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Classic Lectures - Coggle Diagram
Classic Lectures
Optimum Tools
- First of all, we need to look at the rules of the game. We are born into an environment where people already have certain reactions to the established culture. Most of the things we learn today on an intellectual level do not serve us to survive in extreme conditions. If you produce a unit of product for $0.30 and sell it for $6, you will benefit from the buyers, but if you sell it for $2, then your profit will be lower. The market system reinforces all the already established practices, i.e. it requires you to sell the unit of product for $6 instead of $2.
- In real life, an anthropologist can lecture on the origins of human behavior and acquired habits depending on different cultures, but when placed in a real situation with these cultures, he will not be able to react in any other way than other people in the same situation. When we are late for work, we ignore the fact that the car brakes are broken and we may crash because of the socio-economic pressure exerted on us, but when we crash, we say to ourselves: "How could I have been so stupid? I should have known!" This is the phenomenon of ex post facto. It is difficult for us to make the decision not to travel because our brakes are broken, because we do not know whether we will actually crash, but we certainly know that bad consequences will befall us if we do not go to work.
- An anthropologist can study the traditions and customs of certain cultures for hours, but he gets irritated if these habits and traditions manifest themselves in his own culture. Most people have a hard time growing out of their environment. We may have read all the books on how to control our reactions and emotions, but the environment we live in does not allow us to put it into practice. Very few people can cope with a huge amount of negativity in everyday life. For example, if we generally deal with 16 complaints a day, then with 104 we will not be able to maintain our composure. We must understand that we are not ‘idiots’ by birth, but that we are simply under the influence of the natural pressure of society. The goal of each person is to determine his level of stress tolerance and not exceed it.
- Each person has different emotional states. When we are in a state of overexcitement, we make rash decisions. During a charity dinner, food is served to the taste of most people and the dance performance is classy, because the purpose of the dinner is to predispose those present to larger donations. The most important decisions should be made when a person is not emotional. Then we make our more rational decisions.
- The formula is to be able to take an “inventory” of our personality. Is our behavior the same at the beginning and end of the day? If our behavior throughout the day is relatively constant, then we can say that we have reached a level of non-participation. If we play with our phone during a party that we don’t like, then we are expressing emotional non-participation and thus we are in the middle of the party, but we don’t feel exhausted from doing something we don’t like.
- People exhibit certain behavioral patterns under the influence of external factors. If an employee performs his duties perfectly for 10 years, then when he receives an inheritance of 10 million dollars, he will be rude to his employer and immediately quit his job. The employee has not changed suddenly, but has simply adopted a different pattern of behavior. Therefore, we can only be sure of the nature of another person when we all receive economic security.
- In our minds, we have built models for everything around us. When any of these patterns is changed, then our sense of wholeness in relation to what is already familiar to us is disrupted. If we replace a trumpeter's trumpet with a small ball that allows him to reproduce the same sounds, the conductor and the entire orchestra will feel strange. This happens because their already established pattern is disrupted.
- Thanks to our associative memory, we build models for everything in our consciousness. When this pattern changes, it is difficult for us to accept the new one, as we experience emotional uncertainty. This emotional uncertainty of ours is due to our low level of predictability towards new patterns. If we ride in a glass elevator for the first time, we experience uncertainty and discomfort, because we are used to the old type of elevators, for which our associative memory has already created a model.
- When we receive more and more information, we do not lose our feelings, they simply change. We will always have feelings, but they will not be expressed emotionally. If a social worker were to be involved in the problems of any family, he would have a nervous breakdown. The things we cannot change, we must leave aside. However, how often have we had difficulty doing just that? The reason is our “investment” in a given thing. It seems much easier to us to end a 3-month love affair than a 7-year one.
- The brain develops the areas that are used the most. A dancer’s brain is much more developed in terms of movement and coordination. A pianist’s brain is developed in the area of hand control.
