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  • all right, so I want to go through a lot of material today and hopefully I've Hopefully that'll work out.

  • It should.

  • So, so far, what we've been doing is laying out an argument that you inhabit.

  • What you might describe is a frame of reference or a story, or that you're occupied by sequential some personalities.

  • That's another reasonable way of thinking about it might be the most reasonable way of thinking about it, really, and that these frames of reference or some personalities have a point of view and the source associated thoughts and associated memories, and and that most importantly, perhaps as well is directing your behaviour and emotions.

  • They also structure your perceptions, and I think that's the most critical.

  • That's the most critically important realization about the frames that you bring to bear on the world because they it's through them that the world manifests itself.

  • And what that means to some degree is that you you you have an indeterminant role to play as a consequence of your moral choices.

  • Because these air essentially value based structures as a consequence of your moral choices, you determined to to an indeterminate degree the manner in which the world manifests itself to you.

  • So in that sense, you're a co creator of your own being, and then you're also a co creator through your action and your communication for the being of other people as well and and for the external world in so far as you act upon it.

  • So it's a non trivial realization, too.

  • You understand that to what degree your value structures filter the world for you and shape it.

  • And so we've been talking so far about the structure of that world, and I introduced some neuro physiological ideas last time.

  • The idea being that you come into the world, obviously embodied with a set of inbuilt, will call them some personalities at hand, most of them those air regulated by very archaic ancient brain systems that you share with many other creatures on the evolutionary chain.

  • Which is partly why you can communicate with and understand other creatures because if you didn't share that underlying biological structure, they would be opaque to you in the same way that perhaps an octopus is relatively opaque to you.

  • You know you can't understand it because you don't share an embodied platform and it's It's experiences therefore entirely foreign to you, but you share You're embodied platform, certainly very specifically with all mammals.

  • And of course, you can understand mammals quite well.

  • But you could even really understand lizards to some degree and especially the more social ones.

  • And so there's this tremendous degree of inbuilt biological structure and biological commonality, and we talked about it most particularly in reference to the hypothalamus, which seems to be the the built in initial some personality generator.

  • Something like that in the hypothalamus is responsible for regulating what you might regard as the most fundamental biological elements of behavior that things the systems that not only keep you alive, which is obviously very important but also impel you to do such things as defend yourself, obviously part of survival, and also to reproduce and to explore and the exploration elements quite interesting, because you think of that as a very sophisticated form of behavior.

  • And it is, but it's rooted in an unbelievably archaic neurophysiology, so the hypothalamus roughly sets you into motivated frames.

  • And then when those frames either fail or when they're all quiescent because they've been satiated, it pops you into an exploratory state of mind, and you wander around exploring foraging for information, roughly speaking, so that you can update all the sub personalities that you used to, um, to organize your perceptions and frame your emotions and so forth.

  • Now that so the hypothalamus throws up these frames, it makes you hungry.

  • It makes you thirsty.

  • It makes you defensively aggressive.

  • It helps regulate your temperature through behavior and all of those things.

  • Now the problem with that is that it's a set of impulsive, unit dimensional systems, each one operating in the moment at each one, only concerned with the satiation of its particular aim will say.

  • And the problem with that is that while you live for more than the moment you live across many moments, you stretch yourself across time and we know human beings know that they stretch across time and so actually have to consider notary, the organization of their behavior in the short term, but also the organization of their behavior in the short term, so that it also works across weeks and across months and across years, and maybe even for longer spans of time than that, and also equally and similarly, it has to work across people, and one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is there actually isn't much difference between establishing a value structure that works for you now and next week and next month and into the future, and establishing a value structure that works for you and other people simultaneously.

  • Because you could say that whoever you are in a year is sort of like another person.

  • And so in so far as you can organize yourself so that other people find what you're doing, let's say acceptable and valuable.

  • You're also organizing yourself so that perhaps you're acting in the best interests of your future self.

  • And so then you, you might say, Well, if the hypothalamus can can can can organize you're you're being such that you can satiate satisfy your most basic needs.

  • Why do you need the rest of the brain and answer to that is, Well, it looks like it's to solve the problem of more complex forms of being.

  • So these these fundamental biological subsystems have to interact with each other in a productive way to catch a cycle unit.

  • Dementia Lee from Motivated State Too motivated State.

  • It's not a very effective solution.

  • And not only that, you have to learn to operate in a world with time and with other people.

  • And so that makes the city the the adaptation problem much, much more complex.

  • And it's for that reason, as far as I can tell, no doubt, for other reasons as well that there's there's utility in the provision of extra sub cortical and cortical resources, and I think the right way to think about the cortex in some ways is actually as living space for the hypothalamus and the sub cortical structures.

  • So you know what happens when you're when you develop as a young child, especially in the very early stages of development, the underlying sub cortical systems, including the systems for the census more or less compete for dawn Dominion over the cortical territory.

  • So, for example, if you take a kitten and you close one of its eyes shortly after birth and you leave it covered for a number of months, what will happen is the remaining.

