When I’m in love, my thoughts are obsessed with the person and other thoughts are put aside. My thinking is distorted by baseless optimism. I fail to notice flaws in them I would notice with a sober mind, and when I do notice flaws I accept flaws I wouldn’t normally accept. Since being in love feels so good, much of my thinking is dedicated to reinforcing my feelings through imagining situations with the person when they’re not around and of course nothing in those situations ever goes wrong. This creates unrealistic expectations. I plan my life with them optimistically way further than I would plan my life in any other regard. I can’t properly analyze my mental state while being in love, since analytical thinking would likely end it and that’s the last thing I want.
hyporational
I was thinking about removing the comment because it wasn’t clear to me what you were referring to. I think having strong feelings for other people while ignoring how they feel about you is generally a waste of resources.
Why is it sometimes feelings of love instead of friendship.
Could be just context and interpretation, which do make the psychological reality of the situation different.
I don’t know if being “in love” is a thing that actually exists
What do you mean? There’s a word called love and there’s a reality that people refer to with the word. Words are replaceable.
I’d like to know if it corresponds to an internal state that I have experienced.
The problem is the same hormonal process doesn’t necessarily feel exactly the same in everyone’s body. I think it would be more reliable to inspect your thoughts and your behavior towards the person and compare them to other people in love.
In particular, how does romantic love differ from friendship?
That’s like asking how hot differs from cold, perhaps equally inexplicable, if you’re asking about being in love. If you would’ve experienced it, you’d know. More reasonable people look mainly for friendship in their life partners and therefore might use the words love and friendship interchangeably. They probably wouldn’t talk about being in love however.
As a data point I’ve been in love several times, also reciprocically. It hasn’t made me happier on the whole, since the state makes me short sighted and neglect more lasting sources of happiness, and therefore I’m not seeking it anymore.
When I am in such a state, the feelings of the other towards me are fairly irrelevant to my feelings towards her.
I think people learn to regulate themselves when they realize how self-defeating this is. I know I did. The key to self-regulation is stopping the process in it’s infancy. This applies to other feelings too.
The standard quick-and-dirty method of predicting others seems to be “model them as slightly modified versions of you”
It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me, but I might have inherited some autistic characteristics since there are a couple of autistic people in my extended family. Now that I’ve worked with people more, it’s more like I have several basic models of people like “rational”, “emotional”, “aggressive”, “submissive”, “assertive”, “polite”, “stupid”, “smart”, and then modify those first impressions according to additional information.
I definitely try not to model other people based on my own preferences since they’re pretty unusual, and I hate it when other people try to model me based on their own preferences especially if they’re emotional and extroverted. I find that kind of empathy very limited, and these days I think I can model a wider variety of people than many natural extroverts can, in the limited types of situations where I need to.
I’d be more interested in behavioral changes in the mice. For some reason not all people with tiny hippocampuses or generally atrophied brains have problems with memory (or mood), and we still can’t reliably diagnose progressive memory disorders, or many other neurological disorders for that matter, via brain scans alone.
The hippocampus is a relatively tiny structure in the human brain, and I would guess it’s even proportionally smaller in the mouse brain. I doubt the corresponding decrease in cerebrospinal fluid volume would make any difference in function. There’s already much more variation in cerebrospinal fluid volume in healthy humans than a 20% increase in hippocampal volume could account for.
Do you compare only the responses of the same person at different times
Yes. There’s too much variation between persons. I also think there’s variation between types of pain and variation depending on whether there are other symptoms. There are no objective specific referents but people who are in actual serious pain usually look like it, are tachycardic, hypertensive, aggressive, sweating, writhing or very still depending on what type of pain were talking about. Real pain is also aggravated by relevant manual examinations.
The mob is pretty well educated these days, and the standard of living is so high that there’s much less incentive to step out of line. I don’t think we can compare modern nations to historical nations to make any claim about whether religion keeps people in line.
The claim that people can’t pronounce Jesus’ name might apply to former Soviet Union countries, but I doubt it applies anywhere else in Europe.
for why the wavelength of red feels from the inside like a built-in quality of the world rather than a perception generated by a mind in response to a stimulus
That insight would be an additional layer of processing requiring energy that could be used for other things. How would such an insight increase the brain’s reproductive success? We don’t have insight to our outputs either, you don’t intuitively understand how your muscles work in response to stimuli, which is part of the reason why it feels like we have free will and are agents in the world instead of parts of the world.
The true quality of stimuli is already lost and grossly simplified at receptor level, in the case of light the photoreceptive rod and cone cells of the retina.
I have this ability when my sleep is regular enough and I’m somewhat aware of the time when I fall asleep. I think you probably could have done it without hypnosis, and the relaxation was the key, so that you fell asleep reliably and quickly.
Can you transfer “software” from one brain to another in a purely informational way, while preserving the anatomical integrity of the second organism?
This can already be done via the senses. This also transfers consciousness of the content that is being transferred. What would consciousness without content look like?
In medicine we try to make people rate their symptoms, like pain, from one to ten. It’s pretty much never under 5. Of course there’s a selection effect and people don’t like to look like whiners but I’m not convinced these fully explain the situation.
In Finland the lowest grade you can get from primary education to high school is 4 so that probably affects the situation too.
It’s trial and error mostly, paying attention to other people doing well or making mistakes, getting honest feedback from a skilled and trusted friend. Learning social skills is like learning to ride a bike, reading about it doesn’t give you much of an advantage.
The younger you are the less it costs to make mistakes. I think a social job is a good way to learn because customers are way less forgiving than other people you randomly meet. You could volunteer for some social tasks too.
If your native hardware is somehow socially limited then you might benefit from reading a little bit more and you might have to develop workarounds to use what you’ve got to read people. It’s difficult to learn from mistakes if you don’t know you’re making them.
One thing I’ve learned about the average human looking like a telepath is that most people are way too certain about their particular assumption when there are actually multiple possible ways to understand a situation. People generally aren’t as great at reading each other as they think that are.
I did a rough estimation of my normal monthly costs of living and then added a small amount for fun. The rest of my monthly paycheck gets semi-automatically invested in ETFs and can’t be used without transaction costs. I have a small buffer account that I can use for unexpected expenses and if this happens I’ll be aware of it the next month and try to spend less and grow the buffer account.
Big problems easily cause us to neglect minor seeming maintenance like sleep, nutrition, exercise and personal hygiene. It’s extra important to remain in top condition whenever you face struggle in life.
Sleep is really a decisive factor for me. Being well rested can easily make a hopeless situation into a manageable one.
It’s in Main where the best written and most rationality-relevant articles go. Discussion is for lower quality and less relevant posts. I wonder if missing Main is common and whether something should be done about that.
I thought she put the pin in the bag and you hinted at the bag while carrying it. Why else would you have mentioned the bag? It was a joke and depending on how rigid their thinking were you could have made that kind of a joke right there. I thought your placeholder pin was some kind of a real pin not easily replaceable and you were going to use a more suitable pin in the future. It wouldn’t have occured to me that someone would be bothered enough by losing a sticky note to make passive aggressive comments about it. Do you think it’s possible she could’ve taken it just to see your unusual reaction?
It’s funny how much understanding language depends on assumptions :)
Don’t get it in the first place. Take care of good hand hygiene and don’t pick your nose or rub your eyes and watch where you put your hands in public places. Don’t get sleep deprived or stressed and don’t exercise excessively so that you don’t compromise your immune system. Avoid people who you know are sick, avoid shaking hands or wash your hands afterwards. If you get a cold very frequently or it is always prolonged despite of taking precautions check for asthma and allergic rhinitis and get those treated.