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mr_gay_sex_fan
Dec 20, 2017

by FactsAreUseless
This is a very disturbing book:

https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ou...18512776&sr=8-1



quote:

"Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we trying to discover, anyway? In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us.

This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primitive drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else.

If we don't know ourselves--our potentials, feelings, or motives--it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful than Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves.

Can any psych majors chime in on this topic? Is this stuff taught in college now? I started listening to the audio version of this book -- which I've since got refunded cause I'm a sissy -- and the author at the beginning pretty much says these questions/ideas were ignored for much of the 20th century cause Freud's ideas took up all the space in psychology as far as the unconscious was concerned.

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Mr.Tophat
Apr 7, 2007

You clearly don't understand joke development :justpost:
Sir this is a mental hospital, please take your medication and stop trying to undermine our methodology, thank you

Ocean Book
Sep 27, 2010

:yum: - hi
you are a human with an unconscious - if you wanna know about it start paying attention to yourself

CheeseThief
Dec 28, 2012

Two wholesome boys to brighten your day

1. You post a big wall of nerd text.

2. I think you're a nerd.


I think you're onto something here OP but what could it mean?

Tinfoil Papercut
Jul 27, 2016

by Athanatos

CheeseThief posted:

but what could it mean?

I'm gay

Rock Puncher
Jul 26, 2014
to sum up: stop thinking about yourself and start actively managing other peoples opinions of you and also monitor your behaviour because you look like poo poo

Maldoror
Oct 5, 2003

by R. Guyovich
Nap Ghost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta

Moon Atari
Dec 26, 2010

mr_gay_sex_fan posted:

Can any psych majors chime in on this topic? Is this stuff taught in college now?

From the description it sounds like he has arranged a bunch of very well known stuff about heuristic biases, noncognitive processes, and rumination being bad into some sort of a narrative argument that might be useful for self development. It seems like it would probably be extremely obvious stuff for any student of psychology, but might still be an interestingly articulated collection of ideas.

The bit about Freud's ideas about the unconscious dominating is far more relevant to philosophy majors than psychology. For a very long time now psychology has only cared about Freud in a historic sense, for teaching lessons about the development of the field and philosophy of science. Modern psych is mostly dominated by the combined philosophies of cognitivism, behaviourism, and neurobiology: all three of which contain reactions to and rejections of Freud's ideas, as well as each other. Whereas philosophy majors will still argue that Freud is useful for introspection and self knowledge, often with such conviction that they explicitly reject all developments post-Freud.

The "adaptive" part of the title suggests that it will probably make some reference to the pop psychology interpretation of neural plasticity, which is an extremely popular topic in all pop psych of the last decade or so. Or maybe it will be about environmental and experiential influences.

I'm not sure why you would find any of it disturbing rather than mildly interesting unless you are unusually dedicated to psychological introspection.

mr_gay_sex_fan
Dec 20, 2017

by FactsAreUseless
Because the implication is that the thinking self just rationalizes decisions and motivations made at a deeper level. The mind lies to itself to make it all the more easier for us to conceal our motives from others. Like the straight guy who convinces himself he really prefers having girls as friends over dudes but really what's going is that his deeper primitive mind is just having him carry out a strategy of hanging around females so he can increase his mating opportunities.

FlimFlam Imam
Mar 1, 2007

Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams
Is this how I naturally enhance my penis?

Colonel Cancer
Sep 26, 2015

Tune into the fireplace channel, you absolute buffoon
The best way to be introspective is to insert a camera up your rectum.

Kazak
Jan 10, 2012

mr_gay_sex_fan posted:

Because the implication is that the thinking self just rationalizes decisions and motivations made at a deeper level. The mind lies to itself to make it all the more easier for us to conceal our motives from others. Like the straight guy who convinces himself he really prefers having girls as friends over dudes but really what's going is that his deeper primitive mind is just having him carry out a strategy of hanging around females so he can increase his mating opportunities.

That's not deep seated unconscious/subconscious behavior at all, five minutes of quiet introspection would reveal to himself his horndog way.

I don't believe that the subconscious homunculus is the big player in our lives we all make it out to be. We just do things sometimes without knowing or caring why, but it's not because a deeper shadow self is at the wheel, we've only developed a routine.

Rutibex
Sep 9, 2001

by Fluffdaddy
too much introspection can cause damage? pfft gently caress this guy.

Mozi
Apr 4, 2004

Forms change so fast
Time is moving past
Memory is smoke
Gonna get wider when I die
Nap Ghost
this makes sense to me; when i was younger i was very aware of all my thoughts and where they came from, but i wasn't able to actually change my behavior. it was rather like being trapped in these introspective loops. and the more you think about something, the more you can rationalize a bad decision

Dean of Swing
Feb 22, 2012
I remember being a freshman too. Maybe stop navel gazing over baby’s first introspection and go get some of that prime art school puss.

