Freedomain Radio

I am into software development. When I am faced with a complicated problem, my experience is that I sometimes feel my mind goes blank and is not bringing me any progress. This may be due to panic and freezing up to some extent in some cases, but I think it is not the most important cause. Another obvious cause would be that my analytic and mathematical capabilities are limited. This is of course quite true ( ..guhh..), and I know of colleagues that seem to get a quicker grasp of complexities than I do. On the other hand some of these people speak only in binary code, so I am not too jealous. So these are some possible causes that spring to mind at first glance.

But the thing is this: By now, as soon as I feel myself churning around some rational problem I am stuck with I just pack up and leave early, if I get a chance. I try to dismiss the whole thing, and spend the rest of the day as I see fit. Next morning I usually have a fresh new angle on the problem that seems to come out of nowhere, and I solve the problem without much of a struggle.

My take on this experience is this: It is my subconscious that does the actual work, and it is "Me" who is afterwards bragging about it. I have to some degree learned to rely on my subconsciousness' computing power and creativity. From the working of which I haven't got many clues. Now, this is all very well, and it has certainly made my life easier, but it puts my rational consciousness, the thing I usually call “Me”, in a position I have some difficulties with from time to time. After all it is this conscious “Me” that is currently writing this stuff ( I think). Now why would it do that? What is this conscious “Me” anyway? To “Me” it certainly feels like “Me”, but from a little distance it sometimes appears to be not much more than a chatbox running a message-cue coming from dozens of different adresses all of which are unknown to "Me".

So, this makes me a bit of a sceptic towards myself and others. Rational language in itself is usually not enough to convince me of "Thruth". At this point I'm not sure what to write. Stef's philosophy has become of great importance to me in a short period of time, and especially the emphasis he puts on self-knowledge makes a great deal of sense to me. It is only through a complete internalisation of the “Truth” about ones life, ones motives and interactions, that any freedom can possibly be obtained. It cannot be done the other way round. Merely compiling some philosphical language in your consciousness and rationally concluding it is “True” will not do, in my estimation. But then again this is just "Me".

Any thoughts would be much appreciated!

I'm no expert on this, but I have some thoughts.

To me, your subconscious is yours, just like your heart or your lungs. It is true that you have little control over whether you have them or not. Pretty much, if you want to stay alive, those things must exist in you. But, the way I see it, the subconscious is a lot like the heart and lungs. If you exercise a lot, they get to be really efficient. Your lungs get in shape and stop burning, your consumption of oxygen goes way up, and your heart pumps blood around really efficiently. In my experience, people who frequently use their subconscious have a really efficient one. Also in my experience in the art world, people do exercises to try to open their channels to their own subconscious.

So, I think, by that same line of thinking, you can take as much credit for actively using your subconscious as you can for being in shape. Certainly, the way it works is starkly different from anything conscious, but that doesn't mean you didn't train it. I can think of several dissociated people offhand that are subconscious couch-potatoes.

By that same token, I can think of at least a few people that are subconscious couch-potatoes with a laughable amount of self knowledge who would just love it if they could get me to believe that my talents are just random--that I happened to win the talent lottery or whatever. Then it's a few small jumps for them to convince me to give them my 'unfair' rewards earned by my talents, while also absolving them of any blame for not working to become better in their own lives. Maybe it's only coming from me, or the people I've been exposed to, but your post echoed feelings of this kind of attack in me.

I can empathize with the confusion of what "me" really is. To go back to the lung example, I don't sit around and consciously tell my lungs when to breathe, and then how to process each breath. Mostly, I never ever think about them until they either hurt tremendously, or stop working. I could see how I could relegate them from my mental "self" as just an external tool. However, I can't actually relegate them from myself, not without dying. My lungs are in cahoots with me, but more than that, because it is impossible for them to be in cahoots with someone else. I think that your subconscious is the same way, and I really don't know how better to define how something can be any more a part of you.

