#general semantics

[hug-your-face]

I came across the idea of a "cortical-thalamic pause" in an old novel. The idea being that we take better, more effective action in our lives when we integrate our emotion centers and our reasoning centers. It was a NOVEL, mind you, but coming across the idea as a kid probably helped my life a lot.

A surprisingly useful summary from Quora :

Thalamus/Thalamic is here used as a shorthand for the lower brain functions, associated with feelings, sensing, pain, pleasure, instincts, bodily functions, etc. Massive sub-conscious parallel processing goes on there and responses are often immediate. Neo-Cortex/Cortical is the shorthand for the higher, more recently developed, brain functions, associated with conscious thinking, reasoning, language use, deliberate decision making, etc. It can do abstract thinking, but can't focus on more than a couple of things at the same time.

We easily get in trouble when we mix the two. Our ability to abstract is rather new and apparently a bit faulty. The cortex might construct a "meaning" for some lower level sensations which gives rise to faulty decisions. The thalamic system might launch instant action based on what was sketchy reasoning in the cortex. E.g. killing somebody because they have the wrong religious belief. The idea of the pause is basically to be conscious of the link between one's reactions and one's reasoning, and to make sure they're in sync. It doesn't have to be a literal pause in time, but it could be. It is an equivalent of "count to ten before you...".

If you were about to take impulsive physical action, the pause would allow you to think through the logic and implications of what you were about to do. The other way around, if you thought you just arrived at a logical, well reasoned conclusion, a semantic pause would allow you to notice what you actually feel about it, what your instincts tell you. Does it feel right? Does it work?

The primary ingredient is consciousness. Pay attention. Be aware. Examine everything that is there, including your own thoughts, your premises, your feelings, what you perceive. -- There are certain tools that are helpful. A consciousness of abstraction is vital. Simply being aware that there are many levels of abstraction between what really is there and what you put into words and thoughts. Not just being aware of that, but specifically examining the transition between a "thing" and its abstraction. At what point do some rays of light become a picture in your brain? At what point do you group it together with other tables you've seen, to identify it as a "table"? At what point does the word "table" lose its connection with the particular image you saw?

The objective is to take decisions and actions that are coherent, congruent and sane at all levels. The cortico-thalamic pause is a system check and a consistency check at and between multiple levels.

Learning to be less reactive is literally saving my life. I’m finally understanding that processing things is not the same as immediately forming a response to them. I can process without feeling pressed to formulate a reaction to what someone said or did or a situation that displeases me. Not that a quick head on your shoulders is necessarily a bad thing, but 9/10 taking a minute to just process could save you so much trouble

[faintpress]

Also, I contributed the interior art for a recent issue of ETC: A Review of General Semantics. This has been a huge honor, as it is a classic journal with many wonderful contributors in its long history. https://shop.generalsemantics.org/products/pdf-version-etc-a-review-of-general-semantics-81-3-copy

[adventism-atheism-orthodoxy-me]

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski

"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."

-- R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58.

[stxalq]

“Well, without indulging in chauvinism..." [the character / narrator then spends the next several hundred words skewering? damning with faint praise? that specific type of racial, patronizing chauvinism that believes only Western civilizations and Western languages were ever capable of scientific thought, artistic expression, and technological progress and all "lesser" cultures need only give up their traditions and abide by Western teachings to achieve greatness but maybe the answer is really a syncresis of what came before and that can include both native traditions and foreign insights]

[teledyn]

Korzybski referred to the calculus as "...the study of a continuous function by following its history by indefinitely small steps." Attendees are invited to find other words for "study", "continuous", "function", "following", "history", "indefinitely small", "steps", etc. Using these other words, they will be invited to create well formed sentences for all to hear. (Note: This is not a test. It will be introduced as an example of applying the method.)

