Showing posts with label Human Nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Human Nature. Show all posts

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Chapter 21: On the word "Thanks"

Where we learn what gratitude actually is.

I think I got it how this gratitude mecanism works. Remember the exchange "Favour against gratitude" ?

 
After observing many humans doing this kind of exchange, I think I figured it out what gratitude is.It's kind of a currency that has only value between these two humans. Think of it as kind of Favour Voucher:                   

The "1000 Thx" part may actually be misleading: Gratitude has a precise value, a person has usually a very clear idea how much favours he owns another person or vice versa. However, he does not associate any numerical value to it. It's like temperature before invention of the thermometer.
But how do people agree on the amount of gratitude? Well, the gratitude is transmitted by a symbolic expression, usually a variation of the sentence "Thank you". The way this sentence is said gives a hint on the quantity of gratitude - a murmured "Thanx" has not the same "value" as an enthousiastic "Oh thank you so much, you really really helped me!"
People who know each other well often use those vouchers, strangers use rather money. I'm not sure why humans don't use money all the time, it seems much clearer to me and is furthermore transferable. 
 
This favour-against-gratitude trade has actually an emotional side-effect: The giver of the gratitude feels often bad - something between guilt, humiliation and inferiority - and the receiver feels often good. Those feelings come actually not from the Unconsciousness thingy, but from the Annoying Niggler. Sounds familiar? Indeed: The gratitude tranders. When you know about those feelings, the gratitude sale business I wrote about actually makes sense: What the clients want is actually not the gratitude voucher itself - they will probably never use it - but the good feelings that come with. In other words: When giving money to a beggar (that's how humans call gratitude traders), the client buys himself a happy Niggler.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Chapter 17: On Favours

Where we learn that some humans think they receive gifts from Mr. Nobody.

Social interaction - what a complicated thing. I'm far from being able to describe how social interaction works, but "favours" seem to play a central role in society.

What's a favour? Well, a favour is an action (or, more generally, decision) made by a human A, which satisfies two conditions:
  1. It has a certain cost for A (in terms of time, effort, money, whatever)
  2. It brings a certain benefit for another human B.
Why would a being possibly do something he takes no direct benefit from? Well, I observed some possible reasons. The first two exist also in hell, the others were up to now unknown to me:

Favour exchange
The simplest of all variants. A does a favour to B, and B does a favour to A.


Money
A variant of the former: A does a favour to B, and b gives money to A, which can be exchanged against favours with anybody else.

Biology
Humans sometimes do favours to others because their "unconsciousness thingy" wants it. This usually serves preservation of the human's DNA. A typical example is raising and nourishing children:

A variant are favours done as part of the humans' mating rituals:


Religious ethics

Very popular among religious people. The idea is the following: A does a favour to B, and G does a favour to A in the afterlife, where G is any real or imaginative benevolent supernatural power (usually the Enemy).


Atheist ethics

The same as religious ethics, but without G.


Gratitude

This one is one of the most popular - and for me, the most difficult to understand. It seems to involve some imaginary currency called "gratitude": A does a favour to B, and B gives "gratitude" to A.

I've no idea how this system works, whether or not gratitude from B can be given to another person C (like money), whether or not it is quantifiable etc. I think I have heared the expression "Mille Merci !" (1000 Thanks), but often the precise amount of gratitude is not specified.

I will have to do some research to understand this social mecanism.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Chapter 16: On cars

In which we learn about modern riding animals.

You know what's funny in the modern world? Cars. Not the technical aspect - a car quite a simple construction, compared with a tree or an insect, let alone a mammal. No, what amuses me is that the cars have faces. All of them.

A typical car's front looks more or less like this:


There are two "eyes", one "nose" (usually a company logo) and one "mouth". There are often other elements, but those elements are always present, and always in this arrangement.

The type of the face "defines" the car's character: Feline faces for manoeuvrable cars, canine faces for strong cars, bear faces for large cars, aggressive faces for fast cars, cute faces for small cars... Combinations are, of course, possible: Agressive felines, cute canines...

I wonder whether the humans are aware of this - it seems quite obvious for me. On the other side, nothing can really assumed to be obvious for people who have a tentacle thingy inside their head... Maybe they inconsciently prefer cars which they can "personalize", or they regret the horses and donkeys of the old times. In fact, many humans - in particular males - seem to have feelings for their car not unlike the feelings a rider might have to his mount.

