Athenes Theory of Everything - With comments and thoughts.

I did't know where this will take me when I happen to stumble over this video, but I liked it and posting it here both to share my comments on it but also as a recommendation for any of you who have not yet seen it. Enjoy!

What made me write this were couple of statements in the beginning of the video with which I not so much disagreed but felt that they needed better explanation in order not to come off as misleading. As the video just started, I knew that I would't remember the objections in the same way if I waited until it was over to se if it was necessary to write them down, so I started to write down every thought I got watching it. Some might be more relevant, more relevant are in the beginning because toward the end I had nothing to object against and started to digress into irrelevant thoughts, hence if you feel bored reading my comments just stop and watch the video if you haven't done it yet.

The very first thing, statements about self awareness set me off writing dow those comments:

Certainly increased self awareness can be beneficial in many cases, but the obsession with it is not explained? Yes it will help us in the ways mentioned in the video, and also in day to day life avoid mistakes as we get more self aware of who we situation we are in, basing decisions on better greater understanding of the situation around us, but it also increases the risk for missed opportunities, when you are always self aware in a situation where you have nothing else at your disposal but intuition. That is with excessive self awareness arise situation where one overanalyzes the situation and miss opportunities. The obvious argument against my position is that if one is very self aware one can chose the opportunities as an aware choice based on rational thought instead of just stumble over them, which brings this to the next point.

In part two the benefits of self awareness are said to be the ability to alter misplaced emotions, enable self regulating parts of our brain and increases the ability to control feelings. Hence the feeling of going for something, i.e. an opportunity can be regulated together with other emotions and hence one will not "go for" an opportunity when such present itself, but instead by being very self aware identify those feelings for what they are and then try to make a conscious, rational decision on wether or not follow through. As it often happens we do not have sufficient amount on information to make such a decision. By trying to make rational decisions based on insufficient information one will probably avoid mistakes, one will also miss out on opportunities by misjudging the situation and often one will abstain from acting dude to inability to make a rational decision and at the same time being so self aware that one does not get caught up by the situation. Self regulation and and control of feelings by definition diminishes your ability to be taken over by your feelings i.e. be passionate and impulsive, and as result when people that are not self aware to same degree either get sad from mistakes they made or the happiness from stumbling into an opportunity and passionately enjoying it an excessive self aware person will suffer fewer mistakes, by reducing amount of impulsive decisions and hence also experience fewer moments of passion and miss out on more opportunities by being unable to make a rational decision.

Hence increasing self awareness can be great if you for example tend to get in trouble by being unaware of yourself or have homicidal tendencies but it is not so great with some other things such as dancing and love, where being overly self aware can make it dispassionate.

Simply put, the result of being overly self aware is grayness, without heights or lows, which is often how depression is described nowadays. Though obviously this will not be a depression due to ability to control feelings to greater extent and emotional resilience, but it will be rather close.

Therefore I disagree with the statement that one always ought to strive towards greater self awareness but instead one should strive to enough self awareness, which for many people probably is more. The problem though is that when you know that you have enough self awareness you probably already have too much of it since you have crossed the point where you are not only self aware but are also self aware of how much you are of self aware, at which point you will see yourself as being one self aware entity among other entities which are self aware to different degrees and the boundary between self and other will start to blur to a point where you might start to sacrifice your personal happiness for other people, since it does not matter, one self aware entity getting it or another, it still brings happiness to one of them.

This then changes the value system an what one perceives as happiness, self aware people certainly do find happiness in some other things otherwise it would not be distinguishable from depression, though again it will probably not be as intense, impulsive and passionate as it otherwise would. For example a person that is not very self aware might get caught up in an action movie where there is no plot at all but very cool effect, such person will be sucked in to the situation and feel the intensity of all the effects e.t.c. while a self aware person might look at it as some computer graphic on a screen and find it utterly boring, being self aware as he or she is and unable to get drawn into it, such person might instead enjoy a movie where there is an interesting plot and some twist such that he can be self aware of himself sitting there and just watching at something on the screen, but at the same time ponder what is meant by that and that way get caught up in it instead, but this is not as intense as living through all the action other people are able to.

