Saturday, 16 March 2024 ------------------------ In the book I've been reading, the one about emotions and stuff, we learned of a new theory or model for emotions. That they are constructions to help reason our affective feelings in a context to take better action for our survival. That constructions or concepts is a way for our brain to learn about the world. An iterative process (prediction loop) of making predictions from past experiences and resolving prediction errors. From bottom-up the brain learns patterns in the raw, tangible senses by statistical learning, then from top-down the brain can transform an abstract function to its full representation in a context with great variation due to degeneracy. Practical actions we can take from it: 1. Improve emotional granularity by learning more emotion concepts. This can help you reason why you're sad or angry so you can take the best course of action. You also realise you are influenced by affective realism, that you incorrectly attach affective feelings to something like a thought or a person. You are angry, in your affective niche, the dominant element is the food worker taking your order, you find them rude because you're irritated by them somehow, but you're actually hangry, but unfortunately you don't know that and act out on it and tell them to shut up and flip my burger. Now you are more angry and they have become hostile and angry because they find you even more aggressive because they're tired from overwork, and eventually you gun them down, they die and you spend life in prison until your premature death from cancer. 2. Tap into priming. How you perceive the world is influenced by what you experienced in the previous moment. If you want to use this to increase your suffering, then before you leave home, watch the latest news about people killing and wishing death on everything dear to you. This will prime you to greet people on the street or coworkers at work with more fear, improving your chance for illness from chronic stress. 3. Improve communication with others. You understand everyone has different social realities so it's easier for you to show humility that your reality is not the only one, and you can have more leniency or understanding for people lost in their own reality. 4. Improve connections with others. You now see how platonic and romantic bonds can improve your regulation. This can help you prioritise investment in bonds. But it also helps you remember intention for it. If you're taxed by a bond or you tax the other party, you must be realistic with this, whether it can be resolved or the bond wont work. If you keep failing, you should consider improving regulation by yourself first. You have the power inside you, it's just hidden by confusion like dark patterns in the apps you use, or confusion about relationship between reasoning and feelings. I'm happy I found this book. I have hard time adopting something if I can't make some sense of it. I think it's good to have a better understanding of how things work to convince you instead of faith, especially if you're someone that has a hard time trusting simply by authority of who tells you the information. This is not a bad thing I want to make clear. I'm going to trust the surgeon to remove a tumour before I read a how to blog post and start sharpening my kitchen knives. I'm now reading "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows. This book is an introduction to systems thinking without the use of technical language or math. In the introduction, they tell us systems thinking is more of a holistic approach to finding the cause of issues and how to resolve them. It's about seeing the relationship between structure and behaviour. Sometimes you may not be able to find the issue by reduction to a clear cause and effect. The issue may be in the structure itself, how whatever makes up the system plays together, and you therefore have to restructure the system to resolve the root cause. This makes sense with that I wrote earlier that when you don't have all the information, you may come to incorrect conclusions for why things are the way they are, and get distracted in resolving the issues you see in front of you, instead of the root issue that caused that issue in the first place. Systems are everywhere. Your body is a system. A system is a set of elements that creates new behavior by the elements interconnection. Because systems are everywhere, we find similarities between them, and common structures, called 'archetypes', that create characteristic behaviour. I think we have to remember a system we define is only an abstraction. We can make up a large system with many levels each containing different systems. Think of the levels and systems we can alone categorise within a human, like the functions of its organs, the functions if its cells, so on. Is an element part of this system or that system or is it one system? My assumption is we categorise as best as possible to match the relationship between structure and behavior. And yes, I will keep mixing between american and british spelling, it's only fair everyone gets upset. They briefly mention 'feedback delay', how this can cause misunderstandings in causes, and they mention 'feedback loop', that arise by the structure or interconnection of a system, which can cause unintended effects. The introduction ends with the quote "The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made". This reminds me of what we read in the last book about essentialism, where we bind an 'essence' to the elements and try to understand behavior by each element in isolation. The issue with that is some behavior may arise due to how the elements make up a larger system. The interconnection of the elements can create new behavior that can't be found in any element alone.