Philosophy of Psychology (Part 3)

What is the meaning of meaning? Why should the philosophy of language be buried outside the fence? On suicide, parenting and hedonism from a learning perspective

Is suicide a language act? Does it have meaning? (Source)

What is a learning existence versus a linguistic existence? Ordinary language is a very fixed habit, agreed upon, automatic to the point of being autonomous, learned in childhood. Any innovation that is purely linguistic, like linguistic experimentation in literature, is destined to be erased in the face of ordinary language like a splash of a thrown stone in a flowing river. Therefore, it is a disturbance and disruption, not an innovation (this is the radical political action of our time, and often the artistic one as well). Because the moment you work in language - it's very easy to innovate an innovation that has no substance, like any nonsensical sentence, nonsensical any sentence like, that has no very easy innovation substance in it (what shall we say, poetry). Because the innovation is mechanical. In mathematical language, we would call this a combinatorial system of combinations, where the number of possibilities grows exponentially, because at each step the number of possibilities is multiplied by the number of possibilities. Therefore, innovation is just another possibility, and another possibility, and another - a low-value game in possible combinations. Therefore, in order to truly innovate (even in language, in writing) one must bypass the uncontrollable theoretical exponential explosion of possibilities (like in NP), of why this way and not another, in a kind of illusory freedom. The theoretical possibility must be replaced with a more effective and efficient practice (i.e., more like P), and even heuristics. Because if you say it this way, or say it another way, what difference does it make, and how will it help - what comes out of the mouth is vanity. But if you learn this way and not another - it makes a huge difference.

Any psychological change that works, even today, is created through learning, and essentially bypasses the incorrect linguistic picture of the person in learning practice (and this includes linguistic changes themselves, which are also learned). Language is the ideology - but learning is always the practice. Those who think of humans in linguistic terms, as linguistic creatures (meaning their essence is linguistic) instead of as learning creatures (meaning their essence is learning), imprison themselves in a struggle against the formidable apparatus of learning with the clay tools of language. They are like someone trying to speak in words about the core of a primordial learning monster, shaped over billions of years of learning, namely evolution - and is surprised when it swallows them, and it was not known that they came into its midst. Splash.

This is the reason why writing history in language as lessons has never succeeded in changing history - as opposed to historical learning expressed in institutions, laws, organizations, and methods. And this is also the reason why economic regulation doesn't succeed, because it's impossible to capture economic learning in language (such an attempt will only show the limitations of language) - and therefore there's no need to believe in that "miraculous" invisible hand, because the true name of the invisible hand is learning. In linguistic existence, your algorithm is too mechanical, in a binary phase transition from fixation to liberation: either too hard and not innovative enough, or too easy in low-value innovation (bullshit) - and these are two sides of the same hard coin. Whereas in learning existence, the algorithm is organic: it's not easy to innovate, but it's also quite difficult to remain fixed - innovation and fixation are equally natural, and the transitions are smooth, analogous, and soft. Language is an agreed-upon symbolic illustration of the Middle Ages (don't go outside the lines!) - and learning is sfumato.



The Freudian idea of healing through speech parallels (also historically) the idea of politics through speech (which is propaganda and what is now called "communication", and whose peak was totalitarian propaganda). In the same way, it also parallels the idea of a media-based economy, where every product undergoes advertising mediation, the sale is a conversation, and the transaction is communication. And just like the idea of healing through learning, not speech, there needs to be a parallel idea of politics through learning (and therefore effective) and economy through learning (and therefore less manipulative for consumerism) and sociology through learning. Because the idea of healing through learning doesn't see the particular case of the individual patient in isolation from the general social system, and therefore doesn't see the psyche as disconnected from historicization. In every era, there are new and more characteristic challenges for the psyche, and the psyches in society that seek such solutions are the place for psycho-social innovations, and for solving the problems of the time.

For example, the problem with a partner can be perceived as a problem arising from the current stage in the sexual revolution (or feminist, or information revolution, etc.) - and therefore as part of the broad search for solutions to the problems of the hour, and for innovations that will advance them. Therefore, the solution should also be derived from a vision of the future, for example, understanding the future of the sexual revolution (and so on). Suffering is not a malfunction or worthless, but indicates an attempt to solve a problem of the generation, so that future generations can progress and solve more advanced problems. All treatment focused on the individual disconnects him from learning, which began before him, will continue after him, and occurs on a broad front around him. In such a view, the innovation of the solution is not only of personal egoistic value - but of broad learning significance for the system, and both the therapist and the patient have a role in cracking it and spreading it to advance the learning of the system. The right side of history to be on is always the side of the future, and psychology is also part of history.

