Priming, Framing, Transcending & Enjoying (part 2)

Philosophy is the study of living. The absence of a true philosophy can destroy a life. We may want what we want, but we get what we get. Sometimes we don’t know why we want what we want or, even less, why we get what we have.

There are about five billion web pages on the Internet (source). Readers who return to a Philosophy of Enjoyment or who stumble upon it, are looking for something.

Unless you’re a bot—an autonomous program on a network—you’re here for a reason.

We’re more or less a mystery to ourselves. That’s why we say and do things and think later, “Why did I say and/or do what I said and/or did?”

The post “Priming, Framing, Transcending & Enjoying” (2017) produced evidence from the sciences that says we don’t always know why we think and do what we think and do do. We can be manipulated at an unconscious level by priming and framing (source).

Priming can influence any decision including one’s judgment of happiness. Priming is when an exposure to a stimulus activates mental pathways without conscious guidance. Those pathways can become mental ruts with repetition.

In this example, dotted lines show primes from words that sound similar and straight lines show words that have associations (source).

In the dictionary priming is a “substance that prepares something for use or action.” It comes from the Latin primus meaning “first.” Priming here means the same except, in psychology, instead of a substance preparing a surface or priming a pump, it’s a memory triggered by a sensation that leads to streams of associations.

We see the word “BLUE” and get confused. Priming is more than a wandering mind triggered by sensation. Every perception that we have consciously or unconsciously sets off a chain of ideas in our neural network (McRaney, 2011).

Magicians trick us through our brain’s limitations. If life is a joke, wanting is the set up, getting is the punchline. You get it or you don’t. If you get it, you laugh and enjoy. If you don’t, there are no spontaneous eruptions of glee.

Look at Jim Morrison from the Doors. Jim wasn’t into playing it safe. Better to be wasted than see life being wasted. For Jim Morrison, life boiled down to having fun regardless of consequences.

In 1968 Jim Morrison sang, “No one here gets out alive.” It’s from the song “Five To One”. Jim had no idea when he sang that one-liner that he’d be dead three years later.

And so it is for many people who argue that nursing homes are full of people who played it safe and now live with mental deficiencies. Rather a full life that is shorter than a slow life that is longer, so the argument goes. For Jim and others like him, the hardest thing to do is do nothing.

But doing nothing can be a good thing. By not doing and enjoying a moment of stillness, time feels extended. You can see how driven, agitated and restless our brains normally are (see also: “Enjoy a Funny Feeling“).

Can you watch a pot boil?

Can you stop and stare like a sheep or a cow? Can you enjoy the stillness of a lull or the silence of no sound? Can you not do anything, at least, for a while?

Existence is the starting point. If you don’t exist the absence of pain is assured and the absence of pleasure, although sad, isn’t bad either. 

Want buys you a Kinder egg in hopes that you enjoy the toy inside. What you get from wanting is a prize, guaranteed. 

Rather than fight the current of your stream of consciousness or think what you want is important, go with it. Let life take you.

What did Kurt Vonnegut Jr. say in Breakfast of Champions (1973) when a character sees the question, “What’s the purpose of life?” Answer: “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!”

The universe exists because you’re in it and of it for when you cease to exist, you and your universe go together.

If you’re reading this, this reading is your life. Primed by sensations, you make a collage of images from your consciousness pasted from memories, emotions and thoughts that exist only in your skull.

Memories hidden from conscious awareness prime associations without you knowing why. That’s when you confabulate—as in, fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for a loss of memory.

Framing is like priming except different.

Large and small decisions are based on a “frame of mind.” Words used to frame perceptions are based on thoughts and feelings these same words evoke in you. Framing is circular or, more usually, rectangular.

Appearances frame perceptions based on visual cues. Feelings frame perceptions based on emotional responses. We think we know what affects our behaviour, but in truth, we don’t always. It’s how you spin it.

The painter René Magritte once said, “There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us.”

On TV when someone is falsely accused or “framed,” evidence can be construed as damning or inconsequential. If you effectively frame, you strategically magnify losses and gains depending upon the desired outcomes.

The truth is, most of the time, we’re unaware of the influence of our unconscious. We react in the situation (the ground) to some thing embedded (the figure). We toggle between positive and negative and sometimes mistakenly frame what we think we saw.

Framing is how we see an idea, issue or reality based on context. One’s perception of reality is not set in stone or passively observed. One constructs reality as one sees it.

“Each morning when I awake, I experience a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.“

You could be somewhere and smell a rum-dipped cigar. Automatically you think of your grandfather. Grandfather loved his garden. His garden was replaced by a Walmart which reminds you, pick up vegetables and rum.

