Friday, December 9, 2011

Chill out Brain

My bathroom is different.  to some people it could be a nuisance.  and I totally agree that it can not ALWAYS be fun.  Architecture really is a work for the convenience of others.  everyone knows someone who is or is trying to be an architect, and call me ignorant, but one of those people you know you probably don't like.  They have a certain particularity about them that makes them difficult to get down with.  My bathroom has shown why.  My shower head is located directly to the right of my sink, a little bit above my head.  it is positioned so that if it were continuously emitting water and you walked in to simply wash your hands, you would be bath starting from the head with the water eventually trickling down to your toes if you remained there long enough.  now of course this has never happened - I am a water conservationist.  but what has happened and actually only two times, but all consecutive, was that the little knob that reroutes the water from the sink to the shower head had been left on the shower head slot after I finished my bath for the night.  I slept, and around 6-7am I usually need to pee so these two consecutive mornings I woke up, went to the pisser, piss, and then out of pure habit cuz I definitely wasnt conscious at this time, I turned on the SINK to wash my hands.  But to my surprise, the water decided that it was my head that needed the cleansing.  And I was completely awake from that moment on.
as interesting as this might not might not be, what really tickled my pickle was the psychological effect these mere two instances have had on me ever since.  this was about 2 weeks ago and 2 weeks later, every time I turn on a sink, regardless of where I am, restaurant, school, cafeteria, cave......I flinch.  my brain sends signals to my body to prepare for a surprising "unexpected" surprise.  But it doesnt happen.  I have used various sinks in various parts of town including my own since that fateful two-day event and at every one of them I turn on the hot water like a man trying to disarm a bomb.  when it is my own sink I never fail to check the knob.

Why did only 2 times caused such a deep profound everlasting effect on my psyche?

and this brings up another question all together.  above i wrote "unexpected" in little dots for a reason.  flinching is what you do when something unexpected (usually physical) comes into your field of vision or aura of awareness.  turning around to see a car racing down upon you.  hearing the sound of a bullet whiz by your ear, are all cases that would cause some flinching.  But the key element here is that it must be something that you didnt see coming.  "unexpected" entails that you were not aware of said object, and said object suddenly makes its presence known unbenounced to you, and so your evolutionaric reaction is a corporal flinch.  BUT!!!!!!!  the only reason I flinch in front of my sink if because I have already been attacked by the shower head twice before.  MEANING I am expecting it.  i am AWARE of what could happen. so this time I much be using the same evolutionary tactic for a completely different purpose.  I am using it for not an unexpected event containing an unexpected object, but an EXPECTED response from a familiar object.  similar to flinching in front of your evil step-father when he raises his hands to pick up his coffee at the dinner table because before he had done the same action, not to partake of caffeine, but to beat you cuz he doesnt like your mouth and the way you naturally feel comfortable using it.  That shower head had taken upon it a carnal presence complete with its own history and rational within my brain.  its rational, similar to that step-dad, is to cause freezing cold icicles of pin-pricking pain upon my face EVERY TIME i use a sink.  and because I flinch at any sink anywhere in the world, it is like that diabolical devious demonic duche has attained the ability to makes its spiritual presence in any room wherever a sink is also located, (excluding kitchens)..........*deep breath*......and this entire complicated psychological confluence happened from a simple 2 seperate yet consecutive attacks.  I am not a cousin to pain and misfortune which makes it even more bewildering to me why my brain reacted so aggressively to such seemingly innocent mishaps.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

finding a mate

animals are currently at a "finding a mate" ESS of males advertise themselves outwardly with attractive, colorful tails or unprecedented fighting ability, or high risk-taking lifestyles, that are economically equal to their actual inner quality. (Quality being their true ability to survive and produce offspring that survive.)  Females just wait and choose the most best male.  They don't look pretty or exciting.  in other words, Males actively impress, females passively wait.  I won't go into the reasons for this but suffice it to say that females are in demand so they can wait.  what is interesting is that humans are different.  We all know this but we don't know why.  Why have humans "decided" to switch roles with the females dressing up and trying to impress the males and the males waiting to find the most attractive female?

