Wednesday, 6 March 2024 ------------------------ I had a guess this was somewhat of a controversial book, but not to the extent I found myself reading around the internet. I guess you could say there's a lot of.. emotions, bad dum tss. Sorry. The criticism I felt was grounded to a varying degree. The two main common themes I found interesting was innate concepts vs. constructed concepts, and to which degree how you can split up function to various regions in the brain. While you have to think that these two things link together somewhat of course, I find myself most interested in the innate vs. constructed issue. First we must acknowledge these are theories, and to really say anything with more certainty, I'd have to dive further into it. I also think it comes down to how much you find the various experiments reliable or trustworthy in the end. I'm not going to make an argument for that everything is constructed, and that there's absolute no emotions more complex than affect that are innate. I'm barely an adult with only half a higher secondary education hehe.. So I'm not writing this as an authority, just someone curious. However, I feel a lot of people discredit the sheer ingenuity of the brain's ability to construct concepts. I felt some people preferred reasoning that I found to be simplistic or lazy. Perhaps I'm biased from my experience with programming. Once you sit down and have to think of how to make something be, the simplest single purpose task, you realise how quickly the complexity can rise as you try to do just a bit more and more. You find there's many ways to solve things, you discover some very special algorithms, that are used everywhere, and how brilliantly you can exponentially optimise things such as time and space complexity with simple but clever solutions. The simplest instructions can turn into wonders of complex beauty. The fact humans went from discovering fire to space exploration. Something to keep in mind. All things considered, I'm happy that these voices exist and to have read some of them. They sparked an uncomfort in me, which is a signal I'm starting to appreciate more. It tells me to slow down, and to consciously think things more through. I could easily see myself dismiss all criticism by being selective on comments I found unnecessarily attacking the author, or comments that I felt were critical in sake of being critical. There were many criticisms I felt valid to keep in mind. On reflection, I am grateful for all the many different people, that mostly thanklessly, dedicate their lives to seek understanding through a laborious and mildly joy crushing scientific process. To remember that we all run on human brains, and to not dismiss everything a person says because we find or interpret them to act up at occasions. I am keen to see that some forms of basic emotions are innate with consideration of things like how the human face can configure itself in great variation innately. My understanding is only on a high level / layperson level, so I'm insistent on keeping doors open, though I find myself to resonate with that our emotional expressions are in large part an abstract construction like our other complex concepts, and other forms of expressions like dancing. Mentioning dancing in this context, it reminded me of when I was in Malawi once during my time in boarding school. I attempted to dance with students at a local school. Growing up in scandinavia, where we are generally more reserved of our personal space in public, I felt uncomfortable if a person dancing would get to close to me with their rear end, which I found naturally transgressive, but because I had some understanding of cultural differences, and they respected my signs of hesitation, as they had this understanding too, there was no conflict. We could therefore get along very well, because we were thoughtful of each others differences in social reality as we still shared a common desire for people's wellbeing. It's funny, ironic as it is, many times I've felt more comfortable and accepted in very foreign countries than my own home country. There was an expectation of difference in culture on both sides, so that it was more natural for both parties to be more understanding and comfortable with unexpected behaviour. Though it is still important to remember that social realities can clash on fundamental levels of understanding where coexistence is not possible without resolving those disparities. That is a super complicated and delicate matter that I don't think I'll touch much on. Returning to innate vs. constructed, I have an itch with the idea that we fear social rejection inherently due to in our far past, exilement would result in death. I don't know if the book touches on this later, but I find this reasoning lazy. Yet I had adopted this line myself, and I see it very commonly used, including in the previous book I read as an explanation for social anxiety. I don't find this reasoning poor alone from a purely intellectual interest in understanding, but that incorporating this reasoning in practical life is bad. I think because our brain is incentivised highly to minimise effort or necessary brain cycles, we sometimes intuitively accept an idea too easily without making much effort to think the idea through. Now why I think there are better explanations, that also are more useful in practice, I will first say that every single human alive has experienced a time where they would starve to death if they were socially rejected. That is when they were a baby. I think it's perfectly reasonable to think as the brain is trying to make sense of its environment to survive in that age, it learns the importance of predicting correct response to the entity nurturing you. Throughout our childhood, we're still heavily dependent on our parents. In school, our future is in the hands of our teachers. Our social status among peers influences what we can get and simply reducing our risk of physical harm. As we grow older, in the social reality we live in today, your social connections may be the biggest determinant of your ability to thrive. This also goes for daily life in a workplace and our interactions with institutions. Again, it's discrediting ourselves or the brain's ability to account for social reality in its probabilistic prediction making, and boiling it down to a simple reason about our past. We like to do that because it can be difficult to know with certainty why we feel social anxiety at times, and our conscious thought does not want to exist in uncertainty. We do not see the prediction making but have to rationalise the best explanation we can in our consciousness. This is bad because if we think we're limited by an inherent anxiety to social life we may not try harder to find better explanations, experiment, and find flaws in our brains experience that limits our brains prediction making to serve us. I'm basing this thinking from what I can read and learn of course, but large in part because it resonates with my personal experience. In my life, I see myself have different levels of anxiety depending on the social context, or how well my brain can predict outcomes and what consequences it predicts could happen with wrong prediction. This shift in my behaviour was scarily instant. At the time, I had no control in this shift, I just remember how puzzled I was of how I dramatically changed in an instant. When I was at home, I could be myself. To my peers in school, I would have a hostile demeanour as it was better to assume the worst than predict incorrectly and risk becoming a victim, and I had already, on a conscious level, decided I was not going to succeed socially. I therefore diverted all my ability to be approved by teachers, they were also generally easier to predict with less severe consequences if misspredicted, and I thought I had to succeed academically to succeed in life as I was disadvantaged socially. To give more of an idea of how shifting my social anxiety was, I had the lead role in a drama act in our school, I loved it, I didn't know exactly why then, but now I think it's because I could predict more easily written down lines of interaction.. And after the act, my demeanour would completely change, hurrying home before I'd stumble into a casual interaction. But even for me, with seemingly struggle with social interactions, have made major progress in my social wellbeing, but it's so easy to become misguided and lose hope. I didn't reduce my social anxiety because I became better at being someone I wasn't, but by, first of all, doing everything in my power to place myself in an environment I have the best chance to survive being myself. And then, changing my strategy for how to interact with life in a way that works for me and my surroundings. I'm still awkward in public, I don't look in people's eyes all the time, but I meet people happy and smiling that is genuine from conditioning myself with loving kindness. I don't get caught up anymore in minor oddities of mine, and having less anxiety has freed up my attention to actually better interact with my surroundings. Just as the idea of innate anxiety from our past, this is also just a rationalisation I make. But the latter explanation has given me more tangible ways to understand how to improve and with tangible results that tells me I'm at least a bit on the right path. I think everyone struggles to some extent with predicting social reality, that's why I think everyone can benefit from loving kindness to the extent their environment allows it. Writing this meant a lot to me. Thank you for reading :)