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jonnyjonjonjon said:
Took me a long time to learn that but now that I know im happy I learned the hard way. I dont take it for granted now. I can appreciate living a way better life now. The way I see it you have to experience how shit things can be to appreciate how good they can be.

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So true.

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The particular sub-area that I'm interested in developing myself has to do with the structure of the mind in terms of biased information flow between the conscious and the unconscious, and the very peculiar and counter-intuitive fact that humans in a variety of situations misrepresent reality to the conscious mind while keeping in the unconscious either a fully accurate, or in any case more accurate, view of that which they misrepresent to the conscious mind. That seems so counter-intuitive that it begs explanation. You would have thought that after natural selection ground away for four billion years and produced these eyeballs capable of such subtlety—color, motion-detection, the details of granularity that we see—you would have perfected the organs for interpretation of reality such that they wouldn't systematically distort the information once it reaches you. That seems like a strange way to design a railroad.

The function of this area of self-deception is intimately connected to deception of others. If you are trying to see through me right now, and if I'm lying about something you actually care about, what you see first, to speak loosely, is my conscious mind and its behavioral effects. You can get some sense of my mood or my affect. The quality of voice might give you stress while trying to deceive you. It is much harder for you to figure out what my unconscious is up to. You have to make a study of my behavior, such as a spouse will do, much to your dismay at times.

One simple logic is that we hide things in our unconscious precisely to hide them better from other people, so the key interaction driving this is deception. I often talk about deceit and self-deception in the same voice because you can't see self-deception properly if you don't appreciate its deceptive possibilities. Likewise, if you talk about deception without any reference to self-deception then you tend unconsciously to limit yourself to consciously promoted deception, and you tend to overlook unconsciously promulgated deception. Each failure to link the two topics limits one's understanding of the topic under consideration.

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FrenchSocialist said:
Remember that darwinian processes favored fitness, not the ability to perceive reality accurately, or make valid inferences. It should be obvious, given what we see in human history and nature that while honesty is admirable, manipulation is generally more useful.

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How do you beleive? I beleive this principle entirely I want to ask you, what exactly happens inside your head when you make the mental switch?

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Athletics is another area where this is true. There are so many examples I can site but one that always gets me is when I try to dunk a basketball.

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like let's say i decide i am great at Spanish.
Well, to decide this I have to override my beliefs that I don't really care about Spanish, because I don't. So even though I don't care about Spanish, I must convince myself I do, and that it is ridiculously easy and I understand it.

So do I just say like a mantra "I'm great at Spanish" or do I just "realize" I'm great at Spanish? It seems like there are good reasons to think I'm great at it but also good reasons to slide by as long as I can make the solid grades. But it's more fun to enjoy Spanish I suppose.

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SoY said:
Guitar playing was definately one of those things.  I had played for 4 years and then one night there was like a "click" and all I could think was, "Duh! It's fuckin' simple!" 

Athletics is another area where this is true.  There are so many examples I can site but one that always gets me is when I try to dunk a basketball.  If I think about jumping up there and puting it in, I won't ever get high enough.  But when I don't even think about it, and just do it, I get plenty of hops and it's just too easy.  Same with beer pong!  If you just know you can do something, you will do it! 

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I also saw that by truly knowing something it would occur. The most extreme example of confidence if you will, knowing without a single doubt, one could do anything. This is almost impossible for humans though because of the doubts we have created and the way we have categorized things. We have gone down the wrong path, and today’s world is so far from what it should be. By using language and placing things in categories we see things as separate now. Language is so inadequate. Nothing is separate. Everything is the same thing.

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