Thank you for sharing this idea Ruben. As a webdeveloper I share your experiences: my subconscious does most of the work for me. Each and every of my breakthroughs have been during off-time. In the train, whilst gaming, in the shower - these are the places where I have my eureka moments. During my daytime activities I use these to solve the problems at work. Before FDR I would typically have 2 or 3 what we called 'bad days', during which I just wasn't productive because I couldn't solve the problems we had. Now, when I am open to let my subconscious do the real insightful work, my workpace has slowed down to a steady pace of relaxed but constant production and my output has more than doubled. More than doubled! It's insane how much smarter my subconscious is than my conscious mind is!

I agree wholeheartedly with what Kaylee says; it is a part of you that you take care of and that takes care of you. It is your virtue to listen to it and give it the time and the material that it needs in order to work. It is your virtue to be engaged in things that engage it. It is your virtue to be humble and accept what it brings to the table.

I'm having some doubts about the validity of this metaphor, but I think it's accurate enough: Do you have less respect for your arms because they are weaker than your legs? Of course not; they are not for the same purpose and should not be held to the same standards.

Is this helpful?

Those are great comments, thanks.

Kaylee, thank you for pointing this out. I can see how thinking about what I wrote might echoe feelings about the kind of behaviour you describe. If I understand it correct you sense that my line of thought could be adopted by all kinds of completely irrational and stranded people in order to absolve themselves from the fact that they get nothing done in life, or worse: It could be seen as ridicule towards the hard and very conscious work people do in order to get somewhere.

I'll keep that in mind, and I assure you that I have no contempt for rationality and hard work. 

My idea is that as a faculty the consciousness has some defined limits and blank spots ( at least mine does). I try to look at it as a very specific part of "Me" that is dealing with communications and all the technicalities of interacting with reality. Encoding practicalities into language, decoding them back into practical meaning. It is higly technical and linguistic by nature, and so it has a tendency to reduce our experiences to technologically defined transactions. Literature and music bypass it to some extent, jokes do it too. Laughter is a short, irrational break from consciousness. 

Consciousness has an overal tendency to be reflective of our lives as technologically defined structures: we count our legs, we twitch a toe, make plans for the day, and we tend to take on the overall assumption that we are consciously in control of all that, or should be:  "... find a rational solution to this problem now or you're done with! ...". When it comes to this point, and my thoughts are racing around in loops, I have come to think of it as the occurence of a software-bug. Unplug the thing, take a walk. And from now on I might just send a problem report to Pim :) 

Just as a sidenote: you may consciously think of what it would be like for you to miss a leg, or even a lung. You may -when you slow down a bit- consciously observe that you are breathing without active commands. But try to think consciously about what things will be like after your death has occured. Not the funeral and the grief, just the "you being dead". In my experience the mind goes blank and tries to divert. It is in deniance of the whole concept. This is the consciousness, which disappears completely each night when you go to sleep. Apart from it's blind spots, it is simply not even there for a large part of your life.

Hello, I am interested if you want to elaborate on any of the questions that came to my mind:

How does it make you feel when you see your mind behaving as a chat box? I am interested in knowing a bit more about what feelings accompany this experience and also what feelings typing the words above produced in you.  Or as you mentioned in your own post "why would it do that?", I am curious if you can provide a bit more of an explanation for what it is that you hope to come out of the post.  What motivated you to write it?

Also your statement about rational explanations not satisfying your conclusions of truth, how do you experience these moments.  Do you feel like you want to believe and do not, or do you feel apathetic or neutral?

Also, would you expand a bit more on how you find yourself more skeptical towards yourself and others, I am not sure what you mean by this.

Sure!

> How does it make you feel when you see your mind behaving as a chat box?

When I sit down and make myself aware of it's flow I feel curious in general, and not unpleasant. Nice and unexpected stuff comes by from time to time, good ideas along with the everyday banalities. It is mainly under circumstances where I feel swept up in an effort to rationally solve a problem here and now that I can get annoyed with myself at just running around in circles. In extreme cases  where it borders on panic (which is not occurring often anymore ) I no longer absorb text well, I become uncreative, lose perspective, I forget what solutions I allready tried and not ... etc. And this is in fact a horrible experience. It is a feeling of general unwinding. 