- Each person has a threshold of saturation. When a person is considered boring, the audience is actually not interested in the subject of conversation. A marine biologist can be boring to an English teacher in the same way that she can be boring to him. Boredom is caused by being overloaded with information about something that we have little interest in. The level of curiosity is different for everyone. The goal is to know the audience's saturation level before presenting them with new information.
- Each person's behavior depends on the stimuli they receive from their environment. A person can be stimulated to take their own life by jumping into a volcano if they are promised a happy eternal life in heaven. People can be stimulated to feel no pain while burning alive if they are taught to give a higher priority to the idea that they will connect with God when they die.
- No one can be completely mechanistic. If someone is suffocating with poison gas, their brain cannot work on a purely logical level and calmly say to itself "Poison gas is entering my lungs and from there I am reacting by coughing." There will also be an unconscious emotional reaction in such a situation.
Relationships
- If we start drawing part of a familiar figure on a piece of paper, the person on the other side knows what it is even before we have finished the drawing. This is because the human brain uses the closest possible guess about the outline of the image in order to complete the drawing. This means that there are pre-structured models in the human mind that allow us to build a general opinion about events or ideas. For example, the word “love” is a general concept because the prevailing feeling of affection for another is generally accepted by everyone without going into details about physical features or character traits.
- However, the human intellect has the ability to evaluate physical features or character traits in another based on his value system. If Mitko evaluates Ani according to twelve criteria, but Petya possesses a certain trait that is essential to Mitko, then he will be initially impressed by Petya, but as circumstances change, Petya's behavior may disrupt the initial image he was attracted to.
- When we view and perceive the behavior and overall image of others as absolute values (I like/love her/him, I don't like/love her/him) we feel confused. This is because we don't accept that our feelings are in the gray area, but view them as black and white (at certain times I like/love her/him, at other times I don't). For example, when we are with our partners at a party and they humiliate us in front of our friends, and then they behave, look and speak in a more ideal way for us, we get confused, thinking to ourselves: "A while ago I couldn't stand her/him, I didn't love her/him at all, she was driving me crazy, and now...?"
- When a person is in an overexcited state, positive or negative, he is unable to realize the negative or positive sides in the person opposite him. In this regard, sometimes when a person uses logic to analyze his relationship with another, he will leave his partner, but after a while, when he has calmed down, the same person will feel lonely and return to his partner. When we are calm, critical-analytical reasoning disappears.
- Most people like a thrill in their lives. The slower the development process in a person's life, the less thrill there is. If a man wants to have a relationship with a woman, he will calculate how much time to invest in courting her, because a lot of effort in the long run will reduce the thrill of success. Also, the thrill in the first 7 months of a relationship is on a much different level than the thrill of a 7-year relationship.
- Most people follow socially constructed patterns of relationships, but these generally accepted patterns of communication require the satisfaction of certain requirements that do not always correspond to natural human needs. During Valentine's Day, the social model is for the boy to woo the girl by giving her flowers and/or taking her to a romantic dinner. This does not always coincide with her natural needs for human closeness and warmth. We feel obliged to fulfill the generally accepted norm in order to receive social approval, but the rational act would be for the boy to identify the girl's natural needs and satisfy them.
- The value system of most people in the past was similar. Today, the words and actions of one person do not correspond to the understandings of the person on the other side. The desires of a girl who lives in a village are different from those of a girl who grew up in the city. If in a village it is generally accepted for a girl to marry at an early age and start a family, then a girl who grew up in a big city will try to meet the generally accepted norm of building a career. Our desire to meet these social norms, which have nothing to do with our natural needs, lays the foundations of problems between people.
- Today, most of our needs regarding relationships with other people are not met, but even if we get what we need, we will always have suspicions of ulterior motives on the part of the person who did us the favor. A man may express very positive intentions towards a woman during a romantic dinner, but usually changes his intentions after spending the night with her. If this is repeated too often, the woman will doubt the intentions of the next man she meets, even if his is natural and sincere. This is because she has put the intentions of all men under one denominator, and suspicions of ulterior motives, as well as the need for self-preservation, become stronger than the need for intimate relationships.
