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Robert Sapolsky's new book Behave shits on Peterson's new book. Robert's book is probably the best book I've bought in my entire life. Seriously, I open it and learn something new everyday. If Robert and Jordan ever "debated" I guarantee that Robert would make Jordan look like Kathy Newman.
In Sapolsky's new book Behave, Robert talks about hormones and how much of what we think of serotonin and testosterone is misleading. It is contradictory to what Jordan thinks or argues.
For example, many people think increasing testosterone leads to increasing aggression. This is false. Increasing testosterone leads to behavior that is needed to maintain your place in the social-hierarchy, regardless of if it's violence, empathy, etc. This means that if your society rewards pacifism, you rise up the social hierarchy because of your generosity. Increasing testosterone will increase your altruism, not aggression. Give a community of pacifist monks a shot of testosterone and you will have them running around trying to out-do each other by being the nicest monk in the community.
This is antithetical to Jordan's view that social hierarchy is inevitable and a product of human nature. Since humans have historically fought nature, having the strength to overcome and master nature was the historical modus operandi. However, since we have now evolved as a species with urbanization, the industrial revolution, and the division of labor, our battle is no longer against nature, but against ourselves. Therefore, we are no longer in a battle for dominance against nature, but against ourselves, which does not need to happen anymore if we as a species decided we would no longer reward dominant, aggressive, social-hierarchy-enhancing behavior.
I suspect that is way too vague of a question to have an answer (murder vs jaywalking, the person's individual biology and environment, etc).
You may be interested in the book Behave by Robert Sapolsky, as he looks at behavior in general from one second before you do something, up to months before you do something.
Orgasms result in a release of Oxytocin. It is a mixed bag of a hormone. It's called the 'love' hormone and it promotes tribalism. (reference, Behave). It promotes pair bonding.
There are a lot of influences on our feelings and I agree with many comments about religious indoctrination. I'm making my way through Caliban and the Witch. (Thanks, MODS)
This topic does not belong to Philosophy for about ~200 years (is this controversial?).
An excellent overview (from 2017, and ALREADY a bit outdated) is "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" by the legendary Robert Sapolsky (a neuroendocrinologist).
Culture refers to social behavior in an integrated way according to geography. Biology explains human behavior, even social behavior. Psychological behavior is a description of a kind of behavior, which again is biological. We can cite contributing factors such as genetics, epigenetics, hormones in utero development, hormonal contribution to neurology through childhood development, and of course hormonal environment moments before the behavior. We've talked about motivation, which is a driving factor in behavior. There is no evidence to suggest it is an existent, autonomous element acting independently upon the organism.
You might enjoy the book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Dr. Robert Sapolsky. He's written this for the non-scientist to understand how human behavior works, and how it can be explained. You can also watch his lecture series from Stanford University, a semester course that has been recorded for the purpose of sharing information freely. It's available on youtube. Fascinating stuff.
These are great primary sources. For an overview, I would recommend Behave:The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky. He teaches both in the Stanford med school and lectures for a few weeks in the undergraduate introduction to biology. His books, including Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, are great pop-sci narratives with some serious science in there. Behave has an appendix which is basically an intro neuroscience course.
No, no you did not have a thick skull, the part of the brain which inhibits actions and does "the right thing when it's the difficult thing to do" hadn't developed yet. Like literally you couldn't think like you do now.
You were a child acting exactly like a child, failing to see more than one move ahead, or to control yourself because you did not have any tool to do so, NOT because you were particularly thick skulled, we all are at that age!
So no, you did not deserve it at all, you deserved it as much as a blind person deserves to be hit by cars because they cannot see the green light.
Dude are you stupid? What story what are you talking about?
> The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred.[1] The book uses data simply documenting declining violence across time and geography. This paints a picture of massive declines in violence of all forms, from war, to improved treatment of children.
https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
Behave is a textbook.
