calandtheblackhole

I'm not getting into details, but here's how it works: When your mind feels good, or pleasurable, or euphoric, the world seems smaller and less complicated. That's why when you feel good things seem to somehow all make sense. Even if you don't specifically know anything more than usual, your brain generally thinks it has things figured out. Why not? If you've got pleasure, you must be surviving, so why complicate what must be working fine? On the other hand, when you feel dysphoric, or frustrated, or confused, the world seems infinitely complicated and difficult to handle. That's why, if you give up on your calculus homework one night, you feel terribly frustrated with many other aspects of the world. "If I can't do this integration problem, and other people are out there building skyscrapers and airplanes, life's just gonna suck for me," thinks your poor brain. If your brain feels bad, things must not be working out. So the brain complicates and darkens its perception of the world. Pleasure is really just chemicals, which the brain has released in response to certain situations, reacting with parts of the brain, and displeasure comes from either the lack of these chemical reactions or from other, displeasurable chemicals. It's interesting that these chemicals have such a profound affect on the brain's overall understanding of what it knows, and that these shifts constantly happen without being noticed. Also, there are clear evolutionary links between us and animals who can't think at all. What seperates us so drastically from the cat, for instance? (If you don't recognize how similar we are to ALL other mammals, especially the 4-footed ones, with eyes and ears and noses and mouths and hearts and stomachs all in the same places as ours, your imagination sucks, because they could have turned out a whole lot differently.) We all realize that we think in our language. Language isn't just a means of useful interpersonal communication, it's also the operating system of our conscious minds. You could never construct complex (or even compound) ideas without verbal cues. ("I'm gonna go upstairs and make two sandwiches while watching Frasier once I get finished writing this E-mail." Think about how hard it would be to sort out that idea in pictures instead of words.) Also, you couldn't access memories (which you must realize aren't just floating around up there) without language. You need to think "summer camp" to access pictures and quotes and ideas related to summer camp. Language is a powerful tool for sorting the resources of the mind. Another thing is, language is connected with many of the senses. The word "Daisy" appeals to sight (the shape of the word and your recollection of the look of the flower) , sound (the sound of the word "daisy,") and even the feeling of writing the word (motion the word "daisy" with your hand without looking.) This connection between words and the senses helps the brain to organize things better, which is to an obvious intellectual advantage. The better a language is at storing things, the more intellegent the speakers of that language will be. Members of native cultures are also known to have much lower intellegence than members of developed cultures, but these differences disappear when natives learn languages like English. This should prove that language correlates with intellegence. The feeling of being alive is a lot simpler than it seems. Think about how few things you feel at once. Sight, sound, touch, smell, the voice in your head, your brain's innate ability to recognize what it sees and feels and make reactionary decisions, and a few chemicals floating around in your body (you can clearly feel things like adrenaline or the pleasure chemicals in your body). These components form the harmony of life. Think about a band you listened to as a kid. At first the sound seemed like one complicated thing, but as you grew up and learned to identify the sounds of different instruments, you realized how simple the music really is. Existence is a lot simpler than the brain seems to want you to believe. Think about typing with your fingers on the computer keys. You feel the keys and motions, see your fingers moving, and hear the clicking. These three parts harmonize to create one perfect illusion of reality. Without the sense of touch, you might as well be watching your fingers on television. The feeling of being alive is far less complicated than you might realize. So, if you ask me, it's important to give your mind pleasure in order to keep things in the right proportions and make life understandable. Hedonism, baby! Hedonism, which calls for basing life on pleasure, makes a shitload of sense. It doesn't mean you should run out and empty your wallet on heroin, it means you should live socially, with human, animal, and envinronmental morals, and with a trust in your own, well-constructed judgement over society's mish-mashed, tangled, misled judgement.