On Certain Supernatural Believer

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

I don't think it is a stretch to say that ghost and any other supernatural entities around the world are products of hearsay being told by parents in their respective culture. Concurrently movies were made about those hearsay, and stories being told about them from relatives, friends, friend of a friend. Fascination about the subject lifted them away from mundanity. Also there is an appeal of a pascal wager’s-like intuition: if you believe, and it's not true, you just waste your time; but if you don’t believe, and it's true, you place yourself in grave danger. 

So after an ample amount of reverberation of the above (i.e. anecdotes and movies with the addition of fascination and the pascal’s wager) in one’s thought processes, you are well prime to be attuned to supernatural thinking.

Claims of the supernatural are simply a series of events which don't align with the perceiver’s notion of cause and effect. The line of causation was chopped off somewhere along the way. So it was interpreted as the supernatural. So, the supernatural simply means the things that they can’t explain. This calls for more explanation not less. The problem is that they were not willing to accept any other explanation except the supernatural. 

Then there is another thing. Certain people with a bent towards supernatural thinking would claim that they were the open-minded ones. That would make the ones who doubted, by contrast close minded. The reasoning was: Well, of course, you have just closed off to a possibility, you are not open to an extra idea, your thinking is rigid. 

Is it though? Are the people who were clinging to the belief of the supernatural really the open-minded ones? 

Say, if they saw an apparition of sorts, or heard a disembodied voice or heard something supernatural from a friend, or even a friend of a friend. Believing is always their immediate reaction. They would accept that its a spirit, a ghost, a soul, full-stop, no additional inquiry needed. But if you would to say maybe it was a visual illusion, or auditory illusion, which is a product of contextual cues such as being in a dimly lit place, a predilection to assign agent and the feeling of fear which accompanies it, then all of a sudden, critical thinking kicks in. They would apply a stronger than normal scepticism to question your various assumptions. Well, how about this? If it is not a ghost how do you explain that? 

Questioning assumptions is good, all assumptions should be questioned in a fair-minded way. That's critical thinking. 

But the supernatural thinkers weren’t being fair-minded. Their thinking was in fact lopsided. How is it fair if they were not willing to put the same rigor to their supernatural belief, compared to the rigor they place on others when various forms of possible logical explanation were presented. 

At best they would mostly settle with the phrase “something just can’t be explained”. That is true, there might be things that would end up not being explained, but the conclusion they draw doesn't end at "i don't know". Instead their logic often goes like this: It can’t be explained, conclusion: the supernatural. So, their line of reasoning: It can’t be explained, therefore, it is explained (the supernatural).

Similarly, they would say things like science can’t explain everything. In a way which insinuates the idea that there is a science world and there is a paranormal world. It is nonsensical because science is just a method of inquiring the truth. It simply means if you make a claim, you should have evidence which supports it, and that evidence provided would be placed under close inspection. 

At times, a disbelief would be taken as offensive. That is because not believing would be taken by the experiencer as you labelling them as someone crazy, so it's either they are sane and it happens, or they are insane and it didn't happen. What if you told them, no they are not crazy they have simply made a mistake? That explanation too wouldn’t bite, because that would mean that it was not special with their fantastical accounts rendered moot.

Some people who experience the "supernatural" were indeed genuinely scared. So being sceptical would be taken as you seeing their experience and emotions illegitimate. At this juncture, feelings would come first, and rationality would be placed at the back seat. What If you take the approach of I believe your feelings are real, it's just your conclusion of the feelings might be mistaken, will that work? The most compassionate approach seems to be taking a suspension of disbelief while hearing the apparent victim of the "supernatural" out.

Lastly, to say that science can't explain everything, is to say that the best method of inquiry we have can't explain everything. Which is true, that is why it is an expanding enterprise. If one day the supernatural were to be explained by careful inquiry, then it would become the natural. That's why there is no such split as scientific view vs everything else magical. If there are, it is just the things that were explained vs the things which were yet to be explained. Believing the supernatural in the modern world seems absurd. But I believe even in an age of progressing technology and science, it will be here to haunt us for a long while, if not indefinitely.

Something to Tell Yourself from Time to Time

Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash

 
 
            It can be trying to stay emotionally poise, especially when you're under duress.To be carried away by negative moods is just so easy. I hope you'll find this helpful, here are a few reminders to tell yourself from time to time:

            The poignancy of Now. Be present. Do you want to merely react to an emotion? or do you want to see the options by taking a step back? You can choose who you want to be at each moment; do you want to be a better friend? To be more forgiving? A better person in general? You can literally halt your current attitude and take that change. You can do this anytime. It doesn't matter if you have committed a faux pas or you just had a terrible altercation. There is always time to change. 

           Keep in mind: Everyone is constantly solving their personal inadequacies. Just be slightly compassionate.