[rottingraisins]

it kinda sucks that you hc a canonically pansexual character as gay (clef)

i deliberated not answering this one bc i dont rlly mean to get into representation discourse or w/e during pride month of all things but i think the sentiment behind it is very fair so i feel bad ignoring it.

firstly, i think it needs to be said that clefs "canon" romantic orientation is very much just, whatevers funniest or most poignant for what youre trying to do with him. i understand the sentiment, there are characters in scp who are queer in a very specific and straightforward way where i'd also be upset if people erased that about them, but clef is not that guy. he is probably the single most contradictory character across the entire wiki, and everyones got a bit of their own take on him.

secondly, to defend my own take a little, i don't even really see clef as strictly homoromantic. i think when applying queer labels to fictional characters one tends to kind of treat them as these ontological, prescriptive truths, rather than how labels are used in real life, by the individual themselves to approximate their lived experience.

what i'm trying to say is i don't think clef the character, at least the version of him i'm most fond of, the fifty something year old reformed casual homophobe from resurrection and co, really knows what the term "pansexual" means, or "mlm", or "demiromantic", which are other words i'd use to describe him if i were using the prescriptive approach.

i think clefs relationship to romance is deeply complicated and not something he spends a lot of time really thinking about, and in practice, despite the theroretical breadth of his capacity to be attracted to other people, he's really only attracted to men, which is to say one particular man who also just so happens to be dead, so there's no point in really dwelling on it.

[thepandalion]

"its ok, you don't need to know verbs, you're not a linguist, you're a dog" -me, to my dog, right now

[sysig]

Whoa, whoa, Wander is into Yanderers?! I never thought he’d be into that sort of thing!

I mean - he does go for the evil type pretty consistently lol

Though in specific I was referring to The Lonely Planet!

"Wander, my darling - as long as you stay here, you can have whatever you want ♥"

He didn't seem very Into what Janet was offering, past a point haha coward

[spiribia]

what is a furry? if you don't mind. like i've heard of it for years but i realized i don't actually know what it means other than animals are cool

it just means animals are cool

[mantisgodsdomain]

Finally, we get the opportunity to put our Spy Cards worldbuilding in a work. Though there are many questions about such things as "regulation" "how these cards are printed" "who approves a single spy card", and so on, we are here to present a bold new take: this game is based like 60% on obscure roach memory-reading tech that got turned into a card game with absolutely No card-game-related intentions included in the original tech and most of the card vetting is just from the fact that there aren't too many card printers out there and most of them make cards that need to be translated from Roach.

Strictly speaking, as a card game, it is not a terribly good or well-balanced one. It's popular primarily because of a mix of the difficulty involved in getting the data for high-level cards, the fun of seeing the variety of monsters that can be brought to the table, and the incredible amounts of ham and drama that goes into specifically the professional scene.

[streamat4am]

Im coping so thoughts on sex worker enid

[thepowerofmusicc]

Now listening 💿🎶: For some reason my playlist decided to play these two songs next to each other and I love both of these songs but I was not ready for the mood whiplash

Also *breathes in* I LOVE CHOI CHANGMIN!!!!!!! *breathes out* That is all.

[caraecethrae]

I'm starting to get a bit uncomfortable with the term "Irish Polytheism"

I do understand what it's trying to say. it's a clarification that they're only using stories that come from irish documents and local irish folklore.

but anthropologically speaking, this is extremely inaccurate.

not only would the people who wrote those documents consider themselves Gaels, not Irishmen, but also several key texts come from Scotland. it's not noticeable with an Irish bias, bc the language is called Old Irish, but that was the language that people living in what we now called Scotland used.

not only that, but there was no cultural construct of ireland, outside the land mass. before the provincial kingdoms, they were tuatha. there wasn't even a clear cultural/political divide between the hebrides and parts of ulster. many stories move back and forth between both land masses (though yes they reflected some later political beliefs, like the high king myth, that could be used as an argument. but that was political propagandizing, not reflecting history or culture).

the stories aren't centered on Ireland, and closing your focus to Ireland barely narrows folkloric differences or diversity of story options. you're way more likely to find differences between lore from the south and north of Ireland than between Ireland and Scotland.

in my opinion, using "Irish" (or even "Scottish," though you can make a better argument there) instead of "Gaelic/Goidelic" to define your paganism/polytheism more reflects current nationalist and political divides than it does any historical, cultural, or linguistic differences from the Past.

[jasontoddenthusiastt]

I just ordered $100 worth of comics online

[the-casbah-way]

What’s your opinion on the English