  • I will invade both hemispheres visual representation systems so that I becomes this is single remaining eye becomes much more acute, and Mork or tickly dominant, like an invader, really like an invader.

  • Then the other one does.

  • And then if you uncover the other eye, the cat.

  • After a critical period of vellum, that cat will never learn to see out of that eye.

  • And so, you know, you've got these underlying biological systems motivational and sensory, and they're looking to expand themselves as the organism manifests itself in the world.

  • And it does that by occupying cortical territory in a competitive process.

  • So, for example, if you're deaf, your your your your visual cortex will become occupied by auditory and tactile process.

  • Because why not?

  • You know, I mean, you could basically see with your hands, you know, and you can you can.

  • Well, I wouldn't say it's not so easy here with your eyes.

  • That's harder.

  • Although you can hear to some degree with touch right, because you can feel vibration.

  • All of your senses overlap to a substantial degree.

  • And if one of them is missing, it's perfectly reasonable for the others to occupy the territory that's that would otherwise be given over to that sense.

  • And this actually has some practical implications.

  • Even so, silent reading is actually a relatively new ability, evolutionarily speaking, Certainly, literacy is a relatively new invention from an evolutionary perspective.

  • But to to silent Reed is to use your eyes as ears.

  • So you know, when you read silently, you could hear the words so to speak in your head.

  • And the reason for that, as it turns out, is that the part of the brain that you used to read silently with is right between the visual and the auditory cortex.

  • It's right where they overlap, so you are literally, literally you are using your eyes as ears, and so that's quite the thing that you can.

  • You can figure out how to do that.

  • So anyway, so you can think about thes hypothalamic systems being in place more or less ready to go at birth and then having to organize themselves into a sophisticated and integrated a single ego that acts across time and in the social environment.

  • And, you know, when PJ originally started talking about child development, he regarded the child is something that was born into the world with just a set of very primordial reflexes, mostly sucking reflexes and some primary motor reflexes.

  • He was very much a constructionist But I would say, you know, had he been alive now, his constructionism would've be modified it modified by the relevant neuro physiological data showing that there's a lot more built into us right from the beginning than PJ expected.

  • He still might need experience to catalyze the development, but obviously Children are born with the ability to hear and to see into sense with touch.

  • They're hungry and tired and angry and like they have the whole range of emotions at hand, and they also come into the world with their motivation already in place.

  • Otherwise you wouldn't be able to form a relationship with him, and that's modified by the development of the higher cortical systems through play and through social negotiation.

  • But the biology is there to begin with, and so that's that's a That's a good way to think about it.

  • With regards to understanding how these how both how the fundamental biological systems operated, how they manifest themselves in in personality and in story, because you do that all the time.

  • You tell a story about how you got angry, and it's basically a story about being dominated by a particular kind of sub personality which would be hypothalamic and exactly how you manifested that and what the consequences weren't.

  • You know, I was very mad at this person, but I knew I couldn't get too upset because and that that's a good story that indicates both the highly motivated nature of the original response tendency and then your immediate proclivity to have to figure out how to negotiate that expression within a social space so that the medium to long term consequences are positive rather than negative.

  • And people are very interested in such bits of information should send such units of information because we need to know how to conduct ourselves in complex environments.

  • And so if someone's willing to share their experience and they can narrate it in an interesting story, were absolutely more than happy to listen, because in some sense we're assembling our identities out of those stories.

  • And then you can think that there are patterns across stories, which is really a useful thing to understand, because what that gives you real insight into what constitutes an archetype because an archetype is what's comin across sets of stories.

  • That might be one way of looking at it.

  • So an archetype is like a meta story.

  • And so what part of what we're going to turn to now in this discussion is a description of certain meta stories.

  • And there's, ah, particular meta story that I'm most interested in.

  • And that's the story about how stories transform themselves.

  • And so that's what that, I think, is the most fundamental story that characterizes human beings.

  • There is the story.

  • I was here.

  • I implemented some behaviors and I went there.

  • There was better than here.

  • That's the fundamental unit.

  • But the thing about structures like that is that they may work in one situation and not in another or at one time and not in another, and thus they have to be modified.

  • And it was partly for this reason that PJ has his career as a developmental psychologist.

  • Progressed started to understand that it was more important not so much to understand the given structure of a knowledge structure, but to understand the manner in which Nolan structures transform.

  • And that was partly partly illustrated in his description of stage theory, because stages were really movement from one set of axiomatic pre suppositions that through through through with which the child was structuring the world into a state where that system failed because it wasn't sufficiently comprehensive and then into the development of a new stage that could do everything the previous stage could plus account for all the things that the previous stage couldn't.

  • So that's also why PJ believed that knowledge actually accumulated because each time there was a transformation, the new structure could had a wider range of application than the previous structure, even though it kept all the advantages of the previous structure.

  • And so that's a good way of that's a good way of conceptualizing progress because it's not that easy.