Sapience a brief history of human kind is self explanatory it’s a summation of human history
The book you need to read to understand what happened here is Behave
In a nutshell, people believe what they want to believe... Elizabeth surrounded herself by powerful, old men who knew nothing of science... She impressed them, made then feel like a million dollars and promised them money and power... They wanted this to happen so they believe her even when others saw through Elizabeth and warn them
In their minds (EH and SB) they believed they were smarter than anyone around them and that all that was needed to produce the next revolutionary tech was to whip it out of people... The concept that very smart people had tried to accomplish this for decades was completely alien to them
Nope... Dehumanizing people and feeding tribalism with fear have been scientifically proven to incite violent behaviour
Here is one of the many books on the subject (the one I happened to have read)
Also, I am not trying to "score partisan points"... I am not registered or affiliated with any political party and have very often explained how, in my personal view, all politicians are to be distrusted... It does happen I have a particularly high level of dislike of the type of rhetoric the far-right is absolutely pushing
> this guy
While I would prefer OP had linked something like his class lecture at Stanford or something with citations, Robert Sapolsky isn't exactly some guy. Rather, one of the more famous professors in neurobiology, though a bit less popular than Pinker.
>Sapolsky's work has been featured widely in the press, most notably in the National Geographic documentary Stress: Portrait of a Killer,[15] articles in The New York Times,[16][17] Wired Magazine[18] and the Stanford University Magazine.[19] His unique speaking style as heard on Radiolab[20] and Joe Rogan,[21] and his Stanford Human Behavioural Biology lectures (still circulated despite its 2011-era neuroscience) have garnered his otherwise serious topics attention, and even adulation.
>Sapolsky has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant in 1987,[24] an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience. He was also awarded the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Young Investigator of the Year Awards from the Society for Neuroscience, the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology, and the Biological Psychiatry Society.
>In 2007 he received the John P. McGovern Award for Behavioral Science, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[25]
>In 2008 he received Wonderfest's Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.[26] In February 2010 Sapolsky was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers,[27] following the earlier Emperor Has No Clothes Award for year 2002.[28]
Wikipedia links not recreated in my excerpts above.
And given that he identifies as atheist and was named a 'distinguished achiever' by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, he's not exactly dunking on his outgroup by saying there's something interesting and potentially useful about religion. Quite the opposite, even.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594205078/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_KF84ZA0W1MCP8D7AGQ7E
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679763996/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_P9W9MW7NRHAJ0ZBVZH7W
Some light reading for you. You can feel however you wish.
This atheist thinks free will is a vague term that serves as a poor, outdated model of human behavior that is not only poorly defined (what is the will? how is it separated from non-will? from what exactly is it free?), but it defies certain known facts, such as the brain prepares for action before a person decides what action to take.
Biology explains explain behavior, even complex human behaviors. Dr. Robert Sapolsky provides a magnificent resource explaining this for the average non-scientist: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Ofc here you go: https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
It’s a big fucking book, but so so worth it to understand why we do, think and act the way we do.
There’s a summaryBehave (a summary) I found too if you want to read that first to get a sense of the book
We know plenty. Read this.
https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
It’s pretty dense though.
This is the kind of question that evolutionary psychology tries to answer, successfully or not. Old man sapolsky gives it discussion, for another resource; see https://youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA and https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
Interesting to note is that, from a game theoretic perspective, in the context of human society multiple "natural" parenting styles could coexist in a stable state. Human young require lots of investment from at least the mother. In a world where all fathers abandon their children immediately, though, a father who instead stays around and cares for the child can give that child an advantage, making it advantageous behaviour. In the opposite setting, though, where all fathers invest heavily, a sneaky father could "cheat" and insert his young into a setting where it will then be cared for and raised by someone else, while he continues on to mate elsewhere, also advantageous. thus you could maybe expect a stable state somewhere in the middle, a mix of investors and cheaters. Human behaviour is more complicated in practice, of course, with cultural influences etc, but.
I think free will is an outmoded and unreliable explanation for human behavior. We know for example thatthe brain prepares for specific behaviors before the subject decides on that behavior. The "will" is a poor explanation for our behavior, free or not. Behavior is explained far more elegantly through science.
