A cognitive rambling...

So it's another Friday night...Woo...oh well. I'm just sitting here and reading up on the text for this cognitive psychology class that I'm taking and saw that one of the flaws with cognitive psychology is a difficulty with designing experiments that could be ecologically valid. That is, the lab is a place where reality is stunted...like a kid that drinks too much Coca-cola when he was 5 and is like a 3 foot tall 12 year-old...but I digress. We control for things in the lab, but the lab, you see, is not reality. It is what we make it. It is, for a brief moment that we hold those subjects in our experimental grasp, our Matrix.

However, the greater study of the human mind does not depend on what happens in whatever reality that you might mold in the laboratory, but rather in the exploratory nature of the real world. Now here's the real question: Is the real world experience even ecologically valid? I mean, how are our realities stunted by all the rules and regulations that we experience throughout our lives, and I'm just talking about social rules here, including laws, taboos, sage advice on "getting' some", every little thing. So if all of those rules have led us to conform to one mold or another, then how ecologically valid are they? Just as we as cognitive psychologists mold and create a reality in our own labs, so do these social contracts mold everyone's reality.

So the only real way to be ecologically valid would be to be God, Shiva, Vishnu, Buddha, Allah, Zeus, Thor, Jehovah...oh yeah I already mentioned Him...and any other god you might want to throw into the mix...that manipulates mankind through organized religion (each insisting on its own slightly different, but not really unique), but not faith. Then we run into the same problem, the problem of ecological validity. So really, the only way to be truly and totally ecologically valid is to be a simple observer...the way that a art gallery patron is a observer...never touching, never interfering, just watching, and that is a very special thing.

Think about it, how often have you gone out and observed people...I mean really people watched. Every day is like a traveling menagerie of animals...because, after all, that's all a human being is at the end of the day: animal. A highly intelligent, often clumsy in its will, animal. And by us observing ourselves, we might get the idea of what it's like to be God, just watching, and enjoying ever minute of it...but a compassionate god would want to reach out of the observation bubble and try to make things good for everyone...pretty soon, this just means that any god, as a construct by people, is fallible...but a god of its own creation, now there's something. Think of it as existential hype. Now here's where it gets really interesting....Parallel what I just said about what's needed for a god and what is more desirable in a person. Do you want someone who's full of hype or someone who, by their own determination, made a mind that is ripe and willing to drink the juice of knowledge? Dunno about you, but I want the smart guy (or gal, it's an equal world, after all).

So there you have it, you are your own god in a sense, you are the master of your own destiny, you are the ultimate sealer of your own fate, and for what it's worth, I'm glad it's you and not me.