To enjoy the full experience of this movie, there is laughter and tears, but there’s a big difference between a brain as thing and the experience of thinking or the heart as a pump and not the home of loving.

The trick is to enjoy what transpires as it’s transpiring.

Enjoy a Little Dream

“Tower of Babel” by Damian Parlicki.

A philosopher has a dream. In the dream she’s lying on her back beside a precarious tower. From her vantage point, it’s like she’s inside the Eiffel Tower looking up. The top looks far, far away.

Without a sound and ever so slowly – like a cargo ship setting out to sea – starting at the top, the tower begins to fall in slow motion straight down upon the dreamer.

With terror and disbelief she thinks, “That’s it. I’m dead.”

Inside the Eiffel Tower looking up.

Within a minute she will be killed. The screaming words of AC/DC come to mind, “I’m back in black. I hit the sack. I’ve been too long. I’m glad to be back” (Back In Black, 1980) or as another poet put it:

This is the end, my only friend, the end.
Of our elaborate plans, the end.
Of everything that stands, the end.
No safety or surprise, the end (The Doors, “This Is the End,” 1967).

In death there is no pain, only regret.

It’s like the final scene in the the TV series The Sopranos. The family is in a diner talking and eating onion rings as “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey is playin’ on the jukebox. Just as Steve Perry sings, “Don’t stop!” BINK – it cuts to black silence and remains black silence for longer than is comfortable. Ten seconds elapse before credits roll.

The silent black nothingness surprises us. We want to go back, but can’t. It’s the silent slam of a door.

Some will win. Some will lose. Some were born to sing the blues.
Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on, and on, and on…
(Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin‘”, 1981).

AJ says, “Focus on the good times.” “Don’t be sarcastic,” says his father. “Isn’t that what you said one time? Try to remember the times that were good?” “I did?” says Tony with pause. “Yeah? Well, it’s true, I guess.”

And so it is that we too focus on good times and let bad times roll off like duck water. It is now the dreamer who is included as one of “those people who died, died” like in the song by Jim Carroll.

And then… the dream ends. She wakes up. She sees her bed, a cat in the window and hears crows singing brightly, “Caa! Caa! Caa!” There is no tower. There never was. Dreamers see worlds behind closed eyes.

“Is that what it feels like to die?” she wonders, looking around at what was old made new.

“Is it, BINK – cut to black silence, roll credits? What if death is like being born? How would you know? Do you remember being born? Do you know when you became aware of yourself as you?”

Is it not the case that as far back as you can remember, you’ve been you? Are you not the only you you’ve ever known? It’s always been you. It’s always been now.

And so it has been for anyone ever. All we know is now! Here you are then something happens – a tower falls, a bit of cancer: Cut to black silence. You’re gone then BINK! back from a dream beginning anew.

That could explain why squirrels and birds look so surprised.

Time feels permanent while you’re in it, but it isn’t. The year could be 1822, 1922 or 2022 – doesn’t matter – you roll in the time you’re in.

Flash – you’re at work. Splash – you’re eating dinner. Zip it’s tomorrow, all the while, without interruption, you’ve been yourself to you alone.

What if we each become aware of our self as we go along living from the beginning but the you-ness in each of us feels (and is) the same! Why not? Maybe ‘you’ is a relative term?

After all, we’re all ‘you’  to each other and ‘I’ to ourselves. Every night you close your eyes to disappear and every morning you open them to be yourself again and so does everyone all the time.

Everything is in motion. Cue music: “About Time” or “The Knick.”

A woman says, “I’m Mavis. I live in Moose Jaw. I’m middle-aged, overweight and I work at Tim Hortons.”

Mavis has an idea of herself that others have come to share, but no one but Mavis knows what it’s like to be Mavis from birth to demise.

When Mavis is gone, only the idea of her will remain.

A man says, “I’m Archie from Arizona. I teach high school and play video games.” Archie has been acculturated. He knows who he is and goes around proving it. He judges others using himself as exemplar.

Charles Dickens wrote, “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other” (A Tale of Two Cities).

What is that secret? Can you see it? Peer into the pupil of another. What do you see? Do you see a black hole the same as your own? Maybe they’re not even just the same as in similar but the ‘same’ like the space around a star is the ‘same’ space near or far.

Eye see you.

A black hole isn’t a “hole” at all. It isn’t even black. It’s an orb in space that looks black because light can’t escape. If you jumped on one you’d descend towards it so slowly that “it would take an infinite amount of time” for you to be atomically disassembled and added to it (Universe Today).

Isn’t it odd how black holes look a lot like pupils in eyeballs, which, by the way, also absorb light rays (Wikipedia)?

