PhiloPsycho Freedom

It's all too common that we hear these words bitterly uttered: "Guys are just stupid", "Girls just don't make sense" etc. Simply put, everyone is stupid at times.

What has been incorrectly derived from this for so many years has been the "Men are form Mars; Women are from Venus" sentiment that we are completely different and will never understand each other. It's true; Men and Women are different. But, what is failed to take into consideration is that there is greater variance within a gender than there is between them. That is to say, the best man and the best woman in a category will perform generally the same; neither party will have a huge advantage over the other on any given skill.

There are many problems with this theory of consciousness that we call the soul.

First, this anthropocentric notion that only humans have souls is ridiculous. Why would only human's have souls? Why not all living beings? or everything, for that matter? What makes humans so special? Many people will probably answer that humans are god's chosen species, and that we're special like that. Do we think that we're so grand that we'll reign forever? Nothing lasts forever, just look at fossil records. Dinosaurs, had they had the cognitive capacity to think this, would have thought that they were god's chosen species. Also note that humans weren't around at that period, which means our reign is a relatively short period of this planet's history.

So, after saying how I enjoy a factor of chance in my life, I would like to look at the opposite of chance: determinism.

Determinism is the belief that there are founding laws in every object, no matter the size. The bigger constructs' rules are made from the combined laws of the smaller constructs' that they are comprised of.

In light of my previous post, I thought now would be a good time to explain what a friend of mine and I have considered a "pure relationship".

A "pure" relationship is one where you  meet the person with no apparent connections and in a random situation. This relationship can be considered pure because it has no previous expectations or rules of engagement for interacting with the person that you've come across. Just to clarify what I mean by "in a random situation", I mean out in the world, moving about and not in some predetermined situation with set guidelines of interaction (class, club, dinner, etc.).

 

Our first lesson will be on social priming and social interactions.

So, what is priming? Priming is when some stimulus causes us to be more likely to expect something related (Read: perceived to be related) to happen. For instance, if primed with the word "dog", you'll react more quickly when you see the word "cat" (because it's related) when asked if it is a word or a non-word.