  • You know, if you're a relativist, fundamentally, you don't believe in difference between solid structures, say, and you certainly don't believe in the idea of progress.

  • But if you think about ah more sophisticated structure as being able to do more things properly, then you can certainly map out progress with no problem.

  • And you know, you know that because you see people operating the world who are less competent, generally speaking and more competent, generally speaking, and there doesn't seem to be much debate about that.

  • You can recognise people like that very very easily.

  • So So that's the basic structure.

  • And we've talked about that at length.

  • And I suggested that while you're occupying a structure like that, the world manifests itself to you not as objects but as number one.

  • Things to ignore, which is the major category.

  • Was talking to some guy yesterday who is working.

  • Think he was in San Diego on artificial intelligence and neural networks, and he was working with someone who's actually started.

  • So a neural network work will learn howto wait certain stimulus features, Let's say, in order to identify an image so the thing will be trained up on a whole set of diverse images, and it learns through feedback to discriminate between them.

  • But the problem with the neural network is that it's not easy to understand what's actually going on inside of them because it self itself generated.

  • So we could easily end up, for example, creating fully conscious machines and not understanding at all how they work.

  • That's the most likely outcome, in my estimation.

  • But this guy was working with another guy who had figured out how to model the weights, and one of the things he told me was that a tremendous amount of what the neural network is doing is learning what's not relevant, right, which is exactly what and and these, By the way, these neural network models produce output that's analogous to the output that's produced by sections of cortical tissue.

  • It's not identical, but partly they make the same kind of mistakes, which is an indication that they're functioning in the same way.

  • So one of the things that a neural net does when you're training it has learned to figure out which things that can ignore.

  • And that's mostly What you're doing is what can be ignored.

  • And that's a tremendous realization, too, because it it highlights again.

  • How important the structure within which you exist.

  • What how Importantly, the structure within which you exist determines what manifest itself to you as you move through the world because you ignore almost everything, so you ignore almost everything.

  • But then you concentrate on things that move you along your way, or obstacles that get in your way.

  • And those things have emotional significance there.

  • Vaillant stand.

  • The reason they're veil inst is because they're conceptualized in relationship to the journey.

  • You know, if you run across a tool or something positive on the opportunity, we could say, which is like an abstract tool.

  • Then that moves you forward.

  • And the fact that it's moving you forward is signaled by the incentive reward system.

  • Dope Inman.

  • Urgently mediated incentive reward system that's grounded in the hypothalamus, the same system that you use when you explore the same system that's activated by cycle motor stimulants like cocaine and heroin.

  • And most of the drugs that people abuse that that system indicates to you that this entity is non ignore a ble because it's positively functionally related to the transformation of the world that you're attempting to accomplish, so that makes you happy.

  • It makes you that that that provides you with with hope and incentive to move forward to fundamental motivating force of life for human beings, with the possible exception, say, of aggression and sexuality, which I would say operate much more sporadically.

  • This is pretty much continual, and then, of course, the negative emotions are generated when you encounter something that gets in the way, which can require a small detour, let's say or can blow apart the frame that you're inhabiting completely and part of what we're trying to do is understand how you compute, how emotional to get about about certain classes of events.

  • And the reason that it's so complicated is because often when you run into A when you run into a tool or an opportunity, generally speaking, it's not too hard to compute how useful it is.

  • Although sometimes something can happen to you like let's say you win lottery, where the possibility space is so great that it's of indefinite positive significance.

  • You know, when you're gonna be overwhelmed by that sort of thing.

  • It's pretty rare that something like that happens.

  • It does happen to it.

  • Maybe it happens when someone that you're desperately chasing for amorous purposes agrees to go out with you.

  • That's another place where that sort of excitement occurs.

  • It seems to occur to football players, you know, when they make a touchdown on TV, too, because they do their little touchdown dance around like mad dogs.

  • And you know, scientists never do that when they get a paper published.

  • So there's something about scoring a goal that's really got that incentive reward blast, you know.

  • So anyhow, um, the positive emotion systems are operating roughly speaking, because you have encountered something that moves you forward on your path.

  • And we could say that given, as we've discussed that your your value structure is a nested entity, right, with small goals nested inside, larger goals or small personalities nested inside of larger personalities.

  • Ah, positive thing that's really positive has implications for what you're doing right now that are positive but also has positive implications higher up the abstraction shape, you know.

  • So, for example, let's say you study really hard for an exam and you get a really good grade on it and you're surprised.

  • You think, Well, that's extraordinarily useful.

  • I passed the grade, I passed the exam.

  • I did well in the course, but that means that maybe I'm a better student than I thought.

  • And given what I'm aiming for in the future, maybe I'm a more confident person that I had believed, and so you can see that the positive emotion would echo through those levels of analysis because it has implications on each level.

  • Now you're also trying when you encounter something negative to constrain its propagation across those levels, because let's say you study really hard and you fail a dismally.

  • And so then you think, Well, I messed up this course I messed up this exam.

  • I messed up this course.

