is characterized as the absence of contradictory thoughts, then its opposite is the presence of contradictory thoughts. A state where two or more ideas seem correct and no clear consensus can be made. Although this all seems very straightforward, it has a few major implications relevant to faith. First, any object which remains uncontradicted is believed and posited as truth. As William James put it: "As a rule we believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we only could... A child's mind is the same. It is only as objects become permanent and their relations fixed that discrepancies and contradictions are felt and must be settled in some stable way." Secondly, from this simple analysis, it is clear that a belief has an opposite which is not disbelief but rather resembles doubt.

Although disbelief may grammatically seems like the opposite of belief, recall belief is a constant state. If you've ever argued with someone who didn't believe what you believe you know that their viewpoint seemed just as constant as yours. Both of you didn't budge. And there is a distinct feeling we get when someone talks about something that we don't necessarily agree with or believe (I guess it's possible you may be feeling that right now). But this feeling of disbelief is merely a byproduct of belief itself:

"We never disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something else which contradicts the first thing. Compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied [this is a principle of logic]."

Good God that was wordy and confusing. Translation: you cannot be in a state of disbelief without believing something else to be true in its place instead. We need to believe something first to disbelieve something else. As an example, if I do not believe that the sun revolves around the earth it is only because I believe the the earth actually revolves around the sun instead. I believe the earth revolves around the sun which makes me disbelieve the opposite because it contradicts my beliefs. So really, disbelief is just a way of saying I believe something else. Disbelief = belief. They are the same. Two sides of a coin. If you recall Belief as the absence of contradictory thoughts then the presence of contradictory thoughts is best described as doubt.

If a man consistently told a woman they loved her with all their heart but then had sexual relationships with other people and physically abused the woman, it would be hard for the woman to make sense of that because two different contradictory messages are being recieved. Do they love me or not? They say they do but they don't act like it. This is doubt.

So why would this be good? Consider the example I just gave and the role faith would play in it. Faith may have different meanings for many different people but there is one definition that, in one way or another, captures the true nature of faith regardless of its usage. Faith is believing in the absence of evidence. Phrased another way, faith is also believing in the presence of contradictory evidence. Faith would have the woman believe he loves her despite infidelity and abuse.

"The different between faith and hope is that faith is believing in the absence of evidence; hope is wishing for an outcome based on probablity."

The problem is that faith resembles a choice; a choice that has chosen based on feeling and done so without the consent of evidence. Faith would chose the first choice; the man loves her and just excuse the abuse and infidelity. It would never conisder that the man may not love her because there is evidence that suggests otherwise. Outside a religious context, faith seems like a problem no question. But faith presents a problem universally. This is not saying that religion or spirituality is groundless, on the contrary, but a belief system surrounded by more answers then questions will likely have faith as an emotional comfort and support.

When people point to faith as an emotional comfort, they seem to be consciously choosing a position that may have no basis at all. Again, this is not just a religious thing and is not a religious statement. An atheist debating a theist that states "nothing happens when you die" is also taking a leap of faith. No one knows what happens after we die. Science does not answer it and religion answers in presumptuously. I recall hearing the famous Christian apologist D'Souza argue this brilliantly. The theist is taking a leap of faith by saying there is an afterlife and the atheist is by saying nothing happens. Also remember that belief and disbelief are two sides of a mental coin. They are analogous mental states. Disbelief simply has another belief already in its place. The problem with faith is that it is a choice not based on evidence but on the feeling of belief itself. Belief, like depression, feels like something. From my experiences growing up in the Christian church, the religious circles I've experienced have routinely pointed to doubt as a kind of phase that the masses go through. You know, just a bump in the road. There is no validation for the questions being asked or the feelings being felt. Faith prefers the choice that is in our own self-interest and its bias is toward the unexplainable.

In a practical sense, however, faith appears wonderfully adaptive. A person who can persistently bat off negative contradictory evidence in favor of positive beliefs supported only by faith is choosing the more positive outcome and thereby reducing anxiety. These people can achieve longer (but obviously fragile) periods of mental stability and comfort. It is a medical fact that positive beliefs (even without evidence)statistically affect the likelihood of recovery in a favorable way. The positive consequences of a belief supported by faith always reinforces faith. Doubt almost always, especially in religious and dogmatic domains, supports negative consequences. Strictly as an example, if you don't believe in an afterlife, then where will you go when you die? If faith is believing in an after life, thereby continuing our existence (everyone wants to live), faith has a positive consequence. So would doubting the possibility of an afterlife mean possibly missing out? Religion would certainty says yes (because religion is an enterprise dependent on group membership), and if that's the case, faith clearly seems like the route to an afterlife-- and less stress, evidence or no evidence. Why would we ever consciously choose negative consequences over positive ones? Why would we ever choose doubt over faith?

