Wednesday, 5 June 2024
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Hello. All is well. God is love.

In chapter eight, we learn about memory. How does it work?

Encoding is the process of adding memory, and decoding is the process of removing memory.

In encoding, we differentiate between automatic processing and effortful processing (deliberate, focused attention). 

The book mentions three encoding types. Visual (images), auditory (sounds), and semantic (word meaning). Interestingly it's easier to remember words that are less abstract with more sensical visual encoding, for example chicken vs. experience. What do you see when you read experience? 

I guess these are the primary senses because I think all other senses get encoded too? Like taste, smell, and touch. Think of a strawberry, squeeze it with your hand and feel the sensation and the smell released. Now, put your hand in a blender. Ahhh. The other day, my plate broke. Very sad. I like to eat sourdough bread with olive oil as a snack. I accidentally dropped the plate on me foot. My foot started bleeding. This may sound weird, but blood is pretty beautiful if one avoids freaking out. Red is my favorite color I think. Also, just to be clear, I don't self-harm or anything like that. I googled if others found blood pretty, and that's all that came up mostly, shake my head.

The book moves on to the storage of memory. We have sensory memory (few seconds), short-term memory (15-30 seconds), and long-term memory.

It's crazy how much stuff we can jam into our memory. Imagine you could visualize a brain fully and how it links together on a computer screen. Like google street view but for your memory. Yeah, that's not how it works. Silly goose.

In long-term memory, the book splits it into explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory is episodic (events) and semantic memory (words, facts) you are consciously aware of, while implicit memory is an experience you're not consciously aware of. Implicit memory is procedural, priming, and emotional conditioning stuff.

For decoding or retrieval, we have recall (no cue), recognition, and relearning. I think a good example for me is Swedish. I haven't used it daily for a long time now, so my recall has atrophied a bit, but I can recognize it (comprehend text and verbal). I still count in Swedish, though. My brain can't understand Danish when it comes to numbers. They say numbers in reverse. Why?!

I think my native language, Danish, has more emotional conditioning associated. I learned english through the internet, starting at age 6 or so I think. Now when I compare, my brain is much faster when I think in Danish but slower in English. Interesting.

That's interesting, actually. I can get angry when someone speaks Danish. It can really piss me off. I'm not sure why. Maybe I should try to write in Danish sometime and see if it changes anything in my writing. I think it's because I have a lot of negative experiences associated with it from my times of delusion.

I don't dislike the country or language itself. My knowledge is all context-based. I don't merge stuff together as much. I feel I know the source of my knowledge well, and if I don't, I don't really trust it. Nothing is absolute. Is that also how other people view their knowledge? I don't think so. I think they have much more implicit or intuitive knowledge. I have to think through everything constantly. That's why I'm obsessed with simplicity.

As second book, I'm now reading "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" by Robert Sapolsky.

In the introduction, we learn that the book is about human behavior. Why violence is a part of the human experience. Why, depending on the context, we like or dislike violence. It takes an interdisciplinary approach of various fields in biology, explaining the causes of a behavior with a timeline with each influencing cause that led to a particular action of behavior. It does this to avoid categorical thinking, which limits big-picture understanding.

I think this book will help me learn about my acting self. I still resonate with the idea that I have a disconnect between my acting self and my thinking self, which perhaps is why it comes more naturally for me to question my experience and how I perceive and conceptualize reality. I find it like I have two minds not really in agreement with each other, but like the acting self doesn't say much, the thinking self has to try and interpret what the thinking self is communicating. The thinking self also has a tendency to dominate the conversation. See, I acknowledge I have to listen more.

The first chapter talks about the meaning of words, specifically words of emotions we frame behavior. The word aggression means something different depending on the field or context it's used within.

The book talks about our idea of actions done in hot-blood or in cold-blood. Typically, we find actions done in cold-blood or in an emotionless state as less good. It also talks about pure altruism in this regard.

Right now, I'm unsure if being purely intellectual or cold-blooded is a thing (like fully, in any case, it's a limitation in sense-making). I merely think it's a state where one is completely unaware of how one's feelings influence one's decisions. I think this is why we find it scary because we can't understand why they do it or we find their intellectual rationalization out of bounds or far gone from reality. Pure altruism falls victim to this as well. It's pathological to be disconnected from feelings. It's dangerous because it leads one to lose touch with human sense-making, falling victim to making sense with some limited, intellectual logic. Obviously, one can make scenarios where logic can be used, but in general, no (should be obvious), and I'm not talking about scientific endeavor as that is, in a way, a method to outsource sense-making to objective observations that can be measured, which fundamentally adds severe limits to it. They're two different tools for two different purposes that sometimes overlap, like fields of engineering. It's more nuanced than this, but yeah.

But this is why I believe that in practice, we should try to get in touch with our feelings and then use our imaginative cognition to optimize prosocial behaviour and maximize our agency. Conceptualizing god as an emergent force of love is where I'm currently at this stage. I started with purely focusing on loving kindness, but I think adding an idea of god to that idea as a concept of absolute love can help one adopt it to your perceptual model. It's basically a way to make the concept less abstract, and I think one can fine-tune it to their level of need. Hence, some may even conceptualize a person like Jesus as the physical embodiment of this idea. I think if one truly understands the power of our imagination and how we genuinely bring emergent forces into physical reality, one can rationally understand why this makes sense.

I know religions work on the absolute level. I'm more of a practical person who just wants to function better. As long as you let me follow love. I'm a man of love. I do realise it's more complicated in practice but I'm talking about something not even really relevant. I'm alone on a little island, writing to myself.

I'm simply saying nature has developed this fantastic sense-making machine, and it would be foolish for us to dismiss it. Truly. That's not cool. Humans are amazing. The fact we have an imagination. Like, holy moly. That's pretty amazing. Embrace it and see its potential to give you agency, especially when it becomes a network effect of many minds. But as I've said, it's our greatest strength and weakness. We have to use it wisely.