For more information I would look into Robert Sapolsky, an endocrinologist out of Stanford University. His latest work is a fantastic summary of what we know about human behavior, and how we know it (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst).
Glad you enjoyed my post! :)
I'm still doing a lot of reading on this topic. Outside of the story, if anyone is interested in the neuroscience currently going on regarding free will, I recommend the following books:
>Social status could be seen from a similar angle. We're built to have social relations, and status is a by-product of that. But if you are authentically you, and you are living a just and moral life, you will never need to worry about your status. People will know you by your actions.
I've been thinking about your post all day and it's reminded me of what I like about Stoicism as a philosophy. I hope you don't mind my taking your comment as the opportunity to opine for a bit. Not that I expect anyone to read this this late into the thread, but it's a convenient place for me to dump these thoughts.
You refer to us as apes, and that's a really interesting reminder because it's so helpful with respect to understanding our behavior. As apes, particularly hairless apes with very complex social structures, our need to be on the inside of the safe group is met in lots of different ways. We seek the safety of the ingroup and conform to its expectations. This process happens way back in the primitive parts of our brains, our "monkey minds" if you like.
OP's craving for fame, attention, admiration, and the symbolic immortality of a legacy is an expression of solidifying this social security. Or like you say, a desire for social status. And fascinatingly enough, social status contributes to physical health in many ways.
And here's where Stoicism comes in. Stoicism argues that we ought not concern ourselves with others' view of us because our view of our selves should suffice. Importantly, wisdom is crucial for this success, for otherwise we have only confidence. Any fans of The Office might remember Vikram's comment that confidence is food for wise men and liquor for fools. Stoicism suggests we avoid foolishness by training ourselves to be wise, so wise that we don't need to refer to others in our social groups to confirm what we're doing is right or wrong.
In being wise, in knowing the action is the virtuous one, one is then relieved of the need for social feedback. This isn't a coincidence. I think Stoicism is a good philosophy because it taps into our biology - into our nature in a very real and literal way, even if it is rather deeper than most people consider. Anyway, I've been reading Robert Sapolsky's book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, and it's uncanny how on target the ancient Stoics were with regard to identifying the things that contribute to stress, and how to address it.
If these authors are honest and not cherry, picking like most biased “scholars”, the Flynn effect is irrelevant here because it’s not genetic (low g loading).
Further, the white – black gap has high G loading and is therefore genetic (twin studies: 40-80% heritability).
New counter: I’m sure you’ve listened to the Charles Murray episode, where he concedes that a tutor and external pressures were able to increase IQ by around four points. But eventually the individual reverted to their genetic appetites and their old IQ. This at least proves that IQ can be affected by environment. Compare Asian culture with black culture. Asian culture is extremely repressed and fetishizes testing while black culture is the opposite. You are condemned as “white“ if you enjoy reading, this is a deeply embedded incentive structure, that lasts their entire lifetime, i.e. a tutor for life. This could account for most of the 10pt difference.
It’s not absurd to say that Russian government and culture inculcates a sort of borderline personality disorder in their people. if you’re familiar with the Russians, you know this. just as American culture does so with narcissism. Studies show that narcissism has increased 30% in just recent decades. It’s also not unreasonable to say that black culture inculcates some thing approximating ADHD, known to reduce IQ scores.
>It is possible that some individuals with ADHD may have lower IQ scores due to cognitive difficulties related to the disorder, such as difficulty processing information or difficulty with executive functioning (e.g., planning, organizing, and problem-solving).
It has also been argued and supported through gwas, that the individuals who migrated away from Asia and cross the Bering land strait had genes more associated with novelty seeking, promiscuity, criminality etc. which is what you’d expect from migrants who are willing to face the perils of new land journey. This further contributes to the Asian culture becoming even more repressed, introverted, bookish to the point of contradiction with their remaining genetic appetites for excitement. Hence Asian people being less happy, but deeply obedient and successful. China has had 5000 years of unification, which is exceptional. It also helps explain the chaotic state of South America, where those ‘Asians’ migrated.