Because doubt is NOT the rejection of a belief (disbelief) NOR the opposite of faith. It was previously logically demonstrated how doubt is the opposite of belief not faith. Going back to the afterlife example, those who do not believe in an afterlife are saying they believe in something else instead. This is disbelief. Doubt allows for a choice to be made, but demands evidence to make it, and never has the brazen to say for sure. Most of the time there is just no way of knowing. Is hope not superior to faith? Is the possibility of something not enough? The different between faith and hope is that faith is believing in the absence of evidence; hope is wishing for an outcome based on probablity. I hope I win the lottery today. I hope my friend recovers for his illness. I hope I live to see tomorrow.

Doubt has the ability to confront the anxiety of not knowing and make it habitual. It can make conflict become a constant stable state that provides adaptive mental strategies to cope with all the stressors inherent in human life. Doubt is dispassionately passionate about the truth. Doubt forces a search for evidence-- a self perpetuating machine that draws attention to the details and promotes intellectual growth. The focus no longer rests on being right or blindly accepting positive consequences. The attention goes to the limits of knowledge and truth. It has no preferences. It is unbiased. It records the path said to take while referencing the entire known map.

But doubt is not for the faint of heart. It is uncomfortable, at least a first. It takes courage to admit we don't know-- and prudence to know if it can be known. The most important function of doubt is it leads to inquiry, the birth of the modern age. It is well known that common sense and intuition are flawed and misguided by our sensibilities. Sometimes they can be just dead wrong (stereotypes, phobias, ect.). Human inquiry gave us the power of questions but the weakness of answers. It is my belief, based on the evidence I have, that as we discover how much there is to know, and in doing so uncover just how little we actually know about more and more, that doubt is the only acceptable intellectual position. This is not a philosophy of agnosticism or a system of neutrality; this is an objective examination of belief, disbelief, faith, and doubt-- as evident by those far greater than I who have devoted their lives in the search for truth-- and the conclusion that doubt is superior to faith in its ability to generate knowledge and produce lasting comfort without the weak foundations of faith. The fragility of faith lies in the fact that it does nothing for understanding. It is, by its very definition, volitional ignorance. The common phrase "you always fear what you don't understand" rings true enough. We should be weary of those who claim to already know the answers. It is not enough to surround ourselves with like-minded people. Doubt will shake our preconceptions and unsettle us just enough to start searching for our own answers. And that is doubt's trump card over faith. Growth. We must never stop searching. The fact we can choose at all is a match struck in the dark.

"... the whole psychology of belief, disbelief, and doubt, is thus grounded on two mental facts-- first, that we are liable to think differently of the same; and second, that when we have done so, we can choose which way of thinking to adhere to and which to disregard."

*referenced from William Jame's classic work The Principles of Psychology in his second volume on Belief

On Dreams

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives” –William C. Dement

After about an hour of trying to fall asleep tonight, I rolled over frustrated and searched around my nightstand for my iPhone. I needed something to entertain me until I got tired. I made some moves on Words with Friends, creeped on Facebook, watched some things on YouTube...

I tapped on my Netflix app and browsed the same, familiar movies that never seem to get updated until I got to the documentaries section.

A few caught my eye, but when I saw a documentary about dreams I stopped cycling through and stared at the screen, remembering a couple of conversations I had about my friend's dreams. A few weeks ago a friend told me about a violent dream he had and how the dream disturbed him. The night before last, another person told me about a vivid dream, which she believed to be symbolic and a sign from God for her to do something.

I rarely dream. Or at least, I rarely remember my dreams. And I never have nightmares. Or maybe I just never remember my nightmares... whatever, point is, I thought about both these conversations and I let my finger hover over the the "play" button. I looked below the title at the description... it didn't sound all that interesting. In fact, it sounded cheesy and fictitious. Pseudosciencey. I suspected if I did watch it, I'd get bored within 10 minutes...

But I decided to watch it anyway. And to my surprise, I watched it all the way through.

It was about a woman who, through a series of dreams, becomes terrified of her own death. It had a paranormal style to it, often running through disturbing images to convey dream-like sequences. I got the vibe that the woman was trying to convey something supernatural about dreams...

And given the events that happened in the documentary, there was something otherworldly about the dreams...

I won't ruined it for you (the doc was called Edge of Dreaming) but it brought to light some interesting questions about dreams that I've heard before. And that, for the most part, people are not familiar with the nature of dreams. The film wasn't exactly scientific, but it did present some reliable information and it showed how powerful a dream can be in the sense that a simple dream, simple but disturbing, can affect peoples beliefs in the waking world.

I would argue that dreams are just another way thinking that occurs when people sleep, that they most importantly reflect emotional concerns, and that certain aspects of dreams can have symbolic meaning in regards to emotional concerns. But the gist of my argument is that I believe we can find a purpose for our dreams without speculation of paranormal activity or invoking the supernatural.

I think what interests most people is the content of dreams. There is often a strangeness to dreams.