In fact, people compete in being ahead of their time (a state that has psychological and even economic advantages), and this overall competition is what advances time and creates the future (just like hamsters running on the wheel of time, and without their running time will not progress). Such a view gives a much broader meaning to learning - and therefore to the psychological problem, and therefore to the person. A psychological problem is a learning problem, meaning an obstacle that prevents progress to the future, and therefore progress in it is bringing the future, just as religious correction of the individual is part of bringing the Messiah. Every person is an example, and everyone can discover and embody an innovation of value to the whole. A person is a small generation.

This approach can particularly suit intergenerational problems (like parenting), which are not "communication problems" between generations, requiring "language translation" (a harmful conceptualization), but distinct learning problems. Each generation needs different parenting, and there is a need to grasp the future in a certain way to crack it in real time. It's easy to blame and say in hindsight what should have been (and in this psychology has made a name for itself), after culture has reached conclusions on a broad front (which of course are only valid one generation back, and therefore don't help the next generation). But such blame can also undergo transformation through learning understanding, which steps into the shoes of the learning challenges of parenting then - through the history of generational learning. Expanding meaning in learning time and space gives meaning that expands the soul - to the soul.



The philosophy of language has answered on its part very unsatisfactory answers from a psychological perspective to the question of meaning (use? translation? picture?...), precisely because it distanced itself from any specific content to language itself. In doing so, it abandoned meaning, which is basic in the psyche, to ideologies and religions and even politics (God forbid) or to inflated and pathetic literary kitsch (see existentialism) - and thus philosophy itself lost meaning. The secular fear of the religious distanced itself from any general meaning, and left it to the particular case. But as language did understand, meaning by nature is related to the general system, and particular meaning is not sufficient. What the philosophy of learning does is provide systemic, general meaning, of direction for the system - and its progress. Because unlike the language system, a learning system has a direction - and meaning in it has a dimension of time, and particularly time that is very suitable for our times: the future (a dimension that is completely missing in language, and in fact learning can be defined skeletally as the result of the composition: language system + future direction). Thanks to conceptualization as learning - unlike various ideological utopias - the direction exists but is not predetermined and marked in advance, and there can be progress not towards a specific and limited (and therefore destructive) goal. There is meaning - without ideology. Evolution can progress - without man being the crown of creation and its desired end. The soul can progress without there being some desired ideal of normality and balance and mental health - and precisely because of this there are always new spaces for progress.

Unlike philosophy, which completely failed to be part of human life in the past century, and was exiled to academic death, psychology actually recorded its greatest success in it, and conquered the world from within academia. But this success stems precisely from entering an empty space, which philosophy failed to enter. In fact, psychology succeeded in the past century only following secularization, and following its replacement of religious functions - such as confession, dream interpretation, expressing hidden wishes (prayer), private meetings with the Admor, setting dates for inner correction, etc. - this, while replacing the soul with the psyche and the spirit with emotion and the religious myth with the childhood myth (the myth of the child). But more than replacing any specific function, psychology owes its success to being the privatization of meaning, that is, being a secular systemic function that transfers the focus of meaning from the general to the particular.

But private meaning fails just like private language, and we've come out bald from here and there. On one hand, we understood in philosophy that meaning is a systemic phenomenon, and meaning in the brain or in evolution does not stem from any neuron or individual, but from the learning that takes place in the system. On the other hand, we tried to find private meaning in the individual, and this philosophical mistake eventually becomes a psychological mistake, and masses of people live their lives without meaning, and raise children without meaning. The disastrous attempt to give up meaning in spirit and replace it with meaning in psyche has become inferior Hollywood kitsch (because what is the meaning of life? Love).

If so, what is the meaning of life in learning philosophy? To be part of the general learning in the system. Therefore, one who is not part of the system, and has no part in its learning - their life is meaningless. Just as there is no meaning to private language, there is no meaning to private learning of a person that is outside the learning of society. Unless in the future it will be part of the learning (for example, he wrote a book that will be distributed after his death). If a tree learns in the forest and no one will ever know about it - there is no meaning to its learning. The pain of our removal from the system - is the pain of our disconnection from learning, and therefore excommunication is severe in Judaism and similar to death - because a tree of learning is for those who hold onto it.

The pain of loneliness is the pain of disconnection from general learning. Other mental pains stem from personal non-learning, like depression and anxiety - which are learning disorders. And what heals the pain is its transformation into learning. Thus, one who suffers from social rejection can turn it into new insights and reconnect to learning. Unlike the attachment psychologist, who sees the need for connection as the mental need and healing, the learning psychologist sees learning as the mental need - and therefore the source of healing. For example, one who has no children - in the past he was not part of the learning of the species, if he was an animal, hence the pain of infertility (and even the pain of premature death). But since human social learning, one can contribute to social learning even without children, and since literature one can contribute to social learning even without social connections. As the ability to be part of world learning increases, people feel less need for children, not because they have no need for learning - but because learning is possible even without children. Learning is the criterion of meaning. And if the mystic, for example, learns something that there is no way to teach - it has no meaning.