> There are several studies that have found a correlation between introversion and intelligence. A study done by “The Gifted Development Study” found that 60% of gifted children showed very introverted characteristics. They also found that very highly gifted children (geniuses) had a correlation of 75%.
The point being that there are genetic traits that influence culture, which then influence IQ for a life long feedback loop, which is separate from a true genetic G. Your data set is too narrow.
I think people are pretty bad at understanding the nature of human behavior by casual observation and life experiences. There are however scientists who spend their entire careers sorting it out objectively. Robert Sapolsky is one of my favorites:
https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
I have done several subjects in psychology. And read books like robert sapolsky- behave https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
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But yes, mental illness is also common among drag people. Depression for instance : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15401383.2018.1549517
But normal men doing drag have less dysphoria than in the trans community, and drag not a mental illness in itself.
robert sapolsky stanford lectures or his book behave
from the book:
Here’s how I’ve always pictured mitigated free will:
There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brainspecific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book. And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview—seizures blow the homunculus’s fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock. There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente—for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot. But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do.
A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science.
May I suggest some reading to help your mind sort this out by connecting some dots UNconsciously? (In other words, you don't have to try to "do" anything with the material other than allow it to be there.)
The five stages of psychotherapeutic recovery are rarely linear. One almost always does a sort of "two steps forward and one step back" dance through them... AND, under stress, one may regress (temporarily).
All forms of mental conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, imprinting, socialization, habituation and normalization leave long-lasting connections in a neural network of cognition in the human brain. The further one gets into awareness of how distorted and inaccurate that conditioning (etc.) is, the weaker those connections get over time.
But it does take time for that to occur.
What you're going through is straight out of the half-dozen best neuropsychology texts I had to plow through over the course of almost ten years of post-graduate school, and since then... Robert Sapolsky's <em>Behave</em>, being the most recent, and Iain McGilchrist's <em>The Master and His Emissary</em> being the most influential to date.
Stoicism is a virtue-ethics based philosophy, and ethics is one of the three pillars of the philosophy (the other being physics and logic). Arguably, one cannot be ethical while watching others suffer. This dichotomy of control to which you refer (what we can control and what we cannot) is a tool to be used to this end, not a foundational tenet of the philosophy.
Knowledge and reason increase one's capability to be ethical. This is where the dichotomy of control comes in - knowing what is dependent upon you and what is not, and recognizing that even your best efforts may not produce the results you'd prefer, without getting hung up about that. What you do about injustice is up to you. You know the resources available to you, and you know your personal strengths and limitations. But I will say the more information you have, the more effective you can be in obtaining your goal. And the more you understand, the more reasonable your goal.
I would highly encourage you to learn about human behavior from a data-driven point of view. We all too often assume the intent of a behavior is one that we would adopt were we in that position, but this is a limited point of view. Looking at the data can reveal points of view and a plethora of variables that contribute to the explanation. One absolutely fabulous resource is a book by Stanford University professor Robert Sapolsky: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. The more you know the better you can identify the real problem, which is surprisingly uncommon as people assume their interpretations of an event or experience is a reliable representation of reality when in fact it is plagued with all kinds of subjective assumptions clouding up one's understanding. This is the Stoic way - using reason to navigate life.
https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
This covers human behavior all the way from biochemical to physiological to psychological to sociological to cultural influences. It's pretty dense, but very educational.
Behave by Robert Sapolsky is a really good read. I highly recommend
See the "Edit". We have this for spiders and snakes.
Basically our eyes are constantly checking for patterns. Visual information goes from your eyes to the thalamus, sort of like a hub for information. Then gets transported to two areas of the brain. The visual cortex (at the back of your head), which goes through the hard work of actually figuring out what you saw. It's pretty complicated and I only have a rudimentary understanding, but as far as I understand it, it goes through different "stations" where the information gets analysed. The shapes you see, combined with the colours, means that you saw a tree (for example). This takes a while though. A fraction of a second, but still too long to rely on it for our survival.