There are those dreams, like the ones in the documentary, that seem supernatural. And there is deja-vu. Those moments that feel like we have already experienced or seen a current situation...
These experiences are the strongest reinforcer of the mysticism of dreams. I would argue that we know more about dreams to suggest an explanation for all these phenomena.

Let me get the boring stuff outta the way. Using brain-imaging we can actually see that dreams are products of activity in the lower brain stem. We can study the mind by studying the brain. The mind is what the brain does. When we are awake, signals from the lower brain stem are sent to an area of your brain that interprets them as the sensations you need to experience reality-- seeing, feeling, hearing, etc.

So because these signals come from the real world, you experience reality. When asleep, our frontal lobe goes offline and the brain is tasked with interpreting these signals from the lower brain stem without the help of higher mental processes. These signals from our lower brain stem cannot perceive reality because we are asleep and so the brain has to make sense of these signals that you have when your are awake when you are asleep. We can infer then that the brain puts together an explanation of these signals from other parts of the brain which are not shut down, from memories and other stored information.

This is how I have come to understand it anyway. Again, as always, this is not original-- it is the basis for something called the activation-synthesis hypothesis. Because we can see and observe these things going on in the brain, it is a much better explanation in my opinion as to why we dream. We dream because we have perpetual minds. Even when we are sleep, we still cannot entirely escape our private realities.

BUT if this were all that dreams were (firings of signals from the lower brain stem) they would be random and meaningless-- and consistently bizarre. Yet, when someone we love passes away, they can haunt our dreams for weeks. When someone hurts us emotionally, we can dream of our pain in similar, and even symbolic, ways. There are also reoccurring dreams-- which are too consistent to be random signals from the brain.

Much of our dream content is meaningful and consistent. They reflect past or present emotional concerns. There is a cognitive explanation for this but I don't think it's necessary to explain. All that matters for my argument is the fact that dreams reflect emotional concerns (Domhoff 1996).

If dreams reflect emotional concerns, then they can reveal information about ourselves (like what we are feeling). This would also explain why religious people have religious dreams because that can be an emotional concern. Whatever is on that person's mind is probably what they're gonna dream about. It is all about what the dreamer's feeling. And we are very presumptuous in thinking, at all times, we are aware of what we are feeling. I can attest to this from my training and experience at Helpline (a crisis hotline for A&M). People can become so confused in their feelings that all they need is someone to point those feelings out to them. Or to validate them. I think we tend to think these people crazy but "crazy" isn't a very good way to describe someone. That word can mean many things and isn't very useful. Dreams, specifically those which display emotional concerns, can serve a purpose to better understand ourselves in moments of distress or to come to terms with repressed feelings. We can interpret our own dreams and use them to better understand ourselves.

Some can argue that the answer to what is the purpose of dreaming is the same answer as to why we dream: it is a way for our brains to make sense of random information used from our memory and past experiences. Dreams don't need a purpose. But they can serve a purpose.

I know putting sources in a blog is overkill, and in my defense, I just believe that when talking about research findings it is best to state them if possible. So with that said, there is evidence to suggest that dreams feature repressed thoughts (Wegner, Wenzlaff & Kozak 2004)-- which is why they can be purposeful in discovering information about ourselves that may otherwise be consciously inaccessible .

So having a disturbing dream or an emotionally powerful dream can serve as a great insight into some very real feelings. By looking at all aspects of the dream, people can engage in a kind of therapy when times are tough. People tend to shake off dreams or discard them if disturbing-- but they can be purposeful with but a few moments of reflection. And it's possible dreams can even reveal emotional content that the dreamer is completely unaware of.

But... In reality, what I'm suggesting is dream interpretation. There is a huge danger in speaking about dream interpretation.

I'll use Freud as an example of this danger. Freud would say that all your dreams are a statement of wish fulfillment that stem from childhood. That is, the whole purpose of dreaming is because your unconscious mind is stating what you desire. But because we have defense mechanisms, are dreams are coded in symbols. This way, our minds can hide the true nature of our dreams so as to not disturb the dreamer. Freud would say that the particularly bizarre aspects of dreams are unconscious wishes or desires. Research does NOT support this (Breger, Hunter, & Lane, 1971; Dement & Wolpert, 1958). All dreams are not wish fulfillment, desires, or repressed conflicts from the unconscious. Dreams can be much simpler than that.

The problem with Freud’s view and dream interpretation is that there are an infinite number of interpretations for any one dream. Finding the correct one is a matter of guessing. This is where people who practice dream interpretation can make a living. If anyone can interpret your dreams it is you and you alone. No one else shares your exact experiences or knows precisely what you feel and why you feel it. People also attribute different meanings to symbols. For examples, lets say two people have a dream where a man gives them an apple. One of them interprets the dream as Satan tempting them with sin (a biblical allusion) and the other sees it as being given a snack because they went to bed hungry (and they love apples). For one person the apple holds symbolic meaning and for the other it is just an apple, or maybe the apple symbolizes hunger.