  • I'm not as good a student as I think I am.

  • Maybe I'm a failure as a person and that that can take you out completely right?

  • And of course, there are more.

  • They're certainly more traumatic events that can be fall you than that.

  • A typical one that really will wipe someone out.

  • Imagine someone who's naive and dependent and over sheltered.

  • You know, when they and so they're off into the world, although they're not prepared for it.

  • And you know they're they're axiomatic.

  • Pre suppositions aren't sophisticated enough to allow for the existence of radical uncertainty or malevolence.

  • And then one day they're attacked.

  • When they're maybe they're out, they get mugged.

  • Or maybe they get raped or something worse, and they develop post traumatic stress disorder from that.

  • And the reason for that is that the event is so anomalous, especially combined with its malevolence, that it demolishes the the interpretation frames from the local level all the way out to the super ordinate level.

  • And then the person is cast into this chaotic state, and they're terrified and angry and and vengeful and paralyzed and depressed and all of those things simultaneously.

  • And maybe they never put the pieces back together, right?

  • They descend into chaos.

  • And that's that.

  • And if you're in a situation like that long enough, you know the cortisol that's produced can produce permanent neuro physiological changes.

  • Shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that moves information from short term attention to long term storage.

  • Shrinkage of the hippocampus and growth of the A mandala, which is something that seems to tag stimuli roughly speaking, with emotional significance more or less permanently.

  • Right, because if you really encounter something traumatic, the hippocampus restricts information with regards to its application in a certain time and place.

  • So it's sort of situation specific.

  • But if you encounter something truly dangerous, your brain is set up so that you will be afraid of it.

  • Rep.

  • Regardless of context, so it's called the amygdala could produce context, independent fears and those air those air.

  • Basically, while they could be part of post traumatic stress disorder, they could be part of a very, very serious phobia and so you can't contextualized.

  • Um, what you really do with someone who has a problem like that is you try to walk them through a re contextual ization process.

  • So, you know, maybe if they're afraid of snakes so afraid of them, they can't even really think of snakes.

  • You have them while first, maybe you have them sit for one second and think of a cartoon snake, you know, and what happens is their brain notices that they can hold that image and nothing negative happens.

  • And so then it's that in some sense it's built in inhibitory structure that partially, that partially inhibits, which is what inhibitory structures do that partially inhibits the otherwise context.

  • Independent fear that would constitute the phobia.

  • And so you basically build up contexts of safety around the phobia until the context signifies lack of danger and the person can progress forward if they're really damaged.

  • It's really hard to do that, especially if the trauma was really severe.

  • So okay, so you see, you don't see irrelevant things.

  • That's most things you do see things that move you forward, and you do see things that get in your way and in the class of things that get in your way are indeterminant occurrences novel or in or Melissa occurrences.

  • And almost everything that gets in your way is in some sense of novel occurrence because you usually structure your behavior so that you don't go anywhere where something wildly a normal ISS is likely to occur.

  • So so no, if you encounter an obstacle to things happen at the same time, and one is that your movement forward to your specific goal or sets of goals is blocked.

  • But the second thing that happens is you're faced with the mystery, and the mystery is this thing wasn't supposed to exist, but it does exist.

  • So what implication does that have for everything I think, And that's very, very hard on people.

  • They do not like that at all.

  • And no wonder, because it's it's It's the constrained chaos that's underneath everything inhibited by your contextual knowledge that suddenly popped its head up into your world.

  • It's like it's like the shark in the movie jaws, which is, of course, a mythological story.

  • It's exactly that, and it's exactly what that movie signified.

  • A safe vacation paradise all of a sudden threatened by some subterranean thing that can pull you down, and and that destroys the peace in the harmony of that particular community.

  • It's a dragon story.

  • It's a hero myth.

  • It's It's the story that people have been telling forever So so and what you can think.

  • You can think of that thing that re emerges that shark that rises up from the depths or that whale or that dragon or that predator or the foreign invader for that matter, or the barbarian, they all fit into the same category.

  • That's what had Bean deemed irrelevant, suddenly manifesting itself.

  • And when you think about how much is deemed irrelevant, the fact that it suddenly manifests itself, that's exactly the purpose for the reason for the for the trauma.

  • It's like, Well, I've eradicated from my conceptualization is 99.99% of everything it zeroed out, and all of a sudden I made a mistake.

  • Bang.

  • I don't know where I am well, what's relevant when you don't know where you are?

  • Announcer That is, since you don't know everything is relevant, and you can imagine this sort of terror that people who experience paranoid schizophrenia are living in perennially because what happens to them is precisely that they undergo neuro physiological transformations that makes everything that they once depended on.

  • Disappear and everything comes back is relevant.

  • And that puts the eye in the early stages of schizophrenia.

  • That's extraordinarily stressful neural physiologically so they're overwhelmed with cortisol and their brains did deteriorate.

  • As a consequence of that, it's just too much so and unsurprisingly, right, because you can't deal with you can hardly deal with anything, let alone with everything, often what you see, and it's rarely conceptualized this way in the training of clinical therapist.

