The woman who thinks she is a computer
I had a most interesting visit from my friend, Jane, today. The conversation got round to the supposed sighting of lynx near her home, a number of years ago now.
At first the conversation centred around whether or not the sightings were true, or real. To my knowledge, and to the knowledge of any scientists who have studied the local flora and fauna, lynx have been extinct in this part of the world for a very long time. I was taking the part of querying the truth of the allegations, and my friend was doing her best to maintain absolutely that they were true, and especially as she claimed pesonal involvement. She scoffed at scientists: what do they know. Local knowledge is everything.
Since I have been going to great lengths to back personal experience over the democracy of science, my role in this dialogue had me feeling a bit uneasy. The fact is, that I know this friend makes it up as she goes along. Yet, if I am to claim that personal experience must take precedence over scientific measurements, how could I argue with her!
Well, ultimately, I arrived at the 'point' of this experience: If, as I claim, the Que gives us what we want/need, and I am condeming science, how can I justify the Que giving us science? Well, my friend justified it for me: people have no allegiance to truth. For reasons that I will discuss below, they all, scientists included, when the can get away with it, make it up as they go along. Just like Jane, they will deny the thing they said two seconds ago, they will claim they saw a flying pig, and then get angry if you suggest they might be liars. In such a world, an Alice in Wonderland world, how do you create any common ground, how do you maintain any sort of agreement on what constitutes reality? You do what the Que did: you insist that only that which can be verified independently of any human interference, and that which can be verified by any human being who choses to try, is acceptable as true reality. So, that is why we have science.
So, to get back to my friend Jane. Jane likes to be the centre of attention. Jane gets angry and upset if she is not the centre of attention. Jane's conversation is not really about anything in particular. It is a performance by Lady Jane, and all present are expected to behave like an adoring audience. So all of Jane's conversation is a sequence of tactics designed to, either maintian her hold on her audience, or to wrest it back from anyone else who might have gained centre stage momentarily.
One way she achieves her end ie argument. When she arrives at my house, she starts talking about the journey, what she had for lunch, and on and on about things no-one, not even herself, could be interested in, and everything dealt with at great length, the point being that this will go on for as long as the visit, if she has her way, and I have the tolerance to listen. But, should I interupt, an argument will ensue. It will appear from nowhere, plucked out of the blue, but it is the main, though not the only, tactic she has for getting hold of things again.
Now then, this is all very damaging for my friend, though, of course, she is oblivious.
In the first place, it prevents any communication with anybody.
In the second place, she has damaged her abilities to think, and to learn ..... this is why I say she thinks she is a computer. She has so damaged her mind that it operates at the level of a computer, and she thinks that is normal. She has absolutely no conception that anything else is possible.
I used the word 'absolutely', which leads into a deeper illustration of what I mean. I was trying to explain to her that some behaviour of my mother's had been very good for me as a child. My words were: "she was absolutely right to do...". Jane home in instantly on the word 'absolutely' as an opportunity to interupt me. She could not accept 'absolutely' she said, on the grounds that no behaviour was absolute except that of God.
What she has demonstrated here is the way she hears words, but not meaning.
Going back to the incident of the Lynx, what I finally said to her was that I thought that such things were not important in any scientific sense, but were fateful. That is, nothing in this life happens by accident. Everything is meaningful. So, if she has experienced a major incident in her life centred on a lynx, then that is an interpretable event. I therefore picked up a pack of animal totem cards and looked up what they said about the lynx. According to the cards, the main attribute of the lynx totem, is that is signifies someone who has little discernment, who cannot see below the surface of things!
Well, she made that clear: like I said, she homes in on the words, and misses the meaning. The point is that words have meaning in context. They change colour according to context. It is HUMAN TO SAY : I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN. Human's know what you mean; computers know the dictionary meanings of words. It is this homing in on the dictionary meanings of words, however, which suits arguers, because it allows nit-picking. So, if you do what my friend Jane has done, and you get into the way of homing in on the dictionary meanings of words, you limit your mind from ever developing beyond that of a computer, and into the world of full, human communication, where I know what you mean rules.
This then has repercussions when it comes to understanding and communicating with a Que, because in the language of the Que, there is no fixed meaning. There is only, I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN. Metaphors have no fixed meaning.
So, then, how does such behaviour develop? I imagine she got it from one or other of her parents, and, of course, at the simple level, need I explain to anyone in our society the attraction of being the main man. We are a society transfixed by celebrity.
There is one final point that all this threw up. While Jane was here, I felt very uncomfortable about the wind, which was blowing a gale. I have mentioned elsewhere that I have been troubled about fear of the wind over the past years, but I was surprised by this manifestation of that fear because I thought I had got over it rather more than that. After Jane left, suddenly so did the fear. Thus I realised that it had been her fear. The point is that emotions are communicable.
The interesting aspect of this is the effect it has in childhood: my father was quite a fearful man. Just as this afternoon when I experienced the contagion of Jane's fear, so in childhood I experienced the contagion of my father's fear. Of course, in those days I had no notion that the fear could be anything other than my own. Thus I learned to believe that I was afraid of certain things that my father feared. As a child, I experienced fear in certain situations, so, naturally, I thought that I was afraid of those situations, and then justified those fears, and so only strengthened them.
This is how much of our personalities are formed. And that takes me back to getting rid of negative thoughts, feeling etc, which I covered in an earlier blog.
