Reddit mentions: The best books about emotional mental health

So I think a natural progression to this topic is to ask "What makes human intelligence unique?"

Again, this is a very active area of research. By no means is there a single consensus. We are constantly learning new things about ourselves and animals.

Animals are complex beings, and scientists for the past few decades have come to understand that the divide between us and them is not black and white, but rather a continuum of shared abilities. Animals exhibit a lot of similar behaviours and can even do things that we can't do (even on a cognitive level). They have morals; they have emotions; they make and modify tools; they can solve multi-step problems; they have culture and traditions; they can lie and cheat; they know when they are being treated unfairly; they mourn the dead; they have complex communication systems; they feel empathy; and some recognized themselves in a mirror (e.g. mirror test) and are able to distinguish self from other. So these aspects of intelligence and cognition, and very likely many other aspects that we have not fully explored, are not unique to humans. Given the complexity of other animals, it is very likely were are not the only species to have consciousness, that is to say other animals also have theory of mind. It may be more akin to the consciousness of a 3-5 year old, but none the less, they still know themselves from others. So what does make us unique? What led to our unique kind of intelligence?

We know of some factors that contributed to our awareness and unique intelligence as compared to other living species. It is important to know that this is a very active area of study in many different disciplines (psychology, biology, animal behaviour, psychiatry, physiology, anthropology, neurology, linguistics, genetics, archeology...).

• Traits we inherited from our distant ancestors. Obviously all species are a cumulation of inherited traits. Who we are today is largely due to who "we" were in the distant past. We inherited a strong tendency to be a very social species from our mammalian ancestry. Mammals are social beings, humans included. We inherited opposable thumbs from our early primate ancestors. Humans are not the only species with opposable thumbs so it is not a trait that is unique to our species. However, the inheritance of thumbs enabled us and the other primates to develop fine motor skills like precision grip. This enables us to manipulate objects, and make/modify tools. Humans also inherited an upright bipedal posture from our early ancestors. Humans are not the only bipedal species (after all, all birds are bipedal!) but our upright posture has given us many advantages, namely that it frees our hands to do other tasks.
  
  
• Brain/body size ratio & exceptional brain gyrification is a somewhat useful indicator of how intelligence a species is. The correlation is decent among related mammal species, but it breaks down when applied to distantly related animals. It underestimates intelligence in heavy animals like horses and overestimates small animals like mice and birds. You also have to consider what the animal's brain has evolved for. Bird's typically have very large brains for their body but may not be exceptionally smart. A lot of that large bird brain is used for flight calculations and isn't available for higher level processing. Fruit flies have enormous brains compared to their mass, but that brain is simply too small to have any real thought processes. Humans are highly intelligent because they have an extremely large brain for their normal body mass and that brain has evolved specifically to perform complex thought. Size isn't the only factor, scientists also consider the degree of specialization, complexity of neural connections, and degree of brain gyrification. Humans score high on all these physical qualifiers associated with increased intelligence.
  
  
• Two cognitive traits thought to be unique to humans - shared intentionality and cumulative culture. Shared intentionality "sometimes called ‘we’ intentionality, refers to collaborative interactions in which participants share psychological states with one another". It goes one step beyond being able to solve problems as a group, it involves anticipating the needs of others and the situation in order to solve a common goal. This requires incredible foresight, flexibility, and excellent problem solving skills. It requires an almost hyper-social group structure. We couldn't stick 100 chimpanzees on a plane and expect it to land in one piece...but you can stick 100 human strangers and all, for the most part, get along just fine. This level of cooperation is rarely seen among other animals (save for the Eusocial insects, naked mole rats, and perhaps Callitrichid monkeys). Shared-intentionality enables us to achieve what other species cannot. Cumulative culture goes beyond the cultures exhibited by other animals. Other animals have culture where [non-essential] traditions are passed on from one generation to the next and are typically modified slowly over many generations. Humans also have traditions, but these are past on much more easily between individuals. Moreover, these traditions are quickly modified, almost unlimited times within a single generation. We are able to rapidly build upon the ideas of others and modify these ideas to suit new problems. Moreover, our adults, as compared to the adults of other species, are much better at learning and retaining new skills or traditions. Generally speaking, the age old adage "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" applies well to the non-human animal kingdom.
  
  These two traits, shared intentionality and cumulative culture, led to the development of other aspects of our being which are unique (e.g language). Everything else that we can do is just a happy by-product of these two traits: being able to go to the moon, or build a super dam, or create art, or think in the abstract, maths, industrial agriculture...Those things are by-products of our level of cognition. Our uniqueness is derived from shared intentionality and cumulative culture plus a couple of random physical traits that we were lucky enough to inherit from our distant ancestors - a big brain, bipedalism, and opposable thumbs. We are not the only species with a large brain-to-body ratio, we are not the only bipedal species, and we are certainly not the only species with opposable thumbs - these are physical characteristics that we inherited from our distant primate ancestors. These traits built the foundation for what was to come.
  
  Whatever the pressure around 40,000-50,000 years ago we notice a significant shift in the archeological record. All of a sudden humans are making cave art, our hunting tools are changing rapidly, we began to engage in long distant trade, we made jewellery and we even had symbolic figures - perhaps the seeds of language. This is known as the period of behavioural modernity. Not only did these humans look like us, they acted like us too. Its hypothesized that an infant from this time could be raised in a modern context with little to no intellectual deficit...we wouldn't be able to pick them out of a crowd. Humans haven't gotten more intelligent over time. It is hypothesized that a human from 50,000 years ago is anatomically and behaviourally modern.
  
  So, if we aren't any smarter - why do we have cell phones and galaxy print jeggings and people didn't way back then? Increasing complexity - we know more than people in the past because we've built upon what they've learned. Humans have always been smart, and our great benefit is that we build on other people's discoveries. Someone figured out how to domesticate plants, someone figured out how to sew cloth, someone figured out how to weave materials, someone figured out synthetic materials and dyes, someone put it all together in those jeggings. We just build on what other people have found out. This is cumulative culture in action. Humans today are not more intelligent than humans living 50,000 years ago - we both have the same potential. The difference between us and them is we have a wealth of shared knowledge to draw upon, and they did not. Humans 5000 years from now could be asking the very same question..."Why didn't they invent warp travel, its so easy!"...well we don't have the wealth of another 5000 years of experience and scientific study to draw upon. We only have what our ancestors gave us. As more and more knowledge is accumulated we should in theory progress faster and faster (without consideration to other limitations to progress).

Preface: This is my first post and it ended up rather larger than I intended, but such is the nature of this subject matter. Additionally please forgive any spelling/grammar errors, I am far from perfect in this regard and have come to rely too heavily on auto correct which constantly misses "to vs too" and so on... Bellow crept into my honours thesis when it was supposed to be below, you end up reading what is in your head not what is on the page, and for that I appologise in advance. Gulp Here goes the submit button.

I am doing my PhD thesis on something in this area (I am a philosopher) and thought I would just give my $0.02... which is actually a bit steep for what its worth. There is a way out of this "pathological trap" I think but it requires a fundamental overhaul of the way we treat the social sciences as a whole. There is essentially two things going on in what we label "social science" one is immutable and unchangeable and that is science, the other is closer to a social strategy than anything else. If a theory depicts the best strategy in a social situation it is not a science, it is a strategy, it does not tell us this is how things are, only that this is something we could choose to do. A lot of people seem to be confused by the difference. A scientific theory by itself is ethically neutral, it either is or is not the case. A strategic theory is not so disinterested, it is something that may be willingly acted upon with our own free will and the fallout of those decisions is on we, the actors.

To give an example, we know thalidomide works on suppressing nausea, and there was a time we did not know it caused birth abnormalities. So a strategy was devised. Given what we know about thalidomide we should use it to treat morning sickness. Strategy worked, really well, and 9 months latter had unforeseen repercussions. We would nail a doctor to the wall for administering thalidomide in this day and age to a pregnant women, s/he could not hide behind "its science and thus ethically neutral!" the strategic decisions of the doctor make him/her morally culpable.

Now the undergrad economists out there will shout "but where are you going with this, thalidomide has side effects, there are no side effects with neoclassical economics" while the post grad economists will shake their heads at them (not in all but in some cases, most undergrad economists I know are very sure of their discipline while most post grad and lecturers are much less so). Neoclassical economics (or more precisely in this case, the self interested "rational" agent) has essentially created a gigantic prisoner's dilemma, and the mantra is "fuck less yee be fucked" (again, granted not in all cases but usually where issues like these arise)

I can imagine two opposing cries from the same field, one saying "but that's just a model to facilitate prediction!" and the other saying "you obviously are misrepresenting "self interested" it is just to facilitate an agents unknowable motives!"... but this is confusing which is it? something definite we can use for prediction or a place holder because we cannot predict humans? It cannot be both, one of these options supposes that we are going to get reliable results from it, the other that we just call whatever happens "self interest" and have no way of knowing what will happen, or that we will just confirm all the results we get after the fact. (I cut some info here about Thomas Reid and his theories on Credulity and Veracity, I will link it in the reference at the end) It is in actual fact a worst case scenario, when Adam Smith used his butcher baker brewer example it was an appeal to their self interest not because they will not respond to anything else, but because it has more chance of working in worst case scenarios as well as best case scenarios and everything in between. This is a strategy, and I must admit a rather compelling and persuasive one. Here in lies the reflexivity, which is the amount a strategy is persuasive in terms of the decisions we make in the real world, that have a direct impact on the results predicted by the strategy. (Sorry that is rather confusing... "What will really cook your noodle later is would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?" - The Oracle - The Matrix [sorry if that's a misquote no time to go back and watch it again])

Sandri has done experiments into this area in ultimatum games, PD games and so forth, turns out that you are more likely to follow the expected results when you know what the expected results are and why. Who would of thunk it aye? I am not suggesting that if you learn about capitalism you will instantly be transformed into a monster or even that it is a sure thing, just that the arguments/strategies generated from what you learn are now part of the internal deliberative process when it comes to decision making in the area it is concerned with... it had damn well better be or what is the point of studding it? The point I am trying to make is that the results change after people have learned about the theory and the expected results... if it was a science they would not, only game theory and strategies do this. These are better models for understanding, explaining and predicting behavior for social strategies than some idealism of absolute knowledge, luckily we kind of recognise this.

So I mentioned there was a way out?

Well as the champion of neoclassical economics (Friedman) once put it in a paper on positive economics, the predictive power of a theory is more important than the assumptions that go into it, now I disagree completely but I cannot fault his reasoning... he just has his assumptions wrong. So knowing that knowing a theory makes you more likely to pursue it (the exact amount of which varies from theory to theory, even its valance changes but I wont bother with that here) and that it is a strategy and the actors employing that strategy should be morally culpable just like the thalidomide doctor. This in turn alters the weights in the game, I could choose to fire those employees and get a pay rise and call it efficiency, oh but my science is now widely recognized as a strategy and knowing that, I am also a fuckwad for doing it. But first why would it be widely recognized as a strategy? And second why should I care if I am a fuckwad?

First: predictability, we can get more accurate results, by treating the strategies as strategies rather than sciences. Sure we also need to admit that employing these strategies makes us ethically responsible but that's a small price to pay for more accurate predictions right?

Second: Because people don't actually like to be fuckwads in general (outside of the internet and high school I mean)... it's a ghost, a boogieman, none of my friends act like the self interested rational agent to the point of being a fuckwad, well ok may be once or twice but they are usually repentant and remorseful for it (myself included). However, what about all of them out there? Just because I have overwhelming experience completely contrary to this construct does not mean that the rest of the world is not out to get me! I just happen to know the best people on the planet and the rare few. So it is ok if I am a fuckwad to those strangers out there because they would of been a fuckwad to me right? No, of course not, it is unacceptable for anyone to be a fuckwad. Fuckwad is not the norm we should strive for, no matter what the strategy tells us. But this reflex stems from the very understandable desire "not to be the chump" to take Robert Franks words.

Not all of these strategies are bad mind you some strategies are really good (even within neoclassical economics, and capitalism as a whole) for everyone and these now (after we accept them as strategies and have accounted for reflexive influence... not going into that here) have probably a greater weighting, given the new information, we may finally stop prescribing thalidomide to pregnant women.

Are there tons of holes in this argument, sure. But cut me some slack I kept it under 1000 words... well I did initially now I check it it is around 1500. Also it may sound like I am picking on neoclassical economics here and its not really my intention, it is the strategies that it generates and their persuasive nature, even then this in itself is neither good nor bad till some one actually acts on them. And all of the social sciences have some amount of strategies within them and the reflexivity entangled with that.

Some of the things/people/articles referenced not putting up a proper bibliography here as it seems to me this may be more productive in giving credit for those that lack access to JStor and the like.

http://www.amazon.com/Reflexivity-Economics-Experimental-Self-Referentiality-Contributions/dp/3790820911 Sandri (warning horrably esoteric and dry read... very informative but yeah... it's a hefty price for eye sand paper.)
http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Nations-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553585975 Smith (also available on Project Gutenberg, I think so many people quote the bits that help them and ignore the gigantic tracts that condemn them from this)
http://www.amazon.com/Essays-Positive-Economics-Phoenix-Books/dp/0226264033 Friedman (The guy was brilliant I cannot take that from him, Samuelson disagreed and so do I and they managed to remain friends and civil. I wont reference any Samuelson here as it is not really relevant to the current discussion out side of the "scientification" of economics by the mathematisation and formalising of economics.)
http://www.amazon.com/Passions-Within-Reason-Strategic-Emotions/dp/0393960226 Frank (Cracking read)
http://www.amazon.com/Inquiry-Human-Principles-Common-Sense/dp/0271020717 Reid (Another Cracker and well ahead of its time I think, Also I have just discovered I have lost my copy.)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Matrix/dp/B000HAB4KS (For the hell of it)

*Edited Spelling/Grammar/Matrix ref

Thanks for making it this far.