finding an explanation might be difficult because of the way I explained the current ESS of animals.  But the fact that it is an ESS expresses that there were other strategies that were attempted but they in themselves are not stable enough to reach ESS.  for example, some males might have attempted to lie about their actual quality, to advertise more than they actually were.  others might have hid their true quality and only reveal to female they felt truely understood them.  but with all these strategies washing around in the machine, it become very unstable until an ESS was reached and that ESS happened to be honesty.  Males honestly adveretise their quality and females trust that males are being honest.

That is found amongst us humans.  generally the most successful and happy humans are  the ones who are honest.  but why are females the ones who dress up and try to impress the guys?  guys also try to impress girls.  Why else do most men lift weights and enjoy extreme things.....women find it attractive.

my idea is that maybe over evolutionary time, women realized that passively waiting for a qualified male to come along was just not effective anymore.  of course this realization was effected by the ones who just passively waited ended up not procreating enough to leave enough of their children to continue their style.  and some mutant strategy came that decided "I will stop just sitting here and wait and I will go out there and let myself be known!!"  and it so happened that the women who adopted this strategy happened to have more success mating and left more offspring to continue this and maybe the way this more active way of finding a mate has been adopted by female humans is by dressing up and looking, smelling good.   possibly the reason this mutant strategy was successful in the first place was that just waiting for an honest male to come wasnt good enough.  There were enough lying and shy and other ineffective strategists that females just got frustrated with the whole game and changed the rules.

culture is a virus.

I am not currently satisfied with the current general consensus for the definition of life.  There still seem to be too many things that challenge it and they aren't even ideas some rebel scientist has proposed; they are all common observations in nature anyone with a mind that questions would be able to make.

The first one is the textbook example for challenging what the definition of life is so I won't spend too much time on it.  It is of course the non-metabolic DNA hacking virus.  we all know why viruses have been challenging our views of life.  no need to talk about it here.

Instead I want to introduce a few observations I have made.  and they all can fall into the differences between humans and their animal descendants.

To sum up all my observations I ask one question.  Why do humans break every law of life that animals still follow?

- species tend to all follow one way of life e.g. monogamy, polygamy.  Humans practice every lifestyle under the sun.  This makes me think that there should be a new taxonomic rank below species to better understand Humans.  we seem to be becoming too diverse to all be able to be under one classification.

- sperm is in surplus, eggs are a commodity.  every species but human has evolved accordingly.  Males compete to propagate because females hold the ace.  Males have to doll up and impress the females.  Males don the haughty apparel. Males take the life-risking chances.  Females sit back and wait.
It used to be that way with humans.  almost every central Asian can trace some DNA to Genghis Khan because he fought for the women.  Yet now, a little more than 800 years later(seconds in evolutionary time) Women are the ones fighting for the guys.  Women doll themselves up, and don all the haughty apparel.  Women are the ones who take life-risking chances whenever their relationship is on the rocks.  Men just sit back and wait for the next one to come.

My idea is that anything that can change the genetical make up of what we have defined as living must have some true form of life that we are over-looking.  Just like a virus can enter a cell and literally steal the hosts DNA and insert it's own as it pleases, Culture may have the same effect on classes.  imagine a class as all having one big communal 'DNA' Mammals for example all have mammary glands and the dividing species all used to practice one communal lifestyle.  but Culture comes and takes some DNA from the human species, say what made us all live one communal lifestyle, and inserts its own DNA, say making us life however which way we choose.  and from this the sub-special category race is born.  but the cause of this genetical mess-up from the introduction of "culture".  Maybe we all started out as one.  Maybe there wasn't any but what we call "life"  and then culture came and infected, and caused the splitting of life into the sub-category of domain, and then more culture came and trading its DNA with Domain and Kingdom was born, and so on all the way down to species.  and now possibly the introduction of culture into the human species has created a new sub-category called race, and maybe it is a perpetual argument all the way down to the individual.  or even the gene.  But if that's the case then it s circular argument.  And if that is the case!!! then the way we have defined life can never be answered because there is no beginning or end.  we would have to look at it from a displaced objective POV.  what if we took a step back from what we call "life" and we saw that something else was controlling it.  we have given this "thing" two names so far, "culture" and "virus".  but what if it was something even bigger and more complex, and virus and culture are just the tools it uses to control that certain part of the whole circular ring we call "life" to keep it going round and round, keeping us from ever finding the end and understanding.