           Whenever you are struggling, question it: which part of this struggle can’t I endure? why can't I endure? Break the problem down to manageable chunks, as small of a chunk you can. 

            A problem free life doesn’t exist. Things will definitely go wrong. You will fall ill, your electronics will malfunction, the weather will be unpleasant, motivation to get things done will be impeded and you will get into a disagreement. Choose to accept the natural order of things and deal with them with equanimity or choose to deal with them with indignation, either way you’ll still need to deal with them. 

          When overwhelmed, just realize, thoughts, emotions, sounds, sights and sensations are all appearing apart from you. A constellation on their own. Let go a little. Nothing last forever, and there is a last time for everything.

         No worries, you'll do fine







Reference:

Waking up app
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

A Trip in Hat Yai: Consume, Pause, Resume

After an untold cycle of office routine, the need to start afresh, to loosen the grip of anxiety becomes ever dire. Studies have shown that vacations are an essential means to de-stress to the point of lowering health related mortality. 8 days were the prescribed number of day off, but I don't have that luxury, I’ll take what I can. So, here I am, on my way to Hat Yai.

A disclaimer, this recounting is not in chronological order but base solely on the sequence of what I can easily call to mind.

In the beginning...there is the immigration point. And like everyone else, I queue. The bureaucracy of traveling. The "lining up" was not as painful one imagine. It will only be hell if I would need to withstand prolong period of physical pain or require to follow strict schedules, we'll get back to this at the end of the trip. But thus far, there was no discomfort or urgency too tiring. Comforted by the thought of: we’ll get there eventually. And we did. It is worth stressing why going through immigration is always a drag, it is the long wait plus potential line cutting the moment you let your guard down. At times the line can't even be seen, only a mob of exodus heading to a bottleneck that ends with one of three to four booth, where one gets their passport stamped and approved.

The line begins

Checking in was a relief, legs were worn from navigating the location of the hotel. Before that a proper lunch was had. It was satisfying, an unsatisfactory word but that's what I felt. Food taste better when you’re hungry. The brain send signals to alert us of our deficiencies, a crave for meat could be a lack of protein, fruits could be a lack of glucose and so on. So that meant I truly needed the prerequisite nutrient which can be summarized as I need food!

No complains, wholesome 

Next stop, the shopping mall. Going with the previous group of friends, commercial complexes would be a no-no, why? That's because malls represent the loss of culture, consumerism is the ultimate enemy of art and aesthetics. Traveling should be the promotion of spiritual growth, it should be the antithesis of materialism. That could be too much of a gonzo to describe their view but it capture the gist of it.

Going in we were immediately greeted, or should I say halted by a metal detector where we're force to unload our pockets and backpacks. What could have cause such a need? Are there rampant attacks of terrorism? Or perhaps an alarming amount of robberies? Regardless of how I looked at it, the security measure gave me the perception of how unsafe their reality were.

After a short search I believe this newfound paranoia was caused by terrorism (in Hat Yai), one that was politically motivated. Back in 2006, in a shopping mall, 4 people was killed in a bomb blasts, and two more in 2014 in front of a 7-Eleven and the train station wounding 8 people. Which is why we see metal detectors in malls.

Within the building, we can find items ranging from skin care to pork skin. Like any other malls, it was filled with consumers milling about, looking through dresses, drinking matcha and eating ice-creams. It seems like globalization has homogenize most of modern culture, the mall reminded me of back home with language as the only difference. But, the appeal of the place, to many tourists, is not about the artistic side of travel, but the affordability the place have to offer, stuff there are just way cheaper. In short, a commercial paradise.

Into the city

A cliché thing to say but...look at em' wires

Then, there was the 7-Eleven, that's right, a convenient store. However, their convenient store, was extra convenient. Compared to those in Malaysia, the variety of food in their 7-Eleven is out the yin yang. Grilled sandwich, steamed dumplings, burgers and other microwave food abound, what surprises me most is the size of the beer, sure they have the normal ones, but the huge ones are really huge. Family size beer can, is how I would describe it.

Not your average size beer

Moving on...

The marketplace, an immersion into a world of counterfeits. They have speakers, earphones and other entertainment paraphernalia, Beats was one of their merchandise on the counter. I am not gonna lie, I do have the urge to buy it at the off chance that it might be real. Thank god for rationality, I did not. We went within and around the area, after surveying I surmised that shopkeepers here can roughly be delineated into three levels of enthusiasm; shopkeepers who implored you to buy their items, shopkeepers who implored only if you made eye-contact, and those who rather give their phone the attention, jaded by the ongoing failed attempts to sell.