  • But often what you see when you are dealing with people who are in crisis isn't people who have a mental illness.

  • In fact, in my experience, that's actually quite rare.

  • What's far more common is that the person that you're talking to has become overwhelmed by catastrophe, so their life has fallen apart in some way that makes what they're doing, actually impossible, you know, So maybe someone very close to them in their family that they were depending on has developed a very serious illness, and that's throwing their entire financial state into utter chaos.

  • Or maybe they've developed a condition that makes it impossible for them to work.

  • You know you can.

  • You can imagine the potential range of catastrophes, and they're coming to see you because they're anxious and depressed.

  • But the reason they're anxious and depressed is because everything they have ignored has popped its head back up and is hell bent on their destruction.

  • And often you see people who are being attacked by five or six of these monsters out the same time.

  • And it isn't their mental illness that stops them from being able to deal with it, although that, you know, whatever weaknesses you have are going to interfere.

  • It's the fact that what they're facing is no damn joke.

  • And if you were facing it, you'd feel exactly the same way.

  • So then you're trying to come up with practical solutions to these tremendously complex problems, and that's a very ah, very well.

  • It's It's extraordinarily difficult.

  • Generally speaking, people often don't come to a therapist until they've exhausted their entire range of resources that cannot figure out what to do.

  • And so, you know, in a situation like that, you can administer anti depressants, and maybe that will help the person increase their stress resistance, but as a and it may be that because they're depressed and have been brought down, that they are in fact exaggerating the danger of some of the smaller monsters that are after them.

  • But making the person more stress resilient doesn't give them, for example, a new job.

  • And it certainly doesn't bring back the person they've been living with for two years who has degenerating neurological disease or some form of cancer.

  • Like these things Air Major.

  • I often see people who, while they're in a relationship, maybe they're rather isolated older, older people one of the partners is dying in their entire financial situation has become catastrophic.

  • It's like that's not a mental illness man.

  • I mean, they may have got into that situation because of one inadequacy or another, but you don't even want to push that too far because that sort of thing can happen to anyone and will in fact happened to most people in one form or another, at least at some point in their life.

  • So you want to be damn prepared for that.

  • You want to be prepared for that because it's bitter and and harsh and anxiety provoking and painful.

  • But if you're not ready that it's also held, and often you can stop things from becoming hell, even though you can't stop them from being bitter and painful and anxiety provoking.

  • And all of that, you can at least delimit the catastrophe enough so that it doesn't permanently bring you and the people around you down.

  • And that's that's not so bad, right?

  • That's a hell.

  • Or a least.

  • It's a lot better than the alternative.

  • So this is the problem.

  • You know.

  • Things object.

  • Things are obstacles.

  • Well, how big is the obstacle?

  • It's the same.

  • It's the same question is how big is the predator that's lurking outside the door of our cave?

  • It's exactly the same problem except construct conceptualized, abstract Lee and and I would say, exactly the same systems that your distant ancestors used to conceptualize the lurking predator are the systems that are activated.

  • Now, when you encounter the reemergence of all the monsters that you've ignored, it's the same neurological platform you think well, how could it be otherwise?

  • Because evolution is a conservative process, Everything about you is built on an ancient foundations, right?

  • Very little new certainly very little, radically new comes into existence.

  • It's mostly tinkering with structures that have been around forever.

  • Like your body plan, for example, that's unbelievably old.

  • I mean, you share that with you.

  • Share that with lizards, roughly speaking, So it's incredibly ancient, so you know, when you share a bilateral symmetry, even with most invertebrates, so those those things are extraordinarily old.

  • And so for our, for our ancestors, what was down out of the tree?

  • Let's say, down in the grass, that was the thing that lurked in the unknown.

  • Well, for us, the idea of the unknown has become watch more abstract Lee conceptualized like we can think of the unknown as such things we don't know.

  • And so then we can think of the abstract predator.

  • An abstract predator is the thing that lurks in the unknown.

  • That always confronts us now because people are strange and complex creatures and because we're partly predators and partly prey animals, we don't only conceptualize the thing that lurks in the unknown as ah, as a devouring predator.

  • We also conceptualize it as something that offers possibility, because we've learned that if we go into the unknown we confined things that we need for for now and for the medium and for the long term, it can be beneficial for us to confront the things that we don't know, and that's human beings.

  • In a nutshell.

  • That's what we do.

  • And so that's the basis that's that.

  • That's why I believe that's the most archetypal story, because it fundamentally characterizes our motive being in the world where information foragers, we go out into the unknown, that terrifying, unknown and we gather things of value.

  • It's not much different than squirrels foraging for nuts, Really, you know, it's it's and we used exactly the same biological systems to go out and forage for information that squirrels use when they go out and forage for nuts.

  • So I guess the system developed in part because we were fruit eaters as well.

  • And so we found trees that had right proved in them and look and learned where they were and how to gather them.