focus = emotion?

Where is the door to our emotions?   Any answer whose basis is anywhere near the vicinity of the word "heart"......don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.  UNLESS you can give me a logical explanation as to WHAT a heart (pertinent to my question) is.  By logical I mean physiological and/or anatomical and/or biological.  Because however naively stupid I may sound I couldn't even throw a balloon that would be full of the amount of surprise from finding out that everyone had already made a conscious distinction between what we call our emotional heart and our anatomical heart.  Our very gestures prove that my surprise wouldn't be too much to assume.  Ask a kid where the love for his dead mother is.....he will point to his anatomical heart.  Because that is where his dad points when he asks him.  and thats because his studied, degree holding dad thinks in some deep sub-layer of his mind that emotions COME FROM where our anatomical heart is!!!!  THOUGH he would never admit to it if asked in physiologically sound prose.  "So what you are telling me is that this muscle that helps circulate our blood also makes our emotions?"  of course no one would say yes to that question.
Lets dumb it down a little bit more and see if we can get a yes out of even the lamest of laymen.  "So the organ that makes blood, also allows for us to feel emotion?"  IMPOSSIBLE!!!  no matter how you word it, if you put the two definitions we have given to "heart" in the same sentence, it makes a sense that even a dog would poop on.

We don't think our anatomical hearts are shaped like a half cleavaged/half invert-cleavaged circle like we like to iconicize with our hands.





yet we still gesture that our feelings come from/are stored there.

But alas I must admit I have slightly strayed from the purpose of this article(HAHAHA article........  And when I get my Doctorate, my name will become J.A. Gracey.......HAHAHAHAHA  cultures amuse me)

I would like to paint my original question, and also the title of this HaHArticle with an observation I have made.  but first a little background situation to get you focused.  You are walking down the street and you step over a substantial amount of money (or whatever thing you kids are hooting about these days) and you don't even try to pick it up.  Why?  All moral and ethical reasons aside.  I don't care if there was a starving monkey child about to pick it up, The "you" I am talking to would slice that kid up and barbecue it for dinner before you would let it have that money.....but you don't.  Why?

Because you didn't notice the money.  Your attention wasn't on it.  You.......were.......not.......focused. on it.

Does that mean you hate money?  I mean we know you hate starving children who need money, you ignore them all day.  But do you hate money?

OF COURSE NOT!!!!!!!  You just didn't see it.

1. Why can one person get so much out of movie while another person falls asleep from boredom?

2. Why is it so much easier to walk away from your girlfriend/boyfriend when they aren't trying to talk to you?

3. Why is it more difficult to walk past a stranger on the street when he tries to talk to you?

4. Why can you easily brush off a quick subliminal flash of something that you are morally against (pornography, racism etc.) and feel awkward or even angry when confronted with something more explicit?

#1 would be easy to answer with your emotions.  "this movie just touches me"  "that movie just didn't interest me"

#2 is still easy to answer with emotions, but a little more complicated.  you walk away because you are emotionally charged, yet you don't want to walk away forever because you have emotions for that person.

#3 is quite difficult to answer with only emotions.  You can't have more emotions for any particular joeshmoe stranger over any other. (ignoring any physical aspects that manipulate your emotions)  So why is this stranger who you are walking up to/by/away from causing even the smallest morsel of emotional reaction within you?