Which is why the thalamus sends a second batch of visual data to the amygdala. Basically two little pieces of brain that are concerned with all things fear. Also controls aggression, but fear is the big one. The amygdala is lightning fast. Throughout our evolution (and to a lesser extent experience), the amygdala is really fine tuned to detect certain patterns. Long twisty things for example. Or little balls with lots of legs. Or teeth. Instead of relying on the visual cortex to accurately figure out what your eyes see, the amygdala takes only a passing glance and instantly sends you into a state of panic or general alertness. A surge of adrenaline being the most noticable one. Fight or flight.
This is awesome and gives us a fighting chance against ambushes. Unfortunately, it is really inaccurate. So there's plenty of false errors. So you go into panic mode, until your visual cortex catches up and tells you to relax, it was just a stick (or a cucumber in the funny cat videos).
Now, this has only been spiders and snakes and maybe leopards or something. But that's not all the amygdala can identify as danger. Unfortunately, it's also pretty racist. It can quickly detect others looking different from you. And in our early evolution, this meant danger. So you get an involuntary activation of the amygdala when you see someone with another skin colour, for example. Pretty fucked up and you have no control over it. Fortunately you can get habituated to it. Spend a lot of time with people of different appearances and your amygdala chills a bit. Same thing, if you spend plenty of time around spiders, you don't always get a full panic attack, when you see one.
In more broad terms, besides the known dangers, the amygdala is vigilantn for anything unusual or quick movement. If you're in the dark and you think you saw something move at the edge of your vision, that's probably your amygdala getting scared by a shadow or something. Again, an amazing defensive system that's misfiring every now and then.
ooookay, sorry for the rambling mess.
I can recommend this book https://www.amazon.de/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
Robert Sapolsky, Behave
Or check a presentation of his here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnSY4L3V8s
I'm not aware of any books in the same category as The Molecule of More. Instead, I'll focus on this part:
>Want to understand why we behave and love the way we do- the role of dopamine in creativity etc.
The obvious recommendation here is neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky's Behave. Sapolsky is lovable, charming, and funny. Primatologist Frans de Waal (author of the excellent Mama's Last Hug) reviewed Sapolsky's book for Science Magazine and had this to say:
>Sapolsky places what makes us special in the wider context of humans as animals with brains that are fundamentally similar to those of other species. It is the first book that does so comprehensively enough to qualify as a guide to human behavior to be adopted as a textbook in courses not just in neuroscience but in the social and behavioral sciences in general.
Academics rarely praise books they review to this extent. So I'd definitely recommend that you check it out.
Not OP, but think of culture as being more like 10,000 years old rather than policies developed within the last century. I'm getting this from Robert Sapolsky's book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our and Worst. He identifies three major cultures identified, communal, individualistic, and I want to say pastoral. The US is a good example of hyper-individualistic, where the value is placed on the autonomy of the individual, even at the expense of the security and well being of the community. However, there are certain aspects of the individualistic culture that are common to those of us living in western civilizations. The same goes for people living in communal civilizations. Certain expectations and values may vary from culture to culture, but overall the main values, what justice looks like for example, will be familiar.
So back to OP, one of the examples Sapolsky provides in his book is in watching mothers of communal vs individualistic cultures read picture books to their 5 year old child. When they reach a page with a school of fish, and the one in front colored a different color to stand out, the mother from the individualistic culture will note to the child how the leader of this school of fish works very hard to be in front and look how all the others follow his lead. Without directly telling the child, the mother is modelling and reinforcing individualistic cultural traits.
The mother from the communal culture will reference the same picture and tell her child to look at that poor fish in the front. That fish doesn't cooperate well with others and look how none of the other fish want to swim next to him.
Same picture, vastly different moral values. And yet they both fall under the umbrella value of working together. In the first, the fish work together by following the lead of the strongest, leader fish. In the second, they work together through social conformity. These are both cultural ways of expressing a biological drive humans have for cooperation. Which is "right" and which is "wrong"? I think the better answer is Which is "right" or "wrong within the metaculture. And even there we disagree, to the point of contention when cooperation conflicts with protecting one's own society by virtue of whatever is understood to be protection.