>"why would it do that?" ..What is it that you hope will come out of the post? 

I'm trying to formulate some coherent thoughts about these observations and see how it works out in relation to philosophy, knowledge about myself, and my efforts to find out what's true in my life and what is not. Doing this feels both gratifying and to some extend compulsory: I wanna figure these things out, and test how my thoughts stands up to reality. Writing about it on this forum feels like a good method.

> Also, would you expand a bit more on how you find yourself more skeptical towards yourself and others

Well, this is where I might just wander off to another subject, and maybe my idea will lose it's relevance along the way. Anyway, it is my life's experience that a person's sound rationality is not much of an indication of virtue or truthfullness, especially not in the personal and subjective domain. I am a relative newbie on this website, and I notice that rationality is pretty much the prevalent and final method of measure in most of the discussions here. Which makes perfect sense, but I remain apprehensive of it. My doubts are that on a conscious and superficial level any rationale can be adopted without much effort for reasons that remain subconscious and out of sight. Some of those reasons might be in accordance with my feelings about morality. But others might be outright fraudulous, sadistic, vain or selfserving. And then there's everything in between of course. These reservations may be there mainly due to the fact that I myself have been verbally abused quite severely as a child. I am well used to people who abuse the language of psychology, of morality and thruth to scorn, humiliate and condemn others into a state which -thinking about it- is quite like the state I described above when facing acute rational problems that I cannot solve: A feeling of general unwinding. 

My experience of your original post, was that you are expressing a feeling of alienation from your mind. A feeling that sometimes, someone else is behind the wheel.  I can relate and have also experience doubt in the unconscious motivators that might be keeping me from the truth, as well. I am a fellow also on the journey to discover the truth and bring light to this mental conflict.  I get the impression that you find that rationality seems foreign to you at times and not a suitable measure of truth.  Would you say that this is do to the lack of feeling that a the rationality is sound, or from a discrepancy with the logic?  It is my experience as well that people will often cling to their beliefs and it is difficult to change their mind.  Are you concerned about being able to change your own mind? Or the minds of anyone in particular?

>
I get the impression that you find that rationality seems foreign to
you at times and not a suitable measure of truth


  That's
right, I usually don't. 

"How
can you possibly know whether the love that somebody expresses
towards you is genuine or not? It's very, very simple. When
it is genuine, you feel it."
( "On
truth, The Tyranny of Illusion",  Stef ) 

I think
this is the direction from which I have arrived at truth in my life
sofar; I need to feel it first. Perhaps not a very scholarly way to
go about it, but well .. there I am. I've read a fair amount of
philosophics and literarure throughout the years, and logic has never
been a fundamental quest while doing that. Truth, certainly. But if
it didn't reach me in some of those works, it has probably been
because I do not look for  it in linguistic equasions, wordgames and
technicalities. I skip that stuff, scanning the lines for possible
pieces of interest. Which may be lazy of me, I don't know. Perhaps
it's because I am basically an artist or something. 

Could
you expand  a bit more about the "unconscious motivators"
 you speak of, the ones that might be keeping you from truth?

r1z8:

I think this is the direction from which I have arrived at truth in my life sofar; I need to feel it first. Perhaps not a very scholarly way to go about it, but well .. there I am. I've read a fair amount of philosophics and literarure throughout the years, and logic has never been a fundamental quest while doing that. Truth, certainly. But if it didn't reach me in some of those works, it has probably been because I do not look for it in linguistic equasions, wordgames and technicalities. I skip that stuff, scanning the lines for possible pieces of interest. Which may be lazy of me, I don't know. Perhaps it's because I am basically an artist or something. 

Would you say that in this quest for truth through philosophy and literature, you are waiting for an "ah-ha!" moment? I wonder, since it sounds to me like you prefer and intuitive route to choice and action, versus a logical/rational analysis. I might add, that my preference has been for the latter, and now I am working on developing a more accurate intuition.

r1z8:

Could
you expand  a bit more about the "unconscious motivators"
 you speak of, the ones that might be keeping you from truth?