Wookiee

The ability to feel, to have emotions, are not limited to human beings. Other animals also have and express emotions, from reptiles, to birds, to mammals. However, one could argue that mammals do it best. Our hallmark is that mammals, humans included, are very social beings...with sociality comes the ability to feel complex emotions.

Affective neuroscience is a very interesting area of study which examines "the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood." It also examines how our own neural mechanisms are mirrored in animals (and especially mammals) because of shared ancestry. The study of motion is definitely a very active area of science that permeates many different fields - evolutionary biology, animal behaviour, human behaviour, animal communication, human communication, origin of communication, psychology, psychiatry, neurobiology...each look at different questions concerning emotions.

In ELI5 words this means that animals are certainly capable of feeling emotions because the neural mechanisms that produce emotions are conserved through evolution, and are similar to the neural mechanisms that produce emotions in ourselves. All mammals, being related through common ancestry, have even more similar and conserved mechanisms - humans are of course mammals too!

But a few things to note:

1. The way animals express a particular emotion may differ from the way humans express that emotion. For example, humans often smile to exhibit happiness. But for the rest of the primate order smiling is either a signal of submissiveness or fear. This does not mean that other primates are incapable of feeling happiness, but that they very likely express it in different ways from ourselves. We also have to be very mindful that other animals, even cognitively complex ones, may be physically constrained and incapable of complex facial expressions. For example, we know dolphins are capable of a lot of complex cognitive tasks, they are able to identify themselves in the mirror and they may even have names for one another...but they don't have the facial musculature to make the expressions that are, well, as expressive as ours. Their emotions may not even be obvious for this reason, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
   
   
2. Humans like to make emotions poetic, like love. But love is simply a kind of attachment emotion. Humans become attached to each other and objects, sometimes to the point of obsession. Animals also become attached to each other. Mothers and their infants, bonding pairs of adults...all forms of attachment exhibited in the animal kingdom. Again if you were interested in studying love, as a scientist you would actually study attachment. I recommend the book affective neuroscience: the foundations of human and animal emotions. It can be rather technical, but it is very good read. In any case, if we want to objectively study emotion and their origins, we sort of need to take the "humanity" out of emotions and look at them in a more universal way.
   
   As to why emotions would be beneficial there are a number of good reasons. First, it allows social beings to create meaningful attachments to each other, strengthening group bonds. This may allow a group to be better able to accomplish a task, which may benefit some or all of the group members. For example, defending a food resource from a neighbouring group. Emotions might also help an individual remember a negative experience. For example, becoming frustrated when being treated unfairly. This might help an individual remember who is helpful, and who is not. Even if the animal cannot recall a specific memory, they may form impressions of individuals, in the same way human babies form impressions of those around them. Thus for a social being, emotions may help an individual form positive or negative associations with other individuals.
   
   Edit: For something a little more directed towards the layman, the moral lives of animals is a very good read, as is age of empathy.

There is no way of exactly knowing if an animal has theory of mind yet we can try to find out by using carefully constructed behavioural tests as well as including observational data on day to day behaviours of individuals. One example might be the mirror test: "to determine whether an animal possesses the ability to recognize itself in a mirror. It is the primary indicator of self-awareness in non-human animals and marks entrance to the mirror stage by human children in developmental psychology." However, the mirror test is biased in that it really only works for animals whose primary sense is vision. The previous wiki page provides a good starting point but I would also recommend other books by a number of scientists such as Age of Empathy or "Our Inner Ape" by Frans de Waal, "The Moral Lives of Animals" by Peterson. More specifically books like Primate origins of human cognition and behaviour or Animal Wise: where the author "explores how this rapidly evolving, controversial field has only recently overturned old notions about why animals behave as they do. She probes the moral and ethical dilemmas of recognizing that even “lesser animals” have cognitive abilities such as memory, feelings, personality, and self-awareness–traits that many in the twentieth century felt were unique to human beings.
By standing behaviorism on its head, Morell brings the world of nature brilliantly alive in a nuanced, deeply felt appreciation of the human-animal bond, and she shares her admiration for the men and women who have simultaneously chipped away at what we think makes us distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities come from."

First, it may be highly controversial to say this even here on r/askscience but humans are not the only animal on this planet to have theory of mind. Other animals can approximate the mental states of other individuals within their groups and can also understand the difference between the self and others. This effects how we view animals in a profound way, no longer is there a clear and defining "us" vs. "them". I can go into more detail but these previous books do a way better job of thoroughly exploring the subject from a laymans point of view. Consequently, humans seem to acquire these abilities sometime around 18 months of age. I also know that there is extensive literature on theory of mind in humans with autism, although I am not familiar with the details of this literature.

>What are the prerequisites for sentience, for example clothing or hunting techniques?

There is no one single "recipe" for having or acquiring theory of mind. I can tell you it has little to nothing to do with anything you see that is modern around you (i.e. cars, clothing, tools or hunting). This is because people (or groups of people) and other animals without these things still have theory of mind. Even oral or written language as we know it today is not likely a necessary precursor to theory of mind. We can still have complex thought or processing without the need for complex language. Does oral or written language enable us to communicate in a more efficient way? Yes. I still don't think you can equate the two - perhaps (human) language requires complex thought, but complex thought does not require language. Many scientists hypothesize that "theory of mind must have preceded language use, based on evidence of use of the following characteristics: intentional communication, repairing failed communication, teaching, intentional persuasion, intentional deception, building shared plans and goals, intentional sharing of focus or topic, and pretending." - all of these precede language and we see many of them expressed in animals, especially within the primate order. So first cognition then language.

However, animals that do have theory of mind tend to be highly social. Being social requires a lot of brain power in the sense that you have to be able to keep track of a number of individuals and your relationship to them. Long lived species need to keep track of these relationships through time. You also need to keep track of others relationship to other members of your group and you need to keep track of "outsiders" and "insiders". This stuff gets pretty complex. In order to navigate a complex social environment being able to tell yourself apart from others and even one individual from another is pretty critical.

> What differentiates homo sapiens from homo neanderthalensis in terms of intelligence?

First I would ask you to define intelligence. It's not so easy, so what I can do is explain the differences in behaviour based on what we have found in the archeolgical record:

• Neanderthals were able to use tools, well tools had been used by Hominins for millions of years by the time Neanderthals evolved and tool use isn't even unique to our lineage. But I digress, the tools used by neanderthals remained relatively consistent in design and use for their entire existence (from about 600,000 years ago to 24,000 years ago). On the other hand, human tool cultures were much more varied and were adapted to new environments. So humans have been described as better [tool] innovators than neanderthals.
  
  
• We lived in many different kinds of habitats and moved around a lot where as Neanderthals stuck to Europe. Therefore we have come to the conclusion that humans were better able to change our behaviour in order to survive in a variety of environments (tropics to temperate, deserts to alpine). We also had long-distance trade whereas neanderthal populations seemed pretty isolated from one another. Another indication that human oral communication may have been fast out-pacing the oral communication abilities of neanderthals (if they had them at all - some think that gestures played an important role in pre-language hominids, including early humans, in that they used gestures rather than words to communicate.)
  
  
• Neanderthals had jewellery, buried their dead, and probably made cave art etc. So they had some pretty complex cultures. But around 50,000 years ago human cultural activities exploded. There are statues, symbolic art, more complex burials etc. indicating a shift in our collective behaviour. This is known as behavioural modernity: "It is the point at which Homo sapiens began to demonstrate an ability to use complex symbolic thought and express cultural creativity. These developments are often thought to be associated with the origin of [modern] language...One theory holds that behavioral modernity occurred as a sudden event some 50 kya possibly as a result of a major genetic mutation or as a result of a biological reorganization of the brain that led to the emergence of modern human natural languages".
  
  
• The control of fire and cooking date back between 500,000 and 1.2 million years with H. erectus. Fire is not unique to humans (Homo sapiens) or neanderthals.

I just wanted to add something that I felt would be fitting here. This is simply my perspective on the collective unconscious so take it as you will, but it seems relevant.

I see the collective unconscious as being a good basis for spiritual ideas, and I have my own beliefs based around it. The reason I see it as a good basis is 1.) much of it is empirically supported, and 2.) the idea of a collective unconscious itself to some extent implies a universal realm of existence.

First I would like to briefly cover relevant literature which substantiates the collective unconscious. The point of this is to show which aspects of this idea are supported enough to branch off of. The information I’m going to sum up is from the field of research called Affective Neuroscience, which was coined by Jakk Panksepp, who I believe is Jungian himself based on his reference to archetypes, and both Freud and Jung. I believe his book is a must read for all Jung enthusiasts and I’ll be linking it below. After this I’ll present my little theory of what this means from a spiritual perspective.

Summation of Relevant Literature

Affective Neuroscience is a field of study which combines three major disciplines of psychology: Cognitive, Behaviorial, and Neuroscience. What the study’s and experiments have generally shown is that there are distinct anatomical neural structures which illicit consistent patterns of behavior in animals when stimulated, and are shared to varying degrees by all species (the degree of variation becomes larger as species become farther apart on the phylogenetic tree, with the nervous system becoming more complex rostrally as it progresses through species). On top of this, due to the nature of the behavior patterns showing approach/avoidance tendencies, it’s reasonable to conclude that it is an emotional response which is evoked from stimulation that influences the corresponding pattern of behavior.

To simplify, this shows that organisms are preprogrammed with mechanisms to properly respond to environmental triggers. These systems were refined and passed down through millennia’s of adaptations. In a sense, these systems are an ancestral record or bank of knowledge, passed down through generations of offspring to better equip them for the obstacles presented by the physical world. These systems inspire organisms to hunt, forage, seek security, reproduce, as well as many other things.

To show an example of how it works in practice, one of these systems is responsible for dealing with danger; the fight or flight system (more broadly speaking, FEAR). This systems goal is to help organisms detect threats in the environment and react accordingly. Now imagine an archetypal situation: you are hiking through the woods when all of sudden you hear a suspicious crackle in the leaves not to far from you. Upon looking you notice your being stalked by a mountain lion. You freeze up and your heart beats faster as your body prepares to run or fight. What happened here? First, your perception was triggered by an environmental trigger, the mountain lion. Without you putting any effort, your body naturally prepares you to deal with this threat by altering your physiology to better facilitate active movement. On top of this, your phenomenologically struck by an overwhelming sense of fear, your body’s way of not letting you ignore the immediate threat your faced with; painting your perception with a relevant and meaningful narrative: the hunted.

The Parallels

I will now attempt to draw the connections between this information and Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious to show what aspects of it are empirically supported. First, you must understand the concept that brain and mind are intimately connected. Monism or dualism are not important here, just understand that when something occurs in the brain there is a reaction in the mind, and vice versa. Now for the connections:

1.) The neural systems detailed above are shared by all species to varying degrees. What this implies is that there is a template of mind, which is indeed true. All minds share these unconscious operating systems which interpret environmental events in a meaningful way, and evoke a proper response out of the organism. With these systems being homologous throughout species, we could reasonably conclude that these systems make up the neural/physical representation of the collective unconscious.

2.) These systems imbue our perception with meaning. The idea of meaning is almost indistinguishable from archetypes, with Jung describing how these unconscious contents are essentially the source of all meaning. And just as archetypes are all around us, the products of these neural systems are too. It seems these systems project archetypal narratives onto the world around us to allow us to move through the world in a meaningful way. This is seen in the mountain lion example, with the fight or flight system projecting the archetype of the beast onto the mountain lion. This could also be seen in the systems responsible for love projecting the archetype of the anima/animus onto the object of desire.

Spiritual Speculation (Creation Story)

Based on these parallels, the idea that the collective unconscious is universally shared and the source of all meaning is not at all unreasonable, and is empirically supported to a large degree. So we now have a base to branch off of: there exists and aspect of consciousness that is universal and home to all which is meaningful. On the other hand, we have physical reality which exists independent of this realm of consciousness.

From this we can form a sort of story. There exists two worlds: an objective reality, cold and void; and a subjective realm, deep and rich with meaning. Objective reality is finite and exists in certainty, while the subjective realm is amorphous and infinite, being simultaneously beautiful and horrid. Between this chasm of worlds exists a bridge: organisms. The organism is a part of the objective world existing as a sort of vessel for the subjective realm to inhabit. As the subjective realm inhabits this vessel it takes on all its finities by conforming to the structure of its biological limitations (for example, sensory organs). In doing so, the subjective realm takes on the form of an individual, in a sense becoming a soul. The soul walks its path through the objective world, experiencing it from the shoes of its vessel, in the process turning the once cold dead world into a place of meaning and potential, leaving behind it stories of good and bad. But in the end all vessels face the inevitable faith of reality: death. And all souls return to there source, the heavens and hells of the collective unconscious.

Link to Jakk Panksepps Affective Neuroscience:

https://www.amazon.com/Affective-Neuroscience-Foundations-Emotions-Science/dp/019517805X

You're making the huge assumption that the rest of society has the same values you do, and the only thing stopping them from a revolution is oppression from above. This assumption is dead wrong.