Artist’s conception of a black hole, Universe Today, 2015.

An old philosopher said, “Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death” (Schopenhauer, 1851). The question is: If your lifespan is 24 hours, how will you live it?

A trick to enjoying a rock and roll philosophy is to recognize the significance of existence and in Hard Times rock it like Ray Charles and in Good Times roll like the Cars.

Enjoy the role of you playing you always and forever (or at least until a tower falls on you).

Enjoy A Point of View

So, here we are. Enjoying an opening. Parting the curtain, as it were.

In 1571 poet Richard Edwards wrote, “Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage / Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage,” and so it is: the sage is wise, the lookers-on is not (but thinks he is) and the philosopher knows he’s not so seeks it out.

In 1623 William Shakespeare had a melancholy character named Jacques say in Act II Scene VII of As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Then melancholy Jacques explained the seven ages of man from infant to old age as, “this strange eventful history / Is second childishness and mere oblivion / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

In 1971 another melancholy man sang of realization, “When all the stars are falling down / Into the sea and on the ground / And angry voices carry on the wind / A beam of light will fill your head / And you’ll remember what’s been said / By all the good men this world’s ever known. / Another man is what you’ll see / Who looks like you and looks like me / And yet somehow he will not feel the same” (Moody Blues “Melancholy Man”).

Whether that beam of light hits you depends on your version of reality. Are you full of yourself? Do you see? What do you think when not thinking?

In 1927 Martin Heidegger (1899-1976) the philosopher (not the plumber) described the feeling as being thrown into the life we’re in. We don’t notice we’re alive. In self-absorption we lose touch with the mystery of existence and the interconnections of being.

A bankrobber bankrobbing.

In 2015 Stanford University found that when one wins the “birth lottery” by being born into a high-income family, the economic pay-off is huge. Children from low-income families will have few opportunities for economic mobility (Stanford News).

In 1980 the Clash sang of this, “Some is rich, and some is poor / that’s the way the world is / but I don’t believe in lying back / sayin’ how bad your luck is” (“Bankrobber”).

Awareness of our “thrown-ness” is like the 1989 to ’93 TV show “Quantum Leap” where a physicist leaps through space-time to take the place of people.

In 1981 the Talking Heads sang of being thrown, “You might find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and you may ask yourself. Well, how did I get here?” (“Once in a Lifetime”).

In 1954 Ernst Bloch said in The Principle of Hope that being thrown into the world is like a dog’s life and in 1971 The Doors put that idea in verse, “Into this world we’re thrown / Like a dog without a bone” (“Riders on the Storm”).

It is with a flash or a CLICK that we get it. In a moment of incongruity, we see greed bubbling out of self-importance, “All for me and nothing for you!” We see people do terrible things and understand completely.

People don’t know what they’re doing. If they did, they wouldn’t.

We know the billionaire in her gated community, the office worker with a chip on her shoulder, the shoe salesman with a wig fooling no one, the egomaniac electrician without imagination, the angry waiter, the crystal meth addict, the gangster…whatever! We know them all through imagination.

We know what people feel. We feel it too. We know why people do what they do. It’s like each of us is everyone and everyone is you!

When this realization occurs, it’s like the ending to Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” call, “With my lightning bolts a glowin’, I can see where I am go-going! You better look out below.”

In 1963 Kurt Vonnegut said in Cat’s Cradle that the greatest student of human nature is the one with the quickest sense of humour. But like a messy room  we put off cleaning, we resist most what most needs doing. Most of the time there’s a split in our mind. We’re half-conscious, half-living machines. To restore ourselves it takes a conscious return to our senses.

In 2002 Cold Play sang about starting again, “Nobody said it was easy / No one ever said it would be this hard. Oh take me back to the start… Questions of science; science and progress. Do not speak as loud as my heart” (“The Scientist”).

In 1939 writer Henry Miller recommended we choose a language, “as fluid as music in order not to be broken on the sharp spokes of the intellect” (“The Cosmological Eye”).

Imagine you have a dream. In the dream you look in the bathroom mirror but the face you see isn’t your own. It freaks you out. You run downstairs to tell, but people don’t understand your language and you wake up in a cold sweat.

As you think about this dream, you realize how funny it is. You realize that sad and vicious people are taking the game too serious. Better to live and let live. Better to enjoy. We are living creatures of mind and matter. Hear the music from Interstellar!

When you lighten-up, you see yourself as not there.

You become an ethereal being as what you see becomes you. You see your point of view as everyone’s.

You dig those crazy ups and downs, those beauteous essences, disappointments, struggles, burps, pains, ugliness, injustices because flaws are absorbed in perfection.

The world is always as it could be.

Because it is.