The escape of philosophy in the last century from meaning in favor of language created mountains of meaningless writing (in both senses), and entire corpuses written in special philosophical languages created so that their meaning value is low to zero, and no one will read them in the future (and in the future lies the true, learning-based meaning). One who flees from meaning loses meaning, and all learning is a pursuit of the meaning that resides in the direction of the system's development. Thus intelligence emerges as the supreme meaning of evolution, and life emerges as the meaning of the universe. The meaning of a story stems from its organization towards the plot, that is, from the learning process towards its future and end (and that's why the ending is always so critical to the question of meaning. The Holocaust redefined the meaning of exile). The philosophy of the second half of the 20th century will be remembered in the future exactly like the art of the second half of the 20th century - the stage where language coiled within itself and created zero meaning and therefore zero value. Indeed, today the meaning of art is private, therefore psychological, and therefore will not interest anyone in the future.

The private meaning of linguistic psychology fails in an astonishing manner precisely in extreme cases, such as suicide. From the perspective of pure private psychological meaning, we have no justification to say anything to a person who wants to harm themselves (since they are not harming others), or who wants euthanasia for reasons of mental suffering, and even forceful intervention to save them is without any justification. A person is the master of their life because they are the master of its meaning, and the therapist is merely a servant in service of that master. Of course, in practice something entirely different occurs, because billions of years of evolutionary learning have imprinted even in the most dogmatic psychologist the learning-based meaning, according to which suicide is a disaster - the greatest harm a person can inflict against the future (even more than murder).

Every suicide is in fact a suicide bombing - an incomparably violent act of deep harm to the environment, from the parents (who embodied their future in the child) to expanding and wide circles (and therefore it shocks every person), because it is an act of terror against meaning, and therefore against learning in the system. The moment meaning is not psychological and not property in the land registry of the person themselves but of the learning system towards the direction of the future - it is clear why suicide is an act of terrible violence, more than murder. Suicide does not deny the meaning of any particular individual - but the most general possible meaning, in all meaning that can exist towards the future, that is, in all learning whatsoever. Therefore, a learning psychologist has a solid stance of meaning against suicide, while a linguistic psychologist only has such an instinct. He does not understand the meaning of burying the suicide outside the cemetery - and the justification for the enormous social anger towards him.



But why is the idea of learning so suitable for human psychology? Because human psychology itself was shaped to produce learning. We see this for example in the emotion of suffering (which is after all the justification for everything for the shallow therapist). In the short term, pleasure is much preferable to suffering, and indeed this is how motivation is built in primitive creatures with primitive (behavioristic) learning, but human learning is built mainly differently. Learning itself is the long-term motivation/pleasure, from the direction of the future (similar to what Aristotle tried to call happiness and is mistakenly interpreted as the emotion of happiness). And from the perspective of the future, for example after years, there is an equalizer phenomenon: in the range of negative and positive experiences, suffering and pleasure, there is a reduction, and the criterion that becomes much more relevant is interest, that is, how much we learned. People are able to remember periods that were difficult in real time positively, and periods that were easy in real time negatively, and our general satisfaction stems from how much we learned.

In other words, contrary to the hedonistic picture (which we feel in our animality), we discover that in humans, interest (that is, the learning motivation imprinted in us, the interest of learning) is a much stronger emotion than suffering and pleasure, and even suffering and pleasure (for example sexual) are subject to interest, and therefore suffering and pleasure without novelty fade on their own. And when looking at the short term, that is, how people act in the short term, we again discover that interest (versus boredom) is no less strong than suffering and pleasure, and that people act according to interest much more than according to the hedonistic picture. Dopamine is a much more dominant neurotransmitter than those associated with various animal pleasures, and therefore we can "control" ourselves, that is, prefer learning over immediate gratification and act contrary to it. This is precisely the advantage of humans from a psychological perspective.

But those who see humans in a communicative way, without internal motivation, believe that the world communicates with them through "feedback", and that humans are Pavlovian creatures shaped by being told "good" and "bad", while the story of the Tree of Knowledge teaches exactly the opposite: knowledge and interest and curiosity overcome all good and evil and all reward and punishment. People are religious not because of reward and punishment, but because it interests them and teaches them (and this is also the main reason people become secular or religious). And this is the same reason they enter romantic relationships for example, not because of the pleasure waiting for them at the end in intercourse, but because of the interest created in them by the other side, which is the attraction (and therefore complex courtship interests and challenges them). And why does sex itself interest them at all? It's not the simple pleasure that motivates them, but precisely because it is a complex and complicated field that requires learning. And this is the very reason that human sexuality is so complex and "difficult", unlike animal sexuality, and unlike what is "hedonistically efficient", because otherwise humans would not be interested in sex. And this is exactly the reason people are more interested in sex than in food, because food is less interesting (that is: there is less to learn in it. And to make food interesting and therefore enjoyable you need to complicate it: in preparation methods, complex flavors, textures, smells, presentation and an entire culture around it. Once the interest in food was in obtaining it, for example hunting it, but agriculture created sexual culture).