  • And then you see a tight relationship there between information and food, right?

  • There's almost no difference between eating and knowing where the food is, and as soon as this, so our systems of knowing where things are grew massively and so that turned us into the kind of abstract creatures that we are.

  • So we're always looking for ways of producing more of what we need.

  • That's a good way of thinking about it.

  • And we do that abstract Lee.

  • So all right, so when you encounter something that's a normalised, something unexpected so oh, you're in a relationship that you're not that happy about.

  • It's a good example, and the person that you're with is suddenly much colder to you than usual.

  • Okay, now the question is that good news or bad news?

  • And the answer is, well, it's good news in so far as you're not that happy with the relationship.

  • So it's and it's bad news in so far as you want the relationship to continue.

  • And so very frequently it's the case that you're somewhat ambivalent about the frame that you inhabit.

  • And so a normalised information has a two fold meaning.

  • It's like, Well, now I confined to get out of this.

  • That's one way of thinking about it and and if the person is particularly cold and distant to you and maybe even insulting, then half of you is going to be very upset because this is happening in the other half is roughly speaking, is going to be saying, Oh, this is just the opportunity I wanted.

  • And what that means is you're in your frame that constitutes the relationship.

  • Let's say in the story you've laid out about it.

  • The novel event occurs, and it produces activation in two competing systems.

  • One is the positive system that explores for new opportunities, and the other is the threat system that paralyzes you because your current motive conceptualization is no longer valid.

  • And so a normally has this deeply ambivalent nature.

  • And one of the things that I've tried to understand for a long time is how you compute that.

  • And it seems to be that you need to consider it in relationship to this hierarchical value structure that we've talked about before.

  • So you might say that imagine your nervous system is tuned so that if the normalised things happen at high resolution levels, you produce a very small amount of negative emotion and a comparatively large amount of curiosity, because the thing that's being threatened by the anomalous event isn't that big, and so the possibility that information lurks there that might be useful is high compared to the threat.

  • Where is generally speaking?

  • If you encounter something, maybe you I don't know.

  • Maybe you go into a store one day and on a whim you shoplift something in a you know, a fit of stupid impulsivity, and you get caught.

  • That happened to a There was an NDP member of Parliament 20 years ago who did exactly that.

  • He you know, he had a pretty good reputation.

  • He went into a department store, swiped something, some gloves or something.

  • I don't even remember what it was and got caught.

  • It's like, Well, you know, that's sufficiently a normalised behaviour to or occurrence to make you question whether or not you're actually a good person.

  • And so it's It's almost a Ziff at the higher resolution levels of the value structure of something in normalised occurs.

  • Then it's either neutral or tilted slightly towards positive and at the higher levels at the more abstract and comprehensive Levin's.

  • If something in normalised happens that it it's more likely to blow out large portions of your of the systems you used to organize, the world is gonna be experienced as negative and partly what you're trying to do when something in normalised occurs is to do a search up and down this value structure.

  • You have an argument with someone that you love.

  • Well, what does that mean?

  • Maybe you're arguing about how you interact with each other.

  • When one of you comes home, you'd like a kiss and a hug at the door, and they just assumed sit there and watch TV.

  • So you have an argument about that?

  • Okay, what is the argument?

  • Meat doesn't mean that some little thing has to be adjusted at the level of micro detail.

  • Or does it mean, you know, the person that you've tangled up your life with really doesn't care for you at all, And there's a complete jerk and you should leave.

  • While a big part of the argument is going to be, How do we construe the occurrence?

  • How do we construe the occurrence is a major event or a minor event, and my advice would be unless there is strong reason, presume it's a minor event and start operating in that level because otherwise every argument becomes a catastrophe.

  • And if that's the case, you actually can't solve any problems you won't build discussed anything right?

  • Because as soon as you bring up a normally something unpleasant, the other person will assume that everything's over and get so shorted out that you won't be able to talk with him.

  • So those are the sort of people who will cry if you bring up anything negative, right?

  • And so they they're threatened by their their value might say, their value structure so fragile e constructed.

  • And maybe they're not standing on enough pillars so that anything you toss it them, that's a question is enough to shake the entire structure to its foundations.

  • Or maybe they're acting that out just to manipulate you.

  • That's another option.

  • So anyways, partly what you seem to be doing when you're thinking about something is too.

  • Shift your frames of reference up and down your value hierarchy to constrain the occurrence and to determine the degree to which it's positive and the degree to which it's negative.

  • It's all so complicated, too, because whether something is positive or negative depends on the frame of reference that you bring to bear on it, right.

  • So that's why I was saying earlier about the relationship.

  • If you're ambivalent about the relationship and something negative happens, you know something disruptive.

  • It's certainly possible to adopt a frame of reference almost immediately that makes that into something positive.

  • Say, Well, I'm I was done with this Anyways.

  • I'm glad you said that, because it gives me the excuse I needed to terminate this.