So when do we interpret dreams? What makes a dream meaningful? I dunno. That's for you to decide. I would caution excessively attributing meaning to dreams, as Freud did. Dreaming can reveal our deepest fears, hidden feelings, or what we truly desire. Or they can just be situational abstractions. In my experience, it is pretty easy to know which dreams reflect emotional concerns. Usually because... you feel emotionally concerned. Pretty straightforward. Finding meaning in dreams can give them a useful purpose: another path to self-actualization and knowing yourself.

Oh-- and a possible explanation as to what happened with the woman in the documentary who had a dream that later came to be true? I think the psychiatrist at the very end gives some good possible explanations. I guess you'll just have to watch it to find out!

"The waking life, with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, is never repeated; on the contrary, the dream aims at relieving us of these. Even when our whole mind is filled with one subject, when our hearts are rent by bitter grief, or when some task has been taxing our mental capacity to the utmost, the dream either gives us something entirely alien, or it selects for its combinations only a few elements of reality; or it merely enters into the key of our mood, and symbolizes reality." --J. H. Fichte

On Self-Reliance

So I've been wanting to get my thoughts down on self-reliance for some time now. The concept of self-reliance completely transformed my way of thinking. It sounds self-explanatory and simple, but the nature of self-reliance is actually quite complex and intricate. Many people would readily apply the label of self-reliance to themselves, but I seldom see it in daily life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote an essay in 1841 called Self-Reliance. I read his essay during a... receptive? time in my life. I was interested in human nature and eagerly reading many works to discover why we do the things we do.

Self-reliance is, in a general sense, relying on yourself. It is synonymous with independence. I suspect there are some who will instantly be bored by this topic because it would seem it doesn't apply and must be for other people. To those people, I hope to convince you otherwise, as I was, that we are extremely dependent on the forces around us-- that we are born with a disadvantage in respect to self-reliance; we are born dependent creatures; born reliant on our parents knowledge and beliefs, our cultures, and even our friends. Why else do you think that there is such a chasm between the person we are when we are alone and bored at night and the person at the bar or among friends? Why is there a difference at all between a conversation alone with our best friend and a conversation we have at a party?

Emerson outlines the nature of self-reliance and argues its value on several points. I will argue on a different point: that self-reliance leads to a happier and healthier life. I have also found a ton of overlap between this concept and the scientific study of mind and human behavior. After contemplating the ideas in Self-Reliance, something in me changed. It was a slow transformation, to be sure, but over time the difference between who I am today and who I was became as plain as day and night. Really, it boils down to me becoming a nerd. I started to like school. I loved reading.

I started a blog.
 

It must have opened up apart of me that never understood the importance of self-expression. I never allowed myself to think out loud, to question, to be wrong. All of a sudden I was allowed to wander into fields which dealt with facts, a passion for learning, and I saw a self that was always intimidated by history and deferential to it-- that had not the right relation of identity to circumstance.

Self-reliance is a formidable goal. Its initiative is that each person become free from social embaressment and psychological punishment by eliminating concepts that destroy identity and creating ones that promote fearless self-expression. This is done by understanding three key principles: self-trust, inconsistency, and nonconformity. These three principles will be the majority of the discussion in this post. It is my initial belief that a mastery of these principles will lead to greater mental health, higher self-esteem, and a much more vibrant and coherent world. The possibility of harmony.You will learn to trust whatever thought comes first. Being wrong will become as exhilarating as being right. You will be free:

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost-- and our first thought is rendered back to us us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement... A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses [his thought] without notice... because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” -- Emerson's Self-Relaince

Princple 1: Self-trust. Emerson argues that we are reliant on people to think for us. Emersonian self-reliance insists on trusting your self enough to think and speak freely and be afraid of nothing. Sigmund Freud once wrote:

"When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within them, not by the compelling power of hypnosis, but by observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish."

These statements by Freud and Emerson both speak about an unspoken force that seems to repress certain thoughts and feelings. However, a recent hydrolics model of the brain suggest that for every emotion repressed, it surfaces in another form. In other words, what we try to keep hidden often leaks out. An example of this notion of repression can be seen in an experiment where a group of people were asked to watch a graphic and disturbing surgical procedure. Half of the group were asked to try and remain expressionless. That group had higher blood pressure, increased heart rate, and remembered more about the video than the half that were given no instructions (free to express their emotions). It's almost like the mere act of repressing their feelings leaked out into their physiological state. Sometimes the concept of "leaked repression" is better served when we remember a time when we really wanted to tell someone a secret but couldn't. Sometimes we can recall giving them hints, phrasing sentences in a way that imply the meaning of the secret, or even displacing the frustration of keeping a secret onto others. We can keep secrets hidden beneath only to have them surface in another form. "Always the inmost becomes the outmost." You might be surprised how easily others can see us. I mean, see us better than we see ourselves. This is most evident when people talk behind our backs. The same things are consistently being said among different people who know us-- and most of them will never say it to our face, and so we will never know what it is that others see so clearly. I think this kind of gossip is a natural thing-- a last resort to communicate frustration about something we are too cowardly to talk about with that person.

