You have to respect your analytical abilities, your choices of sources, your notes on lectures, your own way of studying (self-pedagogy), one’s critical thinking, your choice of the course being a good one, your choice of school, the goal of your studies, the potential use you will have for the course and the grade. Sure you will get a grade which will be the school’s measure of what you did, and even that you need to put in a context of your own values and plans and how you interpret, use their sense of your learning. IOW to use the course well requires confidence at the meta-level that doing it is worthwhile for you and your own goals. They you need self-respect around all the skills needed to pursue your own goals and if they include doing well in the course according to the professor, confidence in your skills in satisfying his or her criteria. There is no passive learning nor contextless events.
and as far as the open mind - this concept is really quite vague, but one cannot learn simply passively, not that you are saying this. One can come close to learning simply with an open mind through rote learning, memorizing facts another has given one, but if the idea is to have some skill with those facts, one must still have confidence in being able to paraphrase, apply to concrete situations if the learning is about concepts, and draw abstract conclusions, if the focus is on specific events or facts. Any academic course is going to require skills in interacting with the information and arguments/justifications/evidence presented. And here you must respect your own abilities to interact with the ideas and apply them. An open mind generally means a willingness to try out new ideas, to consider them. Even at this minimal level one must have confidence in one’s understanding. One needs confidence in one’s own introspective skills - am I rejecting this (or accepting this) for emotional reasons or for rational reasons. One thus also needs confidence in one’s analytical abilities and then even intuition: nagging feelings that something is missing or not justified, for example.
Notice how Fixed Cross said that if you do not respect yourself you cannot respect the standard by which you measure other things. IOW sure, you can have an open mind, but if you don’t respect yoruself and your abilities then you can’t really respect your evaluations of other things. The author of this text I got in my ancient greece course was well argued and provided strong evidence for its conclusions AND I do not respect my intellectual abilities
just doesn’t work. How would I know? Why would I respect my conclusion about that work?
For me most of that would come under the definition of self assessment rather than self respect which I think are not the same
Self respect is accepting that you have moral value as a human being because of who you are and of what you think or believe
Self assessment is knowing what you are good at and not good at and how you can improve your skillset for what is necessary
For me also an open mind is simply avoiding all dogmatism by remaining emotionally detached from whatever is being studied
For it is merely accepting that within certain disciplines such as philosophy for example there will be multiple interpretations
One can acknowledge this and understand each as much as possible without necessarily being commited to any particular one
Also when you have acquired a certain degree of self awareness you should know where your capabilities are
This knowledge is not something that has to be acquired for it should already exist based on past experience
I for example know what my academic capabilities are without having to analyse them in order to know what they are
For I can instinctively assess whether a particular course is something I could do without requiring any real evaluation
OK, but then self-assessment is neutral. You have self-assessment means you evaluate yourself. Self-respect implies that you have a positive self-assessment. You respect your skills and abilities. You respect yourself as a learner or whatever.
It seems to me he was talking about measuring, evaluating, something else. IOW drawing conclusions. Not remaining detached, but taking a position. Whether one should or should not do this, I don’t think you are quite reacting to what you quoted in your first post above.
Which means you have formed a postive regard for some of your capabilities. If you don’t have a positive regard for your abilities, how could you have a postive regard for any conclusions you might draw about a text, a book, an opinion expressed by a lecturer. Whether this is instinctive or not seems beside the point. You can’t make the evaluation of the information, position, idea, if you don’t respect your own abilities.
Somehow I think you are responding to some other position.
The words that you have used there - positive / respect - are emotional ones which I do not personally apply to ability
Knowing whether or not I can do something is just practical knowledge that requires no emotional input from me at all
I can and indeed do assess my abilities from an objective perspective rather than from a subjective one
And so avoid any unnecessary use of emotion and try instead to have detachment as my default position
Indeed. We seem to generally agree on a lot of things, and to have explored quite a lot. Differences are largely due to different histories with certain terms.
The point you made about Buddhism and the limbic system is of extreme importance to me -
Id like to spend some thought on what would amount to methods for strengthening the limbic system.
Im sure much that occurs in the west could be designated as such a method - but it would be very useful to think about it anyway. Perhaps to form some kind of discipline where he limbic system is strengthened and purified of unnecessary disgust, despair, neurosis, etc.
I guess this approach would make me into something of a psychiatrist.
Another way to look at the goal could be to not treat the limbic system as the enemy and then to try to integrate the brain’s different parts.
There is a huge set of powerful judgments out there that you must choose one part of the brain over others. I don’t think this is true. I think they can work in conjunction.
But what isn’t an idiotic idea necessarily is to rank the different parts. They cant all be decisive in all situations. Our time is definitely marked by a completely chaotic relation of the different parts of the brain. Nothing makes sense, yet everything has its reasons.
What, in youe psychiatric opinion, would be the most important part of the brain to anchor oneself in, lets say, in a morning exercise?
The brain may have many individual parts but they work together rather than operate in isolation
The limbic system communicates with the amygdala which is primarily responsible for fear and anxiety
The amygdala is in the reptilian part of the brain so it is very old and primitive compared to other parts
It is also responsible for moral and physical disgust because disgust in any form is based upon fear or anxiety
It would have been a more active region in early homo sapiens because of the evolutionary need for survival
I’m all about da mutual respect, honey… it’s fundamental, at a certain point in society, upwards… I’ve seen it in action… it’s an important aspect in business and politics and social settings.
Once respect has been lost, it’s very hard to gain back… and near impossible for some, that are so short-sighted that their vision prohibits such necessary formalities to materialise as true.
Human Behavioural Biology / Professor Robert Sapolsky / Stanford University / Lecture I4 Limbic System
I watched the first of these by chance then just went through all of the 22 that he gave
The first lecture is absolutely amazing and is one of the best ones that I have ever seen
His other single lecture video on shamanism and the biology of religiosity is just as good
A world class education freely available on YouTube to absolutely anyone - the internet as it should be
I intend to watch all of these lectures as many more times until I understand them as much as possible
It can work like that, but we tend tend to try to suppress the limbic system with the neocortex. Different cultures do this more than others. Different amounts of judgment and suppression. I think this is mostly unnecessary.
The amygdala is part of the limbic system.
The amydala is not in the reptilian brain, but in the limibic system that came with mammals. Though the triune brain theory is controversial these days. But if we are looking at the brain this way, the amygdala is not in the reptilian part of the brain.
Dsigust is regulated by the insular cortex. It is strongly related to the limbic system, but not generally considered part of it.
Yes, the is essential to building a circuitry of being, a self-valuing consisting of more than one person.
Mutual expressions of valuing is the lifeblood or heartbeat of such an entity.
The Philosophers Clan kept failing because of failure to attain this mechanism between all its members.
Yes. It takes a powerful will to favour strategy over the “right” to dissociate given by insult.
They seem dissimilar to me. Though disgust will cause fear and anxiety, anxiety and fear do not suffice to produce disgust.
I wonder about that. It seems hard to live in a city without making a measure of disgust an unspoken precondition underneath any judgment, simply because there are so very many humans with all of them different weaknesses to encounter without any warnings.
Like in an engine, no single module should in general be working at maximum capacity and none should be not working at all.
It is a balancing act, and because there is no standard for a literally defined perfect homeostasis, it is also an art; once has to create the criteria for ones own sort of balance. A human cant avoid creating its own world based on the kind of cerebral balance it is capable of attaining. Beliefs serve these balances, they are like default setting presets. A lot of subtle considerations hidden behind a name, a button, a trigger.
What is this controversy about?
Interesting. That makes sense - it would be the function of that which cannot be processed in limbic systemic terms.