psychology – Page 137

People Like To Watch What Others Are Naturally Good At

Vladimir Klitschko and Anthony Joshua are both close to 2m tall and 110kg heavy – and it follows naturally that more people want to watch them fight than have sex

Why does the world’s most popular female porn star get paid orders of magnitude more than the world’s most popular male one? And why does the world’s most popular male athlete get paid orders of magnitude more than the world’s most popular female one? The current fashion is to attribute all manner of prejudice behind these two facts, but the reality is that it’s just a reflection of nature.

A bird looks awesome swooping through the air, but there’s nothing graceful about a waddling duck. A shark looks awesome sliding through the water, but on the floor of a boat a fish looks ridiculous. A cat looks awesome stalking some prey, but looks much less so when licking its own arse, as cats do.

There is a reason behind all of this. We humans appear to derive some aesthetic pleasure from observing parts of nature doing what they have developed to be the best at.

A bird is a creature of the air; naturally it looks best when in the air and not on the ground. A fish is a creature of the water; naturally it looks best when in the water and not on the ground.

Every creature looks the best in the environment that they have adapted the most to thrive in. This follows naturally from an appreciation of basic principles of biology.

And this is why the world’s highest paid porn star is, and always will be, a woman, and why the world’s highest paid sportsperson is, and always will be, a man: women are made to make love and men are made to make violence.

Both of those truths are highly unfashionable at the moment, because the zeitgeist is that all are equal in every single way. The trend at the moment is to insist on equality to the point of rejecting all evidence to the contrary (which even goes as far as some suggesting that the skill levels are equal in international men’s and women’s soccer, for example).

They are true nonetheless. Females were more than capable of reproducing asexually – the point of sexual reproduction is develop a subgroup within each species that is specially adapted to violence so that they can better protect those not adapted to it.

But because women are made to make love, the demand for watching them make love is (and always will be) much greater than it is for men. A woman is in her natural element when making love, and so looks better making love than fighting, and therefore people are much more willing to pay money for a chance to watch one do so.

And because men are made to make violence, the demand for watching them fight (and play sport, which is just ritualised violence) is and always will be much greater than it is for women. A man is in his natural element when fighting, etc.

Women’s sport can only catch on to the extent that it is a contest of skill, because that is essentially a contest of brainpower and men and women are not different there. So a sport such as cricket has a much greater chance of becoming a mainstream phenomenon than one such as soccer or rugby, much less boxing or MMA.

Even so it will never be as popular as the men’s version, because the demand (among both men and women) to watch men compete at sport will always be much greater. This will be true as long as men are better at fighting than women.

If Materialism Is False, Death Is Nothing To Fear

Materialism is such a dominant perspective in today’s culture that we’ve almost forgotten that it is a perspective. The near-universal assumption is that consensual reality is a mindless collection of atoms and molecules, and of temperature and energy, and that the brain generates consciousness. This essay is a reminder that this perspective is just a perspective, and not necessarily the truth.

Thinking logically, it soon becomes apparent that there’s nothing especially rational about adopting the perspective of materialism, although doing so may be temporarily useful for anyone trying to run a scientific experiment.

From an existential perspective, the only thing you know for sure is that you’re conscious. That’s it. Existence precedes essence – this is another way of saying that consciousness precedes the contents of consciousness.

At this point, most people will protest that they are also aware of the material world. This conclusion follows naturally from the assumption that the brain generates consciousness, because once a person has made this assumption it seems natural to think that the brain has developed to become aware of the material world.

But no-one knows for sure that what they are aware of is a material world. A person might be conscious of a perspective that relates to some mental attempt to make sense of the stimuli that they have received from what appears to be a material world, but this is in no way evidence that such a material world exists – the map is not the territory.

Some might argue here that the sensory impressions that impact upon our consciousness are, nonetheless, impressions from the material world, and that we know that our sensory organs have made accurate impressions of this material world because of our successful adaptation to it.

But the worlds that we encounter in our dreams, which can be as real and as detailed as this material world, are evidently not creating impressions on our eyes, because those are closed and we are asleep. From this we can deduce that eyes are not necessary to create an illusion of a material world realistic enough for a consciousness to want to survive in it.

And from this it follows that a material world is itself entirely unnecessary, because consciousness could simply dream one up in its absence and would be unable to tell the difference.

At this point a materialist might continue to object, claiming that although the dreamworld that the dreamer experiences is evidently non-material (despite being equally as real from an existential perspective), the appearance of it is nonetheless created by the brain, wherein it resides.

But at this point the materialist has allowed themselves to become a magical thinker. The belief that consciousness resides in the brain does not follow from any logical process.