For memorable food, boat noodle. The flavor of this dish is pretty assertive, and by far my favorite of the dishes here. No idea why, just that it's unique and agreeable to my palate. Let me see if I can get the taste out, Its sour, and salty and strong. The lime infuse with the umami of the beef, followed by a tantalizing end, a salty tip. The chili flakes adds another wallop to the senses, mouth drying and nose leaking. Made more appetizing with pork skin. But I have my bias, always have a soft spot for savoury food. Maybe that's why I find this so appealing.

Boat noodle: Satisfying Kapow! of flavors

What else is there on this trip? ahh yes, night market and seafood buffet. 

The Asean Night Bazaar, one word: Huge. So huge that each section is identified as a country. Just kidding! Not a clue about why they decided to use ASEAN country as a way to categorize, or why it's called The ASEAN night bazaar at all, apart from it being a bazaar, its opening hours isn't even night. Anyway there would be a row called Myanmar, another Japan, and so on, but all Asiatic of course. However, I can’t tell what sets them apart. Stall by stall selling the same kind of shirt, dress, pants, skirts, socks, watches, wallets, belts, you get the idea. Maybe it's a statement, about the sameness of our collective mindset. You can find brands like Nike and Supreme, both of which are American, soo... the theory that they only sell ASEAN goods...is out.

As we were browsing, everyone just came to an abrupt stop, a pause button was hit on reality, followed by some kind of marching fanfares playing in the background. I was perplexed for a short while, then I realized, it's the Thai National anthem and this stand still is a form of patriotism, once on 8am and another on 6pm. I am both amazed and weirded out by this phenomenon. Amazed because this is a successful form of nationwide en bloc indoctrinated behaviour, weirded out because I see the disintegration of personhood. Well, this surely cemented my thoughts on the collective mindset.

Eating at the seafood buffet was a real challenge. I am no good with seafood. By that I don’t mean I have allergies or find them distasteful. But because I am really bad at peeling or deveaning. It gets really messy, and after all that hassle, a morsel of flesh is all I attain. Talk about eating like a bird. But the food was alright, I enjoyed the fish, it’s pretty fresh. Though diarrhea was at the back of mind when I first presented with the idea of an oceanic smorgasboard. All and all, it's an interesting place, akin to going to a fish market with wet floors and raw sea life laid out to be hand-pick, also unlike because we eat where we shop. This cooking method is called moo kata or mu khratha, meaning pork skillet or pan pork, but we were not there to kata any pork. I think its pretty popular in Thailand, you'll find no shortage of moo kata restaurants.

Dishes of fishes

Remember I said we'll get back to this at the end of the trip? Here we are.

Riding the train back was hell. I was forced to stand for hours on end. Worst was thinking where do one place one’s bag without being smooshed by the incoming passengers. Squeezing in from every angle, I am left with my own leg to stand on. Situation didn’t get any better when I heard sounds of chewing coming from a passenger standing right beside me, a middle age man, average build, he was on his headphone as he divulged his initial stage of digestion into my ear. The horror! misophonia much? But to call it that would be unfair, that places the onus on me to accept this repulsive habit, as though I am a problem to be fix. When his stop arrived, when he stepped out of the train, a sigh of relief was heaved. Torture ended. Discomfort assuaged. Rain clouds parted.

Though bombarded by rainfall for majority of the trip, the experience was enough to remove myself ever so slightly from the vapid nature of worklife. This was not my first vacation of 2018, I had one in the beginning of the year. That too was for the purpose unwinding. Because like everyone else, my mental state was place under reality’s stress test.

My stop came after that. Journeying back, the feeling of novelty still lingers, the afterimage of an emotion. A kind jamais vu. The odd sensation persisted till I got home.

Not What it Seems

Our experiences are not as definite as we thought

Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash

Are what you’re experiencing now really real? Are you sure? Of course we can always answer that with our own perception, i.e I am sitting on a chair, I feel its solidity, the chair is as real as anything else that I can hold right now. I know for sure where I am now. I know who I am. I am aware of my breath, my face and my body relative to the space around me, I am here. If that doesn’t qualified as real, then what does? The line of reasoning can easily end there, we’re not suffering from any reality warping delusions, we aren't mad. But it doesn’t take much to see that our experiences are, in actuality highly suspect. Our real are less objective than it seems.

Try touching your forehead, it is both common sense and scientifically obvious that the signal from forehead to brain is faster than the signal from your finger along your arm to your brain. Logically, we should actually feel our forehead first then our fingertip. However, we don’t feel that, we feel it’s seamless synchronicity. You can even try touching your toe and your forehead at the same time. You’ll find no lag in sensation. Parts of your memory are re-modify to create this coming together of the senses in the present moment. Our brain cuts out the discrepancy in timing, giving us the abridged version of reality. The real time you think you’re experiencing is nothing less than artificial. We are closer to virtual reality than we come to realize.

