> or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital,
Yes, you can choose what your mind does, but this is simply playing make-believe. No self-respecting mind is going to eat this for more then 10 minutes. Changing your thinking works, but it has to be a bit more subtle (and complicated) then this.
I don't think thought is all that uniform across humanity. I don't walk around with a little voice yammering about all of life’s petty annoyances.
Back in school I was diagnosed as exceptionally gifted / learning disabled. So I am probably an extreme outlier, but I don't think of myself as the voice in my head. The voice is stuck with language which is this huge, unwieldy instrument, that's far too slow to be interesting. If feels like there are separate machines that can preplan how to move my body, solve math problems, play a video game, etc. Still composing this sentence feels more like remembering the words that best fit the idea, while scrabbling to find the next word to fill out the logical sequence.
Anyway, the best analogy for who I am might be the entity that decides which ideas are terrible and which ones are reasonable enough to keep. But, I don’t hear other people talking about themselves like this, so I wonder if there is all that much commonality. When there are so many ways solve a programming problem why assume that everyone is wired up the same way. Considering all the crazy people out there and how people can function with significant brain damage, there is probably a wide range of internal landscapes even among normal seeming people.
PS: Consider how many different ways people you know react to alcohol a simple drug and then consider love as a huge cascade of chemical responses. Do you really think all of humanity reacts the same way internally?
Marvin Minsky wrote a couple of books on the subject - the link is the fist chapter to one of them (The Emotion Machine and Society of Mind). They're pretty much what you're saying.
Really? Because I've "eaten" it for quite a while, and it's been pretty effective. I tell myself that people being rude or jerks have a reason for what they're doing, and while I show a backbone when things get too harsh, for the most part I give them room to breathe. Result: Far fewer pointless fights, far less negativity.
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> or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital,
Yes, you can choose what your mind does, but this is simply playing make-believe. No self-respecting mind is going to eat this for more then 10 minutes. Changing your thinking works, but it has to be a bit more subtle (and complicated) then this.
I really liked this: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/minsky07/minsky07_index.html
I don't think thought is all that uniform across humanity. I don't walk around with a little voice yammering about all of life’s petty annoyances.
Back in school I was diagnosed as exceptionally gifted / learning disabled. So I am probably an extreme outlier, but I don't think of myself as the voice in my head. The voice is stuck with language which is this huge, unwieldy instrument, that's far too slow to be interesting. If feels like there are separate machines that can preplan how to move my body, solve math problems, play a video game, etc. Still composing this sentence feels more like remembering the words that best fit the idea, while scrabbling to find the next word to fill out the logical sequence.
Anyway, the best analogy for who I am might be the entity that decides which ideas are terrible and which ones are reasonable enough to keep. But, I don’t hear other people talking about themselves like this, so I wonder if there is all that much commonality. When there are so many ways solve a programming problem why assume that everyone is wired up the same way. Considering all the crazy people out there and how people can function with significant brain damage, there is probably a wide range of internal landscapes even among normal seeming people.
PS: Consider how many different ways people you know react to alcohol a simple drug and then consider love as a huge cascade of chemical responses. Do you really think all of humanity reacts the same way internally?
Marvin Minsky wrote a couple of books on the subject - the link is the fist chapter to one of them (The Emotion Machine and Society of Mind). They're pretty much what you're saying.
Really? Because I've "eaten" it for quite a while, and it's been pretty effective. I tell myself that people being rude or jerks have a reason for what they're doing, and while I show a backbone when things get too harsh, for the most part I give them room to breathe. Result: Far fewer pointless fights, far less negativity.
But you still consider them rude, or jerks - which they are, reason or not. That's not avoiding reality.
Yes, but DFW doesn't say they're not rude/jerks. He says what I said - namely, that there's a reason they're r/j.