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        general >> psychology >> Mind
        
(Message started by: planetmedia on Oct 30^th, 2012, 3:36am)

Title: Mind
Post by planetmedia on Oct 30^th, 2012, 3:36am

human mind is like an ocean. No one can understand it completely. do you agree with it?

Title: Re: Mind
Post by Grimbal on Nov 1^st, 2012, 9:39am

What part of ocean don't you understand? ;)

Title: Re: Mind
Post by alien2 on Nov 3^rd, 2012, 5:55am

Imagine the universe is an ocean and each of us is a wave in that ocean. The wave and the ocean are the same. (http://www.mindreality.com/one-consciousness-which-everything-exists-from)

Title: human mind is like an ocean. No one can understand
Post by marlonmark on Jan 6^th, 2013, 10:38pm

Yes its like an ocean but the mind can only understand it and no one else.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by sanaya on Sep 2^nd, 2013, 7:10am

Absolutely....Its even more vast.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by goodRiddler on Nov 22^nd, 2013, 10:21pm

It is very complex but I don't think it will never be fully understood. Especially with all of the extra money going into brain research with the BRAIN initiative.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by erica on Jan 29^th, 2014, 9:39pm

Yes, I completely agree... mind cannot be fully understood.

And under humans, how about we womens.... seems more complex... :D

Title: Re: Mind
Post by alien2 on Jan 30^th, 2014, 4:59am

I lost my mind years ago.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by towr on Jan 30^th, 2014, 8:59am

on 01/30/14 at 04:59:35, alien2 wrote:

I lost my mind years ago.

Have you checked the lost and found?

Title: Re: Mind
Post by alien2 on Jan 30^th, 2014, 9:33am

Yes I did but they're looking for it too.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by goprel on Apr 10^th, 2014, 10:56am

I agree. And I don't understand why should we understand our mind. It won't help us to be happy.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by towr on Apr 10^th, 2014, 10:40pm

on 04/10/14 at 10:56:19, goprel wrote:

I agree. And I don't understand why should we understand our mind. It won't help us to be happy.

It might. It's hard to say for certain whether it can or can't without understanding the mind.

Anyway, people put too much emphasis on being happy, and too little on being content.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by goprel on Apr 11^th, 2014, 4:05am

An interesting thing is that when medicine students study diseases they start to think that they have the symptoms of all diseases. The same is for psychology - the more they understand mind the more problems they have (just they think that they have)

Title: Re: Mind
Post by towr on Apr 11^th, 2014, 5:20am

But that's just confirmation bias creeping in. If you study disease/disorder, you'll recognize signs of it faster (even if there is no disease or disorder). But there are many areas in psychology you can study other than pathology, which won't have that particular pitfall.

Understanding the quirks of human psychology makes it a lot easier to forgive people for being human rather than interpret everything they do as pure malevolence. And that in turn makes me sleep a lot better at night.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by goprel on Apr 11^th, 2014, 6:00am

towr, but you are trying to understand your mind using your mind. You have a tool and you want to do a job with itself. It's impossible.

You can work with other mind as psychologist but not with your's mind

Title: Re: Mind
Post by towr on Apr 11^th, 2014, 8:03am

Why would that be impossible? I can have designs and documentation for a computer on a computer. I can even simulate computers on a computer. Why wouldn't a tool be able to work on itself?
If I cut myself I can put a bandaid on myself, I don't need someone else to do that for me. When I make a judgement in error, I can reflect on that myself and consider what I might have done better.

There's nothing paradoxical about understanding the biases, illusions and pitfalls of the human mind, whether your own or another's. Sure, it doesn't stop you from being biased, deluded and tripping yourself up on a regular basis, but whenever you take a moment and step back you can see that's what happening. Why should it be an issue for me to understand that I cannot unconditionally trust my memories? There is ample scientific evidence that memories are unreliable. Why should it be problematic for me to realize I suffer from confirmation bias (like every other human)? I might not always realize it, and remedy it, at the time it's happening; but it's not exactly rocket science either.

And besides, you don't need a complete and full understanding of something for it to be useful. I very much doubt you have a full understanding of the computer you're using, down to the quantum-mechanics that drives it; but you have enough understanding to use it and, probably, improve you day to day life with it.
A little understanding of the human mind goes a long way to improving your understanding of people (and yourself), and dealing with them (and yourself).

