Jewstress said:

I also choose not to live a part of society.

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What is it really That we call mask?

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And if we dont have a mask how do we live in society?

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If its easier to live without a mask why we involuntarily pick it (the mask)

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split_by_nine said:

Jewstress said:

I also choose not to live a part of society.

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what do you mean?

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Huehuecoyotl said:

Masks create internal conflict that we externalize...and cause others to do the same.

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I have many masks, all figurative.

Masks can be a method of summoning quiet or sleeping aspects of ‘self’ needed to be brought forth and have life breathed back into them, to become stronger, to become harder; even more sensitive.

I’ve had to fake and force care and listening as weak as it was to regain it in true after having my heart blasted into a scabbed waste.

To wear the mask and be the character until that sleeping, hidden or wrecked part of my soul was re/ignited.
One can use ‘masks’ to become figuratively possessed by something else entirely, and invite it and train for it to stay if they so need or want.

A ritualistic tool in our repertoire of them for accessing the transcendental.




As RGV said,

redgreenvines said:

the real you is the one that puts himself into masks

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Spiralspider said:

Little interest about This theme.
About the "personas" we have which in greek means masks.

So we all behave differently according to where we are placed and which people we are hanging out with.
And after some time we get used to those people and we create our behaviours on a basis of What you know about them and they know about US.

Calling it a mask should BE bad attribuition of the word.

What is it really That we call mask? And if we dont have a mask how do we live in society? If its easier to live without a mask why we involuntarily pick it (the mask)

Just some food for thought

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Jewstress said:

I don't wear a mask, you get what you get.
I also choose not to live a part of society.
I don't believe in having to fake it to make it... so I refuse to be a part of it.

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It’s always great when someone starts off a response with immediate logical fallacies!

Tripsten, it appears your reading comprehension skills are severely lacking, as I never
“arrogantly classed everything that isn’t my belief as ignorant”

As a matter of fact, I never once even used the word ignorant. Nor am I discussing my beliefs.
To paint my words and position as you have is what's called a straw man fallacy and is not worth another second of my time.

I don't hold myself above anyone else, but even if I was arrogant, what in the world does that have to do with the topic at hand?
Absolutely nothing. It's completely irrelevant. 

I am here taking my time to contribute to fruitful discussion, hopefully grow and help others do the same. Your decision to paint me as arrogant appears to be a text book example of projection, and I find it to be droll and callow, as it does absolutely nothing to contribute in the slightest to intelligent discussion or fruitful debate, let alone support your own arguments. 


But back on topic,

Tripsten said:But what you describe missed correlation in the center, you say ,”well we wear clothes and use a language and buy this or that “
Meaning the fact that we use external things to express oneself somehow makes it inauthentically onesself ?  ?

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Tripsten said:You stated she bought a computer right ?
But there’s also plenty of people out there who do not trust technology and choose not to buy these
Because there all different people who make unique decisions

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I did not state she bought a computer. My post is not even big, did you even read what I wrote? You can literally scroll up while typing in the box you did to reply to me and see what I said, you can even quote me and see what I said in the box you’re writing it in.

But yeah! There are plenty of people who do not buy technology or trust it, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the fundamental aspects in which society shapes us from birth, has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

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Tripsten said:
But then when you get to the root it becomes way more needlessly poetic and murky and faceless with no real explanations

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This is yet another logical fallacy, tone policing.
Why don’t you try discussing the content of what I wrote? Maybe ask a question about it, rather than weakly attempting to criticize the manner in which I delivered it? Doing as you have, provides absolutely nothing in which to help me grow or learn, nor does it provide viable or valuable or meaningful refutation, and to use your own opening words: ‘doesn’t make your point valid btw’

Your failure to understand what I’ve said doesn’t reflect its nature or mine, and I’d have been more than happy to attempt to explain it in a different manner had the thought to ask me to clarify or expound on it ever crossed your mind.

I won't be wasting my time with you again, so don't expect a response unless you actually take the time to read what I've written and and give me and others valid refutations and questions of substance worth our trouble.