#4 is near impossible to answer with only emotions.  (For the sake of my HardyHarHArticle, we will ignore people who are desensitized beyond the point of recognizing any form of emotion.)  For this thought to have any validity we must first come to a consensus that we all have some form of moral backbone.

Even though this breach of our moral bed was so quick and unexpected (say some imagery during a commercial), it would be absurd to say that we didn't have any emotional reaction to it.  To say that would mean we don't have morality.  I mean this is our morality we are talking about.  We have been culturally bred to have these morals so we can react emotionally towards stuff.  Yet we don't react emotionally to it. 

But then *sex* pretend that *sex* this sentence was *sex* a commercial *sex* for *sex* deodorant and *sex* each word was *sex* a camera shot *sex* being played back *sex* to back.
You would walk away from the commercial either wanting that deodorant, not wanting it, or not caring.  but you wouldn't walk away feeling morally violated.  where is the emotion there?  (please understand that the last sentence is a joke.  Of course to read a word let alone a sentence forces to you to focus long enough to react emotionally.  A commercial consists of shots that last milliseconds, impossible to focus on with your anatomical eye.)

I think I should state this in the beginning so that it could bounce around in your head as you read the article and maybe I will in some later edit, but for now I will explicitly state my opinion.  I think the door to our emotions is our brain.  but not our brain in any old state, our brain has to be in a focused state.  We have to be focused on something in order to feel some emotional connection to it.  And the intensity of the emotion is directly linked to the length of time we focus.  You focus on something for one second, your immediate emotional reaction will be equivalent to that second of time.

I would like to point out that maybe our experience pulled some emotional strings deep within our soul.  in that case our initial response will still be equal to the length of focus, but like a bubble floating to the surface, our emotions, when they reach the top, will pop and explode with all the innate emotional connections, in all their intensity, with whatever we focused on.

altruism(recessive) = evolutionarily disadvantaged?

I am aware of the special cases and circumstances where altruistic behavior can be justified and actually aid in the survival of a species.  BUT it's possible that altruistic behavior just for the sake of being altruistic is detrimental to the survival of said species.  If we are all in accordance with this, I have something I need to talk about.  Lets say hypothetically that altruism goes hand in hand with recessive and selfishness with dominant.  I feel like this isn't too radical of an idea.  I'm certain selfishness is a characteristic common amongst most dominant figures of any species.  Likewise, recessiveness (I think passive is a word better suited to describe a characteristic, but both entail the same concept) is a characteristic most likely to be found in altruistic individuals.  (I will ignore for now the special cases in which this may not be the case.  I am aware that they exist but in a general sense of the words, the possible relationship between each one is obvious.)  My idea is If there is a connection between the two,  could it be possible that a body's phenotype that consists predominantly of recessive genes be evolutionarily at a disadvantage with a body whose phenotype is predominantly dominated by dominant genes?  This also then poses another question.  Can it be assumed that if the phenotype of an individual is predominantly recessive, that that individuals genotype also be predominantly recessive?  Please tear me apart with criticisms, I need to learn!!!!!

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Meeting people

you walk in and say hello.  You try to sound different, unique, but also familiar and comfortable.  you know that the quickest path inside someone is the slowest one.  You take too many steps forward, they take that many steps back.  You take no steps at all, they step out.  You poker face all your real intentions into a coffee filter.  Letting them slowly drip out.  Little by little.  letting your victim see only a splat of the picture at a time.  slowly one more.  and one more.  her eyes intent on piecing together the circles.  and then they widen.  they open like a marble exiting a soft rubber straw.  her lips become an "O" quoted by her eyebrows.  And then they pop out.  And before you can throw it in the trash,  shes gone.           what did you do wrong?  years went into that picture.  years were spent softening her mouth.  how can a sponge meta-morph to a rock without even a little sun and rain.  You needed to be inside before the petrifaction.  Now everything you learned seems so fleeting.  all your time filtered away.  But where?