Arquivo para a ‘Neurociência’ Categoria
Empathy and spirituality
13
Jan
We did not point out in the previous post that phronesis is not
a moral virtue, but an intellectual virtue in Aristotle’s theory, so empathy can be according to the feeling of the phronesis, a better component according to the feeling of the phronesis, the best example to explain this is that of akrasia, or the feeling and phronosis of a psychopath.
Although akrasia can be projected literally because it “has no command over itself”, it is described in Plato’s speech in Protagoras, in fact it is a situation of psychopathy where he is aware of a certain actions, but does not have exactly the same a normal person’s feeling towards someone.
Something that is wrong in this counter-argument to explain phronesis is that the desire to alleviate the pain of the other in the face of suffering must be somehow protected, however it does not prevent the psychopath from cultivating some feeling for the other person’s situation and makes of attitudes in the sense of their habits and that are not defined in terms of such we have already said that this comes from thoughts become actions), if we include people who have knowledge or mercy for the suffering of others, then it can be explained.
So it is, therefore, the moral or ethical attitude, although it is, but some attitude of spiritual virtue, that is, the practice of resistance is also only in an action that is not oriented towards a. willingness to act in a moral way that can provide the means to discern about suffering along with Empathy, so one has to expand on that of moral attitudes by Aristotle.
To people who cannot be basic, but can also be able to offer in basic moral virtues, and people who can be basic, but can also be complementary, but can offer a moral virtue, many people who are basic, but who can complement the lack of a virtue. attitude your action, and this is impossible without some exercise in complete to become a habit to feel the Suffering of Others, this exercise that becomes a habit is called here Spirituality.
The phronesis cannot be exercised without basic moral virtues and thus cannot be initiated without empathy, it can be admitted that a psychopath even has empathy, many are charismatic and can influence many people, but he will lack a basic moral virtue that complements your action, and this is impossible without some an exercise to become a habit the full empathic attitude of feeling the suffering of others, this exercise that becomes a habit is called here Spirituality.
While it is not a habit, it can be an exercise in asceticism, a simulation or simply a disguise that at some point will be unveiled.
It is good to point out that there can be asceticism (elevation of the spirit partially) without true spirituality, I call it using Peter Sloterdijk’s term of “despiritualized asceticism”, that is, without a deep root that leads to the broad knowledge of what pain is. of the Other, if we want to give a name to an empathetic phronesis.
Spirituality is, therefore, an exercise that leads to an asceticism, but what is asceticism does not depend only on the belief of each one, but what during life becomes habit and character, those who do not have it can practice it for a long time. a few days, or even a few years, but without deep root it will soon leave it, like losing weight, dieting, diets and other attempts at habits that are not always maintained, to make them life they must integrate our character, our personality.
Walking towards a troubled future
13
Jul
Lectures and motivational books have been growing since 
the beginning of the 21st century, it doesn’t matter much the message, the important thing is to lead people to an action force that is performance.
Traditional religions lose adherents to churches that change the discourse of sin for self-help and the desire for recognition and success, political polarization does not leave this aside, a good politician must demonstrate his “deeds” and not his exemption, balance and honesty.
Far from disdaining technological evolution, it is important and can help in a co-immunological resumption, one in which we discover mutuality, the “exam” as described by Byung Chul Han only seeks performance and it can include disrespect and fake- News.
The repressive and disciplinary society of the 20th century described by Michel Foucault (Watch and Punish) loses space to a new form of coercive organization: neuronal violence, fanpages fill up, lives exhibiting performances and even exhibiting violence, which is worrisome.
Interiority, which is different from subjectivity, which is what is proper to the subject, is that internal space that we need to cultivate to make our lives more balanced, with more positive thoughts and actions and that collaborate with mutualism, the feeling of responsibility for the other, the social conscience, finally, the community (the immunological society).
Chul Han points out that subjectivity, already present in discourses of current thinkers, such as “post-industrial society” (Bell, 1999), “control society” (Deleuze, 1992), “cognitive capitalism” or “material economy” (Negri and Lazzarato, 2001, Gorz, 2005) and “biopolitics” (Foucault, 2008) were forms of expression of this subjectivity, however without resorting to interiority.