Raven Gnosis said:

You’ve still provided nothing of substance and grossly misrepresented what I've said in classic straw man fallacy fashion, think Tripsten, if what you're saying is a gross misrepresentation of what I'm saying and you either lack the capacity to or refuse to acknowledge your fallacy, that's it, it's done.
If I was interested in discussing what else you said, I would have refuted it; its inconsequential to what I've addressed and you can delude yourself into some self congratulation by fallaciously connecting the unrelated, but it makes no difference.

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You even went as far as insisting I said Jewstress was ignorant.

Tripsten said:

"You did claim her belief to be ignorant
It was implied with the first line of your last stanza"

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Once again, a marked lack of reading comprehension skills on your behalf.

There was no stanza, it isn't even a poem.
Even if I waxed poetic in my attempt to transliterate what I was trying to describe, it doesn't make it a poem.

Not only can you, the reader or listener not dictate what a speaker or writer meant by what they said or wrote, there is a difference between implying something and claiming something. To which I did neither and you've failed to prove and simply cannot, it's just literally not there, you can only continue to engage in your numerous straw man fallacies, and fallacies in general.

I've repeatedly pointed these out to you, and you continue to deflect and project and overall fail to understand and see.

Tripsten said:

And wdym if I can’t ha duke having my thigns called out on here lol

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Blindness to the mechanisms and forces that dictate our shape, blindness to the things that precede our every word, our every thought and every emotion that lay unilluminated, sleeping in a perpetual night before dawn, not much unlike our persistent incognizance of our instinct and numb familiarity to pulling air into our lungs, blindness to the eons old monolithic frameworks that precede our every word, action, thought and feeling, do not make us free or void of them.

Ignorance of and denial to that which precedes us, will never make us wiser, or help us forge the symbolic tools and understanding to truly individuate from it, and perhaps if we are wise and powerful enough, breathe new life into it.

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I genuinely appreciate your asking, Sudly.


Though waxing poetic, what I am referring to is quite literal and well documented and researched. It's mildly abstruse conceptually though, so the language surrounding it requires almost poetic language.

But ultimately the finer points I was alluding to belong to what most simply and for the sake of ease here, and is called in the psychoanalytic disciplines:  The Unconscious Mind.

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"The unconscious mind comprises mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgements, feelings, or behavior (Wilson, 2002). According to Freud (1915), the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behavior. Like an iceberg, the most important part of the mind is the part you cannot see.

Our feelings, motives and decisions are actually powerfully influenced by our past experiences, and stored in the unconscious."

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"From this perspective, it is concluded that in both phylogeny and ontogeny, actions of an unconscious mind precede the arrival of a conscious mind—that action precedes reflection."

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What I meant by the ignorance and denial to that which precedes us is either or both ignorance to, or lying to and deluding oneself in regards to the reality "that action precedes reflection."
To many people, I've found they feel like this implies they are in essence automatons with no self control, but that's not the case at all. The reality of our circumstances just are not as simple and superficial as they may seem to ourselves.

One of the things I find most stark about and illuminates precisely what I'm talking about, is its role in PTSD.

A great deal of veterans with PTSD do not have it because of what they saw or what happened to them, but because of what they did.

To keep it simple, it's intensely traumatic because they did not know or think that they were capable of some of the horrifying things they did, and struggle to accept and integrate that as themselves, because its not a reflection of who they are or what they thought themselves capable of, it having originated in the unconscious makes this all the more difficult, confusing and traumatic.

In certain cases, this causes these veterans to feel themselves as fake, false, unreal and/or only wearing a mask in which hides this monster who they never knew they were, causing a struggle of duality of sorts that some never come to terms with and consequentially manifests in horrific ways like with this Vietnam veteran who executed a police officer on a highway in Georgia.
(Warning: this is a very graphic video)



On a side note to that, I ask anyone who happens to be reading this, that if they find themselves talking to a veteran and they have the urge or thought to ask them if they have killed someone, remember having read this, please.

There are a couple fantastic books which thoroughly demonstrate what I mean with veterans in this capacity that are just fantastic and insightful reads in general.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

On killing: The psychological costs of learning to kill in war and society.