Mozi
Apr 4, 2004

Forms change so fast
Time is moving past
Memory is smoke
Gonna get wider when I die
Nap Ghost
instead of doing that i smoked tons of pot and had such terrible social anxiety i could barely leave my room

:hfive:

Moon Atari
Dec 26, 2010

mr_gay_sex_fan posted:

Because the implication is that the thinking self just rationalizes decisions and motivations made at a deeper level.

Well, yeah. It should be obvious that pure cognition doesn't rule human behaviour. If it did we probably would act at least a little more rational. Even just looking on the level of internal experience we are actually consciously aware of you can see that affect often precedes cognition, or interferes with or contradicts it. But it isn't like cognition is just a passive slave to the unconscious. Both interact with one another. To some extent thought can change deeper level stuff, or ignore the commands of that stuff.

That being said there are more or less infinite unconscious processes influencing behaviour in unknown ways. Things like attentional and memory biases can take effect at the level of basic perception, literally selecting the sensory information you receive, not just what you do with it.

SickZip
Jul 29, 2008

by FactsAreUseless
read surfing uncertainity. its cool and has more recent research and explains the nature of thought in a way more advanced then i believed science had gotten on the subject

poor tldr:
-the brain is fundamentally a predictive engine from top to bottom. your conscious experience is the very top of a bunch of layers of prediction-and-comparison. stuff that "works", that fits generated predictions, stays unconscious. stuff that doesnt work is passed upward through the layers until it reaches the conscious mind. the conscious mind being basically a guided dream, a narrative told to ourself used to resolve uncertainty and dissonance between prediction and reality that the lower levels cant make sense of.

Nefarious 2.0
Apr 22, 2008

Offense is overrated anyway.

op you sound like a real dumb dumb and I'm going to whip your bare rear end with reeds until you apologize for this thread

mr_gay_sex_fan
Dec 20, 2017

by FactsAreUseless

SickZip posted:

read surfing uncertainity. its cool and has more recent research and explains the nature of thought in a way more advanced then i believed science had gotten on the subject

poor tldr:
-the brain is fundamentally a predictive engine from top to bottom. your conscious experience is the very top of a bunch of layers of prediction-and-comparison. stuff that "works", that fits generated predictions, stays unconscious. stuff that doesnt work is passed upward through the layers until it reaches the conscious mind. the conscious mind being basically a guided dream, a narrative told to ourself used to resolve uncertainty and dissonance between prediction and reality that the lower levels cant make sense of.

yea that's hosed up man

Rutibex
Sep 9, 2001

by Fluffdaddy

SickZip posted:

read surfing uncertainity. its cool and has more recent research and explains the nature of thought in a way more advanced then i believed science had gotten on the subject

poor tldr:
-the brain is fundamentally a predictive engine from top to bottom. your conscious experience is the very top of a bunch of layers of prediction-and-comparison. stuff that "works", that fits generated predictions, stays unconscious. stuff that doesnt work is passed upward through the layers until it reaches the conscious mind. the conscious mind being basically a guided dream, a narrative told to ourself used to resolve uncertainty and dissonance between prediction and reality that the lower levels cant make sense of.

my conscious experience is actually my immortal soul, sorry

SickZip
Jul 29, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

mr_gay_sex_fan posted:

yea that's hosed up man

it's cool and has hella explanatory power for a bunch of stuff from mental illness to optical illusions

from the slatestarcodex review of the book that got me to read it:

quote:

Schizophrenia. Converging lines of research suggest this also involves weak priors, apparently at a different level to autism and with different results after various compensatory mechanisms have had their chance to kick in. One especially interesting study asked neurotypicals and schizophrenics to follow a moving light, much like the airplane video in Part III above. When the light moved in a predictable pattern, the neurotypicals were much better at tracking it; when it was a deliberately perverse video specifically designed to frustrate expectations, the schizophrenics actually did better. This suggests that neurotypicals were guided by correct top-down priors about where the light would be going; schizophrenics had very weak priors and so weren’t really guided very well, but also didn’t screw up when the light did something unpredictable
...
The exact route from this sort of thing to schizophrenia is really complicated, and anyone interested should check out Section 2.12 and the whole of Chapter 7 from the book. But the basic story is that it creates waves of anomalous prediction error and surprisal, leading to the so-called “delusions of significance” where schizophrenics believe that eg the fact that someone is wearing a hat is some sort of incredibly important cosmic message. Schizophrenics’ brains try to produce hypotheses that explain all of these prediction errors and reduce surprise – which is impossible, because the prediction errors are random. This results in incredibly weird hypotheses, and eventually in schizophrenic brains being willing to ignore the bottom-up stream entirely – hence hallucinations.
...
All this is treated with antipsychotics, which antagonize dopamine, which – remember – represents confidence level. So basically the medication is telling the brain “YOU CAN IGNORE ALL THIS PREDICTION ERROR, EVERYTHING YOU’RE PERCEIVING IS TOTALLY GARBAGE SPURIOUS DATA” – which turns out to be exactly the message it needs to hear.
...
An interesting corollary of all this – because all of schizophrenics’ predictive models are so screwy, they lose the ability to use the “adjust away the consequences of your own actions” hack discussed in Part 5 of this section. That means their own actions don’t get predicted out, and seem like the actions of a foreign agent. This is why they get so-called “delusions of agency”, like “the government beamed that thought into my brain” or “aliens caused my arm to move just now"