At first the conversation centred around whether or not the sightings were true, or real. To my knowledge, and to the knowledge of any scientists who have studied the local flora and fauna, lynx have been extinct in this part of the world for a very long time. I was taking the part of querying the truth of the allegations, and my friend was doing her best to maintain absolutely that they were true, and especially as she claimed pesonal involvement. She scoffed at scientists: what do they know. Local knowledge is everything.
Since I have been going to great lengths to back personal experience over the democracy of science, my role in this dialogue had me feeling a bit uneasy. The fact is, that I know this friend makes it up as she goes along. Yet, if I am to claim that personal experience must take precedence over scientific measurements, how could I argue with her!
Well, ultimately, I arrived at the 'point' of this experience: If, as I claim, the Que gives us what we want/need, and I am condeming science, how can I justify the Que giving us science? Well, my friend justified it for me: people have no allegiance to truth. For reasons that I will discuss below, they all, scientists included, when the can get away with it, make it up as they go along. Just like Jane, they will deny the thing they said two seconds ago, they will claim they saw a flying pig, and then get angry if you suggest they might be liars. In such a world, an Alice in Wonderland world, how do you create any common ground, how do you maintain any sort of agreement on what constitutes reality? You do what the Que did: you insist that only that which can be verified independently of any human interference, and that which can be verified by any human being who choses to try, is acceptable as true reality. So, that is why we have science.
So, to get back to my friend Jane. Jane likes to be the centre of attention. Jane gets angry and upset if she is not the centre of attention. Jane's conversation is not really about anything in particular. It is a performance by Lady Jane, and all present are expected to behave like an adoring audience. So all of Jane's conversation is a sequence of tactics designed to, either maintian her hold on her audience, or to wrest it back from anyone else who might have gained centre stage momentarily.
One way she achieves her end ie argument. When she arrives at my house, she starts talking about the journey, what she had for lunch, and on and on about things no-one, not even herself, could be interested in, and everything dealt with at great length, the point being that this will go on for as long as the visit, if she has her way, and I have the tolerance to listen. But, should I interupt, an argument will ensue. It will appear from nowhere, plucked out of the blue, but it is the main, though not the only, tactic she has for getting hold of things again.
Now then, this is all very damaging for my friend, though, of course, she is oblivious.
In the first place, it prevents any communication with anybody.
In the second place, she has damaged her abilities to think, and to learn ..... this is why I say she thinks she is a computer. She has so damaged her mind that it operates at the level of a computer, and she thinks that is normal. She has absolutely no conception that anything else is possible.
I used the word 'absolutely', which leads into a deeper illustration of what I mean. I was trying to explain to her that some behaviour of my mother's had been very good for me as a child. My words were: "she was absolutely right to do...". Jane home in instantly on the word 'absolutely' as an opportunity to interupt me. She could not accept 'absolutely' she said, on the grounds that no behaviour was absolute except that of God.
What she has demonstrated here is the way she hears words, but not meaning.
Going back to the incident of the Lynx, what I finally said to her was that I thought that such things were not important in any scientific sense, but were fateful. That is, nothing in this life happens by accident. Everything is meaningful. So, if she has experienced a major incident in her life centred on a lynx, then that is an interpretable event. I therefore picked up a pack of animal totem cards and looked up what they said about the lynx. According to the cards, the main attribute of the lynx totem, is that is signifies someone who has little discernment, who cannot see below the surface of things!
Well, she made that clear: like I said, she homes in on the words, and misses the meaning. The point is that words have meaning in context. They change colour according to context. It is HUMAN TO SAY : I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN. Human's know what you mean; computers know the dictionary meanings of words. It is this homing in on the dictionary meanings of words, however, which suits arguers, because it allows nit-picking. So, if you do what my friend Jane has done, and you get into the way of homing in on the dictionary meanings of words, you limit your mind from ever developing beyond that of a computer, and into the world of full, human communication, where I know what you mean rules.
This then has repercussions when it comes to understanding and communicating with a Que, because in the language of the Que, there is no fixed meaning. There is only, I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN. Metaphors have no fixed meaning.
So, then, how does such behaviour develop? I imagine she got it from one or other of her parents, and, of course, at the simple level, need I explain to anyone in our society the attraction of being the main man. We are a society transfixed by celebrity.
There is one final point that all this threw up. While Jane was here, I felt very uncomfortable about the wind, which was blowing a gale. I have mentioned elsewhere that I have been troubled about fear of the wind over the past years, but I was surprised by this manifestation of that fear because I thought I had got over it rather more than that. After Jane left, suddenly so did the fear. Thus I realised that it had been her fear. The point is that emotions are communicable.
The interesting aspect of this is the effect it has in childhood: my father was quite a fearful man. Just as this afternoon when I experienced the contagion of Jane's fear, so in childhood I experienced the contagion of my father's fear. Of course, in those days I had no notion that the fear could be anything other than my own. Thus I learned to believe that I was afraid of certain things that my father feared. As a child, I experienced fear in certain situations, so, naturally, I thought that I was afraid of those situations, and then justified those fears, and so only strengthened them.
This is how much of our personalities are formed. And that takes me back to getting rid of negative thoughts, feeling etc, which I covered in an earlier blog.
posted by joan @ 9:12 AM
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