Friday, March 8, 2013
Imagining the future
I was reading an article about how humans are different because we have ability to imagine possible futures, allowing us to plan.
I liked this. I love to imagine futures. I like feeling like I am living one of an infinite number of parallel universes, diverging at each point in time. I also like it because it helps me to understand some of the ramifications of the things I am doing in the present that I otherwise might not understand. Deciding what to wear, I imagine in my head what the future me would look like in a few minutes if I put particular clothes on. Deciding whether I should or should not eat something, I imagine my future self in 10 minutes and if my stomach would be upset or not. Those are the main practical ones.
The eating one is interesting because I had to learn it, and really only relatively recently. The foods that make me sick don't taste bad to me. They don't taste rotten. (That's why rotten things taste bad to us, right? Evolutionarily evolved to not want to eat things like human feces because they're so bad for us?) So I would keep eating them and get sick. That happened enough times (thousands) that eventually I had enough. Now before I eat something I first try to imagine my future self, would my future self get sick? And it's weird, when I in my imagination my future self gets nauseated, my present self also feels nauseated. (Side note, this is also how I managed to fully fund my retirement -- I imagine my future self enjoying the money and my present self feels the pleasure.)
I also sometimes do this with morally implicated choices. I was raised religious, so I was taught to judge things by a particular standard, even nuanced things -- same as learning to be able to judge musical things by a certain standard. But it's hard to perform and judge yourself at the same time. That's why my music teachers always had me record myself and then listen to it later. And I've never quite learned to judge moral things in the moment either. But I can later realize, maybe days, weeks, or years later that I have done something "wrong". Now if it's something or someone I care about, I will imagine my future self looking back at what my present self is doing and judging things as wrong or right. Not often, though. Not nearly as often as I do the eating thing. Maybe thousands of moral "mistakes" later, I will get pretty good at doing that too?
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Passing
I just watched a film about a young Jewish woman who "passes" in occupied France during the Second World War. It reminded me of a time that I was helping two elderly Holocaust survivors fill out forms for restitution funds. I had been instructed that the Germans are great record keepers and very wary of fraud. I had been warned of people being denied their benefits because of very small inconsistencies in documentation, e.g. spring 1941 vs. March 1941. With that in mind, I tried to be as precise as I could with dates. The man's papers seemed to be more or less in order, and he had the identifying tattoo to match. The woman's papers were more confusing. She had dates from a previous claim, but they didn't really make sense with the story she told me. She was in and out of camps, according to her paperwork, and there were other documents that contradicted both what she told me and what her previous forms said. I didn't really know what to do, so I told her I would ask for help. She panicked, grabbed my arm, sat me back down. Pointing to the form with the dates, she said "this isn't me." She told me in her stilted English about how with her blonde hair and blue eyes, no one suspected her of being Jewish. She was able to "pass" for the duration of the war, working as a seamstress. The documents corroborating her time spent in camps she had gotten from another young woman who had died shortly after liberation. Of course I felt no moral compunction about filling out the forms as necessary for her benefits (i.e. lying). I did wonder, though, was she lucky to have come to me rather than most any other member of the general populace? I'd like to think that anybody else would have done the same as me, but it's hard to know. Arguing in her favor, she must have suffered during the war, if not in the same ways, for the same reasons as those the restitution was meant to help. She probably lived in constant fear of being discovered. Who knows who she had to bribe or befriend to maintain her freedom -- being able to "pass" is not really a passive endeavor. Arguing against her, we don't want to help people who seem to be able to help themselves. We are disgusted with those who seem to game the system, accepting government help rather than seeking employment, being opportunistic about social safety nets, etc. We may even consider her less noble for taking her God given gifts of aryan beauty and making the most of them. But luckily for her, "we" only despise those things when we are unavoidably confronted with them, when we have our faces rubbed in the ugliness of reality, taking away with us the scent of our hypocrisy. As long as she continues to "pass," we may forget she and her kind ever existed, which is all anyone can ever really ask for from society.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Empath vs. sociopath morality
A reader sent me this link to a forum as an explanation of the differences between how empaths and sociopaths see morality. And, well, the thing about human history and nature is that a split morality is *natural* for us. Empathy within the family/tribe, sociopathic-like behavior to oursiders. Like, every tribe calls themselves "the People". What does that make outsiders? Not-people... And then there's the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments, showing how apparently normal people, socialized in modern societies to have unnaturally large "tribes", can still do atrocious things with a bit of social pressure.Another participant responds:
The sociopath doesn't care what he does to other people, or just doesn't respond to them as people. Normal people convince themselves other people aren't people, or deserve it, then do their atrocities.
Ah! Someone who truly understands basic human nature!
There is a descending scale of human empathy involved. Stronger loyalty to immediate kin, somewhat less so to clan, somewhat less than that to local social clique, and so on. Building large scale societies requires the creation of an abstract cultural structure (morality, religion, hierarchy, mythology), that gives humans some reason to act towards the success of the larger group instead of the smaller. When two abstract cultural structures compete without violent conflict, we call that peace. When they interact with violence and destruction, we call that war. An abstract cultural structure that can longer bind its members to its own survival is said to be corrupt and decadent.
Assigning members of different human groups a lesser moral status is as natural to humans as breathing. Complete extermination of a group happens less often than other kinds of conflict resolution only because it is rarely cost effective. Too much work, or destructive to your own cultural tropes, or because oppression and enslavement is more profitable than extermination.
Whatever we think of GENOCIDE!, it isn't crazy or even irrational to most people who practice it.
