Originally posted by inimalistWhy does the brain act to eliminate cognitive dissonance?
the brain acts to eliminate cognitive dissonancebecause dissonance can be created by questions relating to existential concepts (why am I here, etc) and because those questions do not have readily available answers in the environment in which we live, the brain must act to reduce it.
Nature or nurture?
Originally posted by lord xyz
Why does the brain act to eliminate cognitive dissonance?Nature or nurture?
Glib: It is evolutionarily beneficial to not believe two things that are contrary to each other.
It is nature, as it probably exists in all animals. Think about it, without cognitive dissonance, the brain would be unable to predict the outcome of events, as doing so requires forming some theory of causation. Cognitive dissonance requires that an organism resolve the ambiguous, thus allowing it to continue behaving and setting a pattern for dealing with similar situations in the future. Also, prevents an organism from questioning its decisions. An organism that sticks with a less wise choice is better than one that constantly is questioning and restarting a marginally wiser one.
Cognitive dissonance has lots of cool applications to like, "meaning" and other social/philosophical issues, but at its core, it is a basic mental principal motivating even the simplest behaviour.
because we fear absurdity.
the problem is that since the dawn of time we have always looked at life and death as opposites. and death becomes the negative, the bad, the evil. life, obviously, becomes positive, good and right. but its not. esoteric wisdom tells us that life and death are one as are all the seeming opposites in this world. light and dark, man and woman etc. but we have opposites and one side is good and the other is bad.
death is tricky because we lump it up with "end" which is another negative and make it even worse. almost ANYTHING that is bad then automatically gets placed in the same corner as death. thus life is everything and death is nothing. life is good. death is bad. life is joy. death is sorrow. life is light. death is darkness. life is beginning. death is the end. and so on....to the point that we just want to separate from this negative half of the binary opposition as much as possible. because we don't want our lives to "end". human ignorance prevents us from seeing that like all opposites, end and beginning also go hand in hand and are inseperable.
the funny (and tragic) thing is that in avoiding death we are avoiding the inevitable. death can't be escaped. in trying to preserve life, we are going on a doomed expidition because death is its counterpart. one can't live without the other. thus what should really be "an end to one phase and the beginning of another" is simply seen as "the end". period. and to escape this inevitablility we keep looking for ways to go on living. to preserve ourselves and our lives.....just because we keep seeing the world as something split in halves, one of which is good and the other as bad.
so we have to seek to give meaning to our life for it to remain good (and so on the positive half) because "meaningless" is in the same corner as death. why we look for meaning to life is to keep it on the positive side of the dichotomy because we just don't understand that life and death are one and the same. there is meaning and truth in everything but we only try to see it in the positive halves. ironically these halves even exist.
btw, that's the same reason we try to give death meaning too. that's our last ditch attempt to try and wean over death into the positive side
~Sado
I thought the meaning of life was to be happy, isn't that what everyone is trying to do?
Another interesting thing to consider in this question is if animals and other non human living things want to know the meaning of life, or just get on with it as it would appear, but you never know.
Maybe its the unique thing that makes us human, apart from our cancerous destructive nature in some situations of course.
Originally posted by inimalist
Glib: It is evolutionarily beneficial to not believe two things that are contrary to each other.It is nature, as it probably exists in all animals. Think about it, without cognitive dissonance, the brain would be unable to predict the outcome of events, as doing so requires forming some theory of causation. Cognitive dissonance requires that an organism resolve the ambiguous, thus allowing it to continue behaving and setting a pattern for dealing with similar situations in the future. Also, prevents an organism from questioning its decisions. An organism that sticks with a less wise choice is better than one that constantly is questioning and restarting a marginally wiser one.
Cognitive dissonance has lots of cool applications to like, "meaning" and other social/philosophical issues, but at its core, it is a basic mental principal motivating even the simplest behaviour.
I dont know this cognitive dissonace sounds like a fancy words.
Originally posted by Phantom Zone
I dont know this cognitive dissonace sounds like a fancy words.
its social psych, so maybe not as robust as Action Potentials or whatever, but there is a very large body of literature about it.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=DetailsSearch&term=cognitive+dissonance&log$=activity
and PubMed isn't a social database 😉
which part of that aren't you following?
Cognitive dissonance is a social theory about human behaviour, and thus, will be less robust than a biological theory of behaviour, like action potentials.
the Pub Med link lists at least a few hundred articles that are related to Cognitive dissonance (all from peer-reviewed scientific journals), showing how robust the phenomena is (ie- not just fancy words).
That pub med has so many is also significant, as it is a medical/biological database, thus for a social theory to show up and be supported so often in that literature, shows it is certainly not just fancy words.
Originally posted by Sado22
i know what it is. i'm saying why couldn't you just explain it to him in plain english.
no reason I couldn't...
It would take me a while and I'd want to cite at least 2 or 3 studies... Not to mention I gave a brief description when I brought it up.
I didn't think anything more than proving it wasn't fancy words would be necessary, as he wasn't asking what it was but rather suggesting it was nonsense.
like, what do you want? Do you want a post about cog-dis? Are you just giving me shit?
It would take me a while and I'd want to cite at least 2 or 3 studies.
like, what do you want? Do you want a post about cog-dis? Are you just giving me shit?
that's what i mean. and calm down, mate, i didn't mean any offense.
~Sado