Of course, interest itself can be subject to corruption, like any biological mechanism. For example, we will tend to stare at moving images (television trash or changing landscape while traveling or flowing water), or listen to chatter on the radio and read Facebook feed or a fluent novel (an inherently inferior genre, which gained prestige thanks to exceptions that do not teach about the rule). That is: we are vulnerable to sequences of stimuli, which capture interest thanks to simple change that does not teach, that is, novelty without novelty. Many of us will leave learning itself to the sleep stage, when the brain shuts down the body in order to force the internalization of learning into it. If psychology has a general role, it is to turn higher learning into a habit in the psyche, and to expand the creative dream stage at the expense of the waking stage, subject to the tyranny of inferior changing sensory novelty.

The aspiration to elevate the soul is not by chance opposite to dealing with the subconscious and "depth", and focusing the gaze on the future is not by chance opposite to looking "backward" (in the past, in childhood, in trauma), and the aspiration for creation and innovation is not by chance opposite to the idea of repair and plumbing of the soul (which is not a collection of impulses in pipes and covers). Attachment is not the central drive of humans - but interest. And therefore, harm to interest is the most severe harm to personality, because much more terrible than a suffering personality is a boring personality (and psychologically balanced of course). Suffering and imbalance and lack of satisfaction are powerful drives for innovation - and therefore they are the normal of humans, while balance is a severe pathology, because only thermodynamic imbalance can perform work. There is no greater damage to human creativity than taking away the deep lacks from which they operate (see Buddhism), and therefore these lacks are so common (not because all our parents are so terrible, but because humans are built as an incompleteness that produces learning, unlike the psychic completeness of the natural animal).

Would people invest psychic motivations in projects if not for the hole in their soul? The whole purpose of psychology should be to take this hole and channel creative streams towards it - and not to cover it or plug and close it. Because suffering is improper treatment of the hole, for example non-creative verbal dance around it, while creative pleasure is proper use of the hole - as a psychic resource of imbalance, which allows flow and dam construction and power station. Instead of treading water in repetitive and psychological talk (which is itself the problem), the repetitive cycle should be opened to new talk. Because psychic harmony is not desirable, but learning-creative harmony, which constantly produces innovations - is the ideal. Instead of the system reaching balance, as if there is some final rest and inheritance (and therefore repair and treatment), the development of the system should be constant - to walk you need to be constantly out of balance. The human ideal is constant interest, not to be happy and complete. Because rest and inheritance only exist in death, hence its being the end of the world of meaning. It was a fatal mistake to seek meaning in language (and indeed no meaning was found) - because meaning is in learning.



In summary, as we have seen in the three parts, learning-based therapy can have many directions, just like the many schools that were part of linguistic therapy (and in parallel to them). Even when linguistic therapy did work - it was precisely because it was (in disguise, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes hypocritically and sometimes in dissonance and inconsistency) learning-based therapy. This is the fate of an incorrect worldview with a relevance gap to reality - that it implements precisely the rival ideology, in secret, in order to work. Read my lips: it's learning, stupid. Relationships were never about transferring information (communication) between the parties, but about learning that occurs between them, and that learning is what turned the relationship - into a system.

Therapy in the next century will use the root l-m-d [learn] much more than the root k-sh-r [connect] - and this conceptualization will permeate practice in a variety of learning methodologies, which will distill what does work (learning) from methods that almost don't work, but talk a lot. People's attraction to methods where they talk - stems precisely from the fact that it's easy to talk and hard to learn. Therapists' attraction to primitive learning methods (the conditioning of behavioral psychology instead of teaching, or learning through verbal repetition in endless sessions) stems from the fact that it's difficult to be a teacher. The school experience, the most anti-learning institution, took away people's desire to learn (and therefore turned them into a human industry) - and it is responsible for the very rise of the conceptualization of "psychological problems". After all, after we finished the production process of a person, if there is a problem, then it needs to be fixed, just like a car that finished production and goes to the garage - hence the medical idea behind psychology ("treatment" of the psyche parallel to "treatment" of the body, because a malfunction in the body needs to be "fixed" with a doctor, because the body is supposed to be "functional"). A learning-based conceptualization will understand that the psychologist is not a doctor (and certainly not a confessing priest), but a teacher. And therefore one doesn't go to him when there is a problem (a "problematic" conceptualization in itself) - but when one wants to learn and develop. And therefore therapy (a terrible and parental word - teaching is preferable) should become higher education of the soul.

To Part 1