Maps of Meaning #7

[balupton (Benjamin Lupton)]

Discussion thread for 2017 Maps of Meaning - Lecture #7

study group discussions

Discussion as part of our Study Group.

2017-03-18: Maps of Meaning #7

topic discussion notes Submodalities Jordan mentioned they can be changed, such as making a child that hates broccoli now like it Sweden - Tim Pool Agreeableness Vs Competitiveness, Conflict Assertiveness Training for high-agreeableness Sensitivity Training for low-agreeableness Male vs female differences Males - want to eliminate the problem - perhaps due to fight vs flight threat response? Females - want to relate the problem - perhaps due to tend & befriend threa…

2017-03-25: Maps of Meaning #7

topic discussion notes The problem of complexity We solve it partly by cooperating with other people Free speech and insults How should insults be viewed in the context of free speech? Not necessarily helpful, but impossible to draw a line between idea and insult – if insults are not allowed, that rule can be used to increase the restriction to include expressions that are definitely ideas. Incentive reward School teachers in Sweden thought that there was too much competit…

2017-04-01: Maps of Meaning #7, #8

topics discussion notes Cause vs effect Be at cause (you influence everything) first when acting as it is motivating Be at effect (the situation influenced) first when considering an anomaly Archetypal stories Cultures can only interact to the extent of the similarities of their cultures Archetypes must be what our culture considers to be the ideal way of behaving Split-brain problem Internal inconsistency - thinking one thing, saying another; causes: Hemisphere…

[balupton (Benjamin Lupton)]

my notes

• 0:00 - recap again

• 4:00 - quiescent

• 5:00 - humans also need to consider their organisation in the short term, but also in the long term, and across people - there isn’t that much difference in establishing a value system that works for you now, tomorrow, and in the future for yourself, and doing the same for others - so you should share what works (11:30) - we assemble our identities from our stories and the stories we hear - and archetype is what is common across multiple stories, so an archetype is like a meta-story

• 7:00 - competitive brain functions

• 15:50 - they make the same kind of mistakes, which is an indication they are functioning in much the same way…

  • << so do they already have low-level intelligence structures/systems? >>

• 16:30 - you ignore almost everything, but you concentrate on things that move you along your away, or obstacles that get in your way

• 16:40 - valence

• 17:00 - drugs and reward systems

• 18:00 - one of the things we are trying to compute is how emotionally reactive you should get to an event

• 20:00 -** when you encounter something positive, you echo it through the different meaning levels - when you encounter something negative, you wish to constrain its propagation through meaning levels**

• 20:45 - naive to PTSD to descending to chaos

• 22:00 - hippocampus is context aware stress responses, the amygdala is non-context aware stress responses - treatment to PTSD is to set up contexts to contain the fears

• 24:00 - people do like the anomalies as it destroys their stories

• 25:00 - << it doesn’t seem in the irrelevant category at that point, as you haven’t even encountered it yet! it should be in none of your boxes! irrelevant box is for things that you have encountered by filled as irrelevant >>

• 26:00 - the most common patient is not someone with a mental illness, but someone who has been overwhelmed by catastrophe

• 27:00 - the role of psychology / therapy - preparing for catastrophes will help manage them if they do occur (seems a conservative trait - people with their nuclear bunkers, etc)

• 30:00 - evolution is a conservative process - the unknown is a source of predators, but also positive possibilities - we are always looking for more ways of producing what we need

• 36:00 - how do we construe the occurrence, is a minor event or a major event, within our meaning map layers - always start at the minor event, otherwise everything becomes a catastrophe (major event)

• 39:00 - << that’s a really easy way to change a sub-modality, bet someone they can’t do it (aka provide the endurance of the negative with a worthwhile reward) >>

• 41:00 - goal setting, work up from the easiest level of abstractions, to the more complicated/higher level of abstractions - do not try to cascade failures, depressed people do that << perhaps give them MDMA >>

• 42:30 - bottom of dominance hierarchy - when you are the bottom, there are way more threats to you, it is dangerous there!

  • << pewdiepie covered this in his interview video, that while he was at the bottom, hard to find job, hard to find rent, hard to find apartment, all worries - but he worked hard, and with the richness, he has the security of not worrying about those things >>

  • what seems to happen with people who are depressed, as if they have plummeted down the dominance hierarchy, even without plummeting down it, they are still capable and able with lots of status, but their reduced serotonin seems to have fooled them - resilience seems to be how many cascades you can withstand - in therapy, you get people who are concerned with a negativity cascade to walk through the micro details of the lowest anomaly, then what are the multiple ways this can be interpreted, is there some possibility this is not the catastrophe that you were envisioning - in a way, this is setting up micro-defences for them - a lot of people who are prone to depression are not good at defending themselves - they don’t have at hand, the mechanisms to forgive themselves, or to even understand their own failures, or more importantly sometimes they radically overestimate their own incompetence, and radically overestimate the competency of everyone else

