The parliamentary unconscious

There is an intention to stay away from ICT and music for at least part of today. There is also an urge to footer with it. Two members of parliament in my unconscious.

Neither the real nor the metaphorical parliaments lend themselves to easy definition. But the essence is debate related to topical topics.  Representatives of different points of view interact as part of a deliberative assembly. 

In many situations there are not enough fastidious facts upon which to base a definitive decision and blustering bullshit results. And in such environments politicians prioritize policy.

Teresa May and Jeremy Corbyn share our hominid inheritance and have a common set of hard wired instincts. But they will have been encultured differently and will therefore have different sets of intuitions and biases. 

Four hours and four paragraphs. There has been footering.  The mind has been wandering. There has been a continuous buzz of chat from the cerebral lobby but very little of it has been about ICT and music. Yoh!

Note – thanks to David Eagleman for the idea of the mind being like a parliament.

from the unconscious 2

memory workaround

I have very specific memory problems. The Doctor ran me through a set of tests and I did well in all but one which was a complete failure. It involved repeating a list of five random words.

Thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) are linked in the brain. They have been a long time in evolving. They were not planned in advance by a purposive committee. There will be evolved pathways and hubs - some hard wired and some rooted in experience

We survive in the present and make plans for the future based on experiences in the past. So a good memory is useful for understanding ‘reality’ which may have been positive, negative or neutral. As humans it is useful to have a negativity bias but not too much. But there is the option by taking thought to accentuate the positive by savouring it more often and for longer.

But I presently have to deal with poor memory while working through the user’s manuals for several bits of technology. I read the instructions on screen but then come out of the manual to take action and cannot remember what to do. There is the possibility of printing the manual but that is wasteful. I could make written notes but my handwriting is illegible. It is not always possible to cut and paste but the snipping tool can overcome that. And that is my workaround at the moment.

Life’s continuum

Yesterday I was window shopping and people watching in Inverurie. My stone age mind modules were engaged. I knew that I was foraging and that there was hunting and gathering in its computer age costume.

School age people in uniforms were regimented in classrooms by the 40 minute bell. Shop and factory workers were doing their repetitive 9 to 5 shifts. So the streets, shops and cafes were occupied by old age pensioners enjoying their retirement, and by well-dressed young mothers with babies in prams, dogs on leads and long hair streaming down their backs.

This morning I finished reading Dylan Evans and Oscar Zarate (2015) Introducing Evolutionary Psychology: a graphic guide. I give it 10 out of 10. It was part responsible for the bunch of concepts that turned up from the unconscious:

• ·         From cradle to grave.
• ·         From womb to tomb.
• ·         Enculturation by nature, nurture and serendipity.
• ·         Putting the universe back into university education.
• ·        Better ways to be human.
• ·         Mindfulness.
• ·         The paradigm shift in brain science.
•           A sheep is nature’s way of converting grass into wool.
• ·         A human being is nature’s way of …?

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Today’s version of life’s continuum - 

[Infancy, Pre-school, School, work and play, parenting, pet keeping, retirement, funeral]

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• ·         A human being is nature’s way of letting the universe be conscious of itself.
• ·         The purpose of a self-conscious universe would be …?
• ·         The purpose of an unconscious universe is …?
• ·         Argue for and against life elsewhere in the cosmos.
• ·         The purpose of life elsewhere in the cosmos might be …?
• ·         Where is purpose located?