Title: Re: Mind
Post by goprel on Apr 13^th, 2014, 12:05am

towr, thank you for interesting discussion.

To go deeper I would like to ask you - do you think that you can control your mind?

Title: Re: Mind
Post by alien2 on Apr 13^th, 2014, 4:10am

Marayna to Lieutenant Tuvok: "Imagine this: that you - with your logic and your reason - are skimming atop endless waves of emotion. You believe you're in control; but you know that control is an illusion. You believe that you understand the depths beneath you; but that, too, is an illusion."

Title: Re: Mind
Post by towr on Apr 13^th, 2014, 6:56am

on 04/13/14 at 00:05:23, goprel wrote:

To go deeper I would like to ask you - do you think that you can control your mind?

To some extent. If my train of thought goes into a direction I don't want it to go I can usually derail it.
But it depends on what you mean by control, exactly.
There's all sorts of training and habits you can adopt to direct your mental processes. Though I suppose training and control are not exactly the same thing.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by goprel on Apr 13^th, 2014, 1:05pm

on 04/13/14 at 06:56:53, towr wrote:

Though I suppose training and control are not exactly the same thing.

Agree.

But what can you train your mind? Is it possible to train to be it always happy and content? No. Is it possible to avoid anger? No.

So what could you train?

Title: Re: Mind
Post by towr on Apr 13^th, 2014, 10:08pm

You can train yourself to be content more often and angry less often. I mean, if you train for some sport you also can't train to always win. It's silly to consider that the goal.
Meditation/mindfulness has some documented effect on overcoming depression.
And you can teach yourself to recognize the signs of all the different biases/illusions the human mind is prone to so you can get out of those situations asap. If nothing else it'll help you to not fall victim to a great deal of marketing tricks (or at least less often).

Title: Re: Mind
Post by goprel on Apr 18^th, 2014, 9:23am

Yes. So concluding we could say that we could train our mind but only till some level :)

Title: Re: Mind
Post by movie4fun on Aug 18^th, 2014, 7:01pm

Maybe it was so like 20 years ago but not so much anymore. Few things left which we havent figured out yet and soon enough it wont remain a mystery.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by jordan on Feb 2^nd, 2015, 1:37am

Nobody can understand our mind. Scientists know less than 5 percent about our brain

Title: Re: Mind
Post by gintarina on Feb 2^nd, 2015, 1:54am

Science did a lot on brain studying. I believe that we will get interesting results even this century.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by towr on Feb 2^nd, 2015, 11:35am

on 02/02/15 at 01:37:55, jordan wrote:

Nobody can understand our mind. Scientists know less than 5 percent about our brain

How do you know it's less than 5%? Or, for that matter, that it's impossible to understand the mind?
How do we quantify understanding the mind?
If we can recreate the mind in a computer simulation, will that qualify as understanding the mind? I'm not saying we will be able to do that, soon, or ever, or never; but how should we quantify what percentage of understanding we have of the mind?

I don't believe the mind is special and outside of the dominion of science. We'll understand more and more of it, as long as we don't give up trying. And that alone is sufficient reason never to accept it as impossible.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by EdwardSmith on Feb 2^nd, 2015, 3:47pm

The beauty of the human mind is,
it makes mistakes. "to err is human".
A computer will not make a mistake unless it is told to do so.
When a computer can make a mistake on its own initiative, then it can consider itself human.
Perfection has no place in the human world.
The human world is made up of random decisions made by the self.
Computers have no self. They do not even know they exist.

Title: Re: Mind
Post by towr on Feb 3^rd, 2015, 9:04am

on 02/02/15 at 15:47:07, EdwardSmith wrote:

A computer will not make a mistake unless it is told to do so.

I guess you don't work with computers?

Even aside from cosmic rays causing errors in computations, the sheer complexity together with chaos theory make the behavior of computers a bit unpredictable in a real setting. Even when you do the exact same thing twice, the result may be different due to timing or interactions with the environment you have no control over (power spikes, temperature, random burst of internet packages).

And aside from all that, you can easily program a computer to be unpredictable. Random input + evolutionary programming = who knows what's going on anymore.