Society is pushed towards an excess of positivity as Chul Han calls it in his Society of Tiredness, the coercive disciplinary concept (“you shall”) imposed from outside, brought into the scene a new statement (“we can”), which, in its most immanent aspects, “refers to a false freedom by imposing on individuals the imperatives of performance and self-satisfaction.
The author’s analysis starts from the film Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) to explain his thesis, the imposition of performance and performance through self-overcoming is incorporated by the protagonist who is taken to the last consequences.
Today’s society of tiredness is nothing more than the unilateral absolutization of “positive power” and cognitive enhancement (neuro-enhancement) may not pose any moral problem, but it will lead to an even greater moral problem in the normativity of the performance society.
Han, Byung Chul. (2015) THE BURNOUT SOCIETY. Translated by ERIK BUTLER stanford briefs. An lmprint of Stanford University Press. Stanford, California.
Living metaphor and narrative
09
Jun
Both are themes of Paul Ricoeur, but establishing a clear
connection between these two concepts is no simple task, the author himself will not say between metaphor and narrative, there is such a concept.
This is because, as we have already found in a previous post, it is almost a refoundation of eidos (what was an idea for the Greeks), giving it (the metaphor) an “ideology of the ineffable”, which is nevertheless attainable since it is in the consciousness as an unspoken.
Also in this post we emphasize that living metaphor starts where linguistics ends, and narrative is in close connection with linguistics, but it would be bold to say that narrative is not also a form of metaphor, so in this unexpected intersection between narrative where metaphor lives .
Metaphor in the reading of the Greeks, in Aristotle’s poetics and rhetoric, the word or name are basic units between poetics and rhetoric, while the second is more focused on mimesis.
The idea that language has a function other than the conventional one, was defended by Heidegger saying that it has this other function is poetics, and it refers us both to metaphor and other figures of speech that are beyond the so-called “poetic license”, for it has a rhetorical function.
It is found in the current definition of metaphor as that figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is verified, but what is the relationship between a comparison and metaphor?
Ricoeur clarifies that at the core of this relationship, there is “a small enigma” in the Aristotelian discourse, at the origin of this question, “because this treatise (of Rhetoric), which claims to add nothing to the definition of metaphor given by Poetics, in chapter IV draws a parallel no counterpart in this last treatise, between metaphor and comparison?” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 42).
Ricoeur’s first response is that it depends “within the Aristotelian corpus” (p. 42), but he will object to the purpose that is not explicit, “Aristotle points out the subordination of comparison to metaphor”, so “it is not to explain here metaphor through comparison, but rather comparison through metaphor” (p. 43).
This enigma becomes the theory of metaphor-statement in Paul Ricoeur, more than a rich figure of speech, it is broken down into two parts: “under the name of ‘parabole’, it is linked to the theory of ‘proof’ (Book I of Rhetoric), which consists of illustration by example, which subdivides, in turn, into historical or fictitious example; the other, under the name of eikon, is linked to the theory of lexis and placed in the domain of metaphor” (p. 44).
The resources and arguments of living metaphor allow us not only to understand the narratives, but also to penetrate their constitutive elements as resources of language and knowledge.
RICOEUR, P. Metáfora Viva. Living Metaphor. Brazil, São Paulo, trans. Dion David Macedo. 2nd ed., Ed. Loyola. 2005.
Overworked and true empathy
23
Feb
Always smiling and needing to be happy can be altruism and even heroism of 
many people, which should give us confidence and empathy should be transparency, which is not always empathic. Of course, this does not mean being rude or rude, nor deviation from personality, but the relief of inner dualism in the face of truth, even when it is not sympathetic, makes one have greater internal coherence, which is not confused with identity.
Identity may be personal, group or cultural, sometimes confused with being conniving or convenient, but at the root this is falsehood, so empathy has its place in the face of truth and being, not always the social ethics that dictate rules of convenience. and “legality,” which has come to be called politically correct, but could well be politically convenient.