There's more stuff like schizophrenics are less vulnerable to a number of optical illusions (because the illusions rely on your past experience leading you astray and schizophrenics have weaker priors, a more uncertain model that correctly picks up on the novel unexpected stimulus) and that they can sometimes tickle themself (because they aren't correctly accounting for their own action/thoughts in their predictions. basically a more benign version of 'that thought was actually coming from someone/somewhere else')

null
Feb 19, 2003

by FactsAreUseless
Fun Shoe
read every word and about to meditate on what this thread means to me

Lawrence Gilchrist
Mar 31, 2010

mr_gay_sex_fan posted:

Because the implication is that the thinking self just rationalizes decisions and motivations made at a deeper level. The mind lies to itself to make it all the more easier for us to conceal our motives from others. Like the straight guy who convinces himself he really prefers having girls as friends over dudes but really what's going is that his deeper primitive mind is just having him carry out a strategy of hanging around females so he can increase his mating opportunities.

There was a headline article in Pop Psychology Today about this very thing with the byline No, You're not a Slave to Your Lizard Brain

Rutibex
Sep 9, 2001

by Fluffdaddy

null posted:

read every word and about to meditate on what this thread means to me

:eyepop:
dont do it!

mr_gay_sex_fan
Dec 20, 2017

by FactsAreUseless
Here is some nerd giving a talk on this topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4lEvvY1r5U

the point at the 8 minute mark is what really upsets me if it's true

mr_gay_sex_fan fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Feb 13, 2018

mr_gay_sex_fan
Dec 20, 2017

by FactsAreUseless

Nefarious 2.0 posted:

op you sound like a real dumb dumb and I'm going to whip your bare rear end with reeds until you apologize for this thread

my hidden motive in making this thread is probably to signal to random people on the web how intelligent and curious I am so I can get a self-esteem boost but evidently I'm not fooling anyone

don't blame me for this thread, I have no control over my unconscious

Grevling
Dec 18, 2016

The gods and spirits steer us to whatever end they wish, we can only endure.

myDad
Jan 20, 2010

ce n'est pas ma mère
College Slice
Why is my forearm sore?

Mooey Cow
Jan 27, 2018

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Pillbug

mr_gay_sex_fan posted:

Because the implication is that the thinking self just rationalizes decisions and motivations made at a deeper level. The mind lies to itself to make it all the more easier for us to conceal our motives from others. Like the straight guy who convinces himself he really prefers having girls as friends over dudes but really what's going is that his deeper primitive mind is just having him carry out a strategy of hanging around females so he can increase his mating opportunities.

This is extremely Freudian btw, only phrased in biopsych terms.

Carmant
Nov 23, 2015


Treadmill? What's that? Is that some kind of cake?


Well OP.. al your brain poo poo is just like uhhh.. electrons bouncing around. The electrons bounce off each other to make decisions for you.. or something. But you cant control physics and poo poo so free will doesnt exist I think

Big Beef City
Aug 15, 2013

Adapt your mind to my balls

Smash it Smash hit
Dec 30, 2009

prettay, prettay
how about you adapt your lips to my rear end in a top hat OP?

Smash it Smash hit
Dec 30, 2009

prettay, prettay

Big Beef City posted:

Adapt your mind to my balls

:eyepop:

Big Beef City
Aug 15, 2013

I was gonna use that line smash, but changed it at the last moment

Smash it Smash hit
Dec 30, 2009

prettay, prettay

Big Beef City posted:

I was gonna use that line smash, but changed it at the last moment

variety is the spice of life :pseudo:

Grevling
Dec 18, 2016

mr_gay_sex_fan posted:

Here is some nerd giving a talk on this topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4lEvvY1r5U

the point at the 8 minute mark is what really upsets me if it's true

I watched this and I think he's probably right but I hate being aware of these things. I just want to eat bananas and try to have sex with girls. :(

Pitdragon
Jan 20, 2004
Just another lurker
what? my brain would never lie to me! next you'll be telling me my eyeballs have blindspots that my brain is constantly filling in or something crazy like that...

nextlevelstart
Feb 26, 2015
Ironic that although "self" is something that you yourself fashioned, every time something goes wrong, you turn around and place the blame on something else. In denial, you simply resort to looking for another, more convenient "truth" in order to make yourself feel better. ...leaving behind in an instant the so-called "truth" you once embraced.

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FlimFlam Imam
Mar 1, 2007

Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams
If I only had a brain.

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