By unconscious motivators, I am referring to feelings which lead us to chose some actions over others.  I can feel pain either because an action is harmful to my integrity or I can feel pain because my false self has been programmed to keep me away from the truth that an action would be beneficial for me.  This is a real pitfall in feeling for the truth. My understand is that when we have been mal-programed to serve others interests, rather than our own, our intuition is damaged.  We need to repair our intuition. In my opinion, this is where logic and empiricism is a real boon.  Once we prove that these are the only ways to know reality and the truth, then we can test our experiences against these tools and check our understanding.  If some hypothesis is self-contradictory or hypocritical, or our evidence does not show it to exist, then we have to abandon our belief and revise our understanding and try again.  With this method, while I try to respect and understand my feelings, I do not accept them as a standard of proof for the truth.  The truth by definition is not "what makes me feel good" nor falsehood "what makes me feel bad". That is a simple concept,  I know, but I wanted to express how I try and deal with my feelings.  Respect them, but if they lead me to illogical conclusions, then I need to reevaluate the reason for their presence.

"I might add, that my preference has been for the latter, and now I am working on developing a more accurate intuition."

Well, since our approaches to the same goal seem different we might be able to learn from each other, and exchange some experiences. Let's say that my working definition of being virtuous is, like you suggest, doing "that which makes me feel good" and that my definition of evil is doing "that which makes me feel bad". My own ongoing self-evaluation wether I AM in fact living a virtuous and truthfull life is made up of conscious reflections about what it is I am doing, and the consequences of my actions within reality. I agree with you that logic and reason are the only ways to aqcuire knowledge of reality, and must be used in order to get anything meaningfull out of these evaluations. But this does not mean that I use rationality to decide on beforehand what my actions should be in order for me to be virtuous. If I do not FEEL where I want to go with a certain choice of some importance, then I prefer to wait untill I do. 

"My understanding is that when we have been mal-programed to serve others interests, rather than our own, our intuition is damaged. We need to repair our intuition."

Any mal-programming we may find within ourselves has ultimately been implemented by ourselves, and it is usually thought that we primarily establish (experience narrowing) defence mechanisms within ourselves to save our (emotional) life at a young age. I doubt wether any intuitional faculties we have could actually be damaged at all. I never really thought about it. I guess I expect it to be the last thing I'll lose in my life, probably a little while after I stop having a heartbeat. I do think that it can be repressed, by more or less (neurotic) conscious control mechanisms.

"I can feel pain either because an action is harmful to my integrity or I can feel pain because my false self has been programmed to keep me away from the truth that an action would be beneficial for me."

How do you, in the approach of being primarily logic in seeking out truth, discern between these two types of pain at this moment? If you feel like it, could you describe a realtime example of your dealing with "a truth you are kept away from"?

r1z8:

 

Let's say that my working definition of being virtuous is, like you suggest, doing "that which makes me feel good" and that my definition of evil is doing "that which makes me feel bad". My own ongoing self-evaluation wether I AM in fact living a virtuous and truthfull life is made up of conscious reflections about what it is I am doing, and the consequences of my actions within reality.

Would you provide me with some clarification here, so that we can as you suggest learn from one another which I am all onboard about!  These two statements seem to me to be in contradiction, and the mistake may be my own, but it seems to me that in the first statement you say "lets assume I use feeling to determine truth" and in the second statement you say "I reflect on the consequences of actions in reality to determine truth".

r1z8:

But this does not mean that I use rationality to decide on beforehand what my actions should be in order for me to be virtuous. If I do not FEEL where I want to go with a certain choice of some importance, then I prefer to wait untill I do. 