Since the 1930s, the Brazilian has been spoken of as the “cordial man”, although there is a great anthropological and historical distance from the politically correct, this would not be just the update.
Empathy should then be a good mood in the sense that the ability to calmly get into controversial issues and issues with a strong possibility of polarization, the world today needs this, and therefore confusing it with hypocrisy, easy smile or just tolerance can be “ cordial ”and may not be a true feeling.
The pandemic has made many people bitter, dissatisfied and in a way accentuated individualism, in The partner and the next (Le socius et le prochain), Paul Ricoeur explains this difference in relationship.
In fact, doing to the other what we would like it to do for us, is not the empathic system, what neuroscience shows is that we have a set of neurons called mirror neurons that say that imitating the other is a more natural empathic form than To do something to another simply because we would like it done to us, deep down we are “asking” for something we want.
Empathy means the gift that everyone has to be able to feel what the other feels, so to speak of the Other is the true way of both finding an innate gift of humanity, neuroscience reveals, as well as making this truth explicit, we exist and feel the Other.
We only deny it by denying the self that has empathy as a natural “skill”, just by a constant denial training. There is, therefore, no true self without the Other, without the empathy with the Other, natural and not forced, which is thus made a staging and the Other will feel, empathy is thus ontological, part of Being.
The vídeo of TedX by psyquiatrist Helen Riess is very interesting:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=23&v=baHrcC8B4WM
Conciousness and truth
23
Jun
One of the most common tricks is to say a half-truth, a lie without malice or that
which softens our conscience when we know that we are doing what is wrong, it is not a matter of politics because in many cases it is difficult to say that “good” politician if corrupted.
A well-known phrase from William Shakespeare is “We know what we are, but we still don’t know what we can become”, which is as interesting a phrase as “To be or not to be”, because it means that we can be beyond being current , so there is a becoming, so “not to be and I will be”.
The inner sphere in which we satiate emotional voids, frustrations or anxieties, for example in drink or food, we are filling the void by temporarily satiating, but it will come back.
The relationship with philosophy is broad, since Plato who defined the myth of the cave as passing from the world of shadows, where we see ourselves as projections at the bottom of the cave to a high, authentic sphere and where there is true freedom, and the fear of the half- truths disappear.
True consciousness is neither an awakening nor an enlightenment, but an “unveiling” to remove the veil, and the first step is that consciousness is awareness of something, where I found limits or an unexpected NO, not only a pain, but a obstacle at first insurmountable sight.
Gesltat psychology, with a strong influence of hermeneutics, defines how to be aware of something (awareness) and we find a correspondent in Japanese philosophy, for example, as “satori”, to remove the superficial layers to find the nucleus of something.
The three steps to enter these layers are: to awaken to our deepest zone, in the emotional aspect, our fears, anxieties and concerns, the second requires what happens outside, the context, the people and situations that I invest without results, and the third, much more complex, knows what he feels, what happens outside, but there are prejudices, barriers and something that makes him defend himself and not go beyond certain limits.
Make a change, it is not enough to find the strengths, it is precisely in the weaknesses that your defenses are weakened, and they are articulated with your mistakes and experiences.
Balance and calm in times of crisis
08
May
Given the worsening of the pandemic crisis in Brazil and some countries in
the Americas, the arrival of the cold in this hemisphere and the exhaustion of the Health System, without the preventive #LockOut (in Brazil), we will now have to make an emergency intervention, with the consequences that it brings.
In this situation, we need a discipline that we do not have culturally, an awareness that is not always well understood, there is only awareness of something, and in this case it is public health and the extremely necessary and urgent care for the curve to start a retreat process.
Those people who have some spirituality, who achieve balance in this situation need to help the population as a whole, defend the doctors, nurses and support staff working in health (drivers, secretaries, rescuers, etc.) to have working conditions.
There are several ways to find personal balance, physical and breathing exercises, reading, music and relaxation, but it is the state of the soul that counts most, and in the turbulence of the danger of a pandemic, it is essential to find a form of spirituality, thoughts and to be.