I'll point out a little bit of the recent history of respect, dignity, power, control, FREEDOM in my country:

Jim Crow did not happen because of people's strong belief in respect, dignity and freedom. The Southern Strategy wasn't so successful because of people's strong belief in respect, dignity and freedom. The Tea Party hasn't been so successful because people are lazy and don't care about working conditions, or because of their strong belief in respect, dignity and freedom.

All these are successful because people, especially people who don't feel socio-economically secure, would rather defend their place in society over improving society for everyone, if that improvement means they just might stand to loose some benefits on an absolute scale. It's been the Republican party playbook for 50 years now: use people's fear that other people's success might mean they compete with you for social standing to stop any attempt to give basic human rights to all races and genders, strengthen the social safety net, unionize, etc.

The majority of people in the US have proven over and over again they will vote to lower themselves one notch down the totem pole if it will lower those below them two notches. BI will not fundamentally change that on day one.

I totally agree that people don't live their lives in numbers, but they do live their lives based on a number of competing desires and mental heuristics that differ from person to person, though with some useful demographic clustering. I highly recommend you read some moral psychology, like Haidt's The Righteous Mind so that you understand better the various desires and drives people have that get tied up in their politics. This book that spends a good amount of time dealing with the moral differences of egalitarian and hierarchical individuals and this free course on behavioral economics are also related and highly recommended.

People's values will change over time as they become less fearful, but if you think giving a Republican ~10-15k would instantly turn him into a Communist, I can only conclude you've never met a Republican. A "Taxation is Theft" march on Washington is orders of magnitude more likely than a General Strike.

Also, you seem to assume that the rich are a fundamentally different kind of person than we are. They aren't. We have the same tendencies as they do, and roughly the same mix of egalitarian and hierarchical value systems as they do.

TL;DR: The problem isn't just Them and their biases and desires keeping us down. The problem is Us and our biases and desires keeping each other down.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Velvet-Rage-Overcoming-Straight/dp/1611746450

Alan Downs (Velvet Rage) relates sex addiction to delayed adolescence (man children) because of chronic discontent from being raised in a psychologically damaging environment of homophobia. Also Media, gay bar culture, and TV portrayals have promiscuity and sex as the main theme. "Men Who Like Men" have a bunch of sexual testosterone and many gay males reject traditional ideals instead to discover "new ways" to express their sexuality in hedonistic unrestrained ways. Having a smaller culture that disproportionately has more mental illness with the commonality of shared sex where narcissism is encouraged. Different societal standards of "oh he is just gay" vs. traditional thinking / expectations of a straight man because he must mate with females has to settle down from his college exploration phase.

Drugs are a major problem in the gay community. Have you seen how many people on Grindr have Capital T's in their profiles or other drug language which leads to sex habits, circuit parties, and group sex. Slut shaming is a thing is straight culture especially for women who must bear children where this thinking in the gay culture it is considered rude and not evolved. Sex is what brings the gay culture together (The first thing), instead of other priorities and relational bonds. We are rebelling against society's norms and telling us how to live our lives by doing the opposite from what anyone expects of us. Sex is a drug neuro - chemically the brain is rewarded when one has sex instead of dealing with underlying emotions and patterns "(I was just horny; and don't know what I was thinking)." Porn is how a young gay man feels connected to his peers and learns about himself, not from his society and father teaching him about girls. Jaded gay men because of rejection for various reasons (high standards straight females have for partners but with male ideals about sex) do not get insta - relationship like they expect so instead fill the loneliness and personal problems with sex and temporary false intimacy. With the advent of apps and technology it is easier for men to be anti-social and fuck first and date latter, this is 10 times harder for straight men because of women playing harder to get on Tinder. We are more comfortable talking about sex toys, sexy underwear, and who is fucking who than the real deeper issues we face as a community (superficiality).

I would say as gay men we are brought up in a homophobic society with shame and chronic discontent. We do not have normal dating experiences like our straight friends do. "Many" of us have our first gay experience sexually and it is through sex we have to learn about ourselves and our place in them. When one thinks something is bad (they grow up in a world telling them that) and yet occasionally partakes in theses behaviors popping their head out of the closet it can have long term psychological effects of suppression and changing the inherent value of intimacy and feeling close. Add to the fact the brain rewards us for hookups, affairs, and infatuation with PEA a neuro chemical as strong as any drug it's very easy to fall into pasterns of being disconnected from the sexual experience yet seeking (disconnected emotionally & physically) temporary and damaging pleasure. Others have said straights have the same problem, ie. Tindr. Grindr was created for our need for "self" validation (self-esteem boost) and to distance intimacy from the sex (it's like a quick fast food order). It's a sex addicts best friend (these are the majority of men who use these sources as it's quick and easy (just as easy to block someone as they are just a photo to be discarded. This is the beginning of sex addiction devaluing someone to just a accessory and seeking nothing else from the interaction which are normal societal norms of communication and conduct. If it works for you great or your newly experimenting (Addiction means too much of anything and starting unhealthy patterns).

Sex addicts can be anyone (gay/straight), the highest percentage of sex addicts are men, and add to that as gay men we are in a culture that praises sexual experimentation and frequency the number is quite high. Straight society does not have the same psychological factors in play when they enter sexual exploration that gay men do. Straight men do not have to leave a closet and through over expression because of previous suppression and denying themselves sometimes go overboard with experimenting and wanting to show the world they matter. This is why often men in their late 30s start to leave this experimentation and play zone and want to settle down. Biological aging and experience, dating history, desperation (or not), and a fear of death. They also feel more comfortable in their own skin and have the resources to make sure their dreams happen. Some stay in the closet regardless of the age and are still part of the gay bar hookup culture late into life. You do not see the settled down and experienced men because they do not post on Subs like this and they are not into the bars and parades, they are integrated with society.

Gay men are more likely to have sexual abuse than their straight counterparts as well, because society prey's on fear, hate, weakness, desperation (look at teens thrown out of their homes, Russia, Terrorist Muslim culture killing gays). When someone thinks their life isn't meaningful, they have no value, they have much higher risk of being sexually compulsive and doing things they wish they hadn't. They use sex as a way to feel needed and valuable which they are told they are not. Our community has a huge drug problem, I forget the study that showed that 60% + percent of app users like Grindr are meth/ various other addicts who use these apps to get drug fueled sex and forget their mundane lives.

Why else do men goto years of therapy for their childhood trauma (straight sex addicts do not have this same incubation of circumstances). I think in a way its like a neuro-natal (safe zone) environment which is familiar to us. It's a vicious pattern rewarded by gay media, society, we relate with each other being gay based purely on the sexual aspects of ourselves.

**Sex is great, it is necessary for true intimacy. The book does not say you can't have FWB or be open in a relationship, ... hes just questioning why people do it. I think the point he makes in Cruise Control is one should go into sex temporary or long term with a desire to be intimate and open, to not use it as a sex toy but something much deeper and with higher significance. To work on parts of ourselves that are real and honest (ie. your date being wounded from his ex relationship, could date you and be honest about this but open to intimacy and exploration instead of closing himself off emotionally from you or your feelings and emotional intelligence as a equal and human).

Maybe /u/Waywardshrink can add some more to this ;-)

>with the rise of feminism and the normalization of female sexual agency, women are much more likely to seek out "alpha" males for casual sex — attractive, dominant men who don't necessarily have a provider vibe, but are good in the sack.

Sure, but there's also the widespread use of birth control, which influences women to prefer less masculine partners. So what gives?

I think a bigger issue is that the modern world is turning men in to wusses. See The Demise of Guys. A combination of porn and video games has rendered modern men anxious, distracted, and unable to pursue long term goals. Testosterone levels seem to be gradually dropping, possibly as a result of chemicals like BPA. (I suspect that anti-androgens like BPA are also responsible for the increase in assigned-male-at-birth people realizing that they're actually women. The rationalists are at the forefront of this wave because they're more introspective, nerds are lower testosterone in general, and the rationalist community isn't judgemental toward trans people.)

Most modern males read as "disgraced social outcast" to women because they have trouble maintaining eye contact and conversing naturally with them. Any man who doesn't have this problem is labeled an "alpha" by the PUA community. In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you'd need some honest signalling of high genetic quality (symmetrical face, superior hunting abilities, height, high verbal intelligence that allows you to easily make people laugh, etc.) in order to enjoy unusual success with women. (Note that the characteristics I mentioned correspond only loosely with the PUA notion of "alpha" behavior, which is supposedly of utmost importance with women. Also note that "alpha" behavior doesn't seem like an unusually honest signal of genetic quality. Lots of male wild animals behave in a very feral, "alpha" way. If human women really were programmed since time immemorial to value "alpha" behavior over all else, we probably never would have self-domesticated and formed civilization in the first place.)

if you can memorize this sort of stuff, then read this free book on body language. you might like What Every Body Is Saying better, because they have actual photographs of people. I can't say for sure, because I am not very familiar with autism.

Also, I know that you say you've studied facial expressions, but Unmasking the Face has many great explanations of how the main facial expressions work, including masked expressions (such as a sad person trying not to appear sad)

If you say something that doesn't make sense and people laugh, you can either laugh with them or keep a straight face. That will get you out of most situations, because in addition to people not always saying what they mean, they also are nervous to ask for clarification, and will usually assume a positive intent or understanding.

Another book that might help you a great deal is Games People Play. It's based on Transactional Analysis, a very simple model of human behavior. Transactional Analysis defines a "Game" as a complex interaction with an ulterior motive, such as inviting someone to your room for a cup of coffee. You could familiarize yourself with common games, and it might help you.

EDIT: also, are you in touch with autism support groups of any kind? they may be able to help you more than people on the internet, since they will have experience with other autistic people.

No problem and thank you for the compliment. Overall, I love experiential and psychodynamic theories but I try to approach any theory as a means to an end. Any clinician that becomes too dogmatic risks missing the point (that is, helping the client and not serving your own ends). I like playing between affect and behavior with clients and attachment theory is behind it all for me.

In any case, why don't you ask an easier question? Haha. There is so much material out there for each modality that I could recommend plenty.

Strengths-focused

• 1001 Solution-Focused Questions by Fredrike Bannink
  
  
• Positive CBT by Fredrike Bannink
  
  
• Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
  
  Experiential
  
  
• Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy by Robert Elliott
  
  
• Emotion-Focused Therapy, 2nd ed. by Les Greenberg
  
  
• Focusing in Clinical Practice by Ann Cornell
  
  Attachment
  
  
• Attachment in Psychotherapy by David Wallin
  
  
• Affect Regulation Theory by Daniel Hill
  
  
• The Healing Power of Emotion by Diana Fosha, Daniel Siegel, & Martin Solomon, ed.
  
  Psychodynamic
  
  
• The Transforming Power of Affect by Diana Fosha
  
  
• Treating Affect Phobia by Leigh McCullough
  
  
• Psychodynamic Therapy: A Guide to Evidence-Based Practice by Richard Summers and Jacques Barber
  
  
• Time-Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy by Hanna Levenson
  
  
• Negotiating the Therapeutic Alliance by Jeremy Safran
  
  Hope that helps! Feel free to PM me too. I wonder if /u/evilqueenoftherealm would have any suggestions too.

Do that, plus read Raising Cain. The books tl;dr is that boys have complex emotional lives, even if the don't often express that in obvious ways. It gave me huge amounts of insight during the 4 years I spent as a summer camp counselor.

My boy's only 2, but so far, the father protips I've learned are:

• When your baby's very small (like, the first three months), they'll likely hate sleeping alone and love cuddling. You can use this to your videogaming advantage. When baby's fussy late at night, tell your wife, "I've got this." Secure your baby on your chest in something like a Moby or Ergobaby, then go play the Xbox for for a few hours. Baby gets cuddles, your wife thinks you're some kind of superdad and you get to play videogames. It's a win win win situation, and the way I beat Fable II and Gears of War II.
  
• Don't feel bad if you're not deeply in love with your child the moment he exits the womb. When he was born, I loved my son in the "This is my son so I will love him" sort of way. But around the time he turned 1 and became less of a little crying thing and more of a mini-person, I feel deeply in love.
  
• You will never have a better excuse to buy photography or video equipment, so take advantage of this moment. In my experience, mothers are unable to resist the logic of, "I really need a better camera to make sure we have lasting memories or our baby's 1st year." It's like a license to kill. Only instead of killing, you get to go out and spend money on whatever DSLR you've been lusting after.
  
  Congratulations!
  
  
  

The best exploration thus far that I've found of why we've developed many of our unique social patterns/traits can be found in "The Velvet Rage".

It's a really good book that IMO every gay man should read for many reasons beyond the question in this thread. Granted, some of the patterns highlighted in the book have since receded, but the book is incredibly insightful even in 2017. Similarly, an even older book "The Best Little Boy in the World", may be interesting to check out too.

Basically the author would argue this sort of behaviour stems from the experiences many of us have growing up, while learning how to come to terms with our sexualities. We're often subjected to a different experience than other boys. We're often taught to be ashamed of ourselves, even if it was never intentional on the part of those around us.

To compensate, many of us learn to behave in ways that constantly bring us affirmation despite a nagging feeling that we are somehow undeserving of affection. For some, this takes the form of becoming hyper-masculine, being homophobic, being a straight A student, going to the gym, etc. For others this may take the form of becoming more feminine, more sassy, more sensitive, more creative, or more caring. It may depend substantially on the people around them during those times. Due to the different experience of being gay, young gay boys may find different routes of attaining affirmation than their straight peers (e.g., by hanging around with girls who may be more likely to accept them — or at least less likely to remind them that other boys are different). The idea is the same for both "masc" and "femme" gays though: do something to set oneself apart as exceptional in order to collect affirmation and avoid feeling uncomfortable with oneself.