Therefore even if there exist sources for happiness for self aware people it brings less intense joy as being caught up in the moment and more of general wellbeing. Perhaps with sufficiently high degree of self awareness all kinds of entertainment which exists today will be boring and such person will only find joy in actually living it in the real life instead of watching it on the screen i.e. becoming that hero but in real life.

But is it not what we all are already doing? Just that different people have different heros, some strive for increased self awareness, some for enlightenment, some to help other people other for physical pleasure, yet other for money, e.t.c. That is indefinitely striving to increase self awareness will eventually end up in the same thing. Same thing but different.

Before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains, and water was water.

After studying Zen for some time, mountains were no longer mountains, and water was no longer water.

But now, after studying Zen longer, mountains are just mountains, and water is just water.

Master Qingyuan in the Compendium of the Five Lamps

I have no of course elaborated far more on the initial small remark I wrote while I was watching the video, and it stretched far beyond the point I wanted to make that increased self awareness comes at a cost and therefore is nothing one should take lightly, and especially not forced on anyone.

Well this is actually the only critical remark I had, well it is not so much critical perhaps as a elaboration such that it is clear that such drastic transformations of one self will not result in everything as it is but better, but things will actually be different. I wrote something similar earlier in a post called "You can be wise but why?", and this is probably why I reacted when it was said in the video that you should strive for increased self awareness, because it is similar to if someone said that one always should strive to become wiser.

Wat comes below has very vague relation to the video, and contains no further comments on it but are couple of thoughts I got while watching it.

In the beginning of the video it was said that the environment around us and what we experience changes the physical structure of our brain, this reminded me about something i wrote earlier, namely the "importance of language".

What I wrote was that certain languages are more rich and flexible containing not only words but also whole concepts which might not be present at all in other languages. That is you might get more rich experience from one language compared to another, which inevitably changes your brain structure as mentioned in the video, as every experience does. As we use language to communicate, describe the environment around us, and constantly think all day long, it might have greater impact on our brain than the environment itself, since the environment might be the same for the greater part of the life, i.e. work, home, family, friends, nearest pub e.t.c. and occasionally vacation somewhere, what we think in the language we know changes all the time, because we get bored thinking about same thing all the time and think about something else, hence the better we know the language, more expressive it is, the more accurate and rich representation of the concept we get in our mind of the thing we think about, i.e. equivalent to being in more stimulating environment, but in our head and all the time.

Also we might change the environment based on what and how we think, let say our emediate environment such as buying new things for the new apartment, as we are more able to think with many concepts and in more flexible ways, we might affect the environment in more stimulating ways which in turn will affect our brain structure, and the brain structure of our guests.

For example let say your language have one word and one concept of a cup, i.e. a cup is something to hold liquid such as tea or coffee, then you might go out to the store, buy any cup which looks nice and be done with it. Now compare to an imaginary language which don't only have one word, cup, but different words for each different kind of cup, which are intended for all different kind of beverages. When a person speaking such language goes to the store he or she will consider different cups because the not cup but X is for tea and the Y is for coffee and W is for green tea and that person might buy at least two different ones one for tea and one for coffee. Even in this simple cases one person will have more variety at home with different shapes of cups each has different name and purpose, compared to another person which just have a generic thing called cup used to hold any liquid and perhaps even juice if there is no distinction in the concept between glass and cup in that particular language, clearly less stimulating environment for the brain.

But as languages changes us and we change the environment and the environment changes us and we evolve the language it is the chicken and the egg problem. Writing among other things such as agriculture e.t.c. are said to be the founding blocks for civilizations, but before there is writing there must be language, and things to be written must be thought of in that language, hence language to some extent shapes the civilization, people living in that civilization are then inevitably influenced by it, and hence language shapes the environment which shapes peoples brains, which in turn shape the environment.

As I began to write this I had no interesting point to make except for the fact that language also shapes our brains, but as I wrote remembered one thing which fits here very well and I think is rather profound in the given context. Namely, when does a foreigner stops being foreigner?