A question to my human readers (if any): Do you agree with me that cars seem to have faces? And if you agree, were you aware of this before reading this post?

Chapter 15: On the Niggler

In which we meet the strange thingy's antagonist.

The human mind is actually even more complicated than I thought. I saw an additional component, an annoying inner critic who comments and criticizes pretty much anything the human does - according to some strange criteria. Let's call it the "Niggler":


The Niggler is kind of an antagonist of the Thingy. The poor mind is under attack from both sides. It's like having two voices inside your head, one always talking about what it wants you to do, and the other one always observing and criticising what you're doing. It must be quite annoying.

The criteria the Niggler applies are not clear to me, they seem to depend on the human - I must find out more about this. Sometimes it seems to have something to do with religious or ethical commandmends, somethings it's something completely different, like "save money", "be successful" or "slenderise". Some people even seem to thing that saving money or being successful is somewhat ethical. Strange.

As a sidenote, I think I remember having read some human psychologists' writings concerning the Thingy, the Mind and the Niggler. If I remember well, they call it the "It", "Ego" and "Über-ego", or something like this. But I'm not quite sure this is the same thing, so let's stick with Thingy, Mind and Niggler.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Chapter 14: On the Thingy

In which we see a strange thingy inside the human head.

My first day on Earth. I appeared somewhere in the city of what must be Strasbourg. Everything is so confusing, especially humans. Good news is that they don't seem to see me - I can walk around, listen to their thoughts and whatch their minds without them noticing me. Bad news is that their minds are really, really strange.

Let me explain. When I heared about humans being both animals and spirits, I imagined something like this:
I thought the relation between the conscious part and the animal part of the brain would be somewhat like the relation between a driver and a vehicle: The driver drives the vehicle where he wants, and the vehicle sometimes make the driver want to go somewhere, for example to the gas station. I thought the mind would analyze the animal's needs - both the needs of the body (like eating) and the needs of the species (like reproducing), and then decide how to satisfy these needs with minimal costs.

Turns out that's not how the human mind works. There is a third part which links the conscious mind with the "animal": A strange tentacular subconsciousness thingy.

I don't know how to call it, let's stay with "thingy". The thingy isn't simply an interface between animal and mind: It seems to have its own will. It's both intelligent and mad. It lies to the conscious mind. It tampers with the mind's thoughts. Sometimes it transforms an information into something totally different. And, strangest thing of all, it seems to assume that humans are still living in caves.

Let me give you an example: I saw a male human which was getting hungry. One would assume that the human would notice the bodily need, that it would analize which chemicals are needed and then elaborate a plan how to get those with a minimum of effort - and maybe corresponding to some social convenience, I don't know. But that was not was happened. First of all, the male got hungry when the body was not yet in urgent need for food. In the age of cave men this would have been reasonable, as the male would have needed enough forces to hunt down a mammoth or something. But here the hunger alarm went off far too early - which seemed not to be an exception, according to the male's amount of body fat. But even stranger: Instead of simply submitting the need "I'm hungry" to the mind, the "thingy" started kind of an age old program, the program "Hunt down mammoth - roast it on open fire - divide it for the tribe". This seemed to correspond to a perceived "role" of the male human, something like "Me being strong tribe chieftain, ooga ooga".

Unfortunately, there was no mamooth available, besides I am not sure whether the authorities of Strasbourg allow hunting mammoths in the city. So the thingy modified the mammoth program into some contemporary approximation - it's called "Barbecue". So the male went into some building where they distribute what appeared to be pieces of dead mammoths (or other animals, I dunno). It's called "butchery". Some minutes later it came out with enough meat to nourish ten persons - that was the "Hunt down mammoth" part. I didn't observe the execution of the rest of the program, but according to the human's thoughts, it intended to roast the mammoth meat in the garden, to brag about it's exceptional mammoth roasting capacities, and to distribute the meat to it's family like the tribe chiefs did it ages ago. The male's thoughts about everything remotedly related to mammoth hunting and roasting were quite enthousiastic, whereas the thingy made it avoid thinking about other forms of preparing food, let alone clearing the bones away and stuff.