Usually the materialist will continue to profess that science will one day prove what the “origin” of consciousness is, and that when it does so this origin will doubtlessly be material, but this line of reasoning is just the mirror opposite of what materialists deride as “the god of the gaps”.

In other words, it’s magical thinking, not rational thinking.

Talking to a materialist about the idea that consciousness itself has generated the contents of consciousness (i.e. it has dreamed up the material world as a particularly convincing delusion) is like talking to a medieval theologian about the idea that man has generated the idea of the Christian god – their basic existential assumptions about reality make a conversation about it essentially impossible.

If one refuses to make the assumption that the brain generates consciousness, then there is no reason to believe that the death of the physical body and brain should affect the experience of being conscious. Therefore, it follows that, if the existence of consciousness is not predicated on temporal phenomena, consciousness must be eternal.

And if consciousness is eternal, then all the contents of consciousness are just forms – things that come and go. And your body, being nothing more than some of the contents of your consciousness, is one of those things that comes and goes – but it isn’t you.

Therefore, there is no significant difference between the death of the physical body and any other major change in the contents of consciousness. The death of the physical body might portend a great change in the contents of consciousness, but there is no logical reason to think that this necessitates a change in consciousness itself.

Te Reo With Mnemonics: Entertainment Words

Bar/Pub – tūpapa

An infant picks up a glass of beer at a pub and then drinks it. Looking at his father, the infant sees double – he sees two papas.

celebrate – whakanui(-a)

Through a pair of binoculars, a man watches a bunch of canoeists celebrating something far out at sea. They are the far canoeists.

dance – kanikani

A line of dancers dance the can-can. The crowd boos them and throws tin cans at them.

drunk – haurangi

A man tries to talk to another man but the other man can’t hear him. He says “Sorry, I’m too drunk to talk – it’s affected my hearing.”

entertain – manaaki

A tall man, who is part of an entertaining carnival sideshow, has to duck under an archway, and a woman laughs and says “mind the archway”.

Fun/Recreation – hākinakina

A serial killer attacks a cleaning woman with an axe and laughs maniacally. For recreation he is hacking a cleaner.

The Maori word for recreation – hākinakina – sounds like the English phrase ‘hacking a cleaner’

funny – hangarau

On a giant gallows, a line of corpses are hanging in a row. A person looks at this ghastly scene and starts cackling dementedly as if it is very funny.

laugh – katakata

A cat looks at itself in a mirror (it’s two cats or cat-cat) and starts laughing.

joke – whakakata

A cat drops a mouse in front of an old grandmother and the grandmother shoos the cat away, saying “Fucking cat!” The cat says “It was only a joke.”

party – ngahau

A teenager complains “How can we fix this stereo?” A man smiles and says “With my know-how.” He fixes the stereo, music plays and a party springs to life.

sober – taumauri

A drunk youth complains that he feels dizzy. A nearby friend says “Don’t worry, you’ll be sober tomorrow.”

Spectacle – tirohanga

A child gets offered some food from a hangi, and cries “I’m tired of hangis!” and then throws a tantrum. An onlooking old lady says “What a spectacle.”

The above is an excerpt from the upcoming Learn Maori Vocabulary With Mnemonics, by Jeff Ngatai, due to be published by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2017/18.

Te Reo With Mnemonics: Colour Words

black – pango

A ninja, dressed in black, takes a very good look at a black shotgun. Then it discharges – ‘PANG!’

white – tea

Up in the clouds, where everything is white, some of the clouds take the form of two old men drinking tea.

blue – kahurangi

A woman picks up a ringing phone. On the other end of the line, painted in a striking blue colour, is an anthropomorphic car. It is the car who rang.

red – whero

Suddenly a red feral pig bursts out of the bushes and starts wrecking the place.

yellow – kōwhai

A sea of yellow corncobs stretch out to the horizon, a yellow cornfield.

green – kākāriki

An old green car drives past, so old that bystanders can hear creaking noises coming from it. It is a car creaking.

brown – parāone

Wearing a brown suit, brown shoes and a brown hat, a giant prawn walks past.

grey – māhinahina

At a Chinese factory, a gigantic grey machine hisses in operation. It is a grey machine in China.

orange – karaka

Two children pull at either end of a giant orange Christmas cracker.

pink – māwhero

[Lit. ‘white-red’] A boy dressed in pink clothing solves some maths equations super fast and is awarded a prize. He is the math hero.

dark – whēuriuri

A man peers into a gloomy forest and then turns to his extremely hairy friend and says “It’s fair eerie, Hairy.”

bright – kanapu

A bird nesting in the canopy of a forest wakes up as the bright sun starts shining over the horizon.

The above is an excerpt from the upcoming Learn Maori Vocabulary With Mnemonics, by Jeff Ngatai, due to be published by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2017/18.