An 800 page book seemed like a big ask which is why I opted for the author's intro to it. But feel free to go direct to the source - it's quite thorough with citations:
https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
I think youve got an odd habit of reading to respond rather than reading to understand.
Yes, a neuroendocrinologist is a doctor. Here's the book, you're more than welcome to pick it apart having actually read it rather than have oddball opinions based on... well, nothing. What's even cooler, it's on audible, you can have it read to you while you drive or do whatever else. Its not some hokey astrology book.
The subjects included are:
neurobiology
neurophysiology
animal behavior
BISAC: science
life sciences
biology
general science
social science
criminology
neruoscience
Behave by Robert Sapolsky https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst-dp-1594205078/dp/1594205078
https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078 probably best nonfiction book ever.
I used this YouTube Channel in the past when I was taking Biochem. He has some good videos on genetics and biochemistry.
https://www.youtube.com/user/mathdude2012/playlists
Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology, and professor of neurology and neurological sciences and, by courtesy, neurosurgery, at Stanford University. You can find his entire intro course here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD7E21BF91F3F9683
I would highly recommend his most recent book as well:
https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
I'M LATE! But god damn it I'm posting.
Absolutely CRAZY couple of weeks. Moved into the new house, then immediately took off for a week in Paris with just the wife and I.
Had an amazing time, but am SO, SO excited to just settle in to the new house, get back on my diet plan, rebuild my routine and habits, etc. I love vacation, but I also love my day to day life.
(note: trying a slightly different format)
Rate the week (out of 5):
5
What were you grateful for this week?
Trip to Paris. This was a wonderful trip, and a huge reminder of what I've accomplished over the past year or so.
What needed work this week?
Found myself getting VERY reactive about sex. Time away also centered me around what I've been slacking on at home.
PHYSICAL
No diet plan or exercise due to trip. Weighed in on first morning at home at 179 - not too bad. Next morning I was down to 166 (1 lb over before I left).
We did a ton of walking. That said, lack of sleep and constantly eating out has really made me excited to get back on track.
Today my brain is absolute garbage - really need to catch up on sleep. May try dosing with melatonin today and getting to bed earlier than normal.
MINDSET
Reactivity about sex is clearly a huge deal for me, still. I clearly had a large covert contract that we would be having sex every day - and found that (for whatever reason, probably the huge amount of beautiful women in Paris) my sex drive was MUCH higher than normal. Those two things collided to drive up my initiations and my frustration when it wasn't reciprocated.
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I have to remember a few things:
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- Her reaction (or lack thereof) says nothing about my value as a person.
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- I don't need to read into every encounter as a verdict on one part of our relationship or the other. There are a million and one factors in whether she's in the mood or not; take it for what it actually is and nothing more.
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- I let these things ruin my mood, which in turn decreases my chances in the future. Beware of continuous hedonic adaptation stealing my ability to actually enjoy the present (upset about what things "should be," rather than enjoying things as they are).
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Anyway, the experience - and becoming aware of it halfway through - helped to re-center me. Started re-reading MMSL and it re-connected me to where I was when I started this whole process. It reminded me that the process is what matters - like almost anything, progress here is characterized by long plateaus followed by large, quick advances.
RELATIONSHIPS
We had sex twice, and mutually jerked off once while watching porn. Being as the porn thing happened last, I was almost irritated by it (I had initiated, gotten turned down, but then she got interested by me watching porn - enough to jerk off, but not enough to have sex).
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Didn't though - had my head screwed on straight again by then. In a pique of irritation (after what was actually a great night out, and after about a bottle of wine), I made a move I haven't done in ages and tried to talk about our sex life. This was unproductive, as it always is when it's anything other than "making the implicit explicit" from a position of strength. Still, it was good in the sense that she opened up about her birth wound - she has a fistula that sometimes stuff from her digestive tract into her vagina. She's incredibly sensitive about it, and I realized that some of the times she's begged off sex because she "feels gross", it's actually been because she has leakage going on.
