The Luana Model
1. Shoulders of giants
-Einstein
-Heisenberg
-Darwin
-All the shoulders they and anyone ever stood on. Duh!!!
2. Humans are animals that evolved through the process of natural selection from earlier species. Thus, there should be no unexplainable gap in evolution beteween humans and other animals.
3. Neurons make connections, that's it.
4. Conditioning (behaviorist/Hebbian) is the basis for all learning and development in all animals including humans.
5. As in conditioning, we only learn things that we didn't already know, and that are associated with reward or punishment. Rewards are things that feel good, like sex and approval and good food and good music, and good family and good friends, and our first time using a new drug. We can tell when something feels very good because we can laugh and cry when it's done. We laugh because it doesn't make sense and we cry because we know it's real. Punishments, as we know from behaviorism and history (especially forced reparations from Germany after WWI, are always detrimental to development). Punishments include bodily harm, and social rejection or disapproval. Thus, the happiest people are the ones who are punished the least and the meanest people are the ones who are punished the most. Punishment is also known as fear conditioning, and it's very easy to do to animals and humans for evolutionary reasons. Luckily, fears can always be overcome! The one greatest success in clinical psychology is helping people overcome their fears. Our favorite people are the ones who are afraid the least. Since everyone can overcome their fears, everyone can be our favorite person!
6. We can judge other people's emotions by their body language, since body language is universal. Same goes for judging dogs' emotions, since they show good body language. This is the ingenius contribution of the psychologist Paul Ekman.
7. Paying attention is just dedicating energy to the brain, so it can make more connections. We learn so easily when we're young because we have so much energy to devote to our brain.
8. Positive reinforcement via rewards is a virtuous cycle. The more we learn, the more we pay attention; the more we pay attention, the more we learn. Getting in this virtuous cycle is called being in a state of flow. All great thinkers and learners and leaders, and all children, experience the state of flow. This is the ingeniuous contribution of the psychologist and philosopher Mihaly Czikmenthalyi (not sure about spelling!). I thank Howard Gardner for teaching about flow and my dad for giving me Mihaly's book on flow and creativity.
9. Negative reinforcement is a vicious cycle. The more we're punished, the more fear we feel. The more fear we feel, the more we want to punish others. I thank the Confucian scholar Tu Weiming for the idea of virtuous and vicious cycles as the Confucian notion of the Good and the Bad.
10. Positive reinforcement is associated with the sympathetic nervous system ("rest and digest") and negative reinforcement is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system ("fight or fright"), or vice versa, I forget which is which. I thank John Dowling for the convenient rhyme to remember the difference between the two types!
11. Nothing is certain, but everything is connected. No absolute, but unity. I thank my dad for buying me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I loved, and which mentioned Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I checked out the Critique from the library in high school but I never read a page. I thank Kant for the title which helped me trust in the idea that nothing is certain.
12. It is very hard to understand the great thinkers who write in a language that is not our own. This is because all the great thinkers stumble upon item (11) but can only express it in their own language. The problem is that reason itself is bound to grammar. In order to understand that even reason/certainty is fallible, you have to disprove it in your own grammar/reasoning. Some of the great thinkers also realize this grammar problem, so they choose not to write anything. My dad told me that he thought that Yeshua (later called Jesus) only ever wrote one thing, the Venn diagram, in the sand before he died. This is one symbol that represents unity or the idea of dialectics and synthesis. The Venn diagram simultaneously resembles 0 and I, like the infinite sign and the Mobius band. For some reason, people only kept a fragment of the original symbol, which is what we know as the fish. People who really understood phrase (11) include Socrates, Yeshua, Buddha, Nagarjuna, Mohammed, Kant, Einstein, Hegel, Godel, Escher, Bach, the Dalai Lama, and enlightened people everywhere. The one truly great thinker who never understood this was Darwin, and it was because he could never get over the grief of having lost his beloved daughter. But phrase (11) is the one and only natural conclusion of the theory of evolution. I thank the class Reason and Faith for picking up the personal story of Darwin.
13. I am in Germany now and I think it's the most enlightened place I've ever been! My guess is that German is the youngest of the language families, and not having been contaminated that much by other languages (though Germans now are afraid of it being contaminated by English), it has the simplest and most efficient grammar. From (12), this leads to a simple and efficient style of reasoning. I also guess that ancient Tibetan had very efficient grammar, and this is why people like the Dalai Lama who study ancient Tibetan are also so enlightened. To be enlightened is to understand that reason and faith are not at all incongruous. The terrible moral crime of Nazism taught Germans that order and unity must go together. Nazism was complete faith in reason and rejection of the unity of mankind.
14. The Scientific Revolution happened when people realized that by experimentation, they could rapidly contribute to the evolution of ideas. The scientific method is, at its very core, a way to speed up evolution by creating more variation and keeping what works. I thank Ms. Brackett in 6th grade for teaching me the scientific method and being the best science teacher in the world. All weather is created by variable distribution of heat on the earth caused by the sun; see, I remember! One addition: heat = energy = mass/gravity/spacetime = life = neurons = connection = love
15. The internet is one big fucking brain, making connections just like brains do. We connect with the internet just like we connect with humans: by asking it questions and hoping for satisfying answers. When we connect with someone or something, we call it love.
16. There are only certain questions we can ask if we want a satisfying answer. Computer programmers and mathematicians (all logicians) ask questions in Boolean grammar (and, not, or, equal) and there only two satisfying answers (yes and no). People, in addition to asking logic questions, ask questions about spacetime (where, when), names (who, what), and reason (how, why). But there are only a few satisfying answers:
who/what/when/where? here/now
how/why? because
Be and cause at the very same time!! It's so easy!!
17. Humans love asking questions and getting satisfying answers, but we also love surprise. The emotion of hope is our desire for surprise. This simple emotion explains everything irrational about what we do: beliefs we know we shouldn't hold (that's Dad), pulling for sports teams even when they're no good (that's Sean, the ultimate Cubs fan), playing the lottery (that's Grandpa), and loving unconditionally (that's Mom and Luana).
LIFE IS A SURPRISE PARTY! AMERICA NEEDS A SURPRISE PARTY IN 2008!
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