A good gift now is terrible on christmas

A friend was talking on the phone, he talked with his girlfriend and they were planning on what christmas present they should give to his parents. They start to figure what his parents might need and this is what I think.

His parents can afford a lot more then he and his girlfriend (both being students), hence there can't exist such a present that his parents want but can't afford while they can. This means that they were talking on the phone about buying a present such that his parents would need it, but yet not have it, and must be within reasonable price for a student, which in a family with both parents working full time is equivalent to low price.

One sees easily that those are impossible constraints. To make it clear let look at it in detail; you think your parents want X and it would be nice present, then why don't they already have it if they want it?

Can't they afford it? In my friends case the answer is they can.

Then why don't they have it? They didn't think about it? If you are out of coffee, you might not think about it until you want some coffee of which there is none, and then you go and buy some coffee, and if your parents don't own X it's because they don't need it, no matter what they say when they receive it.

Then there is the rare case when you know that there is something let say your parents need and want but can't get on their own, it must come from you, isn't it then very bad of you to sit on that gift and don't give it to your loved ones for several week or even months, let them wait for it, in other words withhold something they need?

Lets take an example, one person torture another by simulating drowning, that is withholding something you need, namely air, by putting your head under water, certainly when he pulls you out you will be very happy for that air, but the person that could give it to you all along but didn't for several second is still not very nice to you.

Yet every year people try to do the same mistake, try to think about something useful to buy to their loved ones and thus missing the point. Useful presents are good when there is a need for them for example if your computer broke it would be very nice if someone bought you another next day, just because they can, but if they can do it next day but chose to wait until christmas or birthday it is no longer an honest present, instead it is a way for them to save money so that they don't have to buy two present, or make it easier for them selves by not having to think about what to give as a present on christmas or birthday. This shows the priority, namely that easier or cheaper for me is much more important then bringing joy to you, which in other words means “wouldn't give you anything at all but I have to”, which raises a thought why do you have to? If it is you parents then maybe one can feel obligated to give some present even though they are not really important anymore, but if it is your boyfriend/husband or girlfriend/wife that does it mean then?

Majority of people try to buy useful presents for christmas or birthday, now it isn't necessary because they don't care about the person they are giving it to, people just don't think about what they are doing, but it's a bad practice which in my opinion should be changed.

What is then a good gift? Well in everyday life a practical gift as in example above with broken computer is really in order, which shows that you are there for that person when he or she need you, and not that you are there for them only when you are obligated by cultural reason to do something.

For situations where a gift is expected, such as birthdays and christmas one must remember that those occasions have a sole purpose to show love and appreciation for a person or a group of persons, and what you give should do just that, while knowing what that person or persons need and wait until the occasion to give them that shows exactly the opposite.

I admit that I haven't thought about this until few weeks back and thus far I did as everyone else, tried to buy useful gifts, mainly because I couldn't come up with gifts that would make that person happy so I figured at least they will use it, but now I feel that it is no longer possible, and there is a very important birthday coming up.

Graph and cannabis

I have been watching many movies lately, and people smoked cannabis in one of them, and I start thinking about other documentaries and movies I have seen about cannabis.

When it comes to arguments against cannabis it all basically bubbles down to two things; people smoking it get less productive in society and it reduces sperm count among males.

Those who argue for legalizing cannabis say that it reduces suffering greatly among patients.
People that don't use medical benefits as arguments say that it's less dangerous then alcohol, and that it's its up to each individual to decide what they take.
And third argument that is not used very much is spiritual use of cannabis.

I didn't do any research on what people would say about those that smoke cannabis but I would think that some of those thing would be that: They are slow, easily amused, can talk forever about something, since that is what we usually see on TV. This is not about my opinion on wether smoking cannabis should be legal or not but about those three thing mentioned above, slow, easily amused, full of ideas to talk about.

Now consider our memory as a graph, I know that it is a common practice to do that in psychology, but since I am not a psychologist I don't know to what extent that analogy goes. Think of the graph simply as a set of points connected by lines. Those dots are memories and new memories are added by relating to already existing memories those connections are illustrated as lines between dots, and the numbers above those lines are abstract representations of strength, that is how well you remember new knowledge. Over time those connections fade away if not used and if they are to weak people forget those things, that's why repetition is very important when trying to remember.



Recall now previous post about humor, especially the case where situations can arise that you are laughing alone in a room full of people, it is certainly not uncommon situation. This can be illustrated simply as people in the room don't have same momories as you to make the situation funny:



Now it is reasonable to assume that a person that smoked cannabis and is laughing in situations that other might not find funny is experiencing exactly the same thing. At the same time that person would not laugh in this situation without smoking cannabis, then it must be so that cannabis reinforces those connections between memories so that the person that is under influence of cannabis can relate to a wider range of situations, and those weak connections that were never thought of in sober state reappear.