Im am confused by this and do not want to misinterpret.  By the first statement are you saying "it is my current activity to not think about the moral value of my actions rationally beforehand" or "I cannot use rationality beforehand to determine the moral value of actions"?  Or is it a third possibility that I have not considered?  And with regard to the second statement, by "feeling" for a specific action, does this work for you by considering an action in your mind and seeing how your feelings react to it? I feel a little bit of puzzlement about "feeling" where you want to go, because feelings to me seem a bit more like an alarm system than a compass of direction, they can reenforce or weaken my resolve to a specific action but not propose an action in and of themselves. I could easily be over thinking this, but I'd prefer not to make a mistake in interpreting you on a topic that is already, in my experience, quite hard to articulate.  Referring to intuition, feelings, consciousness, experience.

r1z8:

How do you, in the approach of being primarily logic in seeking out truth, discern between these two types of pain at this moment? If you feel like it, could you describe a realtime example of your dealing with "a truth you are kept away from"?

 

 

Sure, I can think of an example that I am dealing with currently.  I have a real difficulty being assertive in the face of what is or could become conflict between myself and others.  My parents are distant and closed off people who very rarely share anything personal about themselves, I believe the deprivation of intimacy that I experience as a child from their behavior has lead me to react to conflict in a manner of deference. Here is a hypothesis that I am working with.  "Them major reason that I am terrified of asserting myself is that I might find out that people actually do respect my opinions and feelings, and if I realize this, then it undermines the illusion that I have had to maintain (all by it unconsciously) all my life that 'the reason my parents didn't love  me is because I was unlovable, not that they themselves were bad parents."  I have always and continue to, except in rare occasions, shy from intimacy with people.  In moments of confrontation, I am filled with fear and my thoughts are lost in a fog.  My intuition or feelings in this moment are begging me to shut down, to become small and hide, I am filled with the most disgusting feelings. However, if I were to assert myself and find out that people do value my opinion and feelings, then I would find a most wonderful world awaits me on the other side.  One where I am not loathed, but loved.  And it wouldn't be scary.  But what seems to me to be scary, is an ancient lesson that asserting myself leads to finding out that I was mistreated by my parents, which at one time was too terrible to face, but now only acts to impair my adult life.  I would consider this an example where my feelings (which are overwhelming and debilitate my thinking in the moment) are counter to what it is that I really need to do to be happy.  If I were to only chose actions that made me comfortable, then I would never face any demons from my past or present.  This is where logic and empiricism come to the rescue for me and help me to determine if my feelings are consistent with reality.  I think a healthy intuition will guide you consistently towards the truth, but the intuition must be calibrated with reality as it is, not as it might have seemed to me as a child.

I think a healthy intuition will guide you consistently towards the truth, but the intuition must be calibrated with reality as it is

You formulated this a whole lot better than I could sofar. I totally agree with you. So, effectively it is probably right to assume that I'm no expert in objective knowledge of reality. I'll be working on that. And you appear to be sowewhat disconnected from your subconscious, which does not guide and reassure you.

Unfortunately, that makes you the one with the hardest work to do. Your example given about a current struggle you are having is one I can certainly relate to. You have my greatest sympathy and respect for being there, talking about this. You seem to have all the selfknowledge pinned down. The rationality of it is not going to get any more valid than this. And this is my whole point: Allthough "reason" in self-knowledge  is of great value, in itself it is not enough. It is in fact nothing at all, as long as you do not process it with your whole being.

You have to listen to yourself. You say you have been alone for your whole goddamn life. 

So how does that really feel? Try sitting down from time to time, joining the little infant you were, facing the terror of such a  discovery. It will sweep you off on it's own accord if you let it.  This might take a while. But at a certain point you're going to notice change in your life, intuition, more freedom. 

I appreciate the suggestions about sitting down and staying with feelings, but I feel a little irritation that you are moving from what I experience as a less curious conversation to a more prescriptive conversation.  I could not have gotten to the degree of self-knowledge and awareness that I now possess without spending a great deal of time already with very uncomfortable feelings.  I whole heartedly agree that without emotional integration, a self is missing half of what it needs to be happy.  I wonder how you experienced reading my last post?  Am I off base with feeling that your last post lacked some curiosity and made, what I found to be, some assumptions that made me feel a bit talked down to?  I am aware that I could be projecting onto this post some issue from my past, and I will be vigilant in watching for signs that I am doing so, but for the sake of respecting my feelings and the fact that your post included some presumptions about how I am and have dealt with the problems I described, I'll go ahead and inquire about how you experienced my last post and your response.