  • And so it's It's such a It's a very strange thing that you can shift the emotional valence of almost anything, almost anything, by shifting your frame of reference.

  • There are boundaries.

  • You can teach animals pleasure to electric shocks, painful electric shocks.

  • If you pair them reliably ble with the provisions of something intensely rewarding cocaine, for example, or or hypothalamic stimulation, they can learn to associate pain with something good and respond positively to it to work for it.

  • So when you see this in you even little bit, some of you have no doubt learned to eat.

  • Foods that aren't really edible, like olives are a good example of that or coffee there.

  • Bidder and generally speaking, bitter poisonous things tend to be bitter, and people don't really like bitter things.

  • But if you train yourself, you can get to the point where I taught my daughter how to eat olives when she was very young and like that I bet her I think I think she was only three.

  • I better that she couldn't eat 20 old is over the next week or something.

  • She'd always respond to a challenge.

  • And so you know, the 1st 3 olives.

  • It was not a fun experience for because it faced kids have a lot of taste buds.

  • Her face would get all crinkled up.

  • She just wasn't enjoying it now.

  • But I paid for that desperately later in my life because I used to go to this specialty shop and buy these particularly good spicy olives, you know, by the court.

  • And if they were in the fridge, she come home and just devoured the entire court like a like like I'm like a mad believe Mick.

  • I mean, on all of us, for God's sake.

  • And so then I never got any of them, so it served me right exactly.

  • But the point is, you can rewire yourself quite completely by placing negative things in a positive context.

  • And the degree to which you could do that is quite remarkable.

  • You know you can't There seems to be limits beyond which your ability to turn pain into pleasure, for example, is compromised.

  • I don't think anybody's ever going to learn how to associate being seriously burnt by something hot with something pleasurable, right?

  • There's on.

  • And I don't know how the system is exactly.

  • Adjust themselves so that there are limits to you know how you can transform an emotional stimulus, because you can transform them quite quite remarkably.

  • But obviously there's some boundaries that we don't understand very well.

  • So all right, so no.

  • So, roughly speaking, we could say that the degree to which something is experienced as utter chaos is proportionate to the level of the value hierarchy that that anomalous event is construed or experienced to disrupt.

  • And you really see this happening in people who are depressed because you might think, here's another way of thinking about you might think Well, um, am I a good cook?

  • You're asking yourself, You fail at cooking something, so you think, well, am I capable of completing a meal?

  • And you might say, Well, if all you've done is ah set the table badly, probably the right thing to do is to learn how to set the table and not to question your ability to complete a meal.

  • So then you might say, Okay, well, when should you move up one level of competence of one level of abstraction?

  • We might say.

  • Well, imagine there's five things that you need to do with this level in order to successfully complete that level.

  • So you have to cut vegetables.

  • You have to set the table.

  • You have to do the dishes in order to complete a meal, and so you break six dishes, you burn the soup.

  • And, uh, I don't know, but you set the table properly.

  • You got two out of three wrong.

  • Well, maybe at that point it starts.

  • It's time to start wondering if you're actually capable of completing a meal, but you don't want to jump from a single mistake at the higher level to the to the or at the story at the higher resolution level.

  • You don't want to jump from a single mistake at that level to the next level, and the reason for that is that you'll get a cascade.

  • Oh, I set the table badly.

  • Error that means I can't complete a meal error.

  • That means I can't take care of my family error.

  • That means I'm not a good parent error.

  • That means I'm not a good person.

  • That's what happens to depressed people.

  • And I think what happens is their serotonin levels fall right.

  • They they fall like like serotonin levels fall.

  • If you're brought down a dominance hierarchy now, we already know that if you live at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, you live where it's dangerous, and the reason for that is everything around you is already not good and you don't have a lot of social support.

  • So you're sort of clinging desperately to the underside of life.

  • And what that means is you probably can't even afford a single mistake.

  • Your serotonin levels fall, and that allows error signals to propagate up the value system so that every little thing becomes a catastrophe.

  • Now that in itself is a catastrophe, because if you're living at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy and you're already super stressed, the additional stress that you're likely to experience as a consequence of a additional error is going to be maybe push you over the limits.

  • But the thing is, is that it is dangerous there now.

  • What seems to happen to people who are depressed is that their serotonin levels fall roughly speaking as if they've plummeted down the dominance hierarchy without have actually having plummet to down it.

  • So they're still competent, capable in sconce tw in their in their relatively productive environment.

  • But they're reacting as if every little thing has become a catastrophe.

  • And so partly what happens is if you provide people with serotonin re uptake inhibitors, is that the propagation of negative emotion across these levels of value hierarchy seems to be reduced.

  • So maybe then it takes.

  • It takes two errors at this level to trigger off an error message at that level.

  • While you're in a lot better shape, right, that's like a definition of resilience.

  • So now you can also do that with people cognitively to some degree, you know, because maybe somebody will come to you in therapy and say, I had a bad day at work.

  • My boss hates me.

  • I'm going to lose my job, and then my marriage is going to dissolve, and so you walk them through it at a micro level K.