It is not difficult to see that the same explanation holds for people that talk a lot under influence of cannabis. Since connections between memories get reinforced one gets full of ideas that one never considered otherwise, with unexpected twists that one never thought possible. It is therefore not uncommon that artists and writers use cannabis to help them in their creative work.

That is also the reason people get slow while under influence of cannabis, and it is not uncommon for them to disappear into their own thoughts while you are talking to them. As mentioned above connections between memories that are not used fade away over time, this result in a simpler graph containing only most used knowledge which is easily accessible, while if you smoke a joint and suddenly all those connections reappear the state space one have to search in order to come up with an answer in much greater, resulting in many more possibilities to consider, and naturally it take more time.

General about humor

I was writing about cannabis and realized that this idea is important to describe my thought about cannabis, so I write it separately as a new post since its an idea of its own. Fun is what people laugh about, but there is various degree of fun, and most important fun is different for every person.

What people think if funny depends on earlier experiences, associations and culture. I would guess that there is no joke that is universally funny in the whole world.

Unfortunately I have no choose but to describe the idea in examples:
I have a friend that I met few years ago, and we don't have a lot in common, we come from different cultures with different values, and it happens very often that he tells a joke that is not funny at all for me and when he sees that I don't laugh he says something like “it sounded funny in my head” or he thinks it is so funny that if I don't laugh it must be because I didn't understand it and he start to explain it, and in a way he is right in the assumption that I don't understand it, but it is not what he said that I don't understand, it's that I can't relate to the joke since I have very different experiences, memories and relations. Same things happens to me, sometimes I tell jokes that I think are hilarious but he don't laugh.

This show how different experience, memories, relations condition us to think that certain things are funny lets look at this example; in a culture/family/group of friends where mother-in-law is generally considered evil and especially if you had a mother-in-law that hated you, a joke like:

Q: What is the ideal weight for a mother-in-law?

A: About 2.3lbs, including the urn.

can be very funny, while for a person that have a very loving mother-in-law that only wishes the best for you and her son/daughter that joke will probably be seen as evil and not funny at all.

This kind of differences of associations are of course greatest between different cultures from different countries, but those differences go all the way to individual level, since every person have its own unique set of associations he or she acquired while growing up.

For example two friends X and Y that know each other from kindergarten are conditioned the same way, they have shared experiences and associations and thus will laugh at each others jokes for example about their teacher, but let say X and Y grew up and went to different schools, and X says that he put a nail on teachers chair and it was very funny, Y will not think it is funny unless Y can relate to that, that is imagine another teacher on which chair Y would like to put a nail.

There are of course jokes that are funny country wide or even across neighboring countries that relate to common shared experience of humans, a very common thing is to portray someone else as stupid, for example in Sweden there are jokes about stupidity of people from Norway, and a person from Denmark or Finland might think that some of those jokes are funny because those jokes are based on national pride, that we are better then them, which majority of people can relate to regardless of if the joke is about Norway, USA, India or China, as long as its not about your country.

In the same way there are jokes that are funny only for a small group of people, this might have happened to you; one person does or says something that is not funny at all or perhaps even very serious and you remember an old friend that did that or a funny situation where something similar happened and start laughing alone in a room full of people, or the opposite that you are in a group of very close friends and some one tells a joke that everyone laugh about but not you.
This is also why people put so much weight on the fact that your partner make you laugh, because that means that you two are conditioned in the same way, and have similar relations to things, in simple terms have a lot in common. There is other ways to find out if you and your future partner have things in common, like filling out a paper e.t.c. but I guess making another person laugh is a more fun way to do that.

I hope I managed with this example about humor to give a basic understanding of how every persons experiences, memories and relations condition us in certain way and humor is one way to find out if two people are conditioned in the same way.

Small remark

Last two translations are several years old, and even though my views has not changed considerably there is one thing I didn't consider. Imagine that you have lost everything.

Thus far something very important has been overlooked, namely that the life itself is not guaranteed. Thus far all perspectives has been from a living persons point of view, taking care of an apartment, working and resting, e.t.c.

Reason for that is that it is hard to consider oneself dead, and hence every person make one assumption whenever that person reason about something, assumption that he/she and everyone around are alive.

The point is, if you ask people to imagine that they have lost everything majority will imagine themselves sitting alone in an empty apartment, which is a good indication of what people think is so important that they can't even imagine to loose it.