And if I can add one more bit, the reason I find the presumption unreasonable that I am not engaged in emotional resolution and integration of my feelings into my aware self, is that I very much doubt that such a person would be able to be as honest about the sensitive issue I brought up around my past, in my previous post.  Please, let me know how you feel about what I am saying and about your previous post.  I'm sure it goes without saying, but for my own insecurity Ill state it, I am not trying to provoke you into conflict.  Cheers.

I felt a very personal recognition reading your previous post and I have some quite similar feelings about my own past. I've gone through a period doing pretty much what I spoke of, and I may have spent more time going through a personal recollection of my feelings back then, than I did actually writing an answer to you. Which might be a little thoughtless I agree. Your feeling of irritation and sense of being talked down to confuse me though. 

So I'll do a short overview of this exchange so far:

 We are having a conversation about rationality v.s. intuition and two seemingly different approaches towards dealing with reality. I write about my ambiguity towards dominant rationality in my personal affairs. There are a few specific emotional references on my part towards my childhood, and the abuse that I encountered. I describe how I feel that this may have inflicted damage to my relationship with reality and how it has crushed my basic trust that there is anything out there worth investigating to begin with, let alone thruth. You pose some good questions as to how I seem to function on a rational and intuitive level in all this, but you do not refer to any of the obvious emotions involved. In curiosity of why that is I pose a question of which I assume it will make you talk about a personal experience hoping from which I will be able to get a grasp of what your general rational preferences actually mean to you in emotional terms. It then turns out that you are currently involved in a very difficult situation on which you express some profound feelings of unease and grief. I respond to those feelings not in a questioning manner as to where the nuts and bolts are, or about any rational technicalities about the issue. I respond in an emotional manner, and along with my expressions of sympathy I offer you my own experience based advice. You response to this is, briefly put, that allthough you do not reject the offered friendship, you suspect that the words that accompany it are of a condescending nature and you find them irritating.

Is this overview correct in your opinion?

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, I am relieved by your maturity, which I cannot claim any expertise on myself, and I should likely expect from the honesty of your previous posts, but its is relieving.  Probably especially relieving because I have parents whom conflict is rarely to never resolved reasonably.  I do apologize if I am making a mistake above, and it could be more about me than you.  Also, I do agree with your overview which I checked against the previous posts and find accurate.  I located the specific phrase that made me feel denigrated above.  I think it did so because I have spent a the last 6 years in mild to deep self study and felt when you said "You have to listen to yourself" that you were implying something that I already do and have done for some time.  I fully accept that my defensiveness may be an inner issue of mine.  However, I took a risk in expressing this to see if perhaps you had found any similar feelings upon writing it.  It felt to me a little bit like having a doctor friend talking about a real tricky infection he is trying to cure in one of his patients and suggesting that he use antibiotics.  That would be a degrading comment because he is a doctor, so of course he is going to try anti biotics first.  I dont want to suggest that I am a doctor of self-knowledge, ha, far from it though I am in training.  Anyhow, it seems that people on the boards are pretty smart, and if discussing the emotionally intense issues that we are here, are probably already familiar with practices like sitting down from time to time, joining the infant you were, and letting the emotions guide you to their source.  Which have been very fruitful for me as well, and will be even more productive when I can afford to enter therapy.  I have to leave for a job interview, so let me leave it for now with this.  My feeling right now is apologetic and I hope you will forgive me if I have accused you of something that is entirely within my self.  I am trying to learn to be assertive and trust my feelings a bit more, and I am sure I will take a few spills along the way.

r1z8:

You have to listen to yourself. You say you have been alone for your whole goddamn life. 

So how does that really feel? Try sitting down from time to time, joining the little infant you were, facing the terror of such a  discovery. It will sweep you off on it's own accord if you let it.  This might take a while. But at a certain point you're going to notice change in your life, intuition, more freedom.