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Like all people trying to understand their own behavior, myself included, this is part truth, part hamster. But it reoriented me to a few things: sympathy and empathy for her, rather than frustration; towards responsibility for my situation, rather than irritation for her; and back towards some of the "basics" I'd lost track of while working so deeply on my own co-dependency. Reconnecting to my ability to be angry is great, but I'd lost sight of working on attraction for a bit.
FINANCIAL / WORK
Part of the reason this trip was such a big deal for me was that it's been a sign of how much I've accomplished in the last few years.
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Last time I was in Paris I was single, traveling alone, and poor as fuck. This time, our hotel bill for the week was more than my entire budget for a month-long trip ten years ago. It means a lot to me to be able to live this kind of life - defined by freedom, lack of anxiety, adventure.
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I've worked very hard to make it happen. The wife appreciated it, but she doesn't really understand what it took, or how much effort I've really had to put in. Like most people, things seem simple, easy, or inevitable from the outside.
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That's fine. I'd rather she not know. This is work I would do even if I was single - my trajectory has been mine alone. I've designed this life over many years now, and the fact that it looks easy from the outside is a compliment.
What am I looking forward to this week?
Getting back into the swing of things. We're finally in the new house, and I'm dying to just return to normal...getting back into the gym, the office, eating on my diet plan, hanging with my kids, etc. I like my routines.
What is important to me this week?
Just focusing on re-establishing a baseline. I've got plans for the next few months - things I was to improve or work on - but for now, I want to just re-build my "cornerstone habits": diet, exercise, sleeping well.
Reading
Got back into MMSL. A lot of it's old news now, but I remember how BLOWN AWAY I was when I read it the first time.
Behave - https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
I CANNOT RECOMMEND THIS BOOK ANY HIGHER. It is absolutely blowing me away - every single chapter is fucking me up. Incredible. Kind of book that changes how you see the world.
Read two "fun books" on vacation - Lexicon and The Yard. Both were fun thrillers. I can down that shit like nobody's business.
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> i thought it would be fun to trade books with someone and have a follow up conversation.
Why those books, specifically? Because you threw them out as potential trades and haven't yet read them on your own, it certainly does seem as if you aren't even interested in their content. I sense some sort of agenda here...what, I'm not sure, but if you truly were interested in discovering the "other side" you wouldn't have framed this request as you did. Which is why I feel as if you're fishing for something specific. It seems to me to be more of an attempt at proselytizing, but attempting to disguise itself as genuine interest. Why does it take a book swap for you to read the books you listed? If you actually wanted to "consider the reasoning for atheism," you would have read those already. Fishy, fishy.
>I don't necessarily have a specific list in mind.
I find that a little hard to believe, as well. Especially considering in your OP you wrote:
>I have some books about reasoning for Christianity I'd like you to read and consider.
Obviously, you have a list of books you're planning on recommending. Maybe you don't have them in list form, but you have a select few that you thought would be a nice option in a swap. I would like to see those selections and, as you've requested of me, a reason for why you are recommending them.
>would you mind letting me know what they are, and why you'd recommend them?
Here is my list. Not exactly books for "the reasons of atheism", as none of these are really "atheist" books, but they are books I, an atheist, found interesting.
- Behave; by Robert Sapolsky - This book outlines many of the biological, neurological and psychological reasons for why people behave in certain ways. It discusses how certain things can effect chemicals in the brain, resulting in predictable behaviors. In addition to being informative, its style is engaging enough to make it a rather fun read.
- The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World; by David Deutsch - This book goes into detail on explanations. Specifically, what can be considered a "good" explanation vs a "bad" explanation. It details certain types of explanations and why they either stand or fall and discusses why people hold to any particular type of explanation.
- A Theory of Justice; by John Rawls - A staple in many college political philosophy courses, this book details a Ralws'-specific, more modern take on social contract theory. It describes the social concept of "justice as fairness" and introduces his 'veil of ignorance,' both, what I'd say, are the critical pieces of his entire theory. This particular book is the background for my own moral philosophy.
- On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not; by Robert Burton - This book really takes the time to break down knowing vs "knowing." It's essentially a discussion on epistemology - how do we know what we know? After this book, I've become much more willing to answer an unknowable question with "I don't know" and actually be ok with it.