But self-reliance demands open communication. To speak, as Emerson says "the rude truth in all ways." He says we should learn to detect our thoughts as they come, and value them. To trust ourselves in thought and feeling, and to communicate it without fear or courtesy. He goes on to insist that this is how great men have stumbled upon genius. Emerson then speaks about a notion of consistency which prevents us from knowing our true selves through self-reliance.

"The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them... I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways... Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, [al]though it contradict every thing you said today... Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none."

I love the last passage in that quote. I think it basically speaks to the disservice we do to people when we don't tell people exactly how we feel. Because ultimately, when we don't give voice to our thoughts or opinions, we give others less than the truth. This is especially true in communication between couples. The entire quote leads us to the second principle.

Principle 2: Inconsistency. What Emerson is saying is we should actually be inconsistent in what we say and do, or at the very least, not be afraid of being so.

At first, this seems crazy. Be inconsistent in what we say? Consistency is usually valued isn't it? We would never vote for a politician who is inconsistent in what he says (although that's usually the case). One minute he could be a republican, then after a debate, says he was convinced otherwise and now a democrat. We need people to be consistent don't we?

The outside world demands us to be consistent, and rightly so, because others would have no way of knowing who we really are or what we stand for unless we were consistent in what we say and do. We need to be reliable. If we say something, we have to stick by it. We must pick a side: democrat or republican; friend or foe; theist or atheist; love or hate; and all the other dichotomies which paint the world in black and white-- that which polarizes humanity.

But what happens when we're wrong? What happens if we choose the wrong side?

I'll continue to use politics to unravel inconsistency. A very famous airing of CNN's Crossfire revealed how polarized American politics are when Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) went on to argue how the show itself-- a show that prides itself on a Republican versus Democrat ideology-- damages American politics and warps public opinion. This very heated argument is shown in the video. Three months after this interview, the show (which aired for over 20 years) was canceled. A few months later, on being asked if the infamous Jon Stewart interview had anything to do with the shows cancellation, the CNN CEO remarked only that he sympathized with Jon Stewart's criticism.

It takes a special person indeed to be willing to be inconsistent in what they say, to be able to passionately argue a point and at the same time be flexible enough to be convinced otherwise if the truth be on the opponents side. Being consistent often sacrifices reason, forcing us to take sides and to make sure we're always on the winning team. We become wildly defensive, and stand on one of two sides of something that is actually dimensional in nature, consisting of many sides from many angles.

Inconsistency is therefore valued in character. Emeron's notion of inconsistency allows for two critical things which are mostly ignored by self-trust: listening and learning.

Now, this is not advocating ignorance. He is not endorsing the contradiction of principles but advising self-trust-- to trust your voice when it is hesitant to speak, afraid of being wrong, ridiculed, or judged. Allow yourself to be wrong by being able to be inconsistent if need be. Hold an identity that can evolve with any experience that comes your way.

Say whatever it is you wholeheartedly believe to be true, but if the contrary is found out tomorrow, be willing to be inconsistent and amend, adjust, adapt; these are not concepts of ignorance or conformity but fundamentals of wisdom and self reliance. Conformity is doing and thinking as others; inconsistency is doing and thinking for oneself. If this inconsistency leads you to be misunderstood, Emerson reminds us of the great men who were misunderstood-- Socrates, Galileo, Jesus-- and that “to be great is to be misunderstood.”

Just how reliant are we really? Considerable research has been done to explain our behavior in the social world. In what is now called Social Cognitive Theory, evidence suggests that not only is our behavior determined by reinforcement like Operant Conditioning but also by observing the behavior of other people (and the consequences of their behavior). Learning by example. This is very much in accordance with how our brains are wired. If you have ever watched a spider crawl up someone's arm, you may have already realized that we are wired to feel empathy; we are hardwired to react to another person's experience as if we were actually experiencing it. We do not have to have the spider crawl up our own arm to feel alarmed. We don't always have to experience something ourselves to feel it. We have it in us the capacity to anticipate consequences.

Emerson advises solitude as a way to detach from this method of learning (of social conformity) to unlock something greater: self-reliance. Self-reliance's goal is to discover the true self. It seeks to detach from learned behavior and experience life in a more liberating way.

"If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself... If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument...Well, most men have bound their eyes... and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right."

Can you imagine how different our lives would be if we were that person we are when we are alone around everyone else? Maybe that's what really transformed me so much. I was afraid to really be myself. I was fine with being the social actor that we all are, as Sociology is apt to remind us of, but it never occurred to me that I didn't need to be.