- Many people are reluctant to share personal flaws or suffering with others because they feel vulnerable. During an intimate relationship, both participants relax and share personal flaws. However, if this relationship breaks down, the participants can use these personal flaws against each other. If in a relationship between a boy and a girl, during sexual intercourse, the boy experiences a symptom of premature ejaculation, the girl will keep the information about this event to herself. In the event of a breakup, the girl can use this information to hurt the boy's ego. That is why some people do not share their personal flaws, while others do it to feel uncomfortable.
- In a long-term relationship between a man and a woman or between two friends of the same sex, the relationship may seem to be in dynamic equilibrium. However, if one of them suddenly shows negative behavior towards the other, this will cause surprise in the other. If in a relationship the boy suddenly changes his attitude towards the girl, then this may be caused by harboring remarks towards the girl, propaganda (when someone disparages her with false information) or a number of other reasons. The boy in this situation can be defined as an emotional coward - he does not want to create a confrontation, but after a while he has no choice but to react suddenly and emotionally.
- Today we are subjected to constant media manipulation, propagating a certain model of relationships and behavior. If we do not fulfill this model, we may feel comfortable in a given situation, but not satisfied. In a relationship where people like and attract each other in a natural way, the relationship between them is also natural. When a boy massages a girl or cooks her dinner, these efforts also give him pleasure. He does not consider them a burden, but rather a tool with which he can please a loved one.
- Society discriminates against people who do not follow generally accepted norms of behavior. A long time ago in America, in some of the southern states, it was completely unacceptable for a white girl to have a relationship with a colored boy. Today, this division is visible between different social statuses in society. A girl from a financially wealthy family will be reproached for having a relationship with a boy from a middle-income family. If the son of a military man declares himself homosexual, his father has no intention of understanding his son, but rejects him because it is easier than explaining to society that this is completely normal.
- The goal of every person is to accept themselves and not pay the "public opinion tax" (other people's opinions should not be of essential importance to them). From an early age, it is good to be superficially familiar with most things in life and, over time, to be able to choose a certain specialty in which to develop, but at the same time, this specialty should bring us happiness and enrich us emotionally. If we like ourselves, other people will like us too.
Science & Social Change
- Usually, social change has been a consequence of the development of events and depending on the conditions in a given society. If there is a shortage of a resource, its value increases. If there is more unemployment, the crime rate also increases. In a future society, people will not be raised to cause pain to other people.
- In the past, there have been attempts at integrated schools, but without rejecting the myth of race, i.e. there is no Jewish or black blood, but there are blood types (A, B+, etc.). Today we can use all sorts of multimedia channels to change human behavior by maintaining a parallel value system both at school and at home. Psychologists cannot help change human behavior because they recognize the consequences, not the causes and mechanisms.
- Information provided in an appropriate manner allows for its faster assimilation. Students will be much more interested if an experiment is first conducted in a physics class and only then its principle is explained. The change in the educational system will aim to provide tools that can be useful to a person in his life, by recognizing and respecting the laws of nature.
- There is no single short answer to most of life's questions. Most things today are processes that are interconnected, so when one element changes, all the other related elements change as well. A car is not driven solely by its engine - it needs gasoline, motor oil, etc. The goal is to discover the mechanisms that govern human behavior.
- Man has always imagined that there is a concept of purpose or meaning in nature. A good proof that God exists is to find meaning or purpose in nature. There is no purpose or meaning in nature. Claims of intelligent design are completely irrelevant. What is the point of antibodies in our bodies? Why would someone design us with an internal anti-virus system? Couldn't they just design us without the ability to produce viruses?
- People cannot think, but some natural phenomena have taught us many things. Before there were bridges, people swam across rivers. During a storm, trees fell and served as a bridge between the two banks. Only then did man realize that he could cut down a tree himself and use it as a bridge. All the decisions we make are based on our knowledge and experience. An aborigine cannot appreciate the complexity and beauty of a Swiss watch.