For Christians who believe in the existence of an omnipotent and sovereign God over all the things that govern their lives, he knows that the inner attitude is one of passivity, tolerance and a deep Love for all those around him, and in this pandemic having attitudes of protection for all.
The comfort of their souls, for true Christian spiritualities, is the belief in the Love of God. It is written by the evangelist John (Jn 14,1-2): “Do not let your heart be disturbed. You have faith in God, have faith in me too [Jesus]. In my Father’s house there are many addresses. If not, I would have told you. I will prepare a place for you ”, and his earthly #StayAthome is now a refuge.
Fear between philosophy and reality
06
May
It is necessary to differentiate between fear, anguish and anxiety, those who
blamed the “virtual” world (the virtual comes from virtus which is the root of the virtuous) must realize in the pandemic that they were not correct.
Anguish, another typical feeling in this pandemic, is a feeling linked to not belonging or not understanding the reality we are experiencing, it can be said that it is almost the opposite of fear, since it generates impropriety, that is, we do not face the problem or we postpone it or leave it by positivity, that is, we speed up life, like running from “danger”, being optimistic.
We left anxiety for the end, it is the end of a cycle, we made a post a long time ago to explain that it was not correct to attribute technology to it, there is a book called Information Anxiety (Wurman, 1989) that deals with the topic, however, in psychology it is the end of this cycle: fear, anguish (links to a system of beliefs and systems) that reaches anxiety and can lead to panic and Burnout syndrome, which feeds the cycle with fear. http://marcosmucheroni.pro.br/blog/?p=6199#.XrF_E25FzIU
The first question, therefore, is to treat the fear that is impropriety with ownership, that is, to understand what causes it, to make it conscious and with this the next stage of anguish can be blocked, because we will not escape from reality, the idea of hiding or ignoring facts is what fuels this cycle.
We don’t need to be specialists or in the case of medical pandemics, to understand that some measures are necessary, that without them we get into anguish and this can lead to panic stress, aware that we even face the problem of hospitalization and the social difficulties caused by isolation .
This also explains why people who do only primary reasoning fall into finding fictitious enemies (inappropriate that leads them to the anguish of being unanswered) and in the last stage when the fatalities arrive they lead to panic or the Burnout syndrome, so it makes sense that some cheerleaders who go out on the streets asking for an end to “isolation”, is panic.
As it is the beliefs and systems that take the last step, I treat the religious problem, which has nothing to do with spiritualities that seek balance, and even in suggestions from psychologists you will find do self-analysis and have self-control, good spirituality helps, religious fanaticism harms and accelerates the process.
Beyond idealism, new logic and pandemic
29
Apr
Kant’s simplification led to abstract formulations so complicated that it would
be inappropriate to call them complex since he intended the opposite, but the attempt to reduce 12 categories and three central ideas: the psychological (soul), the cosmological (the world as a whole) ) and the theological (of God).
This will produce an ingenious, rational but very complicated construct, which are the three judgments that would link Subject (A) to predicates (B), the judgments: analytical, synthetic a priori and a posteriori, the idea of a priori judgments was the most controversial because it sees the mind as having a natural memory.
Edmund Husserl and Gottlob Frége, who had a strong arithmetical logic formation, looked at this Kantian theme, imagining that logic could not be reformulated based on action, that is, we do not change our mind because our way of acting changes, this is based on all who seeing the change in the logic of everyday life caused by the pandemic, they imagine that the mind does not change.
Husserl’s departure from mathematical logic to the world of experiences, under the strong influence of Franz Brentano who worked on intentionality (see the previous post, the other eidos), made him formulate a new world of experiences, from human emotions to total life of the world (Lebenswelt).
While the Logical Investigations date back to 1900 and 1901, their idea of intentionality formulated in their phenomenology as the return to things themselves, or how they appear to consciousness through phenomenological reduction, their epoché, which is to place our concepts and thoughts in parentheses, a clear disagreement with the Cartesian cogito.
On its return to the Greek eidos, it will promote eidetic variation, which can be explained as from the phenomenological epoché (putting concepts in parentheses) it produces an eidetic variation on the idea we had of the thing (concepts, thoughts or objects) and it can produce in the end new “horizons”, a fundamental category for the dialogue about the new.
