(May 7, 2022 at 4:30 am)emjay Wrote: I'm still trying to parse the general meaning of this thread so don't really have anything meaningful to say about all thatIt seems to be coming slowly into focus, after a provocative start. What you say here helps, I think.
Quote:Like for instance when I'm doing my exercise on the treadmill, which at the moment relies on 'high volume, low intensity' it can sometimes be quite hard to keep motivated for the whole 100 minutes I'm trying to do it for... so I end up doing a lot of mental gymnastics whilst I'm doing it to try and keep motivated. One way is by essentially splitting the task into easier tasks...
Jeez, man -- I feel proud of myself if I manage 20 minutes on the treadmill. 100 is impressive.
But you know, come to think of it, it is largely about the mental state. I can easily walk an hour and a half at a brisk pace if I'm out and about. In fact I have all the local supermarkets timed -- to Jupiter and back is exactly an hour, if I cut through grounds of the Shinto shrine. Fresta is 45 minutes, not counting shopping time. Downtown to the good cake shop is 50 minutes each way, and I'm allowed to eat the cake if I walk it.
And last Wednesday I walked the mountain trail just north of town, and went down the wrong way and ended up on the wrong side of the mountain, and walked a solid three hours. That was tiring, but not like I needed an ambulance or anything. Unlike the treadmill, I was motivated to find out where the hell I was, and calculating the best way to find familiar ground.
It's not exactly about faith, or about what we're justified in believing, but it certainly shows that what we're capable of changes a lot depending on the aims. I could never manage three hours on a treadmill, but up and down the mountain and then wandering unfamiliar streets was an adventure.
Quote:I have is to put some sort of narrative/story around it and essentially role play... I think of the famous galley scene from Ben Hur
This is very much what I've been thinking about. The role that fiction or other imagery plays in motivation, knowledge, all kinds of functioning. We understand our lives through symbols. Importantly (and I think Neo was saying something like this earlier) there are ways of knowing that are not conceptual. Stories, myths, pictures, are probably more important to life overall than logically-sayable concepts.
As you say, framing the task is crucial, and we do that largely with pictures.