Later into life, even after coming out of the closet and been "out" for years, this can evolve into acting outrageously (or, alternatively, it can evolve into a facade of "masc"/"not a bitchy queen"/"non-scene"/"straight acting"). The author argues this is a way of compensating for lingering shame, and protecting oneself from getting hurt, even after being out for years or decades — and it can lead to all sorts of harmful problems in ones life like relationship problems, depression, etc.

To be honest, I'm only part way through the book, but I'm assuming that probably after that the author will get into a later stage where people can let go of the need to constantly prove to themselves that they are loveable.

I should say that I honestly doubt the author is suggesting that guys who use the term "girl" are always doing so out of shame. I think the central thesis is more that these types of behaviours, which set us apart from other men, are often shaped by those early experiences of feeling "different" and seeking affirmation to avoid dealing with shame. So in some of us, those behaviours may begin there. After that it's more like a part of our history and development as a person, and may be something we continue even after letting go of shame.

Those last two paragraphs are extrapolation, so YMMV.

So in the case of your neighbour, maybe they grew up in an environment that made them feel different. Maybe it caused them to feel ashamed. Maybe their father became distant after noticing something was "not normal". Maybe they found affirmation from girls in their lives, who told them they also found men attractive — or by a female adult in their lives who helped them feel better about themselves.

Or maybe after coming out of the closet, they lost many friends. Maybe they found comfort and acceptance by playing the role of "gay best friend". Maybe that's how they survived high school. Maybe they found that by embracing the unexpected — by poking fun at gender in a tongue and cheek manner — they could garner affection and admiration from their peers. Or, maybe they found that it helped them filter out homophobic acquaintances before they could get close enough to do more damage than a stranger could.

And maybe they've also come to terms with it. Maybe now it's simply become a part of who they are — something they say to acknowledge where they've been. Something they say to let other gay men know "girl[, I've been there too]". Even if other gay men have handled their shame differently (e.g., by being the best at sports or lowering their voice to seem more "masc"), perhaps there are commonalities among the experience that this person acknowledges with "girl".

Of course, it's pretty much impossible to know just how this particular person came to use the word in the way that they do. I don't think that's really the point though. The word signals "hey, me too", which, if we're being honest, is something I don't think most of us heard enough of growing up.

>What annoys the hell out of me is when people attribute higher, human-level emotional and conceptual functions to their pets, and to animals in general.

Well the fact is that many animals do exhibit higher cognitive functions and emotions, even more complex ones that you may think only humans possess. We see this advanced capability especially in great apes, crows, elephants, some monkeys and other birds, as well as some cetacean species like dolphins. The line that separates us and them is not black and white as we once thought, but rather shades of grey. You might be interested in reading more on Affective Neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. It explores the principles that animals and man are not governed by different processes, but rather we share conserved underlying physiological mechanisms that govern processes like emotions. All this means is animals do feel emotions, even complex ones, much in the same way we do. It is not anthropomorphizing a dog to say he is happy, dogs can be happy, they have the same underlying mechanisms that govern feeling of happiness.

Some animals also possess theory of mind, that is they can tell self from other and have the capacity to understand their place amongst others. In essence they have a consciousness not so dissimilar from our own. This enables them to demonstrate a wide variety of behaviours that we thought were once only within the realm of human beings - concepts like shared traditions, teaching, and cumulative culture. Hell it once wasn't that long ago that we thought man was the only being to make, use, and modify tools! How wrong we were.

So for you to be so dogmatic in your understanding of animal cognition is to really do a disservice to the thousands of researchers across this planet working in human and animal behavioural cognition whose works have shown that animals are indeed very smart creatures whom we should not dismiss as being "lesser beings". We are really only beginning to scratch the surface here, and our understanding of animal behaviour and cognition is really only in its infancy.

How we treat animals is another topic all together, but so long as people aren't harming them then why bother with being so annoyed that they treat their pets like children? Its not a reflection on you, nor does it harm you! Its as silly as hating someone for liking oranges just because you dislike the taste of them.

I recommend reading "A General Theory of Love" https://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Love-Thomas-Lewis/dp/0375709223

One way to try to stop dating men is to try to figure out the dynamic and learn how to ID it early, and avoid those types of situations. But that doesn't change the fact that your status quo is to crave those situations that are unhealthy, but what you are most used to.

Another approach is to learn healthier attachment, to the point that what you want has fundamentally changed, and that the unhealthy patterns just don't do it for you any more.

The book I recommended is really great for getting an overview sense of how attachment works.

Then, trying to apply it to create situations where safe attachment can take place, and the other person(s) have a healthier, calmer limbic system than you. Therapy, healing friendships, healthy social situations--whatever situations can help "bring you up" to a more connected approach to the world.

Are you getting any treatment aside from medication? If not you might want to combine your medication with ADHD therapy/coaching and/or focus on developing coping skills.

There's this mindfulness for ADHD workbook and also this Cognitive Behavioral Therpay for ADHD workbook. I haven't used them but they look like they might be useful.

The book 4 Weeks to an Organized Life with AD/HD was very helpful to me when I read it several years ago. The second half of the book is a 4 Week program that gives one simple task a day to help build skills to cope with ADHD (you don't have to read the first half of the book, you can just do the program). If you choose to do this, you might want to ask someone to help remind you to do the daily exercises and be your accountability buddy.

As far as reading goes, I find that writing a paragraph summarizing what I read right after reading helps me to stay interested in what I'm reading. I would guess it might help with other hobbies too.

I would highly recommend Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, as it's really helped me with getting in touch with my body and releasing emotion. The book 'Reclaiming Your Body' by Suzanne Scurlock-Durana is also very good, and comes with a password that gives you access to some great guided meditations that could really help you. It's very inexpensive on Kindle.

The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren may be helpful too though the exercises listed in the book seem to be best suited to people who are very good at visualisation.

Another option that has really helped me is using EFT tapping to process emotions and traumatic events. Other therapies that could really help include somatic practice, somatic experiencing, and sensorimotor psychotherapy. I hope you find something that works for you!

Journalling about my emotions and listening to sad music can also help a lot in this area. All the best with it!

The two modalities I use nowadays are ACT and AEDP:

Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP): The Healing Power of Emotion by Diana Fosha, Daniel Siegel, and Marion Solomon: I seem to be recommending this one a lot on here recently. It's because I've really found AEDP to have transformed my psychotherapeutic practice and filled in the deficits of ACT's radical behaviorism. I've witnessed this approach radically change my patients for the better. I think Fosha and her colleagues are really onto something important and vital in their work that will be corroborated by the experience of many relationally-focused therapists. This attachment-based approach is especially useful for people with long-standing psychological issues, particularly those who have a history of abuse, trauma, neglect, or social alienation.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (Second Edition) by Steven C. Hayes, Kelly Wilson, and Kirk Strosahl: ACT has been the overarching therapy I "present" to my patients for many years. Although, my sessions nowadays look much more like dynamic therapy towards the middle, ACT is where I begin therapy with a patient and ultimately where I "arrive" with my patients after doing some depth work. Put another way, ACT helps me conceptualize the ultimate goal of therapy (to help the patient live a valued life), followed by AEDP-type work if I find they need it, then ultimately back to ACT for behavior change. Hayes is brilliant and I think ACT offer a life-affirming and rich take on behavior therapy. This book is probably the most detailed in the underlying philosophy that informs ACT.

>In '87 we knew stormy weather was on the way, she would have known where her house was (presumably an exposed position), she may have even have known her roof wasn't in good condition. The subconscious is quite capable of putting all that together and once that happens it can end up in a dream.

I thought we were told that there was going to be no storm. Rather famously.

>She trusts her gut-instinct, which means she trusts the reasoning of her subconscious which can include dreams.

Interesting. I wonder what the ratio is between her bullshit dreams and the actual practical premonitions?

On that note, how far early did she dream? Was it that night or a week earlier? Why did she not take any action? Was she sure of it?

Has she entertained that her feeling of a dream may be deja vu? Does dreaming of a possible future have any benefits?

What is the difference of dreaming her roof might come off as it is weakened, knowing that there are storms coming, and someone worrying that their roof is not secure and knowing there are storms coming?

It seems the only real difference is the difference between conscious ability to think clearly, and some half assed ability to think about something abstract when you're asleep.

>Normally people balance subconscious reasoning against concious reasoning, and look for a concordance. If she's good at one and bad at the other, trusting her "gut" may even be the rational thing to do, but only if she doesn't have a rational explanation for it. From all the evidence in that blog post, that does seem to be the case.

Subconscious reasoning? It's not reasoning if it's subconscious. It's a different process entirely.

>She's only a local councillor, the decisions she's making are relatively simple. For a councillor I'd rather have an honest person who goes with their gut than a corrupt statistician.

Yeah. It's a funny thing going with your gut. Look at the wiki list of logical fallacies, that's thinking with your gut and it leads to wrongness. I read an interesting book on irrationality

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Irrationality-Stuart-Sutherland/dp/1905177070

It's funny how people's instincts can be so utterly wrong so often.

Nah, I don't want a councillor who's got tells her that' where there's smoke their's fire' or that someone looked dodgy because their eyes were too close together or that 'It's all these croatians innit?'

Not saying that's what she thinks.
But my gut tells me she's an ignorant fucking loon and my gut is never wrong about stuff like that.

My PhD thesis was on some of the core challenges with integrating a model of emotion (based on appraisal theory) with general AI like cognitive architectures.

Yes! The first two points reflect what others have stated that (and I think are spot on) and I'll introduce a 3rd point.

1. There's no reason to believe any process of the human brain cannot be captured as AI. This would only be challenged by ideas such as dualism, which most of modern neuroscience has abandoned.
   
   
2. Intelligence is useless without emotion - An important reason for this that has been mentioend is motivation. It doesn't stop there though. Based on Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis, we believe emotions are fundamental to all rational thought, serving as a mechanic for dealing with limitless information to process. Think of it as generalized +/- information that serves as a heuristic to other rational processes.
   
   The exact nature of this is still under active investigation, but it's at least worth noting that evolution has developed emotion as a central aspect of our thinking for some reason. It also appears to be present in many other animals (though if that's true is up for debate), and its clear that those with impaired emotional processes cannot make complex decisions rationally.
   
   
3. What doesn't seem mentioned yet is a work done by the Affective Computing group at MIT's Media Lab: http://affect.media.mit.edu/ . In contrast to my work which seeks to synthesize emotions in AI first, they're more focused on giving computers the ability to perceive and display emotions. One of the major roles of emotion happens to be social communication (i.e., we don't just have emotion, but we also express it as a way of communicating information to others).
   
   In the simplest of cases, perhaps AI should understand when it does something you don't like by being able to detect when you're pissed off. More broadly, having an ability to understand and express emotion will do things like allow for an emotionally visceral experience while speaking with a robot, allow an automated customer service robot to understand when you are angry and thus change strategy (like route you to a live manager), or help older lonely patients feel like they're still needed in the world.
   
   ---
   
   In summary how it affects us is 2 ways:
   
   
4. Enable more general intelligent robots to be embedded in our world
   
   
5. Impove AI and human interactions

It sounds like you've been through some tough times. The beauty of life is you always have an opportunity to forge your own path. As cliche as it may be, after every storm there is a rainbow. This is your opportunity. Here is my road map for you:

1. The first thing you must do is talk to a psychologist. It is possible you have depression or underlying mental illness. They can give you techniques to combat that. Even if you do not have a mental illness, the techniques they can teach you, with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, sound like they would be useful for you.
   
   
2. You need to make a schedule and, this is the hard part, follow it as well as you can. Find a diary or make an excel spreadsheet and fill your day with activities. Examples would be: 8am wake up, 9-10am go for a walk, 10-11am write resume, 11-12pm tidy house, 12-1pm lunch, 1-2pm reading, 2-3pm exercise, 3-4pm search for jobs, 4-5pm do online university course homework, 5-6pm free time, 6-7pm dinner, 7pm-9pm free time, 10pm go to sleep. Basically, fill it with tasks you think you can accomplish that are not so challenging that you are put off doing them. Even if you miss one or two scheduled activities, you will still be moving forward in the right direction.
   
   
3. There are some books you can read that may be of benefit/interest:
   
   

• Marty Seligman, Learned Optimism
  
  
• Philip Zimbardo, The Demise of Guys
  
  Good luck, let us know how you go.

In-school counseling is good, but have you thought about taking him to an actual therapist? My daughter's seeing one who specializes in gifted kids, and it's been doing her a world of good. She's becoming more mature and responsible, her attitude toward academics has improved dramatically, and she's picked up a lot of empathy and understanding about how to interact with less-gifted peers.

Just as importantly, the therapist meets with my husband and me every couple of weeks to touch base with us about our daughter and to teach us how we should be working with her.

Mine is young enough that any specific advice from the therapist I could pass on wouldn't be terribly useful for dealing with a 6th grader, but I can share some of the books our therapist has given us about dealing with gifted kids:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0910707898/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593634900/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0910707677/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I'll second all of the suggestions to meditate, but given that this is /r/philosophy it might be a good idea to point you towards some literature.

In my experience, reading a bit of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius always puts me in a mood of calm and control, although Buddhist sutras are probably just as good.

If you want to actually read about the cognitive science behind mood and affect, I've heard good things about Antonio Damasio's older books. (Looking for Spinoza and The Feeling of What Happens.) His more recent books have had a less favorable reception. For a book specifically focused on meditation and the brain, you can't beat Zen and the Brain by James Austin.

