Nice Newsclip from Axios:

“Think about it: Most people you meet in everyday life — at work, in the neighborhood — are decent and normal. Even nice. But hit Twitter or watch the news, and you’d think we were all nuts and nasty.

Why it matters: The rising power and prominence of the nation’s loudest, meanest voices obscures what most of us personally experience: Most people are sane and generous — and too busy to tweet.

Reality check: It turns out, you’re right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent.

These aren’t the people with big Twitter followings or cable-news contracts — and they don’t try to pick fights at school board meetings.

So the people who get the clicks and the coverage distort our true reality.

Three stats we find reassuring:

75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.

On an average weeknight in January, just 1% of U.S. adults watched primetime Fox News (2.2 million). 0.5% tuned into MSNBC (1.15 million).

Nearly three times more Americans (56%) donated to charities during the pandemic than typically give money to politicians and parties (21%).

The bottom line: Every current trend suggests politics will get more toxic before it normalizes. But the silent majority gives us hope beyond the nuttiness.”

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Mariner’s wife, the pickleball player in our family, is pleased that pickleball court construction has received a major grant to be built in a nearby town.

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Perhaps not ‘nice’ but it’s nice that Bill Barr ex-Attorney General is opening up about his Trump relationship.

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There are scant indicators that the Putin war has begun to mollify a small number of populist attitudes. A philosopher once said “Nothing unifies a nation more than a unified hate for another nation.” Mariner assumes that is the case.

Ancient Mariner

In his continuous research into how the electorate thinks or even why, this post is one of mariner’s brain twister posts. This post has no more significance to today’s news than finding the next geode in Iowa. Everyone has played logic puzzles at parties or when reading a magazine. Mariner suggests his readers think about an enigma that the sciences have yet to solve:

Why did consciousness emerge from a fully functional subconscious brain?

Dan Falk, a Canadian science journalist, sets up the issue: “The puzzle of how non-conscious matter, responding only to the laws of physics, gives rise to conscious experience (in contrast to the ‘easy problems’ of figuring out which sorts of brain activity are associated with which specific mental states). The existence of minds is the most serious affront to physicalism.”

The common thought test is the zombie test. The experiment features an imagined creature exactly like you or me, but with a crucial ingredient – consciousness – missing. Though versions of the argument go back many decades, its current version was stated most explicitly by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind (1996). He invites the reader to consider his zombie twin, a creature who is ‘molecule for molecule identical to me’ but who ‘lacks conscious experience entirely’.

Imagine the conscious mind looking at an apple. The apple has an independent reality; it is an object within an entirely reasoned environment including terrain, buildings, roads, etc. The apple is red, a value among many colors that are not part of the immediate image. Lurking close by is a conscious awareness of the industry of apple production and perhaps even an impression of the grocer.

All these externally perceived inputs are collected by our consciousness. What did our subconscious see?

It will be awake, able to report the contents of its internal states, able to focus attention in various places, and so on – all part of the senses. It is just that none of this functioning will be accompanied by any conscious experience. There is no reasoned, abstract awareness. Imagine that you are asleep while the apple is present. What will you know about the experience of the apple? At best the brain may register aroma, perhaps indiscriminate noises, subconsciously of course.

The key question is, why did a totally functional subconscious brain have any need to invent consciousness? The major senses like seeing, touching, etc., provide a completely functional reality for survival. Flight or fight is a fully subconscious behavior; pain and comfort, too, are subconscious behaviors.

Scientists to this day have not been able to pinpoint a literal link that provoked the emergence of a conscious mind. Thus it remains an open question – why does the electorate have a conscious mind?

Is the reader still awake or need mariner sign off only to the zombie partner?

Ancient Mariner

Mariner often cites his father as a treasure trove of shorthand descriptions of personality, tendencies and interpersonal behavior. Most frequently mariner borrows one his father’s favorites: the difference between why, how and what people. In short, why people must know why something exists before any further comprehension can be learned and often may not need any further detail; how people are great problem solvers but need information from why and what people in order to have a problem to solve in the first place; what people don’t care why or how and see no problems if a step-by-step procedure works.

When mariner was a preacher, he had a story about how we can be blinded by our own tendencies. He told the story of a woman preparing a ham for dinner. She cut off one end of the ham as she always did. Her daughter, watching, asked why her mother cut off the end of the ham. The mother replied that she simply cooks the ham the same way her mother did it.

Later, the daughter asked grandma why she cut the ham. “Because it wouldn’t fit in the pot”, she said.

Many confrontations occur for no other reason than the different priorities of these three thought processes.

Another set of descriptors is the difference between extroverts and introverts. Extroverts need human interaction as an element of progress; introverts make progress without any need for dialogue. Mariner once had the experience of wanting to talk with a coworker about an issue. “Leave me alone,” the coworker said; “I have work to do.”