Then we have saccades, the very quick movement of our eyeballs. Try looking into someone else’s eye and you will know what I mean. If it's too awkward for you, there is always YouTube. The twitching is oblivious to us regardless of how well we know about it. Also, the twitch should led us to view our world in a constant nauseating jerks, like watching a bad found footage movie. But our brain fixes that, it edits out the shakiness from our conscious mind, giving us a crisp movements when we dart our eyes from corner to corner. Things literally are not what they seem. If those are what are to be expected when your internal hardware runs smoothly. What happens then if it starts developing faultiness? How far would will our already virtual reality be distorted?

Imagine your brain is damage in such a way where you’re only blind consciously, but seeing subconsciously. Well, that’s known as blindsight, it is a kind of blindness where the individual can still seemingly see, dodging objects, detecting patterns in front of them and even tell objects apart. But when asked they’ll say it’s all guesses, though their accuracy is pretty much above chance. Their eyes are working fine too, capable of blinking and dilating like how functioning eyes would. So what’s the deal? This is due to a dysfunction in certain section of the main visual system, causing signals to be sent throughout the brain except the conscious perception. When they dodge the cones that are laid in front of them, they are actually being steered away from obstacles in a subliminal level.The conscious mind being oblivious due to a lack in signal explain the strange phenomenon away as guesses and inklings.

Take another kind of hardware issue that we might experience, reduplicative paramnesia, a kind of location glitches where places in memory of the individual begins to overlap. Sufferers of this disorder will hold the delusion that places are existing at the same location and the same time. In other words, the brain copied a place and pasted it on another. Finding it tough to picture? Here is an example, a lady suffering from this disorder mixing up her home in Freeport Maine and the hospital in New York:

So where are you? She replied, “I am in Freeport Maine. I know you don’t believe it. Dr. Posner told me this morning when he came to see me that I was in Memorial Sloan Keetering Hospital and when the resident come on rounds to say that to them. Well that’s fine, but I know I am in my house on Main Street in Freeport Maine!” I asked, “Well, if you are in Freeport and in your house, how come there are elevator outside the door here?” She calmly responded, “Doctor, do you know how much it cost me to have those put in?”

Similar to how the brain edited out the time difference between signals from nose and fingers to brain. Here it tries to auto-correct for the errors occurring, its not perfect but it tries, like a very diligent yet clumsy technician.

Which brings us to split brain patient. To stop epileptic seizures, surgeries are usually perform to sever the middle section of the brain (corpus callosum). Seizures would stop after that, and patients would appear fine, but upon closer inspection something would seem... a little off. In an experiment, when shown the word ring to the right visual field and key to the left visual field. Patients would report only seeing ring. Why? that’s because generally the right hemisphere would controls the left side of the body and left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, it is also the main speech centre, meaning: it does all the talking. So even if the right hemisphere sees key, it can’t tell the world. However, when the same patients were blindfolded and asked to pick out the item they saw earlier using their left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere), they would picked a key instead, even if the left hand picked up a ring it would throw it away in search for a key. As though the mind houses two consciousness.

In another split brain experiment, a patient was shown flashes of the word smile to his right hemisphere, and the word face to the left hemisphere. He was then asked to draw what he had seen, with his right hand he drew a smiling face. When asked why, he responded ‘What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?’. Obvious to us, but because the left hemisphere were unable to communicate to the other side, it concocted a justification to explain the behavior away, not knowing that drawing smiling face was due to right hemisphere seeing the word smile. You see, apart from speech the left hemisphere is also a raconteur, weaving narratives to resolve any inconsistencies in our past to present, our behaviors conscious or unconscious.Though the reasons it gives might be a leap it gets the job done in keeping your internal story straight. Going back to the key ring experiment, I would assume that the patient if asked why picked the key, might give an answer like "I am curious if the key works".

So, could it be that the rationalizations given by the patients with blindsight and reduplicative amnesia the handy work of the left hemisphere? Next time when you rationalize an action or intention, stop and think, are you really being rational?

We as the user are made unaware of the workings behind how our brain functions. None of the patients from those disorders are conscious of their predicament. If you have one of brain region being physically disrupted you might not know of it. Our mind has projected a kind of cinema with sight and sounds that we are constantly watching, it’s only constraint is the external world. But when it fails to conform, then what you observe from the patients would be your new reality. It seems as though there is a middle way of realism your brain is attempting to achieve, a kind of controlled hallucination. And split brain patients revealed that even your sense of a unified self might be less than tangible. So what is real?

Reference:

https://www.amazon.com/Whos-Charge-Free-Science-Brain/dp/0061906115 

https://www.nature.com/news/the-split-brain-a-tale-of-two-halves-1.10213
https://www.amazon.com/Tell-Tale-Brain-Neuroscientists-Quest-Makes/dp/0393340627

https://after-on.com/episodes/026

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