Other comments have talked about the medication topic (trying to adjust your dosage if it's not enough or switching medications), so I'm going to focus on being able to do habit-forming, as that's often a difficult task even once medication's figured out.

It sounds like you've already identified the things you need to be doing and the things you end up doing instead of that first group, which is a start. The next step is that you've got to start enforcing the rules you're trying to set for yourself and hold yourself accountable to them right then and there. Some things I see from your description of a day that could be useful:

• Establish set times that you're going to go to sleep and wake up, no matter what. If you decide you need to be awake at 10am and want 8 hours of sleep, make sure that every single night you're not gaming anymore by 12:30am or 1 so you've got time to physically go to bed and maybe read a book or do something else that is intentionally boring/relaxing instead of stimulating. This will help with the next item:
  
• Set only one alarm, but make it something loud and obnoxious (I used the drowning music from Sonic at first, hand to heart), then put your phone across the room so you have to get out of bed to turn it off. Having multiple alarms just makes you more likely to sleep through them all, because it's easy to convince yourself "oh this isn't so bad, even though I slept through this one there's my 4th/5th/6th alarm left, it's fine." Set a goal in your mind that "alarm goes off" means "get the fuck up," and then you need to hold yourself to that.
  
• Even if you don't move your sleeping times around, don't beat yourself up for "half the day being gone" just because it's midday. You already mentioned that you don't sleep until 3-5am, but wake up around noon; your halfway mark isn't until 7:30pm. People who work night shifts deal with things like this all the time, and it's important to recognize that while half of the sunlight might be gone for the day, your "day" is different and adheres to different times.
  
• Write down a schedule of what you need to do in the first 30-60 minutes after waking up. If having exact times helps, add those too (e.g., wake up around 8am, and have breakfast scheduled from 8:10-8:30). Then (and this'll be a repeated theme) you need to hold yourself accountable to that schedule. If you realize you ought to be eating breakfast or showering right now and you're gaming instead, do whatever you need to do to go from what you're doing to what you need to be doing ASAP. Quit the game, alt-f4, or if it's a single player thing just pause and walk away.
  
• While I tend to find that scheduling the first and last parts of my day helped the most since the task list for a day can vary hugely, from your description you already know what the main parts of your day should encompass (job hunt, project brainstorming), so look at setting daily goal lists in addition to the schedules. I'd recommend sticking to 2-3 things as "main" goals for the day based on their importance, not on how long they'll take. If your three things for today are "Get a haircut, apply for 5 jobs and walk the dog for 20 minutes," you could have all of those wrapped up by lunch and have the rest of the day off to do whatever you want.
  
• Understand that even though you're trying these new things, you're still going to fail at them sometimes, especially at first. Establishing a new habit is hard even for people who don't have ADHD, and you're going to have stumbles along the way. I'm currently on week 3 of trying to make myself run every morning as part of my morning schedule, and I've had a couple of days where I woke up late, took too long eating breakfast or just stared at nonsense on my phone for half an hour and didn't have the time. It's fine to be upset when those things happen - you're trying to succeed at this, so not liking failure is totally normal - but you're not a worthless person for being bad at a new skill. Attention span, routine and habit are all skills that have to be actively trained and paid attention to, and sucking at something is the first step at being sorta good at something.
  
  Most importantly, you've got to let go of the anger and remember that you can do this. If you started doing all or some of this tomorrow, that's day 1 of working to be better, not day 500 of being terrible at it. If you only do half of them on day 1, that's still more progress towards your goal than you had on day 0. You'll get better at consistency, you'll get better at holding yourself accountable when you fail but being fair about it, and will start to be able to define the more specific things that work for you rather than this long-winded advice from a stranger on the internet.
  
  A lot of the above came from things I learned while working with a cognitive behavioral therapist (while I was finding medications) and this book. If you think it'd be helpful and can't afford it, PM me shipping info or a wishlist link and I'll buy you a copy. I've been where you are, and it does get better.
  
  (edited to correct a typo I didn't notice I'd made at first)

There's a book I got for a friend who is expecting a baby boy soon. It's called "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys". Haven't read it myself yet but it comes well recommended. Maybe you can try and find a cheap copy of it and have a read? Anyway, good of you to try and be there for the kids. :)

PS You're barely out of childhood yourself. Do what you can to help, but first and foremost go out and enjoy life.

I think that Brain Balance and Sylvan are completely different. Isn't Sylvan just a tutoring place? Idk. This Brain Balance center focuses on kids who have stronger left/right brain type of skills (I think) and then help then really integrate the two using strange repetitive activities (things including finger exercises and music, etc).

Like I said, the mom who I know was blown away by the difference it made in her kids life. I think they had to pay ~$6-8k for the sessions that spanned several weeks.

Although her son reads much much better, she says writing does continue to be more of a chore. His teachers don't mind if he types & they've considered letting him use dictation software for some of his more lengthy assignments, just so he can get his work done and not fall behind.

Kudos to you for recognizing that you've got "a pretty good kid." I hope you can find something to help him with his writing. The comic book suggestion sounds good for reading! Wouldn't it be great if he took an interest in that?

Oh - one last thing - have you read (or seen the documentary): Raising Cain, Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys? I just saw the documentary & they discuss quite a lot about the types of things that boys chose to read and write about (read: somewhat violent at times). It was so interesting to hear their perspective on this & it's relation to encouraging boys to read & write.

http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Cain-Protecting-Emotional-Life/dp/0345434854/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322086525&sr=8-1

Robert Frank, an economist, wrote an excellent boom on the subject of emotions called "Passions Within Reason." that might be useful to answering your question. Basically, Frank theorizes that emotions are a "commitment device" that lead us to behave in certain ways that are beneficial. The book also starts off with the most entertaining and enlightening account of your American clan rivalry between the Hatfields and the McCoys. It's worth reading for the first ten pages alone. Here is a review that does his argument in this book more justice than I have above.

Only if they want to not suffer the consequences of not being good.

Society and moral behavior is a delicate balance of cooperation and competition. Cooperate 100% and you're a doormat, compete 100% and the rest of society will exile/kill you.

Millions of years of evolution as a social ape has instilled a basic set of morals into us which has helped our species survive through the ages. That's what "basic" morality is, and it even shows up different on brain scans than more "advanced", culture-trained morality.

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605

From a (critical) review:

>Utilitarianism, he contends, is not refuted by footbridge-type intuitions that conflict with it, because those intuitions are best understood not as perceptions of intrinsic wrongness, but as gut reactions that have evolved to serve social peace by preventing interpersonal violence. Similar debunking explanations can be given for other commonsense moral intuitions, such as the obligation to favor members of one’s own group over strangers, or the stronger obligation one feels to rescue an identified individual who is drowning in front of you than to contribute to saving the lives of greater numbers of anonymous victims far away. According to Greene, it is understandable in light of evolutionary psychology that we have these intuitions, and for the most part it does no harm to let our conduct be guided by them, but they are not perceptions of moral truth, and they do not discredit the utilitarian response when it tells us to do something different.

>While we cannot get rid of our automatic settings, Greene says we should try to transcend them—and if we do, we cannot expect the universal principles that we adopt to “feel right.” Utilitarianism has counterintuitive consequences, but we arrive at it by recognizing that happiness matters to everyone, and that objectively no one matters more than anyone else, even though subjectively we are each especially important to ourselves. This is an example of what he calls “kicking away the ladder,” or forming moral values that are opposed to the evolutionary forces that originally gave rise to morality.

/u/manwithahatwithatan, this is definitely worth the read. It's a hard one, but also so very important. I also highly recommend taking the time to read a book called The Velvet Rage. The book is far therapeutic and will help you find the tools you need to get over this struggle.

These reads are important because they acknowledge hard truths you are talking about. The Velvet Rage goes into strategies on how to handle issues a lot of gay men face.

It is all about finding lasting happiness and self-worth. I actually think you are on the right track because you are taking the first and hardest step of acknowledging the problems. Getting to that place of self fulfillment will take time, but you can do it.

One key thing I want to note that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being single. In fact, if you struggle being happy while single, you will struggle with happiness in a relationship. I have so many gay friends (and straight) who are married and still feel incredibly lonely. Relationships do not fix this sort of thing.

You're in luck! I have books for that!

Here's a good book on basic communication between men and women in relationships.

And if you're interested in the psychology and neurology behind how we develop our relationship to love in general, try this on for size.

Whether you have a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder or are just shy, this may help with some skill building. (In fact, just about any good book on social anxiety, as well as skill building for people on the autism spectrum, can be helpful even for people who are more psychologically middle of the road.)

And, not a book but a webpage, some good tips on dating in a more healthy manner. Note the first one especially in the context of our discussion on the seduction community.

There's a great book about how boys are raised this way, to be "emotionally illiterate." It's marketed as a parenting book but has been SO interesting to me in analyzing the adult men in my life as well. Highly recommend for anyone who loves/lives with/interacts with men!

https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Cain-Protecting-Emotional-Life/dp/0345434854

A neuronormative could have remembered to include link to the book.

I guess some would feel that the book is a tad too academic, but I find it pleasing to read (and to listen too, the narrator does terrific job in the audible version).

The concepts of constructing emotions described in the book have helped me to understand some aspects of my inner workings. Specially the role of the subconsciousness that feels to have major leaks to my conspicuousness. And also the influence of how I think I capture in much more detail my internal bodily feelings and changes in the environment.

Also the concept of Affective niche (what things and details get your attention) has been useful as it seems to differ occasionally from normies.

I would either say A General Theory of Love or The Demon-Haunted World are books that I always recommend to people who want to expand themselves.

A General Theory of Love is the perfect message for those who think intelligence and self-mastery means an absence of emotions. For those of us who think being rational means not letting emotions into the decision making process, this book elucidates on why that is not healthy and also why you're probably lying to yourself if you think you are incapable of feeling emotions like "normal" people.

The Demon-Haunted World is a book for everybody. It is a philosophical book written by an astrophysicist using everyday language so nearly anybody can grasp its concepts. It brings the major philosophical question of why within the average person's conceptual grasp, without using any spiritual reasoning. I feel that when more people can contemplate that question, why, without immediately turning to the supernatural and shutting down the mundane, we will be a more level-headed species.

Eh, my two cents. ;-)

re: studies of animal emotions

>Jaak Panksepp (2004, 2005) has been conducting a research program that he calls “affective neuroscience” and that encompasses direct study of animal emotions (2004), exemplified for example in the experimental investigation of rats “laughing” and seeking further contact in response to tickling by humans (Panksepp & Burgdorf 2003). Over several decades, his work (reviewed in Panksepp 2005) has elucidated the neuro- and molecular-physiological bases of several ‘core emotional systems’ including ‘seeking’, ‘fear’, ‘rage’, ‘lust’, ‘care’, ‘play’, and ‘panic’. Panksepp argues that these are shared by all mammals, and may be more widely shared among vertebrates.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/#currsci-emotion

Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans

'Laughing’ rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy? Physiology and Behavior

But yes, the subjective experiences of others, whether human or other kinds of animal are rather hidden from us, so we should withhold absolute credence concerning our beliefs about what's going upstairs in their minds. But, plausibly, morality obliges us to be careful in situations like these, not hazardous, so we shouldn't harm or kill these animals without good reason on the assumption that these animals lack what we may believe to be crucially morally relevant properties that we are actually barred from investigating fully at this time.

Let's go another layer and say that women may exhibit unhealthy behaviors towards other women within a toxic patriarchal society.

Women have to compete with other women for reputation-promoting male attention. And I don't mean primarily sexual, I'm talking about professional, romantic, and platonic attention as well. "One of the guys," especially if she is conventionally attractive, has better success in our society than women than don't conform to male expectations.

On top of all this, women are socialized to use their emotions, men are socialized to use their logic. Without combining to two, healthy communication is impossible. For this last bit, I suggest reading, "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys." This book helped me parent both my kids better, boy and girl. It also helped me realize the quiet anguish of men.

I know I'm late to this conversation, but I'd like to add that animals indeed do feel emotions. Dr. Jaak Panksepp has studied this in depth.

Thank you for looking after Tugboat. He's fortunate to have found his way to you. Raccoons are a very demanding animal so it takes a very dedicated individual to be able to have them in their life.

>But what about the oxitocine bond between child and mother?
The chemistry of maternal love is real. So is the feeling. And when the chemistry ceases the withdrawal syndromes are all too obvious.

Yes, I've read something that speaks to this poetically alongside physiological detail, in regards to the limbic brain also A General Theory of Love. But this is a specific kind of relational love.

>NO - the feeling of abandonment is precisely result of our experience, it is the very core of our natural identity.

Yet that is what he is meaning I believe, while proposing from and stating there is a condition beyond this. Have you read his work? It is perhaps being operatively aware in this 'beyond' condition that the activity of contraction as he calls it is perceived to be hallucinatory, state/stage conditional.

> That is why depression is the only truly effective state of individuation, the state of detachment from all cultural categories, the state of entirely submerging in the river of pure sorrow, where we can enter only alone, and from which we emerge as true individuals.

It is a necessary state and position-as-perspective to enter, I would agree. But there is more and/or other (transpersonal developments).

Hm. The website says it's from this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Affective-Neuroscience-Foundations-Emotions-Science/dp/019517805X?tag=quartz07-20
Jaak Panksepp

It was published in 2004. So that data is 2003 and earlier. This isn't new info at all.

Which made me wonder why it was posted, followed by an, "Oh..." I question whether rats are actually doing something like human seeking. On the human side, I think we're zapping ourselves because there's something there. We don't know what exactly but it does have some positive (and negative) effects. It's seeking something better, not just inflicting harm because there's nothing else left in the environment.

