What is your weirdness rating?

[Angrboda]

I was just musing about such things this morning. I had been dreaming, and I dreamed that I was part of this program where we'd go to the top floor of a building, they'd place a piece of paper with a target on it on the floor, we'd climb up on the table, aim for the target, and dive head first into the floor, killing ourselves in the process. Somehow, as a result of doing so, we'd wind up at the ground level, where we'd be met by an assessor who would rate our performance, and then we'd go back to the top of the building to do it all over again.

How that relates to the thread is that killing oneself, and coming back to life, and doing it all over again -- nothing about that seemed weird or illogical in the dream. It all just made perfect sense. And it reminded me how we depend upon cues from our brain to determine if things are as they should be, or if there's something weird and off about a situation that needs our attention. I don't know if this is a feeling we get when things are weird, or the absence of a feeling that things are as they should be, but one way or another, we depend upon that feedback in order to attend to things when they need attending to, and to keep on doing what we're doing when they don't signal us that something is wrong.

So we don't really reason out whether something is right or not, as in dreams, we're fully capable of reasoning, but that emotional cue is simply absent. It's that emotional cue, rather than any specific conclusion of reason, or lack thereof, which has us framing things as either "making sense" or "not making sense". And it strikes me that, perhaps there are times when we are awake, and things aren't making sense, but for whatever reason, our brains aren't generating that signal that something is wrong, so we keep on doing what we're doing even though there's something horribly wrong. What if it's like that a lot? Or all the time? How would we know? We'd just haphazardly pay attention some times, and not other times. I guess we have a sort of faith, or confidence, that this is not the case, because we reason that, if it were happening like that, we'd be incredibly dysfunctional. That's something you'd think we'd notice. Unless of course our brain didn't give us the signal that we were dysfunctional, and so....

So, I don't believe our brains fail to alert us to something being wrong a lot of the time. That would seem absurd. Yet at the same time, we all have the experience of arguing with stupid people who make a counter-argument which just doesn't feed the bulldog. What they're saying just isn't right and doesn't answer your prior objections. We assume that the same bells that are going off in our head must be going off in their head as well. They can't be this oblivious to how wrong-headed their argument is, can they? They must be lying! And yet they're not. Their brain just didn't give them the signal that something was wrong with what they were saying or arguing, so they just went ahead with what they were saying without realizing anything was wrong with it.

So ultimately, our brains must succeed in alerting us to illogic or weirdness some of the time, but not all of the time. And it would seem to be that the brain gives the signal at the correct time more often the more intelligent you are. So stupid people aren't necessarily any less rational than smart people, it's just their brains aren't sending them the right emotional cues as often as those who are somewhat better equipped.

So, I'd say thank God for that weirdness and our "feelings" that something is wrong. Otherwise we'd really be fucked up.