@coberst,
coberst wrote:
Can we compare physics and psychology?
Libido is an energy source"Heat is an energy source"there is potential and kinetic energy
Emotion aka instinct is an energy source"
Narcissism is a force"gravity is a force"electromagnetism is a force"within the atom there are the strong and weak forces"there are four physical forces within nature. Narcissism is a force that displays itself in--self-absorption"self-love"sense of immortality"self-esteem"cosmic significance"self-importance"feeds on symbols, on abstract ideas of my own worth
Guilt is a feeling caused by outside resistance
Feeling"the mental experience of an emotion after the body has reacted to the emotion
Neurosis is the control of anxiety by restricting experience"the humanization process is neurosis in action
Anxiety is a feeling, the penalty for becoming human, i.e. for becoming self-conscious; it is not based on instinct but is based upon individual sense of helplessness.
Ego controls responses by delaying action
Hero"the world is a stage for heroism"our main task on this earth"man’s natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasure of incorporation and expansion, fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols"we compare one another symbolically"we are ignorant of what we want and need, we disguise it in consumption as our badges"desire to be hero is natural and to admit it is healthy"need to make me, man, nation, etc, meaningful"our need for freedom is our need to be a hero"it becomes a blind-drivenness that burns us up"we must feel that what we do is heroic"crises is when youth does not feel heroic, we have a crisis of heroism"religion is no longer a stage for heroism"heroics is a central theme of human action
Culture is a symbolic action system for heroism"to give death its due is perhaps a step back that will permit a step forward"death is reality, when we repress it what happens?"
This is how our brain works. We think with the aid of past experiences. We use linguistic metaphors to give others a direction for understanding. Our brain uses conceptual metaphors this same way; automatically using conceptual metaphors. LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Automatically our brain “copies” what we already know about journeys that help us to better comprehend the task of living.
Abstract ideas are largely metaphorical.
An infant is born and when embraced for the first time by its mother the infant experiences the sensation of warmth. In succeeding experiences the warmth is felt along with other sensations.
Empirical data verifies that there often happens a conflation of this sensation experience together with the development of a subjective (abstract) concept we can call affection. With each similar experience the infant fortifies both the sensation experience and the affection experience and a little later this conflation aspect ends and the child has these two concepts in different mental spaces.
This conflation leads us to readily recognize the metaphor ‘affection is warmth’.
Cognitive science uses metaphor in the standard usage as we are all accustomed to but it also uses a new concept that you are unfamiliar with unless you have been reading this book. This new concept is called ‘conceptual metaphor’. Conceptual metaphor is the heart of this new cognitive science and represents what will be in my opinion the new paradigm of cognitive science.
In my example I speak of two separate mental spaces; one being the experience of being held and the other is the subjective experience of affection. The theory behind the ‘conceptual metaphor’ is that the structure of the sense experience can and is often automatically without conscious intention mapped into a new mental space.
The experience structure can be mapped into a new mental space and thereby becomes part of the structure of that new mental space. In this fashion these conceptual metaphors can act somewhat like atoms that join together to make a molecule.
SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has developed new and revolutionary theories regarding how cognition works. One way that it works is through metaphor, not just linguistic but also through conceptual metaphor. You ought to give it a study. You might be surprised how many things will become clearer.
I am a retired engineer; that is why I think using physics as an aid in comprehending the world I live in.
These metaphors might help you to understand psychology in the way that telling someone that the eye is like a camera, or the heart is like a pump, might help him to understand how the eye or the heart works. But it is one thing to say that the eye is
like a camera, or the heart is
like a pump, and to say that the eye is a camera, or the heart is a pump. The first is not misleading, the second is just false. The same does for the energy metaphor. The main idea is not to take metaphors literally.
