(Un)certain 🚧
"Love and work... work and love, that's all there is."
—Sigmund Freud
> godspeed | peace treaties
Why do we feel in control when so much of the feeling of control is an illusion?
Other animals don't have consciousness like us for contemplating such questions.
So perhaps our ability to consciously contemplate illusions is what makes us most interesting, not our intuitive, automatic, or unconscious behaviors.
- Why do we have consciousness at all? Do we truly need it – or "the truth" – to survive?
Whether evolution or divine creation, human beings had to be assembled in such a way that we could stay alive in an endlessly uncertain world. 🌐 🌎
That meant our maker deliberately equipped us with the ability to experience jealousy, fear, rage, love, pride, and curiosity.
Each experience can help keep us alive in some way. But each can also manifest as melancholy or joy or both.
Each experience reflects the reality that human beings are wired to think and behave like each other. We're observable, measurable, and predictable.
Take media effects, for example.
Two scholars writing for The New Yorker in 2016 explained how huge numbers of Americans could be easily misled by what we saw on TV:
>> "For instance: Ask people what they think is the ratio of gun homicides to gun suicides in the United States. Most of them will guess that gun homicides are much more common. But the truth is that gun suicides happen about twice as often."
How are we so wrong?
"Since gun homicides get more media coverage than gun suicides, people wrongly think they are more likely."
Our minds are eternally perplexing.
But they're all we have for negotiating peace treaties. They're all we have for sending adorable rovers 119 million miles away to Mars. They're all we have for protecting mermaids in the ocean from single-use plastic straws.
- next time Scientists have learned a lot since Freud.
- listening Nirvana "Something in the Way"
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