RE: why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?
January 3, 2019 at 11:13 pm
(This post was last modified: January 4, 2019 at 12:23 am by bennyboy.)
(January 3, 2019 at 5:51 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Because they're depressed, in most cases, at least. Yes, depression causes us to act irrationally, yes..depression amplifies our suffering and minimizes our joy, but depression is almost always treatable...so there's no such thing as "permafucked".
I'm not so sure that suicidal impulses represent dysfunction at all. I've been quite engaged with it these days, actually, and my feelings about it are pretty complex. Sometimes, it's just an over-arching sense of bleakness-- that's probably chemistry, and it comes and goes. But sometimes it doesn't feel like that at all-- it feels like a pronounced clarity-- a general philosophical understanding of mortality, maybe mixed with ideas about determinism, about the mythological nature of the idea of self, and so on. My experiences with knockout drugs in surgery certainly informed me a lot on what mind is or isn't, as well.
When I say "permafucked," I'm not talking about inescapable suffering. I'm talking about the narrative of the self, and cracks in the mythology of it. There's maybe a sense of transplantation-- that one's own narrative and the Cosmic narrative are at odds, and that there's something intrinsically not-belonging in that.
Depression is a very hard thing even to define. Even though it's mainly rooted in chemistry, it's the way that manifests in the way ideas form at the conscious level that are the real killer, not the anhedonic feelings. (in my opinion at least) But it's maybe a call to choose either red or blue, rather than crossed wires, methinks.