This Honestly Hits home for me. I am sensitive to meds.

I recommend you read Driven to Distraction , Skip the first parts about diagnosis, and get to the living suggestions.

There are a few CBT guides that help with ADD, I recommend this one it worked for me. + if you can afford it a therapist trained for ADD would be a good resource.

I honestly have no idea (it could have been an article also) but this is good:
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Multitasking-Doing-Gets-Nothing/dp/0470372257/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494875493&sr=8-1&keywords=multitasking

Also two of my favorite pop pysch books (not 'laziness' related but great information just about how the brain works):
https://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Love-Thomas-Lewis/dp/0375709223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494875459&sr=8-1&keywords=a+general+theory+of+love
https://www.amazon.com/Love-2-0-Finding-Happiness-Connection/dp/0142180475/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&qid=1494875385&sr=8-19&keywords=the+psychology+of+love

>I strongly believe consciousness is like a WiFi signal, our personalities are like software and our bodies are the computer. I reject with all my being that consciousness is only a program the computer runs.

I'd suggest (and there's good science supporting this) that the body IS the mind, the computer IS the software. I can highly recommend the book Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio.

>For anyone to say they know for certain is a lier.

Science doesn't deal in certainties. It forms theories (models of reality) that can make accurate predictions given the evidence we have at the time. When new evidence comes to light, old theories can always be disproven. While it cannot provide certainties, it does provide far more accurate predictions about the universe we live in than any system of knowledge we had before science.

i think this boils down to you becoming more comfortable in high conflict situations. while i do agree that most often it's best not to react in these situations, at some point it's less damaging for you to just speak your truth and not give a damn about the consequences for the person being abusive. i feel it's very common for many forward thinking individuals to romanticize with a zen-like "do-nothing" type philosophy when sometimes it's better and more natural to allow your anger to properly express itself. it also could be related to struggling with codependency issues, where you are more comfortable taking a verbal beating than standing up to it...perhaps.

if that dude came at me again, i'd tell him to kiss my ass. and if he told me i was this/that and a whole lot more i would tell him he hasn't even seen the worst of it and to quit crying about it because it's making me bored already. for real.

one thing i've learned about myself is that when something makes me angry to the point that i want to lash out, i'm usually justified in doing so. i don't have a short fuse and i treat people fairly so if i have to cut them down and put them in their place--they deserved it. i'm not perfect but i have a pretty even keel. and you know what i've found red_pockets? the few times where i've done this it's not uncommon for the person to be so shocked that they actually apologize to me after tell them off. i doubt this guy would, but it wouldn't matter.

i highly, highly recommend reading The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren, you can browse through some of the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591797691/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=33857917435&hvpos=1t2&hvexid=&hvnetw=s&hvrand=1154839568181794320&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_7gu45c69fm_b

I think you would gain a lot from reading the chapter about Anger, how it is not a "bad" emotion, it's purpose and message it is trying to tell us. Take care!

p.s. also i did/do some visualization stuff sometimes that really helps me with anger (or perhaps more acutely in rare moments of rage) and if you are interested i can explain more.

With the caveat that I haven't read any of these yet, but when I found out I was having a boy I looked for similar recommendations and this is my reading list:

• Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
  
• Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood
  
• Boys Adrift
  
• Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
  
• The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do
  
• It's a Boy!: Your Son's Development from Birth to Age 18
  
  (I got caught up in reading childbirth and infant care books, which seem more pressing. If anyone has actually read any of these, I'd love to hear your opinions, especially if it can help me prioritize them.)

Fellow smart kid here. Being gifted or in the upper levels of intelligence carries a LOT of downsides. Please educate yourself and be aware. Mental illness risks are a lot higher as they get older.

One of our children had suicidal thoughts in the third grade. Thankfully she talked to us about it and we got her help. It starts early. Prepare yourself and try and enjoy the ride.

Living With Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and the Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults https://www.amazon.com/dp/0910707898/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_XBlkDbR122PWY

That book helped me understand myself as well as other gifted people. There are other books on Amazon specifically aimed at parenting gifted kids.

I doesn't sound like your problems here stem from religion at all, it sounds like both of you have some pretty deep emotional issues that are not being addressed and that are controlling the situation.

Avoiding reality the way she has, and frankly your own decision-making process, is indicative of some pretty deep-seated issues. The religion is just a manifestation, a symptom.

If you want to stay together, I urge both of you go see therapists, probably separately to start with and preferably not the same therapist. If she only wants to see a Christian therapist or whatever, that is fine as long as they seem reasonable. Anything to get her working on it. If she won't go (or her controlling, psycho mom won't "let" her), you get your ass in therapy by yourself.

I would also VERY strongly recommend a book, Love's Executioner. It has nothing to do with romance but may make you feel better about how completely derailed your relationship has come.

Again, the problem here isn't religion. It's you two, both individually and together. Good luck.

You might be interested in Robert Frank's Passion Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions.

The basic idea is that love can function as a precommitment device, ensuring better long-term outcomes for both partners.

If you are looking for something written for a popular/lay audience, a few good starting points:

Making up the Mind by Chris Frith:
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Mind-Brain-Creates-Mental/dp/1405160225

Older but particularly relevant for emotion and consciousness- "Descartes error"
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

If you want something from a less mainstream perspective dealing with embodiment and consciousness, you may enjoy Brainstorms by Shaun Gallagher:
http://www.amazon.com/Brainstorming-Views-Interviews-Shaun-Gallagher/dp/1845400232

Hope these help!

I don't think the rationalist community frowns on intuition as long as it's getting feedback from more systemic analysis of evidence--look at Julia Galef's Straw Vulcan presentation for example (text summary here). And any realistic understanding of how rational thought works in the human brain has to acknowledge that intuition and emotion play an important role, see Descartes' Error by Damasio for some good evidence. Also, if you look into the history of how scientists have come up with important new theories that later turned out to fit the evidence well, they often talk about the important role of intuition (Einstein has many quotes about intuition and imagination on his wikiquote page). The key is just to not let intuition/emotion have the last words, to subject them to questioning and try to convert intuitions into more systemic arguments that are better for scrutinizing and testing.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zen-And-The-Motorcycle-Maintenance/dp/0099322617/ref=wl_it_dp_v_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1ZUCEHKOSGDQS&coliid=I1LX69VJPFR92N

i want this book because ive heard good things about it

If I were a book, I hope that I'd be a great one.

> will never have them

I really wish I had time to write a lengthier comment, because this question is an interesting one that's the subject of a lot of active research.

Some books you might be interested in, all of which are accessible to the general reader (with a few scattered technical bits here and there):

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/affective-computing
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles
https://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

Lots of good advice here already. I'd recommend reading Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. As a parent myself, it really helped me understand some of the root causes for behavioral issues in boys. Maybe you'll find it helpful as well.

A series is kicking off at the brains blog on Tom Cochrane's new book.

The presentation is a little clunky, but in Part-1 of the series we learn that he takes emotions to be "valent representations of situated concerns". These valent representations give emotions a functional role that is sensitive to "the wider context, and can accordingly serve [the individual's] interests more in a contextually sensitive way". He distinguishes emotions from feelings, taking "bodily feelings to represent the capacity of the body to deal with the situation".

It's a fairly abstract outline, but hopefully as the series continues I get a better sense of how his work relates to, say, Barrett's and Ledoux's recent work.

Not related to tripping, but a resource for more information on C-PTSD: http://outofthefog.website/toolbox-1/2015/11/17/complex-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-c-ptsd

Understand that your symptoms came up to protect you. Through understanding you might even be able to thank them.
I'd heavly recommend reading up on emotions & trauma (contains some visualization exercises to work through each emotion & explains their role in the psyche): https://www.amazon.com/Language-Emotions-What-Feelings-Trying/dp/1591797691

I wish MDMA was legal with a therapist to work through repressed issues.
If you have any specific questions (i.e. ptsd symptoms, shrooms), I might be able help you a little. It's such a big topic I don't know where to start and where to go.


Remember shrooms are not a magic cure, not a "take once and be healed"-drug. Depending on your state (set & setting) they can be healing (like ~positive PTSD :D) or traumatize you further.
I don't advocate self-medicating and prefer to recommend 'sober' methods, but I believe they helped me little by little.

For more on this kind of thing I'd recommend Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland. It has some great examples of similar occurances. For example on numerous occasions a completed application form with an attached photo was placed in an envelope and left on a bench in a town centre. If the applicant was smiling in their photo a stranger who found the envelope would be more likely to post it.

I sometimes find it helpful to draw a mental line between the actual research on the one hand, and the researchers interpretations of their results on the other. One can often find many possible interpretations of a given experiment.

>What Im wondering about is if humans having little or no control over our actions is the standpoint scientists are generally taking now that a lot of new research exists to support it.

I can't comment as to whether the majority of neuroscientists would endorse this view, but I can see another interpretation that jibes well with the research I've read: we do have control over a number of factors and situations (e.g. ducking when somebody throws something at you shows control), but control amounts to a mishmash of both conscious and unconscious factors. Where others see research showing that we don't have control, I see research showing that conscious awareness has a more limited scope than was previously believed. I would not call conscious awareness an "illusion" as such, because clearly we have awareness, but I think we do have illusions about the scope of that awareness and we underestimate the importance and power of unconscious processes.

>I could add that the paper Im writing is on the emergence of Descartes dualistic theory and how it is proven or disproven in todays scientific and religious world.

You might check out Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error.

Anything from Oliver Sacks always worth reading imo.

• Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain!
  
  
• The Compassionate Brain: A Revolutionary Guide to Developing Your Intelligence to Its Full Potential: How Empathy Creates Intelligence!
  
  
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain!
  
  
• Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions!
  
  
• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind!
  
  
• The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound!
  
  not really neuroscience, but interesting imho:
  
  
• How the Mind Works!
  
  
  *(hopes formatting works)

You might like A General Theory of Love. It's the only book on the subject I've read, but I found it interesting and easy to follow.

Affective Neuroscience, by Jaak Panksepp is a very heavy treatment of the topic, but very good.

The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio is a little more coffee table/pop sciencey, but he's a very accomplished neuroscientist who is drawing on his clinical experiences.

Put simply, though, "affect," or emotion, is a subconscious body state. Hunger, fear, desire, rage, sadness, happiness/satisfaction are all collections of biological functions which place our organism in a state appropriate to its environment. Emotion is a fairly primitive degree of control over the entire biological system. Right above reflex.

Feeling is the conscious appreciation of your body experiencing one of these states, and attributing it to a specific perceptual stimulus, or abstracting one from experience.

We as humans also have a further degree of abstraction, where we can imagine ourselves feeling an emotion, and precipitate the physical response as if we were experiencing the stimulus. This is the basis for the emotional weight of things like art, music, and empathy.

It's a worthy read, but kind of dull. If you're looking to improve yourself, I would recommend Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland. Worthy and surprising.

Here are some of my favorite popular books by academic researchers about consciousness:

• The Feeling of What Happens - Antonio Damasio
  
• Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett
  
  And for more of an inside-out view, I'd recommend a book on meditation by a former neuroscientist: The Mind Illuminated by Robert Yates

I experience basically the same inattentive symptoms and anxiety too. I’m not hyperactive but quite fatigue throughout the day so my motivation is quite low.

Anyways, I’m not sure of any apps but I do know a great workbook that has been quite helpful for me, which was suggested by my therapist. It would be even better to use it with someone so you have someone to be accountable to and check in with.

[Mastering Your Adult ADHD](Mastering Your Adult ADHD: A Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment Program Client Workbook (Treatments That Work) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195188195/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_PeSMBbE3XETX3)

Lots and lots of therapy. The Velvet Rage was essential reading. Knowing lots of other gay men have had similar problems helps. There are peer support groups also--there absolutely is profound trauma we experience growing up in a world that doesn't accept us, even if some have it a bit better. Be kind to yourself--the coping mechanisms you developed back then just aren't serving you now. I fell into addiction because I internalized all the negative messaging churches and schoolmates told me. I think it helps also to be the person you wish you had back then for someone else in that situation right now. You know firsthand what it's like, and by supporting someone else going through it, I think you can be that person for yourself at the same time.

This has come HIGHLY recommended to me, and it sounds like it might help you keep your sanity:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0910707898/

Do you have a source? There's a popular book on emotions that came out last year referencing a lot of research showing that emotion categories aren't inherent, and facial expressions don't always correspond across cultures. In fact, here's a quote from classics scholar Mary Beard:

>This is not to say that Romans never curled up the edges of their mouths in a formation that would look to us much like a smile; of course they did. But such curling did not mean very much in the range of significant social and cultural gestures in Rome. Conversely, other gestures, which would mean little to us, were much more heavily freighted with significance.

My boyfriend is a new special needs teacher/assistant with very little training and he's increasingly patient since he's started the job. He recommends the book Raising Cain to get an idea of what the students are going through and figure out easier ways to communicate with them.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/0345434854/ref=mw_dp_cr

If you want the book, I'll get it for you if you PM me contact info.

I've found this book very helpful.

http://www.amazon.com/Living-With-Intensity-Understanding-Excitability/dp/0910707898

It's based on Dabrowski(sp?)'s work with gifted people. Covers the whole positive integration thing-a-ma-jig.

Unmasking the face

While not specifically for artists this book goes into very specific details about facial expressions and what they mean. It is very specific as to what is moving and what isn't in any particular facial expression, which I found extremely helpful.

Fun fact: its written by the guy who the TV show Lie to Me is based on.