- The Ark Before Noah; by Irving Finkel - Dr. Finkel here describes the ancient Mesopotamian flood myths and uses a particular version of it to actually construct a full-sized version of the "ark". This was a very interesting and entertaining read. Additionally, my favorite lecture on YouTube is by Dr. Finkel and describes his building of said Ark and the problems he encountered: https://youtu.be/s_fkpZSnz2I
- The Lost Prophet: The Book of Enoch and Its Influence on Christianity; by Margaret Baker - Going into this, I was aware of the quotation of the book of Enoch in Jude, so I knew that Enoch had at least a small place in early Christian literature, however I was unaware of just how much of an influence it actually had. This book is extremely well-researched and leaves no question that Enoch not only had an influence on early Christianity, but a great one.
That's probably enough for now. Actually, one more. Here is one book specifically related to the reasons for atheism:
- Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism; by Richard Carrier - A lot of people hate on Richard, which I completely understand. He can come off as a bit of a jerk, especially in the manner in which he converses with academics, both in person and in his blog posts. As someone who appreciates academia, he can be quite crass and unbecoming in his discourse, however as someone who also appreciates a good "FUCK" every now and again, I find his approach to be equal parts entertaining. His books, however, are not written in such a way. They are generally respectful and well-reasoned/researched), so don't let his public persona steer you away from a potentially good read. The book he's most known for is On the Historicity of Jesus, which I thought was a fascinating read, however that's not the book I'm peddling here. 'Sense and Goodness,' I thought, was a solid approach to why naturalism as a worldview makes sense. It touches on cosmology, miracles, morality, etc. and does so in a way that is so thoroughly explained that there shouldn't really be many questions to ask afterwards. In short, it just makes sense. Fair warning, the book starts off a little slow and doesn't really pick up until about halfway through, but all of the previous chapters are the groundwork for the good stuff.
EDIT: Seeing several other comments mention Demon Haunted World, also a good one.Also adding one more:
- Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook for the Study of New Testament Miracle Stories; by Wendy Cotter - ok, this isn't technically a book, as it has no narrative. It is a sourcebook, or a compilation of various sources and organized in such a way to make studying the material a bit easier. This book in particular goes into a lot of different people in the ancient world who have been recorded as healers, exorcists, nature-manipulators, magicians, etc. It places Jesus' miracles side by side with those of all these other recorded people, showing the similarities/differences. With so many other people doing essentially the same stuff Jesus did, it makes his claims to fame rather unremarkable.
It's a scholar book: https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078
Currently reading this:
So far pretty interesting and funny read.
>I sorta see what you mean, but only kinda. I always took the "everything is mind" stuff to be more about how delineations between this and that are contextual constructs not really having any merit on their own, not that like sensory data is a construct or something. Am I making sense?
It's possible I've been misreading the Zen texts. I took it as mind creates these labels, it creates the conceptual framwork we see. As to joshu's quote, I took it as you're able to make things look however you want just by thinking about them in a certain way. Sort of like, it's not the flag waving, it's not the wind waving, but your mind waving.
>Poor fake puppies and chimps and shrimps :(
Yea, they went a bit far there for the Zen comparison, but it works in the book.
>This one apartment reminds me of the brain in a vat thought experiment.
I've heard of that.
Have you listened to this? http://www.radiolab.org/story/revising-fault-line/
The second half goes into biology. Very interesting to me. I'm getting ready to read the guys book. He argues that free-will doesn't exist in part of it. link
It's really touching that you care about my education so much as to suggest this. Thank you! Amongst others, I'm currently reading this book during the holiday and it's great: https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078 by Sapolsky.
If you read it aswell I believe you will be happy to see it's arguments of there really being such a thing as "born in the wrong body", as some people that claim they are born into the wrong body really do have a brain structured as the opposite sex. For example, we look at instances of people with penis that claim they are female. Some of these do in fact have a female brain. Or maybe it's better to say, brain with structure most characteristic of those with xx chromosones so we don't step on any toes.
If you'd be so kind as to point out any wrongs again it would be much appreciated
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