  • What exactly happened to you at work?

  • Then they lay out the specific story.

  • You say, Well, what are the multiple ways that might be interpreted?

  • And is it?

  • Is there some possibility that it's not the catastrophe that you're envisioning, right?

  • You get them to contextualize it and help them build out up micro defenses.

  • That might be one way of thinking about it.

  • A lot of people who are prone to depression are not good at defending themselves, right?

  • They don't have at hand the mechanisms to forgive themselves or even really to understand their own failure.

  • Or even more importantly, sometimes they unratified.

  • We underestimate the radically, overestimate their own incompetence and radically overestimate the competence of everyone else.

  • And so that's also another reason why it's sometimes useful for people to seek therapy because they'll come in and say, Well, I'm anxious and nervous and you know, I have this amount of negative emotion and I make these sorts of mistakes and you listen and you think, Yeah, so does everybody else that that's par for the course, but they're so isolated and so afraid of the things that have been happening to them.

  • and so unwilling to expose themselves to social evaluation that they never really communicate with anyone else and find out that the level of misery that characterizes their existence is pretty much normal and average.

  • And so just helping people learn that Kano can often be a tremendous advantage to that because the real issue isn't precisely whether or not you're a good person.

  • That's an absolute idea, right?

  • You could say, Well, are you good person compared to the absolute ideal and answer that is No.

  • But it's also not exactly.

  • It's not a useful comparison across most situations.

  • What you really want to know is, well, how do you stack up against other people?

  • You know, if you're if you're at your job, the issue isn't whether or not you're confident.

  • The issue is whether you're competent compared to the other people around you who are supposed to be doing the same thing because in an absolute sense you're completely incompetent.

  • But in a relative sense, you might be at the top of the pack or even in the middle, and that's generally okay, so and if you don't know what the relative status is, that's that's not good at all.

  • So all right, now, if so, here's a way of thinking about it.

  • Let's say you're in a class.

  • It's near the beginning of the semester.

  • You write an exam or you hand in an essay and you don't get the mark that you desired.

  • Okay, so what are your options?

  • Well, one option would be so you've hit an anomaly.

  • Things didn't happen the way you wanted them to happen.

  • And so maybe you say cheese.

  • That was a boring and stupid class.

  • Anyways, this gives me an excuse to get out, and so that's not such a negative thing.

  • Or you think, Oh, well, I really better buckle down and study and you decide to stay in the class.

  • So basically, what you've done is maintained your framework.

  • I'm going to work through this class, but you're you've decided to modify some of the subroutines that make up that frame.

  • You say, Well, I should study more next time, or I have to prioritize this class compared to other class.

  • So it's a micro alteration within the overarching framework.

  • But another thing you could do is say Oh, to hell with the class.

  • I just won't I'll just drop it?

  • And so the advantage to that is problem gone.

  • The disadvantages.

  • Well, now you have a different problem, which is okay, fine.

  • You drop the class.

  • Do you have another class that you can replace it with?

  • Is that a good way of dealing with a micro failure?

  • You know, to move up a level of analysis and throw the whole frame because you could also say, Well, maybe I should just drop out of university and maybe I should go hang myself.

  • You know, that's well, it's the same line of logic.

  • It's just taken up to a higher degree of abstraction.

  • And so, generally speaking, you don't want to solve a problem by moving up a level in wiping out the frame within which the problem was experienced.

  • You want to do that carefully because in principle, the frame that you were working within had already had already assigned value to it and worked at it.

  • You've already invested in it.

  • It's a big sacrifice to blow up the whole frame.

  • Now, sometimes you can do it.

  • So anyways, what happens is well, you get the bad grade and you're upset about it.

  • And so you've bean plunged from your happy satiated state, Let's say into a state of relative chaos.

  • And the chaos is Oh, I had an obstacle.

  • I didn't expect it.

  • And now I don't know what to do.

  • And so what does it mean to not know what to do?

  • Well, it can mean I need to study harder.

  • It could mean I should drop this course.

  • It could mean I shouldn't major in a different subject mean maybe I shouldn't be in university.

  • It could mean maybe my future plans have been formulated badly.

  • It could mean my future plans have been formulated badly because I don't understand myself very well.

  • And I've been telling lies about my past, right?

  • The thing can really expand on you, and that's what the chaotic domain is.

  • That's the re manifestation of those things that you had considered irrelevant, right, because when you go to pick up the exam, you've got your identity as a competent student intact.

  • You're not questioning whether you should be in the course or whether you should be in that major, whether you should be in university.

  • None of that that's all in the implicitly accepted category.

  • And as soon as the anomalous event emerges, all of those things that you had rendered axiomatic start to become questionable.

  • And that's like the shark coming up out, coming up from the de

all right, so I want to go through a lot of material today and hopefully I've Hopefully that'll work out.

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2017年意義地圖07:故事與變形記的影像 (2017 Maps of Meaning 07: Images of Story & Metastory)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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