I'd recommend the following resources:

https://drjudithorloff.com/empath-support/

https://www.amazon.com/Language-Emotions-What-Feelings-Trying/dp/1591797691

EFT tapping is also a great way to deal with overwhelming emotions and release them.

When taken purely metaphorically, I somewhat agree with your theory.

From a spiritual/emotional perspective there is a (neural) war going on between "enlightenment" and emotional repression, between love and fear, between freedom and oppression.

In an emotionally repressed person, the cortex is constantly repressing impulses from the more "primitive" parts of the brain. (See for example "The Emotional Brain" by LeDoux.) Ultimately these repressed emotions and traumas will effect a persons behaviour without them realizing it. This makes a repressed person easier to control. It also makes them less effective at a lot of things, because the brain wastes a lot of energy on repressing emotions and memories.

Facing your traumas and embracing your emotions makes you more effective at a lot of things and more aware of why you might act in certain ways, making it easier to regulate your own behaviour. IMO this will also make you less susceptible to any form of mind control, ranging from coercive persuasion as done by cults to electronic forms of brain washing and influence. It also makes wiping your memory, which I believe to be possible to some extent, much harder.

I think many TI's are being targeted because they have strong natural tendencies towards "enlightenment", towards not being emotionally repressed. The powers that be want a world where people can be controlled. This means keeping them as fearful as possible. They perceive enlightenment as a threat to their plans and wish to eradicate it completely. They also don't want anybody involved in electronic mind control to find out how resistant and effective enlightened people are, which is why they have to be repressed and kept debilitated 24/7.

If you'd like to deal with childhood traumas or repressed emotions in a constructive way, I'd personally recommend the Past Reality Integration (PRI) techniques by Ingeborg Bosch, or some other form of therapy based on primal therapy.

Banksy didn't originate that quote either. He just re-publicized an age-old idea. Much like everything he does.

You should read this book some time. Published in 1989 and says the same thing as the Banksy quote. And chances are, somebody else said it before then too...but we can safely assume that they weren't some sensationalized graffiti artist.

>As of yet, we have not pinpointed exactly what morality is nor have we been able to provide definitive answers to some basic questions of morality

Sure about that?


https://www.amazon.com/Age-Empathy-Natures-Lessons-Society/dp/0307407772

Current hypotheses suggest altruism (ethics, morality) being a development originating from the maternal instinct.

Lots of non-human animals have morality. So either non-human animals have "abritrary vague social constructs" or morality is in-part biological. This isn't to suggest reductionism. There is a clear social aspect, and a clear social evolution in the development of ethics, but underneath those dynamic, evolving, constructs is biology.

I disagree that empathy is inadequate. Furthermore I would argue that empathy is the driving factor for human values. Empathy was not designed by human beings and had its start long before anything resembling humans walked this earth. Given the importance of empathy to the continued existence our species we can treat it as a meta-value system and derive other values and ethics from it. This argument is made more forcefully and in more detail can I ever hope to by Frans de wall. I would recommend you to read his short article The Evolution of Empathy and if your interest is piqued enough by his arguments to peruse his longer tome The Age of Empathy.

That's actually quite a fascinating topic - there's lots of good psychological research into it.

For example, take a group of people, and divide them in half (set A and set B).

To set A, pose the following question:

"You are considering buying a lottery ticket. The tickets are $1, the payout is $20. There are 10 tickets in total, of which 9 have been bought. Would you buy the ticket"

To set B, pose the following question:

"You are considering buying a lottery ticket. The tickets are $1, the payout is $20. There are 10 tickets in total, of which 9 have been bought by Tony, the person who came before you . Would you buy the ticket"

Most people in set A will purchase a ticket. Very few from set B will.

This is just one example, of which there are staggeringly many displaying human irrationality.

Very good introductions to this area can be found in irrationality by Stuart Sutherland, predictably irrational by Dan Ariely and many others.

That's a great book, but if you want the mother-lode of individual and collective forms of irrational behaviour, I would recommend this book as well:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Irrationality-Stuart-Sutherland/dp/1905177070

Dabrowski's works are still very available on the internet. http://positivedisintegration.com/

​

You can also just type in "Dabrowski" on amazon.

​

I highly recommend the book "Living with Intensity", which contains a big picture view of gifted psychology and practical knowledge for parents, educators, employers etc.

​

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Intensity-Understanding-Sensitivity-Excitability/dp/0910707898/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Dabrowski&qid=1563657833&s=gateway&sr=8-1

​

Some papers...

Overexcitability and the highly gifted child

http://www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/entry/A10102

Tips for Parents: Beyond Overexcitabilities: A Crash Course in Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration

http://www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/entry/A10858

https://www.amazon.com/Velvet-Rage-Overcoming-Growing-Straight/dp/1611746450/ref=nodl_

You can move beyond your shame. I hope it happens for you one day 💗

A General Theory of Love is a reasonable, readable place to start.
Or anything by Oliver Sacks (Dr. Sacks was a neurologist and one of my favorite writers).


"Psychology" is a gargantuan subject with myriad options. Is there an area you are interested in?

The argument of logic vs beauty is an old one and dates back as far as ancient greece :)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Anniversary/dp/0099322617

Have a read of this if you want a modern interpretation of the underlying unity of the two concepts.

The biggest thing to realize is that you have to realize that your body is the problem and is distorting your outlook, so you need to learn to
ignore and not trust your own judgement so much on a good manythings... in other words: Be skeptical of your own thoughts and feelings and challenge them by ignoring them and experimenting (doing things).

If you want to make your life better know that work is not really fulfilling most of the time and is just a grind, what makes your life fulfilling is the kinds of people you have around you and lack of debt...

So you want to get enough money to not be so stressed out and you want to find good people to hang around with... those should be primariy goals now to get there...

Knowing yourself and growing your vision of how to see the world is half the battle...

People are driven largely by unconscious biases and processes
they don't understand so to build up your confidence and how to see the world I would recommend learning about how people aren't
really in control of themselves (so you don't take anything personally)

First see this video (you can find the rest by googling "orwell comes to america")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Most people operate under the assumption that when we talk logically and make rational arguments while we communicate via language other people will understand... this is NOT true and science says so, its good to know this just so you know that each persons mind is it's own universe and each persons interpretation of the world is limited to their own inner world defined by the structure of their biology.

These are good tests just to show you your own biases, and why trying to go against human biases (looks, etc) is a fools game because biases are unconscious

Bias tests:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

If you really want to get a more informed view of the world and how much people have no clue about how they reason and function get and read this book (even if you don't understand all of it theres bound to be stuff you can learn about human beings just by reading it)

http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X/

Just sharing a bit of my own wisdom since I've been through the process of what you are going through.

This reminds me of a chapter from Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy

A rich accountant retires and he suddenly starts to develop migraines and has problems with impotence. He has no idea where the problem is coming from. He and the therapist (author of the book) eventually discover that the timing of the migraines/impotence almost perfectly coincides with his retirement date.

They eventually discover that all his life, all he did was try to make more money and acquire more stuff. He never took any time to develop his character or think about bigger questions like "what am I working towards?" and "how do I bring more meaning into my life?" Once he retired, the focal point of his life disappeared and there was basically nothing left to fill the gap. All the stuff he acquired (predictably enough) meant nothing.

I guess if you fail to cultivate yourself and work on yourself, it's eventually going to catch up to you. One of the most common times that this "catching up" occurs seems to happen after retirement and via "empty nest syndrome." The empty nest situation is much like retirement. For most parents, kids are their greatest source of meaning and once the kids go off on their own, they suddenly realize that they have nothing to fill the gap. They have no real hobbies and they never really developed themselves and created more identities other than "good parents."

I have no idea where I was going with this. Your comment triggered a flurry of thoughts that I thought would be relevant!

I recommend some books on body language.

I'm currently reading The Definitive Book of Body Language

I have also read What Every BODY is Saying

I recommend both of them.

The first book is more about general body language, body language in business, and body language is courting. The second book is about lying and catching people lie.

There is also this book: Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions From Facial Expressions which I haven't read yet, but it looks good.

>Science on reasoning, I mean no offence but this the best link you can provide to information on cognitive thought process?

Go pick it up and have a read when you have the time.

​

https://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

​

> Studies relevance to the Canadian political system?

All capitalist states work the same, you have to understand that canada is a vassal state to the US empire, you don't seem to have any understanding of history, when trump was doing negotiations for the new agreement, do you really think justin and freeland were protecting Canadians? The reality is we are all in the US political sphere of influence because we buy and use products from companies headquartered in the US.

I'm in the same boat as you and the truth is these emo are often not really based on external circumstances. We just are in the habit of looking for external stuff to attract them to. Many negative emotions come from the brains failure to accurately predict an outcome. This explains more & might help you a great deal. https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret-ebook/dp/B00QPHURT6

In the additional list in the article I really enjoyed Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct

One of my own favorites; Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio

Wow! That's amazing. You know, there is a healthy way to be angry. Anger lights up our boundaries. It's a defense. If we use it in defense, it serves its rightful purpose. It's when we use it to attack that it fucks us up.

I had forgotten this. Thank you for reminding me. It's from a good book loaned to me by a friend. The Language of Emotions, by Karla Mclaren. It's time to go back to that book again.

Thanks in advance! I'm a voracious reader and could always use some quality recommendations.

1. The Three Musketeers
   
2. Memoirs of a Geisha
   
3. The Poisonwood Bible
   
4. ASOIAF/Kingkiller Chronicles (EPIC! FANTASY! Not-crap writing (which plagues fantasy everywhere!)
   
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany
   
6. American Gods
   
7. Rebecca (Gothic! Gorgeous!)
   
8. The Lace Reader (WOOOOoooo, unreliable narrators!)
   
9. The Time Traveler's Wife
   
10. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Cognitive Science!)

Going to check these out, thanks!

Have you read The Emotional Brain? It seems to be popping up in looking up the other two and may be a nice one to add, but I haven't read that one either.

I read a (dated) book for my class that highlights this problem. If anyone's interested - Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. It's really an eye-opener.

I'm finishing up a course on teaching social skills (which I will be putting all of the information together and creating a thread in the next week).

I'm reading two books currently: Twelve by Twelve and Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys

Buy any book by Paul Ekman. The one I bought is here, now my friends call me "The Mentalist".

Body issues affect men loads more than anyone cares to discuss and gay men are hit particularity hard. For example, "straight-guy thin" is "gay fat". Guys of all ages tear themselves apart and other gay men are happy to help. In an ever-more image focused culture, it is a struggle to not fall into this trap of trying to live up to everyone else's highlight reel when you're living your b-roll.

I struggled with being a chubby kid forever. I was called 'fatty-faggot' my entire childhood. I am a normal weight now at 29 but my self-image has never caught up. When I am stressed or upset, I feel like that chubby little boy who just wants to hide. That said, what helped me was working on myself inside and out and setting incremental goals rather than grand, long-term goals. Easier said than done, but here is what I did.

The first thing I did was clean up my diet and portion sizes. That is 80% of the battle on the weight front. Figure out your TDE for calories, eat a deficit, lose weight. It really is that simple. I track using the app MyFitnessPal. You can eat anything but a a balanced diet of protein, fat and carbs with minimally processed foods will keep you from feeling hungry and give you steady energy. I always pack my lunch for work and if I forget, I keep Soylent at my desk so I don't eat out. When I can, I research where I'll be eating out so I know what I want to order and don't get tempted by things that'll blow up my daily intake. I know what is not-awful at fast-food joints. I drink but track the cals. And sometimes, I say fuck it and eat a big fat meal...but eating excessively has to be the exception, NOT A RULE. What helps me is not seeing every meal as a pleasure cruise but as me just refueling to do my work and live my life.

Drastic diets do not work. It'll take some trial and error but you will find out a lifestyle of eating that suites you. Remember, this is a long game of changing your habits and your relationship with food. It does not matter what you eat between Thanksgiving and Christmas but rather that you eat between New Years ans Thanksgiving.

I committed to a 'no zero days' approach to exercise. Everyday, I do something for 30 mins that gets me off my ass. Even if my day is crazy, I walk my pups for 30 mins. I use my Apple Watch to track. Often, I eat my lunch at my desk while I work and use my lunch hour to get moving. You don't have to spend 3 hours a day in the gym to build exercise in. If you wanna give your cleaned up diet a boost, this is how you do it.

Finally, learn to start loving yourself being more mindful about how you consider yourself. To this day, I have an automatic negative self-image and when I catch myself being hard on myself, I ask "Well, what have I done today or ever to make this better?" or "who says I need to be this way or look this way?" You can motivate yourself and still be gentle with you. Read some self-help books and if you feel you need it, consider therapy. There is no shame in asking for help.

These helped me shift my thinking:

https://www.amazon.com/Velvet-Rage-Overcoming-Growing-Straight/dp/1611746450

https://www.amazon.com/Daring-Greatly-Courage-Vulnerable-Transforms/dp/1592408419

I hope this helps buddy.

I'm sorry to tell you but you have google, one can easily lookup george lakoff or damasio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio

http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

Don't choose a side. If you say to yourself "I am an X" your brain will find itself completely compelled to irrationally defend X, wasting precious brain cycles that could be better spent on other things.

Read a book on moral psychology if you want to give up political tribalism. Here are some suggestions:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605

This book may help you

Sorry, I'm not willing to wade through another wall of text with so little punctuation.

But I got through this:

> I don't understand what other people mean by "feeling" in expressions such as "talking about feelings" and "talking about emotions" and "describing feelings" and "describing emotions." I just guess.