- Unfortunately, the environment we live in today has built-in mechanisms that make us nervous and cause us to react emotionally. In the future, machines will be able to change the method of communication depending on human understanding. During a flight, if the floor of the aircraft becomes transparent and passengers do not feel safe, the on-board computer will sense their emotional state and react accordingly. The goal is to create tools and devices without pre-set flaws.
- We currently view a technology as useful in only one aspect. If we break free from conventional thinking and a conservative approach to solving a particular problem, we can achieve an enormous amount by combining different technologies to achieve abundance. The Venus Project aims to do just that – to unite the knowledge of all the people on the planet and for all of us to take care of achieving a dynamic balance.
- One of the main points is to be able to change our value system. A key indicator of common sense is the ability to change. The lack of this ability leads to most problems between generations.
Functional Ethics
- Sexual patterns that originate in society cannot be regulated because they are developed in that society. When we consider a technological problem or challenge, we know exactly what we want to eliminate or achieve, so we know how and with which methods it would be good to approach the problem or challenge. An ambulance is just an ordinary bus, equipped with a lot of medical equipment, but it is used for its intended purpose, i.e. it does not carry ordinary passengers.
- The main problem in a society is not pornography or crime, but the fact that it is difficult to determine what kind of society we want to build and in what direction it should develop. The next challenge is to create an environment that predisposes to patterns of behavior that are considered most desirable. It is debatable who can determine which patterns of sexual behavior are considered most desirable, but if we do not find a consensus on this topic, then diverse patterns of sexual behavior will always exist.
- Humans, as living organisms, undergo certain features of physiological manifestation, which can be studied through a systematic approach. It can be established that one of the reasons for the transmission of a certain infection is kissing. This pattern can undergo changes without disrupting sexual communication. In the past, Eskimos touched their noses as a sign of intimate expression. In the future, our intimate habits, which we have accepted as normal, can be changed depending on the desires for better physical health.
- Movies and television instill a certain pattern of behavior and acceptance of the reality around us. If war were presented in detail close to its reality, our attitude towards it would correspond to our reaction based on this information. In a free society, pornography would not be considered more dangerous than church sermons, which make communication between people almost impossible without a serious element of abstinence. What is considered socially unacceptable should be determined on the basis of specific research in connection with some goal that society has set for building patterns of behavior.
- To create a nascent society, certain goals must be established that are not condemned by moral or religious dogmas, but allow the construction of functional morality. Control over all the conditions that determine the physical state of man must be absolute because of the connection of these conditions with his emotional state. If we build a system of public management based on statistical information and change the educational system so that the goals are achieved, this will not be in conflict with creativity and originality.
- If a thief shows originality by walking around with two artificial arms behind his back and robbing people with his real arms, that might be considered original, but in what sense? Without defining the terms creativity and originality, we run into other problems. Teaching human evolution might be considered morally unacceptable to people in some religious communities.
- There are very few people who have knowledge of the science of decision-making. A round table or council of elders will make decisions based on their value system. If pornography becomes illegal, it will always remain part of the underground economy because certain segments of society will need it. For example, every person is the result of some intimate exercise.
- Changing human behavior requires a lot of effort focused on research into how people can live in society. We are starting to work with the next generation of children in schools or college, where their value system will be directly related to the material environment around them. Significant attention will be paid to scientific principles and the exchange of cultural habits to achieve optimal behavior in people. In the future, it will not be appropriate for designers to determine the shape of shoes, but a group of physiologists will study the different types of human body shapes and offer an optimal individual solution for each.
- It cannot be said that there is a person or group of people who can know enough to make such decisions, but they can be reached by applying functional ethics, which will probably in the future be equivalent to morality today. The optimal conditions for functional morality can be determined depending on what problems need to be solved in a given environment.