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

The greatest thing about self-reliance is its ability to release all those inhibitions that keep us from enjoying life and living freely. It's like beer for the soul. It counteracts our reinforced rearing, our learned behavior, and instills a way of thinking that relies wholly from within. At least that's what it did for me. One stark fact that I had to stomach was the realization that we are truly alone. It feels good to share a piece of ourselves with friends, family, lovers-- and that's exactly what makes our loved ones so special-- but when it comes down to it, no one can get as close to you as you. And people are only what they choose to show us. In the end, it will be just you. And tomorrow anything can happen. No one is protected from death, no one escapes life on their terms. Even suicide is an expression of despondency. Self-reliance is a way to break free from false securities and appreciate the beauty in this world without condition.

"I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,-- but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh today? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at last. But... you [may]...give your friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the same thing."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Love

"...Surely there must be this thing called love and surely there must be this binding force that compells us to die and live and sing and kill, all in its name, and in a way that accounts for all of us..."

I guess I would first like to begin by saying that I believe love can be discussed in a much more specific way than how it is conventionally brought about. Consider what it means to love someone. Is it essentially the same as liking someone? What's the difference between loving your mother and loving your wife?

Is it an emotion? A state? Does it mean attachment? Is it in our brain, our heart, the soul? What does being in love mean?

People have so many different ways of describing love that talking about it present a problem. We simply don't have the same experiences or relationships to talk about love without defining it first. It seems intuitive that some people can be more in love than others, but is that true? And how can we know?

When we say we love someone, we have to have some idea of what love is. What makes a relationship special to where we can say it is love and when can we distinguish between love and romantic love? It is easy to judge love when we see it. If we can identify someone in a bad relationship, an odd couple that we don't understand what keeps them together, or a couple we suspect won't last another month-- we must know something about love.

But experience and thought can only go so far in knowing any one thing. What does research say about love? If you know me, and as you read I'm sure you will begin to, I personally place my faith in things I can trust. In things that can be seen to occur no matter how many times we observe it. I begin abstractly talking about things like love, and the soul, and God because I think it's important to try and define them. Because really, until we join the search, we really have only a superficial knowledge of these concepts. We are told about these things without ever really understanding them. And then the feeling of not knowing becomes comfortable, the mystery all but forgotten in our confident responses and the advice we give others. We turn the ear infront of spoken truths at every turn because we forgot we should be listening. This seems particularly evident with love when we're asked to explain it.

Try to explain what love means to you.

If you relied soley on your life experiences and knowledge to explain what love means to you, all you can explain is what love has come to mean to you based on what has happened to you. If you're very first experience was of abuse, then any relationship thereafter will seem like heaven, even if it is a particularly uninspiring relationship. Your ability to predict what will happen to others with different experiences and different ways of thinking about love has diminshed to practically zero. If it differs, and it probably does, we might explain love differently. You might say love is patient, love is kind; I might say love is spontaneous, love is sex. But surely there must be this thing called love and surely there must be this binding force that compells us to die and live and sing and kill, all in its name, and in a way that accounts for all of us...

From one theory, romantic love comes as an emotion that involves many areas of experience: emotional, cognitive, and motivational. From this perspective, love has different styles as well. The triangular theory of love by Robert Sternberg has become very influential in the modern conception of love. He names three components of love, ways in which we piece together our relation to people based on their status in our relationship, which arises when components are absent or present. These components are Intimacy, Passion, and Commitment.

Intimacy is the emotional component of love. It is the sharing of deeply personal information about each other and mutual acceptance. For some people, this is extremely hard to accomplish. If they have been hurt in their life before, are defensive or apprehensive because of it, or feel like they don't connect well with others; this can pose a real challenge to forming connections with other people.

Passion is the motivational force (drive) behind love. Sexual attraction, desire, sexual intimacy, all that stuff. Passion is shown to give rise to preoccupation and fascination with loved ones. It has been shown (which should be no surprise) to cause rapid arousal but shown to quickly fade.

Commitment is the cognitive component of love. This is actually very difficult to conceptualize. Once a person decides if he or she is in love, a certain amount of time passes. This initial decision eventually becomes a lasting sense of commitment (kinda like... classical conditioning). I believe there are also other things that can create this sense of commitment, such as a protective nature or a sense of attachment (the kind of attachment that an infant has for their mother) but... that's just my opinion.

A really interesting thing about the 3 components of love is that Sternberg takes them and creates a model of love that can account for all the differences between people! He calls it.. The Triangular Model of Love... or The Love Triangle ;)

Which, as you can see, lays out all the different kinds of love based on the components of love (intimacy, passion, commitment). We can see that "liking" someone is simply just being intimate with someone, which can be a frequent event in our lives as we meet and talk with strangers-- and because it is without passion (or attraction), it is essentially a friendship. So we love our friends.