Hitler may have had serious emotional issues, but he was not an original thinker. All the terrible things he did were not the product of his imagination. He only collated ideas that had been floating around Germany for generations. He happened to have the imagination and political skill to weld those ideas into a popular governing philosophy, and didn't become clinically insane until he started losing the war and, along with it, his emotional stability and his grip on reality.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Pit stops
I was stuck on a very long flight recently without any reading material, so I ended up reading the inflight magazine cover to cover. One of the articles was about Danica Patrick, former Formula One racer, current NASCAR driver. In an interview she was talking about how the racing styles are very different because stock cars are not race cars:
A NASCAR RACE CAR IS NOT really a race car at all, which is what makes the sport so tough. It has almost no downforce to keep it on the pavement; with 850 horses under the hood, it’s way overpowered; and the rest of the 43-car field is always bearing down on you.
I thought -- this is like me. Over the years, I have fine tuned my brain to be super efficient and as powerful as it can be. But the rest of me still has the same limitations -- fancy race car engine under the hood of a normal stock car. I have been thinking recently that for the first time I have more time than I have mental energy. Little errands that used to bother me like shopping are now welcome mindless tasks (as long as I can keep them mindless). This realization might even induce me to have a committed relationship and family?
Another analogy to NASCAR -- pit stops. I will just do nothing for weeks at a time. I used to think this indicated that I was a lazy person, to just take off to some exotic location every six months or so. Now with this NASCAR analogy, I realize that these might be necessary pit stops. It seems odd that it is actually faster to race like mad, then come to a complete stop for several minutes, then repeat. Wouldn't it be faster to just go slower and be easier on tires? Conserve gasoline? I guess not, not at least for NASCAR and it seems plausible that not for me either.
I think my NASCAR life has less to do with me being a sociopath and more to do with me doing high level brain tasks all of the time for my profession. But maybe the sociopath plays into fact that I have never felt guilty shirking work in some tropical location, which has actually been a boon to my productivity over the years -- a personality quirk that has actually given me a competitive advantage amongst my colleagues who are also regularly running their brains at over-capacity to the point of exhaustion. (Or maybe they're not also running their minds to exhaustion but are just smarter than me. If true, maybe my laziness has allowed me to be one of the stupidest people in my career field while still remaining competitive).
A NASCAR RACE CAR IS NOT really a race car at all, which is what makes the sport so tough. It has almost no downforce to keep it on the pavement; with 850 horses under the hood, it’s way overpowered; and the rest of the 43-car field is always bearing down on you.
I thought -- this is like me. Over the years, I have fine tuned my brain to be super efficient and as powerful as it can be. But the rest of me still has the same limitations -- fancy race car engine under the hood of a normal stock car. I have been thinking recently that for the first time I have more time than I have mental energy. Little errands that used to bother me like shopping are now welcome mindless tasks (as long as I can keep them mindless). This realization might even induce me to have a committed relationship and family?
Another analogy to NASCAR -- pit stops. I will just do nothing for weeks at a time. I used to think this indicated that I was a lazy person, to just take off to some exotic location every six months or so. Now with this NASCAR analogy, I realize that these might be necessary pit stops. It seems odd that it is actually faster to race like mad, then come to a complete stop for several minutes, then repeat. Wouldn't it be faster to just go slower and be easier on tires? Conserve gasoline? I guess not, not at least for NASCAR and it seems plausible that not for me either.
I think my NASCAR life has less to do with me being a sociopath and more to do with me doing high level brain tasks all of the time for my profession. But maybe the sociopath plays into fact that I have never felt guilty shirking work in some tropical location, which has actually been a boon to my productivity over the years -- a personality quirk that has actually given me a competitive advantage amongst my colleagues who are also regularly running their brains at over-capacity to the point of exhaustion. (Or maybe they're not also running their minds to exhaustion but are just smarter than me. If true, maybe my laziness has allowed me to be one of the stupidest people in my career field while still remaining competitive).
Monday, March 4, 2013
Negative emotions
A reader asks me what sorts of negative emotions I feel: "You've written of loyalty, gratitude, exhilaration (when winning or achieving something), a desire to be in control, etc. I'd like to know more about the other end of the spectrum." My response:I haven't really thought about this much. One thing that I like about the way my brain works is that it is very easy for me to compartmentalize, so usually I am an optimist, not prone to depression etc. Plus I am very sensitive to pleasure, like I must have too much serotonin or something, but I do sometimes feel down. Some sociopaths are particularly susceptible to depression, or I have a few readers at least who feel debilitating depression.
I was talking with a friend about this and asked what it looks/sounds/feels like when I am allegedly depressed. She said that it just seems like I am frustrated with my inability to think, which I think is accurate. I think when I feel "down," it is usually because my mind has lost some of its functionality, either because I am sick, tired stressed, or the brain is overtaxed. My friend also described her own depression, as a comparator. She said that she puts so much of her identity in how she feels, that when she is feeling poorly, she has a bit of a crisis of identity. I believe that is true for me too. I believe that I put so much of my identity in how I think ("I am how I think") that when my brain is sluggish and not performing up to par, I also have a crisis of identity. Being a sociopath already feels really empty, which I am fine with because I have never experienced anything different (and question whether anything different even exists). So emptiness is something you just have to learn to deal with day to day, like any other chronic illness, but sometimes it flares up or something irritates it, like a sluggish mind. And sometimes it gets really bad, like a crisis of identity, inflamed, and probably the only solution at that point is to (self) medicate it, dull it, quiet the deafening silence of the void, and maybe even that won't help. When it gets really bad, there's a hopelessness in wondering whether I'll ever go back to feeling like myself again. If I never go back to feeling normal, will I still be me? That's a really disturbing concern. I have never, ever have thoughts of suicide, but I do think there are worse things than dying.
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