Our pandemic phenomenon produced an “colletive” epoché, a new look at a deadly virus, we had to produce an eidetic variation, what we think of this “little flu”, and this should produce new “horizons” about the concepts of how to live the day to day: attitudes health, economic solidarity and total reformulation of family life: spaces, time, food and relationships and the use of technology.
Idealists continue to imagine that everything will be as it was before, they did not do the epoché pandemic.
Tender
23
Mar
In times of #StayAtHome, a good reading is indicated, or watching a good movie,
but no big dramas, sensationalism or violence, the readings that I also recommend that are to calm us down, pacify us and make coexistence possible, in a word Tenderize or Eternalizing.
One of the books I recommend to enjoy the warmth of home, “The pleasure of staying at home” (only in Portuguese and unfortunately sold out, best seller unintentionally), where Brazilian author Leticia Ferreira Braga, without knowing the current events, wrote in 2007, how to improve self-esteem and self-knowledge, how to organize more conscious consumption and explore natural resources, the effort to make the environment that lives more pleasant and also practical, without luxury and simple.
For those who like to think more deeply, we have already indicated and commented here several times, Byung Chul Han’s “The society of tiredness”, the Korean-German knew that humanity was striding towards an exaggerated activism and technologism (he also exaggerates how much the use of technology that can be a good resource in the current situation), but his thinking about the difficulty of contemplating modern man is a good reflection, it is necessary to be touched.
Small routine habits in the domestic environment help, make cleaning better, even recommended for the coronavirus, but be careful with the toc, avoid boring and controversial subjects, laugh at your own difficulties, including personal and family limitations, in short.
If I could sum up a necessary attitude for the family environment to be but cozy, bearable is to do what is not pleasant to become, what is hard to bear, what is difficult to make possible, to finally soften and review rude habits and abrupt.
It is almost a cultural re-education, either we do this or the house explodes and we explode togethe
The virus and its lessons
18
Mar
Suddenly the society that couldn’t stop, the “tiredness society” of the mind-boggling
rhythm, of daily shows, has to resume a vision that you don’t know anymore, stop or at least slow down, stay at home, live with family members that are almost weird.
The fact is that the universe, nature and in it human nature has its laws, and these can be beyond a Big Bang, we can be inside a bubble and whose laws come from “outside” it.
I saw a hashtag go off and was surprised first, but then I gradually understood, mainly young people used #stayfuckatHome in response to “StayAtHome, of course it is not easy for those who never had this cultivated habit, now having to face it.
I was unable to measure both hashtags with the tools, but the universe conspires and makes us stop and stay at home, because events are canceled, there is nothing to do on the street, even the shops give their stop signs, and of course who continue to think on the economic side.
Well we must save the economy, even if it means a rapid explosion of a virus, in short the universe has taught its lesson, it is not the economy that lives for man, but the man who lives for there to be economy, and if it has its own laws, that they do not contradict nature and man, it seems that we have a checkmate.
The lessons for the online universe are twofold, on the one hand, face-to-face resumes a course that should never have left, the face-to-face relational world and fraternal circles and on the other the need for relationships that are public or private to have adequate online tools.
Conflict exists at both ends, nor do we make satisfactory face-to-face relationships, are elusive, authoritarian or worse, indifferent, and we don’t even know how to behave in the online world (the virtual exists before the internet and the digital universe), and always who criticize use it badly and do not understand the “logic” of this universe that asks for relations different from those in person.
Now we have to schedule online meetings, use chats and videos and finally we will go beyond religious and ideological preaching to non-face-to-face relationships that are in fact “relationship”, because virtual comes from the Latin “virtus” which is similar to “potential” either saying we must “cultivate” the virtual to become a real relationship (virtue comes from virtus), the face-to-face does not guarantee the “relationship”.
The great lesson, there will be many others, is that we must share and share responsibilities to overcome the pandemic crisis, which is already social and economic, and depends on the attitude of each one.