But maybe you are having relationship problems and you're not sure why. I think it would be helpful to research this particular thing and figure out what's missing. If you click this link, The Triangular Theory of Love , Wikipedia will give you a little more details. For example, Companionate Love, which consists of Intimacy and Commitment, is said to be a long-term committed friendship (like a marriage) in which the passion has faded. Without identifying the problem and placing goals, it's not likely relationship problems will ever correct themselves. "Oh look, we need to talk more about what our feelings and what bothers us (intimacy) in order to prevent these feelings of anger" is an example of what might be said to repair relational intimacy.
In this triangle, Consummate Love is suppose to be the complete form of love. It is quite rare according to the researcher and it is difficult to obtain. It might be hard to even imagine what Consummate Love would look like. Luckily, we have great demonstrations of Consummate Love throughout history. Consummate Love has been around long before Sternberg invented the term. It is the beauty in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the crux of spirituality, the hype around Twilight. We often describe Consummate relationships with terms like soulmates or "the one".

Maybe you never really thought you loved anyone if these 3 components are all that love is. I'm sure we've all had a "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" by now-- so maybe you don't even think all this applies to you.

Well, there is clearly more to the picture. Psychologists speak of different kinds of love (or styles). This shouldn't be too surprising, but as an example, work in the field done by a couple of psychologists (Clyde and Susan Hendrick) suggested 6 styles of love among college students based on questions that students answered about themselves:

Romantic love--This is what most people refer to when they fall in love. This kind of love is basically characterized by passionate desire, lots of great sex, and associated with powerful physical attraction.
Game-playing love-- Characterized by lack or fear of commitment and getting over love affairs pretty easily
Friendship-love-- Loving attachment, deep friendship, and nonsexual affections. Thought to be the same emotion that binds friends and parents to children. Key word is basically attachment similar to the attachment infants have with their mothers.
Logical love-- Considers the costs and benefits of a partnership, also called pragmatic love.
Mania love (possessive/excited love)-- This is basically neurotic feelings about the lover. They get excited to where they can't sleep, when the lover ignores them they feel sick, ect ect. Very... very... unhealthy. Obviously.
Selfless love-- This is selfless giving and concern for the significant other. They list themselves as willing to do anything to simply help their lover, and view their lover's wishes and needs as far greater than their own. There may be a certain type of dependency here (although I'm not sure that's really in the research, just my lovely opinion once again).

Chances are you've had one of these 6 styles of love yourself. The point being that interpersonal styles like the 6 stated above are different from what Sternberg says love consists of (intimacy, passion, and commitment). Styles more have to do with personality than love as a concept.

So I think it would be pretty wise to assess Sternberg's model of love and see how this applies to you. And just because you see yourself in Consummate Love doesn't mean you are. That is a subject assessment and a big problem with studies like this. It would be better to examine the components intimacy, passion, and commitment and see if these things are qualities your relationship really possesses. Be realistic. What are some examples you can think of that characterize passion in the relationship? The hardest thing I have ever tried to do in my life so far is understanding myself. There are so many reasons why we don't really want to know everything about ourselves, and many more psychological structures in place to make sure we'll never find out.

But it can be done, to some extent, for the willing and the brave. Mostly so by asking questions. Do you keep things from your partner? Do you feel like there are some things you just can't tell him/her? What about passion-- is there a strong physical attraction? Sex? And if there is no commitment (That is, there is no offical title like boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife) then do you wish there was? Why? It is possible to change things for the better, to live in healthier relationships, love many people, and be self reliant and content.

There is this ignorance about love, which exists primarily in you girls, which holds that you will find your perfect match, fall in love, get married, have babies, live happily ever after. Even girls who disagree when questioned specifically about these things all tend to have these very expectations. I have seen some of the greatest suffering among people my age because of the framework this type of love fallacy creates within relationships. It is unyielding in its need to propagate security, from which should only be established by the self; unforgiving in its selfish quest to find "the one," disregarding relationships and burning bridges; unknowing of motivation; uncaring in matters of fulfillment. The goal of this kind of love is simply security rather than human compatibility. There is a romantic notion of "true love" and "soul mates". These words often have a prejudice against all other forms of love. If we want to have better relationships and experience higher forms of human connections, love must be a clear concept.

Someone once said to me in desperation, "love is so hard." And I thought... No it really isn't. My dog practically loves me unconditionally. We make love hard. We don't see people as they are, we see people as we are. We see people through a lens. A filter of experience and baggage. We can fantasize about someone and in doing so make them more desirable, overlooking their vices. Exaggerate their virtues. Experience is an endlessly thick filter which can bias the eyes.

We all yearn for better relationships and happiness. Where you fall in this triangle has it's own set of problems and obstacles... unless you're in the middle of the triangle of course. In which case, you probably thought all this was boring.

For the rest of us, a strong sense of self and identity is needed. Self reliance. I have not lived long enough or had enough experience to say this for sure, but I know of no couple who have tried to work on each other and succeeded. I know of no circumstance whereas a person "changed" the other. The only change I've seen in people come when they are alone. But I have heard rumors...