  • << this seems to be the cucks in the information technology field having imposter syndrome, and also the ideal state that marxists inflict on others, marxism seems to turn imposter syndrome people violent in resentment >>

• 45:00 - the role of social evaluation in depression

  • << youtube seems to reward and a be method of social evaluation - every video puts you up for social evaluation, and as pewds say, you can either have a weak mind and drop out and not accept the evaluation, or you can have a strong mind, accept the evaluation and use it to make yourself stronger – it also seems to be what happens in failing relationships, they never talk about their issues with outsiders, so bad ideas, and bad occurrence, never get outside feedback to correct themselves at the earliest stages >>

• 47:15 - slide

• 47:50 - slide

• 48:00 - going up, and dropping a frame (a meaning map layer), is that the best solution, or addressing the problem at the sub frame level? dropping a frame creates new problems as void now exists, and is a sacrifice as you already added things to that frame

  • << myself dropping hockey >>

• 56:30 - safe spaces

• 57:00 - memory systems - if you go back in your memories, we remember things that can provide us with errors - then continuation into learning what you did wrong, (conscientiousness people)

• 59:45 - precipitously, impetuous

• 1:00:00 - conscientiousness people - mass layoffs set conscientious people on the road to depression, as they can blame themselves and tear themselves apart, when it may not have had anything to do with them - the alternative to something being your fault, is that it just happened!

  • << and that challenges your worldview, as it means chaos is out there, and it touched you, and there was nothing you did to deserve it >>

  • << part of being mature, is to understand you are prey to random forces, and you need to be able to distinguish when you are at fault for something and when something just happened to you - the right rule of thumb is to start with the assumption that something just happened to you, then start to investigate the extent you had in it - situational analysis first, personal analysis second - if you start with the latter, you will take yourself apart before you give yourself a way out, which is very stressful, and you should leave that for emergencies >>

  • << how does this play with cause vs effect? it seems this recommendation leaves you at effect, it seems more useful to live in cause, and then when something negative happens, then starts with effect - so cause for outward actions, because then you have power over the world, and that is motivating - and effect for inward negative results? >>

  • you are at home happy, and then the dragon invades your lair - there is no place so safe that there isn’t a monster in it (the snake in garden of eden)

  • << this goes against the evolutionary perspective of why the snake is there (so god can give people the choice to transform from unconscious animals to conscious humans which now have agency and responsibility, which you would be hard pressed to argue is a malicious act of the snake…) >>

• 1:05:00 - dragons can be found worldwide - categories are constructed in relation to their functional significance

  • **<< this would be why he is against the non-binary gender pronouns, **male female are function in relation to sex and the roles that sex begets onto them - the others are not, and only functional in relation to their ideology >>

  • the dog to a child is a representation of 4 legged pet(verb)-able creature

  • << so you would have to explain the cats functional difference to the child (it can jump high, and likes fish)

• 1:08:00 - snakes - garden of eden, is about an amalgam of social structure and nature, we need both - god is the spirit of civilisation - what humans were trying to peddle out was the nature of the predators - Saint Patrick - **tomorrow starts to matter as you get smarter - **what we do is try and find the highest abstraction of predator

• 1:16:00 - slide

• 1:17:50 - desires are expectations that are goal oriented

• 1:18:00 - lion king - your territory is the horizon of your understanding, and you are the king of that domain

• 1:20:00 - original sin

  • << what did he mean by that? >>

• 1:20:50 - facesnap

• 1:22:30 - slide

• 1:23:30 - moral order is progress - the self is the thing that remains the same through its different reincarnations - part of focus is about, looking at macro and micro levels for where you are not where you could be, and if you do that, it will take you apart a little bit, and burn you down to your core a little bit, and rebuild you a little bit -** what saves you in the eyes of the snake, is your capacity to let things go, and die, and come back to life**

  • << reminds me of my dream last night - dream journal entry #01 >>

• 1:26:48 - facesnap

• 1:31:00 - the stupid puppet (the one at the effect) is the one with the most to burn of themselves -** the nature of trauma, is you can’t believe something like that can actually ever happen** - what traumatised people is malevolence, tragedy can traumatise if it is bad enough but generally they can withstand it - school shootings, islamic terrorism?