To that question we find answer in Slavic history, and actually in the definition of the word itself:

The Slavic autonym Slověninъ is usually considered a derivation from slovo "word," originally denoting "people who speak (the same language)," i.e. people who understand each other, in contrast to Slavic word denoting "foreign people" – němci, meaning "mumbling, murmuring people" (from Slavic němъ – "mumbling, mute"). The latter word may be the derivation of words to denote German/Germanic people in many later Slavic languages: e.g., Polish Niemiec, Ukrainian Німець, Czech Němec, Russian and Bulgarian Немец, Serbian Nemac, Bosnian and Croatian Nijemac etc.^[9]

Wikipedia

That is Slavic people were not distinguished from other by race or geography e.t.c. but by language, if you had the word (Slovo) then you were Slavic, you spoke same language, in contrast to foreigners i.e. mute people, Nemci.

As argued in length above that language and the environment are probably two of the major factors shaping ones brain this I think is a very profound way of determining when forgetters stop being foreigners.

Why is the language better way to determine wether someone is foreigner or not opposed to say religion, race, hair color, shape of the nose or any other arbitrary attribute? Because you can not change your race, or any other physical attribute, well one could color ones hair, and one could change the religion but that would only have symbolic value. The language on the other hand is the most powerful way of interaction, when a person knows the language well enough to communicate freely with others in their own words and concepts they will inevitably influence and learn from each other and eventually finding a common ground, and they will be more similar on the physical level as well, namely where it matters, in the brain, where thinking is going on.

Many governments have apparently realized this long before me and force foreigners to undergo a test to determine wether they know the language well enough before giving citizenship which is just a formal way to do it. And I think regular people should learn from it, i.e. stop differentiating people based on arbitrary attributes, but if a person lives in this country and speaks its language, then that person is not a foreigner.

I am quite tiered now and have been writing for many hours and it is now morning, so I might have missed something, so if there are any objections to the idea that a person stops being foreigner when he or she has learned the language I would like to hear them in the comments, until that time I will consider it to be a profound idea and follow it in daily life.

I'm going to finish this post before I go to sleep, no time to waste so I continue with the next thing which came to my mind watching the video.

The video described a somewhat similar idea I had several months ago when they say that sociologists have established that phenomena such as obesity and smoking, emotions and ideas spread and ripple through society in much the same way that electric signals of neurons are transferred when their activity is synchronized. That we are global network of neurochemical reactions...

That idea did not came to me all at once but in small bits, so I wrote it down as I usually do on the first thing I had at hand, and in the language I am thinking in at the time, which is determined by the language I used most recently, and as I often watch videos or read something online it is often in english, and hence the majority of my posts are in english. Though the consequence of writing a post from a number of small ideas which came to me over a period of time is that they are spread out over several files on my computer and also spread out in different places in a file among other ideas, and parts of it are in my phone and they are written in three different languages, in the end I never got around to merging it all to one post, and later forgot about it.

I will try to merge all that to one post later, but a short version is this: I was not thinking in notion of neurons and not about some grand scheme of setting off chain reactions but in the small scale of one person influencing others in a rather straight forward way, which can be visualized as ripples on water .

The idea is about how our influence propagate starting from our closest friend and family, and spread further as ripples in the water, to friends of friends and friends of friends of friends e.t.c. Of course as further away from your immediate surrounding the less influence you have, i.e. influence you have on your friend will be adopted by that friend and when that friend influences another parts of your influence will be there as well but in much smaller degree, e.t.c. Hence the ripples in water analogy as they spread from the source, i.e. you, they get weaker.

This happens also in time, if you have children of your own, part of you, the way you influence your child, will live on in that child and propagate to others in a time when you are far gone. Same thing happens if you for example spend much time with a friend you will influence that friend changing him or her in some way, and if he has a child this influence will be reflected it the way that child is brought up.

The second half blew me away completely due to the big black hole my knowledge where physics and chemistry should reside, and required great amount of concentration on my part just to follow what was being said, but still it seamed interesting. I also paused quite a bit to write things down, so as I think back I can't really remember much of it or what was said, and perhaps even have misinterpreted some things in my comments. But I'll try to watch it again later when I am less tiered and distracted by my own thoughts.