Which honestly doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me unless you're alexithymic. And even then, there's little mystery to what those things mean - even to someone who is.

Might try one of Damasio's books? Would probably start with this one: https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-What-Happens-Emotion-Consciousness/dp/0156010755

A lot (not all) of TRP tries to teach you that LTR's are wrong and some try to berate you for the effort, however such isn't the case.

What you're experiencing is a form of oneitis, and a form of a lack of Abundance Mentality. Most of the things you will find on TRP do not deal with love - rather 99% of it is the plate theory. While I wont say such is wrong, it has little significance for someone not looking to fuck a different woman every night, and just wants to find someone suitable for companionship.

You need to realize that these "feelings" you have over this woman, could potentially happen with anyone, and there is nothing that makers her special from the rest of the female population. Once you start habitually and consciously retaining this information, your Abundance Mentality development will happen quickly. If you were as alpha and had such good luck with women as you make it seem, you would have no problem separating sex and emotion.

Plus, as other commentators said this lack of separation tends you to emit "beta" Like behaviors when you are entranced by a woman. So the problem here is more likely your behavior and the (probably) sudden change in how you treat a woman that scares her. Identify your actions, your habits and the things that you do that she does and doesn't like (and this is with all women, and learning body language can help with this. I recommend reading up on some Paul Eckman watching the Lie to Me Series on netflix might help with such too, It's a show I'd recommend everyone on this subreddit watch.
This is the type of thing I help figure out/deal with on my blog, so you can PM me if you have any questions or concerns.

Side note: I feel like you need to read the Bitch Hierarchy Guide that's stickied to this subreddit a few times, one thing he made important was this - sex does not affect a woman's level on the ladder - which I saw was a problem of yours.

Much of what you describe is just describing a basic take on human health and the life history of the person you see around you and interact with.

You would enjoy Sam harris I think:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_hruUhJUw

http://www.samharris.org/


Not to be a downer but I'd read up on neuroscience/research papers on human behavior. You should look for roots of instincts/feelings across species because if we have some instinct there most likely will be other examples in the history of life.

Just one example:

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/rev-0000020.pdf

Also:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/014303622X/

On reason and emotion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

I listened to both of the emotion podcasts on there since yesterday. It blew my mind. I've been thinking about it a lot, even related to hunger as you mention as I'm pretty hungry today. I need to know more, so I might have to pick up the book they mentioned: https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret-ebook/dp/B00QPHURT6

If you have boys, Raising Cain. I think the author has one about girls as well.

https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Cain-Protecting-Emotional-Life/dp/0345434854

>At the National Policy Institute conference, the writer F. Roger Devlin gave a talk on why young Norwegian women in Groruddalen, outside Oslo, preferred dating Somali and Pakistani gang members to ethnic Norwegian boys-next-door. “The female instinct is to mate with socially dominant men,” he explained, “and it does not matter how such dominance is achieved.”

There is something surprising here though. The native Norwegians are wealthier than the Somali/Pakistani immigrants, and all else equal wealth is generally associated with social dominance. If you look at history, in basically every case the group that's wealthier is considered socially dominant over the less wealthy group, and women go for wealthy men. So what gives?

My theory: In this case, wealth is associated with high-speed Internet, which leads to porn overuse, which leads to social awkwardness. There have been anecdotes about this online for a long time, but research is finally starting to come out. This is why "women like bad boys" has just recently become such a meme: the average male in our generation is much worse with women than the average male of previous generations. That leads to r-selected mating behavior among women who are targeting the fraction of the male population that managed to survive the introduction of high-speed internet porn unscathed.

Well, the trick to making better children each generation is to not do the things you know your parents did wrong.

Like, we now know that being an emotionally unavailable dad is bad for kids. I strongly suggest this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Cain-Protecting-Emotional-Life/dp/0345434854

The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs. It may seem like an anachronism, but I feel it is still relevant in our heteronormative world.

You might want to read more deeply into the notion that reason and emotion are "easily separated." See, e.g,

Robert Burton (neuroscientist), On Being Certain (see also this for a short intro to Burton's book)

Antonio Damasio (neuroscientist), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain and The Feeling of What Happens

> I've heard it described as boys being handled like they are defective girls.

Yep.

> “Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools,” says psychologist Michael Thompson. “Boys are treated like defective girls.”

http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/28/what-schools-can-do-to-help-boys-succeed/

>arguing with you over how "gifted" you think you are.

Dude. Read a fucking book: https://www.amazon.com/Living-Intensity-Understanding-Sensitivity-Excitability/dp/0910707898

Here part 1

Part 2

http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

http://www.amazon.com/The-Demise-Guys-Struggling-ebook/dp/B00850HTHO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337704658&sr=8-2

Try out cognitive behavior therpy.
This book is about it: http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Your-Adult-ADHD-Cognitive-Behavioral/dp/0195188195/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1325185928&sr=8-2

Books?

Something related

Something unrelated

Something really good

https://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

Affective Neuroscience.

While it's loosely related, what's your opinion on Philip Zimbardo's The Demise of Guys?

I'm guessing the book that the documentary is based on.

A General Theory of Love

A General Theory of Love

Some ideas in 4 categories:

Body Language:

• What Every BODY is Saying
  
• Unmasking The Face
  
  Speed Reading:
  
  
• Breakthrough Rapid Reading
  
  Evolutionary Psych / Behavior:
  
  
• The Blank Slate
  
• How The Mind Works
  
  PUA / Attraction:
  
  
• Bang
  
• Mystery Method

Ditto to Man's Search for Meaning. I also found Love's Executioner by Irvin Yalom to be amazingly life affirming. He's an existential therapist and the book is a collection of fictional stories about patients and his sessions with them - written to exemplify his take on existentialism and how it can be used to positively change people's lives. It's also very accessible - no dense philosophical jargon. I very highly recommend it, especially if you're in the middle of a crisis.

There really are a few people with neurological disorders or brain injuries who don't use any emotion or gut instinct to make decisions. They are totally rational people because they are disconnected from their emotions.

Rather than being Spock (or, I suppose, a full Vulcan), they are people who are paralyzed by decisions that the rest of us make quickly without thinking. Sure, it's one thing to try to make economic policy decisions without emotion, but try using pure rationality to choose between a blue tie and a red tie. They can't do it, and they get hamstrung by it.

Here is another good source of what Descartes got right and what he got wrong.

https://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

When my son was born, I read a book called "Raising Cain" by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. It was shocking to read because it so succinctly covers everything that, as a boy, you think you're the only one to feel. It's helped my parenting a lot, and I would recommend it to anyone who has a son.

Gays are statistically more intelligent, and as the book The Velvet Rage describes, they frequently channel their frustrations into becoming high achievers, so they often get good jobs that pay a lot of money and thus can afford CA/NY.

​

This is the first official episode of the Chameleon Philosophy Podcast. This episode of the podcast covers the intersection of evolutionary history and moral thought. I cover many different thinkers who will be linked below. This podcast also goes into the fundamental disagreements of utilitarian theory and moral pluralism on the subject of human emotions and their importants within our own ethics.

If you have any comments or questions please email me at chameleonphilosophypodcast@gmail.com


Tamler Sommers:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Honor-Matters-Tamler-Sommers/dp/0465098878

https://www.amazon.com/Relative-Justice-Cultural-Diversity-Responsibility/dp/0691139938/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Relative+Justice&qid=1556116613&s=books&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Very-Bad-Wizard-Morality-Curtain/dp/0415858798/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=A+Very+Bad+Wizard&qid=1556116655&s=books&sr=1-1-catcorr

https://verybadwizards.fireside.fm/

Robert Wright:
https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Moral+Animal&qid=1556116727&s=books&sr=1-1

Peter Singer:
https://petersinger.info/
https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Real-World-Essays-Things/dp/069117847X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Ethics+in+the+real+world&qid=1556116779&s=books&sr=1-1

Jonathan Haidt:
https://philpapers.org/rec/HAITED-2

Bob Frank:
https://www.amazon.com/Passions-Within-Reason-Strategic-Emotions/dp/0393960226

William MacAskill:
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

>I'd argue that the idea that consciousness is non-material is our basic intuition.

And that is all you have to go on. Intuition is not a terribly reliable source of information about the nature of real reality. By intuition the sun rises in the east, travels across the heavens, and sets in the west while the earth remains stationary.

I pointed to books in links above that show the material basis for consciousness. I'm not going to be able to reproduce it here. But if you want to credit intuition there seems to be enough information about the universe being material and none about it being non-material to intuit that consciousness is also material.

Some Books:

I Am a Strange Loop; Godel, Escher, Bach; Philosophy in the Flesh; The Feeling of What Happens; Descartes' Error; Self Comes to Mind

>Holy shit, how many times do I have to say that I think that the physical brain plays a vital role in consciousness before you stop trying to argue as if I was asserting something to the contrary?

How many times do I have to say that physical brain is the only thing in evidence? If it is the physical brain and something, produce the "and something". I can produce the physical brain. So it seems my task is done and yours has yet to begin.

Do you have to demonstrate the non-material scientifically? Well of course you do. You say you can't, yet at the same time want it to be the controlling stuff. How can it do that with no connection? And if it has a connection to the material, then you should be able to study it scientifically.

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

> even if the neuroscience he refers to is correct, his analysis seems flawed.

Nope, where do you think religion comes from? Religion is overwhelming evidence that people don't reason correctly. People live in an abstraction and emotion by and large not in reality, what you're seeing right now is an abstraction imposed on you by your unconscious processing. The noise you're hearing right now where you are is all generated for you by unconscious processes.

You can go get this book and look at the medical cases from science.

http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X/

The Velvet Rage- Alan Downs
https://www.amazon.com/Velvet-Rage-Overcoming-Growing-Straight/dp/1611746450

I Am Not Myself These Days-Josh Kilmer-Purcell
https://www.amazon.com/Am-Not-Myself-These-Days/dp/0060817321/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509556002&sr=8-1&keywords=i+am+not+myself+these+days

> No, people of all political positions come to hold their beliefs because of emotions, rather than rationality.

It's "rational" to pay workers as little as you can so that more profit can be made for shareholders. But I would argue that it's morally abhorrent. That's a political belief informed by ideology - even if it's rational.

I also think you're discounting emotion entirely - and that's really not something you should do.

Try this: https://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

And remember:

>You aren't allow to criticize something you haven't read.

Anime is always weird when it talks about "emotions" or "emotionless" people; they usually still do obviously have "emotions", just not very strong or socially disruptive ones. Scientifically speaking, any actual failure of the brain systems that produce emotion would make rational decision making and value judgment impossible.

So I don't know if the word they use connotes something different in Japanese than it does in English.

> All of the behaviors of finding a mate is usually in high school. Passing notes in class holding hands while walking down the hall, going out on dates. Do you see what I am getting at? The gay guys in high school do not participate in these behaviors because they are in fear of their safety and protecting their secret from everyone.... Straight couples have professed their love from the rooftop, had sexual relations that everybody knew about and accepted. What do the gay guys have? Nothing but a blank slate and no clue how to rectify that.

Have you read The Velvet Rage? If not, highly recommended. http://www.amazon.com/The-Velvet-Rage-Overcoming-Straight/dp/1611746450

Edited to add link.

I should have added that everyone believes things at least partially for non-smart reasons. There are no real life Dr. Spocks or Cmdr. Datas. As Damasio points out, all reasoning is partly emotional and those unfortunate individuals who have brain damage to the emotional areas involved in reasoning are actually terminally indecisive not super-rational.

What comes to mind is The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs.

From the Amazon page,
>The most important issue in a gay man’s life is not “coming out,” but coming to terms with the invalidating past. Despite the progress made in recent years, many gay men still wonder, “Are we better off?” The byproduct of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, rejection, and anger—a toxic cocktail that can lead to drug abuse, promiscuity, alcoholism, depression, and suicide. Drawing on contemporary psychological research, the author’s own journey, and the stories of many of his friends and clients, Velvet Rage addresses the myth of gay pride and outlines three stages to emotional well-being for gay men. The revised and expanded edition covers issues related to gay marriage, a broader range of examples that extend beyond middle-class gay men in America, and expansion of the original discussion on living authentically as a gay man.

Take it with a grain of salt, of course, as it may be a little dated and it does not dissect every personality trait and life situation, but I think it has some conversational value.

I was a sorta late bloomer, coming out in the later part of college. I didn't really have people to talk to, most people didn't suspect so it wasn't ever brought up. When I decided to start coming out, I wanted to prepare with stories and experiences from others, but really I didn't know where to look. At that age, the internet had slim pickings for what I was looking for. The book The Velvet Rage offered some reasoning to the way I was feeling. In retrospect, I disagree with some of the author's perspectives, but at that time, it helped.

When I actually started telling people, I would get really tired, and go to bed. The following morning I always woke up with nausea and would puke. No drinking involved, but it was a weird psychosomatic response I experienced.

I guess in a way, your sadness comes from a mixture of things; in a way, it's a mourning of no longer having to be a person that repressed a certain part of their life. It's also an overwhelming sadness of knowing that you've missed out on things in life if it hadn't been for the burden of hiding. I experienced A LOT of rage, not with myself, but with the conditions of the world around me. Things didn't make sense for a while, and when they did, they always felt "fresh." Like not knowing when I could start telling friends about the guys I thought were hot. Always thinking "Oh god, am I being 'too gay' now or have I always felt this way?"
Having your situation be an "open secret" can make this process harder as it raises questions about trust and suspicion. But overall, just know that this takes time, it takes a lot of time. Be patient. Listen to yourself, and think things through.