Here is a pop psych test that’s been around for a long time: Without skipping below the figures, which of these objects seems most comfortable to you:

If you prefer the circle, you may enjoy moments of harmony and stability.

If you prefer the square, you tend to organize things and dislike loose ends.

If you prefer the triangle, you may enjoy challenges and like to achieve.

If you prefer the squiggly, you may enjoy being creative and free spirited.

Pop psychology tests are enjoyable and vague enough to toy with as long as it remembered that no one is a purebred; most of us are a mix of two with perhaps one type a tiny bit stronger than the other.

Pop psych was overrun by the Meyers-Briggs test – a compilation of 16 different personalities with variations within each one. Myers-Briggs became popular to the point that everyone walked around bragging they were an INTJ or an ESTP. Still, because no one is a purebred, these four-character IDs must be taken with a grain of salt and a conscious restraint to avoid condescension.

Another personality test used frequently is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). It is used most often to determine a person’s criminal tendencies.

If you want to have a finer understanding of yourself, type ‘pop psychology tests’ in your search engine. There’s a test for everything – even how fast and accurate your fingers are.

Ancient Mariner

Mariner and his wife maintain bird feeders during the winter months. It is often that there are 50 to 100 small sparrows, juncos, goldfinches, house wrens, woodpeckers, and cardinals, et al, sitting on the feeders, back deck and on the ground under the feeders; those in waiting cover the branches of the fruit trees. Also in attendance are several squirrels, a feral black cat, chipmunks and mice, and at twilight, a rabbit or two.

Mariner has mentioned in past posts that his yard is surrounded by back yards converted to trucking depots with 3-car garages, RVs and concrete pads large enough to land a helicopter. So mariner’s yard, while not a picturesque British garden, is a small spot of wilderness.

Having just refreshed the feeders yesterday, mariner expected the usual crowd of wildlife. But the yard was silent. The yard was still. Not a bird even in the fruit trees.

Around 10:00 AM mariner spotted the cause: a Swainson’s hawk sitting comfortably on the edge of the flower garden. It is a sheltered spot with full Sun. The hawk was cleaning itself and seemingly just passing the time. It sat there until half past Noon. It was the only creature in the yard.

As this post is written, the squirrels have returned. Still no birds.

Nature is tough.

Ancient Mariner

Jever (Did you ever) hear someone use a many syllabled word for a one-syllable meaning? Mariner uses too many syllables sometimes but he means really big words like slubberdegullion, which means ‘unhappy person’.

On the other hand, remember when taking a picture meant sending the film roll away to be developed and during the meantime one would entertain one’s self by singing Snow White’s song, “Someday my prints will come”.

When mariner was a young boy, he often visited his grandmother who had a distinct dialect. She would say zink for sink and “Gawd’ for God. On the other hand, the other grandmother was a German immigrant and she would reverse v and w; for a long time mariner didn’t know it was not viegela but wiegela.

One time, mariner had business in Philadelphia. He visited the old market neighborhood in search of local flavors. He believes that Philadelphians rarely if ever have the need to use hard consonants; the dialect is very slushy.

In primary school the teachers were diligent about teaching grammar and sentence structure and when to use ‘who’ and ‘whom’. In high school he took Latin only to learn it didn’t matter where a word was placed; it was that the suffixes matched.

When mariner was young, he and his friend (now a renowned philologist) would have fun spelling words the way people actually said them. Two common examples are, ‘skoeet’ and ‘prolly’ not to mention ‘jever’.

Poignantly, mariner misses the word ‘gay’. It was a richly nuanced word that combined the sensation of friendly, entertaining and memorable into a three letter word. Today there are those beating the word ‘woke’ into oblivion not only by definition but by tense as well.

It is fortunate that the human brain does not need explicit articulation to shape reason. Unfortunately, it doesn’t even need facts but that’s another post. The point here is that humans need a sloppy, flexible and constantly changing language. It fits the brain so well.

Ancient Mariner

Now that mariner has adopted the New Age, he has some ideas.

Today there are game programs so realistic that the player actually controls the hero. It shouldn’t be too difficult to develop regular movies like crime drama, rom-com and adult romance where the player actually plays themselves in the movie. What might be interesting is not to have a script for the player so the player can watch themselves reacting to the other actors as they would for real. Perhaps this outside-the-self awareness might tell the player more than they want to know about themselves.

Another idea is to have a special robot for interaction with dating sites and other person-to-person adventures. The robot could sit in the room and regulate the experience for maximum enjoyment. Let’s name this robot Alexa.

Here’s a thought: Will we be able to buy some acreage in the metaverse? Then all mariner’s robots can be transferred to the metaverse and mariner can live on the acreage.

What’s neat about all this is that a person never has to leave their recliner!

Hmmm . . . . Maybe Matrix had the right idea after all.

Ancient Mariner