Proper Resilience and False Equifinality

Here's something old that I thought I had posted, but apparently had not.

I define proper resilience as employing the capability to cope effectively with certain situations that individuals may be conditioned to view as being non-preferential to their individual system by understanding via reason the true severity in terms of existential risks of a situation. All 'non-preferential' situations that do not threaten the survival of a system are contextual in terms of arbitrary preferences of that system.

The only inherent purpose of a biological system, i.e. something that is living, is to survive long enough to reproduce and thus continue the survival of the genes within that biological system. All else is arbitrarily decided upon. This brings us to self-interest - all living systems have as their sole inherent purpose surviving to procreate.

Now particular situations which are not directly existentially threatening may have indirect consequences to our reproduction-purposed survival insofar as those consequences may affect our ability to reproduce with a desirable mate. This said though, we as humans have the use of reason and may hence develop our own arbitrary purposes based on memetic replication and survivability as opposed to genetic replication: we may live on in our creations by way of our minds, not just our loins.

Improper resilience I define as the ability to cope without the proper understanding of why and not using correct reasoning for / or not having the correct reasoning behind the actions and mindset allowing for the coping thereof; employing the capability to cope effectively with certain situations that individuals are faced with without the employment of reason, i.e. 'for the wrong reasons.' Merely responding correctly does not connote correct understanding of the whys and the hows.

Ludwig van Bertalanffy, the man we have to thank for General Systems Theory, termed equifinality for when you may reach the same conclusions via multiple paths. When we employ reason for coping we are taking the 'correct' (well reasoned, logical) path whereas when we do not employ reason our path does not necessarily correspond with reality or logic and so, although we have coped properly with a situation and hence achieved our desired outcome, we have done so via irrational means and thus we are in danger of applying irrational means in the future with different situations.

Principles are arbitrary. One develops principles according to a given philosophy which may or may not be based on reason. Reason is not arbitrary. It is a corrollary of an axiomatic basis.

Harnessing the Irrational

Been away for awhile, if anyone noticed. Yeah, didn't think so. Either way, I've been busy doing more concept formulation and active discussion and less composition, but I did want to throw up a quick post for the purpose of keeping myself focused on Alchememetic Illusionectomy, if only in the back of my mind.

Anyway, I've been working on the idea of using reason to harness our irrational side of the brain so as to use it in rational ways; i.e. using reason to take advantage of irrationality. This seems to be on the face of it the basis for systems such as alchemy and goes along with the concept of the yin and the yang. Basically, I'm talking about the marriage of the rational and irrational and understanding the equally worthy aspects of both.

We employ reason everyday in our lives as I've often spoke of before. But we also employ emotion and intuition as well and this can be tricky. Pure emotion often will lead us in the 'wrong' direction and we tend to make 'mistakes' when we go along merely with our emotional responses to circumstances.

When we have an emotional response to something, but before acting upon it we employ reason we can head off a lot of misery by seeing the long-term effects that our strictly emotional responses could have led to if we had acted solely in accordance with them. We become reactionary and inconsistent.

I'm especially looking into how this can be applied to creativity and quotidian life, but until I have the time to fully and more articulately go on further I hope that you may have your on thoughts and feel free to share them.