I hope my next blog will be on self reliance, because it was that concept alone which showed me a higher truth and convinced me of self actualization. Hopefully I'll explain more later.

"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens."
-- C.G. Jung (One of my favorite Psychologists)

On My Belief in God

One topic I refuse to be ignorant about is human nature. If I was being honest with myself, which sometimes I'm not, there is apart of me that wishes I could go back to a more childlike way of thinking. I wish that there were good and bad forces, that I was always good, invincible, and all the important things were knowable. All the years of trying to sift through fact from fiction has almost always led me to the conflict of the two ways which we acquire knowledge: authority or observation. Faith or science. Does truth come from what we are told by prophets, pastors, or professors, or does it come from what we can see and measure and predict?

For all I know, the answer may be both.

It seems to me perfectly reasonable to believe in God, but a God who conflicts with what we know requires much more faith than a God explained by what we can see.

I'll try and explain. If there is a God, which I believe there is, then I do not believe in a personal God that controls or is concerned with human affairs, guiding human actions and thoughts, or interferes with the natural laws of governs nature. These positions violate the concept of free will, and are contradictory in a religious sense. I think quoting a man I heard speak last year about the origin of the universe might be the most appropriate way to convey my belief about this:

"What could define God [is a conception of divinity] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God...They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is, this seems most impossible." - Stephen Hawking

I wouldn't go so far as to agree with Professor Hawking on the insignificance of human life, but his definition of God is something I cannot help be swayed by. It speaks to the vastness of space and the miraculous survival of life on earth. The most attractive thing about this outlook is the definition of God. You see, the problem with most religions, with most conceptions of God, is a lack of definition-- something religions should strive for and borrow from scientific reasoning:

"To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress... If it is one of the goals of religions to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in another sense."-- Albert Einstein

What Einstein is suggesting is that religion can be improved if grounded in the pursuit of truth, as science is, and becomes open to modification by the interpretation of facts. For me, I learned it best to describe what I do NOT believe to better understand what I DO believe. This logic is certainly borrowed from scientific reasoning and is called falsifiability, i.e. proving things false versus proving things true. It is presumptuous of any man to to think to prove a thing true. This is what drives the dogma of religion. It must be acknowledged that religion does, in every sense, operate in vague and unclear terms.

I feel the closest depiction of God is what Einstein and Hawking believed in which is essentially that the universe itself is god. 

"If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

There is a regularity to all that moves in the universe, physics and chemistry; the laws of nature, and while science cannot prove God exists, it can disprove some of the more absurd claims of fundamentalist. I see each side of the debate of God: those for want to believe in a higher power, in the transformative power of love, but at the cost of truth and knowledge; and those against it, who see something contrived in believers, something hypocritical and self-defeating, but often at the cost of empathy. Both have something true to communicate. Both are at fault.

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of of mystery-- even if mixed with fear-- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds-- it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitutes true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let the feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature." -- Albert Einstein essay "The World as I See it"

Knowing what you believe (and what is knowable) is essential for human growth and happiness. Learning new things can give meaning to life. I would love to see more people try and codify what they believe as I am doing.

The Long Prolonged Blog

I know to some people, the idea of a blog is ridiculous. I've heard many people call it an "online diary". But secretly, I have always admired those persons who have the courage to put their thoughts at the mercy of others-- those confident enough to show their true selves and let their words fall where they may.

And now, I must have found that courage (perhaps from the examples of a few friends) but I am still nervous about writing my thoughts for others to see. It seems strange. I'm sure their will be those who mock it, and that fact alone was enough to prevent me for the longest time from starting a blog. But I know of no better way to communicate ideas than through the writing of them. There is something lost in speech-- in the way we talk to each other. Half the time people are just waiting for their turn to talk. The other half their attention is divided. From my training this semester in a crisis hotline, I learned some valuable skills of active listening, only to realize that among my friends and family, I may be the only one who is ever actually listening.

Well, I better not start a rant-- even though that seems to be what blogging is sometimes. But I just want an introduction first.

I will always try to fashion my blogs in such a way where it argues a point. I don't want this to be just another emotional outlet to vent; I want my words to have weight. My blog, I hope, will be used to explore ideas. I will mostly be writing about topics and issues I have long debated in the confines of my mind, which have gone mostly unchecked against the experience and opinions of others. More than anything I want discussion. Sure, I have my thoughts, my beliefs, my ideas-- but what are yours? I have always been more interested in how other people think and how they perceive their world. And because of that I've learned how I perceive mine. It's why I love psychology (I'm a psych major if you didn't know). After all, what are my thoughts but the accumulation of thoughts before me?

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton

So please, as I blog, if you have any comments, go ahead. I want your thoughts. That is  really why anyone creates an "online diary"-- they want it to be read; they want their thoughts validated. I want more. I would rather have mine invalidated; I would rather be corrected than confirmed. Maybe the content of our discussion will generate something that can enlighten the both of us.