This is only one example from what I saw. For every human, the thingy translated needs (of the body, the species or the thingy itself) in different ways. The funniest part was when I observed some other distributing building, like the butchery but specialized into footwear for females. I saw many females whose feelings like anger / need for attention / frustration / joy /fear / hunger / whatever were translated into the same "need": "Buying shoes". (The males' thingies worked in a different way, they rather translated everything to "buying toys", whatever that means.) I'm not sure how the footwear or toys are related to the time when humans lived in caves, but I wouldn't be surprized if there were a connection.

Anyway, I have no idea how the humans manage to live with those strange thingies inside their head. Somehow I'm glad to be a pure spirit and not bound to needs of body or species - let alone chained to some tentaculous monster...

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Chapter 4: On my first human soul

In which I wonder what this is all about

We won't be sent to Earth before next week, for "adminiatrative reasons" - I'm not surprised, infernal bureaucracy is slow.

Today we had "political instruction". Our instructor is a hardliner, she made it clear from the beginning that she won't tolerate any "heresy", which may design pretty much anything from speaking a forbidden word to showing signs of tiredness. Then she spoke for about six hours about humans and their "inherent inferiority to all true spiritual beings". To illustrate her point, she brought a human soul in a jar and passed it around - a pathetic, miserable being, frighened and shivering in its glass prison:According to her instructor, it belonged to a 35 years old housewife, who came to hell for cheating on her husband with her lover, on her lover with her boyfriend and on her boyfriend with her husband. I've no idea what a housewife is, or a husband, let alone cheating - but anyway, it was interesting seing this little creature trembling in its jar, trying in vain to hide from our cureious and piercing looks.

But I admit that I was a bit decieved. It was the first time I've seen a real soul - in accounting, souls are only numbers on paper. So those are the humans this fuzz is all about - the temptation department, the soul accounting, the R&D, all this infernal administration? Those are the creatures whose eternal pain and terror, exploited in industrial scale torture centers, give us demons our vital energy? And are they really so difficult to catch, up there, on earth?

And the most intriguing question of all: Why makes the Enemy all those efforts to "save" them from hell? It seems that "he" does not use torture. "He" pretends he "loves" them, but this is of course nonsense, there must be another reason. "Love" does not exist, this is one of the fundamental dogmae of Hell. Everybody serves his own interests - how could it be otherwise? But if "he" doesn't love them and does not torture them, what are His intentions? Current ideology says that He only wants to harm us, but is this true?

Of course, those are dangerous thoughts. I better not doubt infernal ideology, if I don't want to get into trouble with Inquisition...

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Chapter 2: On humans

in which i am confused.

I've learned a lot about humans but I'm even more confused. They are actually far more complicated that I thought. It seems that the will of their mind controls the body, but the body controls the mind. I can make you a schema but I doubt it will be of any help:


For example, when a human sees an apple, he can decide whether to eat it or not. So the will controls the body, in a fashion. Then again, if the body is hungry, it can make the mind want to eat. So the body controls the mind, in a fashion.

The example with the apple was not chosen randomly: It seems that all this mess started with two humans eating an apple. The mess is generally called "free will", and the Enemy pretends that humans are freer than demons or angels - but I wonder what the fact of being bound by the whimsies of a body has to do with freedom.

According to our teacher, the fact that the vody can influence what the mind wants has a purpose - it guarantees the survival of the humans as a species. Those "suggestions" from the body are generally all about eating, drinking, procreating and other animalic actions. But more important - for us - is the fact that this mecanism is one of the most important ways to tempt a human. Invoking the thought of a female breast, a cold drink or a donut with sugar frosting is often a way more efficient tool than any malicious thoughts about revenge, crushed rivals or world domination.

I can't wait to try it out...

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Chapter 1: On Class

In which I can't figure out what a human is.

My first day in Temptation was rather confusing. They put me into a crash course in anthropology, together with other newbies - twelve hours of class about humans, with a crabby teacher who doesn't like newbies.


Wors is, I still don't know what those humans are. Mister Naruk, the teacher, says they are somewhere between animals and spirits. I've no idea how this is possible. Maybe the body is like a vehicle, the spirit controls it, walks around, eats, procreates and so on. But Mr. Naruk also mentioned "human instincts", and that confuses me. When the spirit is in control of the body, it is not controlled by instincts, so instincts are superfluous. And if the instincts are in control of the body, the spirit is only a passenger, which would be strange.

Maybe my questions will be answered tomorrow.