Something we can all relate to in this respect is getting angry, and most of us have gotten so angry at some point in which we said or did something impulsive and deeply regretted it afterward, having been out of control.

This old New York times article was written by Richard Alan Friedman, a professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
BEHAVIOR; Beyond Anger: Studying the Subconscious Nature of Rage

Hopefully that clarifies it for you, let me know if you got any other questions!

Edit: Forgot a preposition in a sentence and wanted to add a thought.

Tripsten said:

If all is one
Which I believe
Then their are , in a sense , “two selves”
There is the ego self which is the character one is playing out in their life, the “John Smith”
And the true self which is every literal thing period

Knowing this mask doesn’t really refer to anything
It is a philisophical paradox and does not exist in my opinion
The fact that society, and ones cultural upbringing and environment deeply correlated to who a person is is irrelevant because those things are apart of the true self and therefore everyone’s ego / character / persona is then formed by the true self
That being said mask is a useless term that truly means nothing and is just a more conveluted and murky way of explaining just that
To say ones true self can never come through is just philosophy porn
Fun to think of and discuss
But holds no factual basis in the real world which is not words or ideas
For ones true self comes through all the time whether they like it or not
For the true self is everything
And our personas ( also apart of the true self ) are shaped by this so the true self comes out through these as well

What many people in this forum meant by they don’t wear masks
Is that they are not different people for different social groups and that their hey maintain the same general persona save for organic life changes which are inevitable but do not intentionally alter their behaviors and mannerisms for different occasions or groups

What is your reply

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Raven Gnosis said:

Something we can all relate to in this respect is getting angry, and most of us have gotten so angry at some point in which we said or did something impulsive and deeply regretted it afterward, having been out of control.

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The “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis (or the “social brain” hypothesis) posits that large brains and distinctive cognitive abilities of humans have evolved via intense social competition in which social competitors developed increasingly sophisticated “Machiavellian” strategies as a means to achieve higher social and reproductive success.

In humans, the brain is very expensive metabolically: it represents ≈2% of the body's weight but utilizes ≈20% of total body metabolism at rest. The two burning questions are what factors drove the evolution of brain size and why our ancestors 50,000 years ago needed the brains they had. A number of potential answers have been hotly debated focusing on the effects of climatic, ecological, and social factors. One controversial set of ideas coming under the rubric of the “Machiavellian intelligence” or “social brain” hypothesis identifies selective forces resulting from social competitive interactions as the most important factor in the evolution of hominids, who at some point in the past became an ecologically dominant species. These forces selected for more and more effective strategies of achieving social success (including deception, manipulation, alliance formation, exploitation of the expertise of others, etc.) and for ability to learn and use them. The social success translated into reproductive success selecting for larger and more complex brains. Once a tool for inventing, learning, and using these strategies (i.e., a complex brain) is in place, it can be used for a variety of other purposes including coping with environmental, ecological, technological, linguistic, and other challenges.

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The model studied here is based on a notion of “cerebral capacity” as a measure of the number of different memes/ideas/strategies that the brain can learn socially and use. This measure is analogous to “carrying capacity” used in ecology to characterize the number of individuals that can survive in a given ecological niche. During the cognitive explosion phase, the cerebral capacity evolves faster and to a larger degree than learning ability. Both the average Machiavellian fitness and the average number of memes per individual achieved during the cognitive explosion phase are largely controlled by the average cerebral capacity. The importance of cerebral capacity in our model suggests that incorporation of this notion into theoretical and empirical studies of cognitive processes can potentially be very beneficial.

The model studied here aims to describe only some aspects of the early stages of the evolution of intelligence. The model should not be applied directly to actual human history and society. Our model does not aim to explain why a cognitive explosion has occurred only in the lineage leading to modern Homo sapiens. Rather, it tests whether a particular set of explanations advanced and discussed in detail by many, which places special emphasis on the achievement of “ecological dominance” and on competition in regard to social competencies, is plausible from the population genetics perspective. Alternative explanations do exist, and much more work remains necessary to better understand the origins of human uniqueness. As with most other mathematical models used in evolutionary biology, the goal of our model is not to prove that a particular phemomena arises as a result of particular factors. Rather, we wished to explore the logic and plausibility of the arguments used to explain the phenomenon, to identify important factors, parameters, and time scales, and to check the robustness of conclusions to variation in assumptions.