• 1:34:50 - gender roles - feminine things are the birthplace of things - people are stuck interpreting things through the biological platform they evolve

• 1:38:00 - real means: works now, works forever, applies now, applies everywhere

• 1:39:00 - children don’t understand stories unless they are simply archetypical, as they need to make sense for the minimal structures the child has

• 1:41:11 - slide

• 1:41:40 - sleeping beauty - the hero is the exploratory, assertiveness, and courageous part of the feminine psyche that is necessary to bring the unconsciousness up into consciousness

• 1:44:00 - google: engineers just do it, psychologists would be too concerned with the ethics of this, but engineers don’t care, they just plough right ahead, and they actually discover things - 5 types of male monsters - 1. vampire, sucks the life out of you 2. werewolf, sexy and nice but has a dark side 3. billionaire, competitive and ignores you 4. pirate, avoids responsibility and takes your prizes 5. surgeon, want to fix you - plot is the woman tames them

  • << wait, so a well rounded man isn’t attractive to a woman? >>

  • there is no fun in taming someone who is already tame, there is no interest in that

  • << sigh, women need to get a life >>

  • when chaos does arise, what makes you think someone tame will be good for anything, so that aggression is absolutely vital and necessary, but that aggression needs to be civilised

  • << 50 shades of grey summed up completely >>

• 1:47:00 - slide - hero archetype story explained

• 1:48:15 - sexual dynamics

  • << WRITE THIS DOWN LATER >>

• 1:49:18 - slide

• 1:50:45 - what is outside the cognitive structure, is latent information - information means, in formation - the domain of latent information is chaos itself

• 1:52:00 - your job is to be the master of the category of all things not yet mastered - and you can’t do that, unless you conceptualise, so you have to conceptualise it into the meta predator - the gold hoarding dragon

• 1:52:00 - mastery is continual mastery, there is no difference - a lot of brilliance from here

• 1:53:30 - he is the most favoured as he knows when to break the rules - you don’t sacrifice the old rule unless you have a very good reason for doing so, what you propose must be better than the old way, and you must be ready to be touched by the spirit of the snake

• 1:55:30 - that is what being informed means, to be in form

• 1:57:00 - polytheism to monotheism (poly competitive ideals to integrated ideals) - Osiris (old king, Dumbledore, archaic, wilfully blind, Mufasa - great king, established the Egyptian state, founder of Egyptian customs - is what culture is, old and wilfully blind - dead, out of date, can’t update themselves anymore - great when he was young, but will no longer looks where he needs to look - the spirit of structure, but spirit cannot be destroyed) - Set/Seth/Satan (Scar, malevolence, elections stop the dead from staying in power for too long) - Isis (queen of underworld, religious structure that prevailed over thousands of years - queen of hyenas) - Horus (Egyptian eye, falcon, Zazu) - things fall apart because they get old, and because malevolence undermines them - things that fall apart cannot be brought back together as they were - Seth destroys the order of Osiris, and up rises isis the queen of the underworld and longs to put the chaos into order, so she becomes pregnant, and returns to the underworld into Horus, he is the son of the great mother and the great father - Horus grows up outside the kingdom, in the underworld, that is where humans grow up, we are alienated from our fundamental culture, as we are new and it is old, but Horus can see and decides to fight Scar/Seth - Seth tears out one of Horus’ eyes, and malevolence will damage you, Horus is able to banish Seth - banish as you can never remove evil, it will always return occasionally - Horus becomes king - but goes down to the underworld, and gives Osiris his eye, and now Osiris can see - when threatened by malevolence, even to the damage of your consciousness, you go down into the chaos, and find the dead spirit of your tradition and you give it vision, provided with vision, Osiris regenerates and Osiris go back up to the world with Horus, and rule jointly - the Pharaoh is the person who represents the unity of Osiris and Horus - you have to be awake to malevolence, and chaos, and you have to embody you tradition - and that puts you at the highest point on the dominance structure, it is the highest possible moral virtue, from the battle of the gods/ideals that occurred through thousands of years - it isn’t enough to be the best at a dominance hierarchy, it the best to be the best at all different dominance hierarchy - what puts you at the top is paying attention

[JohnBuck]

my notes

• 11m - people enjoy more complex stories because it gives them a useful bit of information for their complex lives

• 22m - a fear of something can start to be dealt with by thinking of that thing under a different context. Ie fear of snakes>A cartoon snake.

• 25m - jaws. (The shark wasn’t working which caused them to not show the shark, creating even more fear from within the human mind. Now is that fact of the shark not working meaningless? No, because why would we talk about it. Spielberg’s willingness to adapt after being spurred on by the universe signalling his own inadequacies caused his endeavor to become even better than it would’ve been.

• 32m - the most archetypal story is the person that went out into the unknown to come back with the reward. (Information)

• 39m - he bet his daughter that she couldn’t eat 20 olives over a week, then that backfired on him.

• 46m - you don’t have to live up to the ideal in a job, just do better than everyone else at your level.

• 1h 00m - conscientious people will blame themselves whenever bad things happen to them. (That’s the iconic Jewish motif, hence they’re quite successful in their endeavors)

• 1h 01m - it’s better to believe it’s your fault, because then you can change yourself, while you’re not powerful enough to change all of existence just yet. (Job)

• 1h 30m - the bible and Harry potter are both drawing from the same universally accessible archetypes.