That might be true for many, but I wonder how many would imagine themselves dead? Probably not so many, I know I didn't.
When religious people ask atheists

What do you live for if there is no god?

atheists often reply that they live for the life itself because it is wonderful enough, but I wonder if those people imagine themselves dead when asked to imagine that they have lost everything? If not then the life obviously not the reason for them to live but what they are afraid to loose is.

The question then becomes why do people assume that they will always be alive no matter how far ahead they plan or reason and why no one things about loosing it until it is too late? Can it be because we don't know death, we can't imagine what we don't know anything about? Can it be because we consider that loosing those other things are worse? I don't know.

Written in an apartment

I have now been at my parents place, where I don't need to cook or clean. There is nothing I must do, and I meet my friends, I watch TV all night and sleep all day, I don't worry what will happen because everything I need is right there in front of me, like in childhood when it felt like time was standing still and I started thinking, what is the difference between pure existence I experience at my parents place and all other days when I am at home, studying, stressing, worrying, feeling time flying by.

I am studying, getting money, to pay for apartment, to eat, eat to live, to be able to study. It is not so bad, sometimes there are parties, there are friends, friends in the same situation, but they don't know that yet, because they haven't read this.

If you ask people what they really can't live without, some will answer “friends”, “family”, etc, but many people manage without friends and family, some will say money, and it is true money makes life easier to a certain point, but if you have money and nowhere to live, the first thing your will do is to get an apartment, and the worst thing with poverty is that you can't afford to pay for your apartment.

The point is, if you ask people to imagine that they have lost everything majority will imagine themselves sitting alone in an empty apartment, which is a good indication of what people think is so important that they can't even imagine to loose it.

Apartment is a predicate for our lives, we can't live without it, even though there are homeless people, and even though some survive quite a long time no one really sees those like useful or happy people, and few are eve hostile towards them, because homeless people don't have that magic thing, that thing you can't start purposeful life without.

And if you think about it, we work to pay for it, we decorate it, we invite people to it, we buy new stuff for it, we clean it, we don't live in it, we live for it, because without it we can't imagine to live, and everything else we do is just a way to make it easier to keep doing just that.

But if the only purpose in life is to take care of an apartment, and if some one else can do it instead of me, what is then purpose of me?

Work to rest to work

People try to earn more money, which usually implies more work, they say more money bring more pleasure. And there are theories saying that if everyone follow that principle, namely to maximize personal pleasure then everyone will be better of. All this leads to pursuit of pleasure, people are trying to maximize their it by earning more money, that is working harder, but people are not machines and more we work the more we must rest to be able to keep it up.

Lets take an animal for example, a lion, it hunts to eat, and it rests to be able to hunt again later. Naturally if a lion had to run around half a day in order to find something to eat it will get tiered and need more time to rest, it is just a natural cycle for survival.

People do exactly the same thing, but we don't hunt anymore, instead one might work in an office and instead of passive rest to get some strength back one might engage in something more active like go to the gym, to get the mind of the work.

People try to find some activities they like to do such as dancing, painting, working out, playing games, while all those are good ways to have some fun and get the mind of the work it is still a necessity in order not to get mad or commit suicide from all the work.

What I am trying to say is that all that work and pleasure are just simple means of survival, not unlike any other animals. Is there anything we do that is something else then basic survival?

New year new introduction

At the beginning of 2008 I decided to write some thoughts down, I created a blog and started to write. During the year I have been busy and got negligent when it comes to writing. The result of that is that many ideas are probably lost forever, but to make things worse the blog service I used lost several entries and I saved no other copy, in this manner I lost one year. I hope that it is only a temporary error and that I will eventually be able to access my old post again, but in hope to prevent similar problems in the future I am switching to blogspot. I realized that what I did not write down, and even some things I did write are lost forever, and I decided to pull myself together and never loose another thought to bad blog service or laziness again.

I will begin by trying to recover old writings, some of which are several years old and in a different language and gradually move into newer ideas. In this process I will also edit the text to be more fit for reading, since I wrote down my thoughts as they came in my old blog, but I will try very hard not to change the meaning of the text. This might result in small conflicts between old text and new text, even though I don't feel that my views have changed, one learns and experience new things every day, which inevitably do influence thought process.

But I don't write this down so that I can remember, since those are my thoughts and I have already been influenced by them even thought I don't remember every detail, I write this blog in hope that I will get feedback, I would like people to tell me what they think, and that is important for me because I don't know what to think when there is no one that thinks differently.

That is not because I have no friends or family, but because none of them wants think that something they believe in might be wrong, they don't even want to consider the possibility, so I am hoping to find someone out here in the vast net that agrees with me that nothing is too holy to think about, and disagrees with what I think about holy things.