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Overall, our results suggest that the mechanisms underlying the “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis can indeed result in the evolution of significant cognitive abilities on the time scale of 10 to 20 thousand generations.

https://www.pnas.org/content/103/45/16823

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It should come as no surprise that evolutionary mechanisms were suggested to play a role in cognitive evolution. Evolutionary mechanisms that lead to the cognitive explosion of the human lineage were not specified in the above paper and this is where I'd like to make my own suggestions, my 2c.

I'm coming to think that co-evolutionary happenings had a role to play. To give an example first, one could ask; Did evolved tools make us smarter, or did we evolve to become smart enough to make tools? 

And the answer is that it is a co-evolutionary thing, a sort of bootstrapping thing where we get a little bit smarter, smart enough to make tools and then those tools make us smarter so, building and building and building.

My thoughts are that perhaps like with human intelligence and tool use, Machiavellian strategies and self-domestication made it easier for us to communicate with one another and cohabit within complex societies.

In a similar way to how a wolf became a dog, perhaps it too is how an ape became a human.
 

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Another theory that tries to explain the growth of human intelligence is the reduced aggression theory (aka self-domestication theory). According to this strand of thought what led to the evolution of advanced intelligence in Homo sapiens was a drastic reduction of the aggressive drive. This change separated us from other species of monkeys and primates, where this aggressivity is still in plain sight, and eventually lead to the development of quintessential human traits such as empathy, social cognition and culture. This theory has received strong support from studies of animal domestication where selective breeding for tameness has, in only a few generations, led to the emergence of impressive “humanlike” abilities. Tamed foxes, for example, exhibit advanced forms of social communication (following pointing gestures), pedomorphic physical features (childlike faces, floppy ears) and even rudimentary forms of theory of mind (eye contact seeking, gaze following). Evidence also comes from the field of ethology (which is the study of animal behavior, focused on observing species in their natural habitat rather than in controlled laboratory settings) where it has been found that animals with a gentle and relaxed manner of interacting with each other – like for example stumptailed macaques, orangutans and bonobos – have more advanced socio-cognitive abilities than those found among the more aggressive chimpanzees and baboons. It is hypothesized that these abilities derive from a selection against aggression.

On a mechanistic level these changes are believed to be the result of a systemic downregulation of the sympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight reflex). Hence, tamed foxes show a reduced adrenal gland size and have an up to fivefold reduction in both basal and stress-induced blood cortisol levels. Similarly, domesticated rats and guinea pigs have both reduced adrenal gland size and reduced blood corticosterone levels.[33][34] It seems as though the neoteny of domesticated animals significantly prolongs the immaturity of their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system (which is otherwise only immature for a short period when they are pups/kittens) and this opens up a larger ”socialization window” during which they can learn to interact with their caretakers in a more relaxed way.

This downregulation of sympathetic nervous system reactivity is also believed to be accompanied by a compensatory increase in a number of opposing organs and systems. Although these are not as well specified various candidates for such “organs” have been proposed: the parasympathetic system as a whole, the septal area over the amygdala, the oxytocin system, the endogenous opioids and various forms of quiescent immobilization which antagonize the fight-or-flight reflex.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FB%3ARUGE.0000033312.92773.c1

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Redgreenvines said: I think it is better to back away from evolutionary concepts when examining cognition especially as common use of the word evolve is directed towards more everyday learning and behavior improvement, completely missing the whole selection + mutation + speciation phenomenon that is core to evolution in the world of science.

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In the model, genes control brains which invent and learn strategies (memes) which are used by males to gain advantage in competition for mates.

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Jewstress said:

I purposefully isolate from people in every aspect possible.

I find 90% of my interactions with anyone outside of my immediate family to be very frustrating.

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anyway, if you want to redefine the meaning of scientific terms, do so at the top of your page,

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