Happiness Is A Scam, Santosh Jha [bill gates books recommendations txt] 📗

This reward and happy perception is also responsible for ‘habit’ formation. We also need to accept habit with novel and alternative analogies and metaphors. This shall facilitate our understanding of the ‘scam’, we have hypothesized about. We shall deliberate it later.

Just for ease of understanding, we may take an example. Suppose, I have heard a maestro sing a song and I later try to sing it the way he sang. I sing it and there is this inner feeling that I am unable to do it right. The two templates – one of the maestro and another of mind do not match. This feels unrewarding. I have this inner urge to repeat it and my subconscious mind keeps telling me that I am doing better every time I repeat my attempt. There is this reward feeling, which keeps me repeating my efforts, till I do it the way, I feel the maestro did. The two templates begin to come closer. This is subconscious system of hormonal plexus working out and leading me to a habit-forming exercise, which shall ensure ‘success’ to me. I may later on ‘own’ the entire enterprise of success; as if ‘I’ was feeling and doing it all but there is a subconscious, auto-mode Intentionality working its way within my body-brain system, orchestrating every small perceptional layer and suitable motor action. The ‘stages’ in the progression; which I have worded above as, feeling, urge, reward, telling, etc, are all chemically mediated expressions of the Intentionality, which my brain is orchestrating, with the help of what we have listed as hormones. Science says, most humans do 98 percent of their behavior and actions in their daily life-living this way and they may not be even aware. They however, may later ‘own’ it, if it works out well for them. Intentionality is emergent at the level of neural plexuses and they get executed at subconscious layers of mind consciousness, which we may later ‘own’ as me or mine. This hypothesis needs to be kept in mind as we proceed.

The brain function, which we just talked about, is something, which is common in mammalian world and primates. In human brain system, this part of the brain is therefore called the mammalian brain. It is known as the limbic system, which essentially deals with ‘primary perceptions’, short term memories and handling of emotional spectrum. We can simplify the above discussion by hypothesizing that limbic system works on the causality of emotional perceptions of reality and is handled by a chemical registry mechanism, known as hormonal system or endocrine system.

Now we talk about the possible trouble, which later evolution of brain may be said to be responsible for. The limbic system worked fine and still works fine for most mammals and primates but it seems to have entered a ‘trouble’ phase in humans, as humans evolved in a unique way, jumping the linearity of symmetrical evolution. As we have discussed earlier, humans stepped down from trees, roamed around and then finally settled to create cultures and civilized life-living. New tools and technologies happened and life-living became complex. Much of the complexities were behavioral and therefore required complex motor skills too. Civilized and cultured family-societal life-living required rules and laws and novel shades of emotional contents. As we talked earlier, humanity created its own intelligence, many in conflict with nature’s age old and dominant intelligence and cultured life-living for the first time required ‘thoughtfulness’ and ‘controlled’ decision-making, as against reactionary and mechanical decision-making, which the limbic system performed so far.

This created first dualism in mind consciousness. The primary intelligence was ‘reactionary’ and speedy action and promptness of behavior. As cultures and societal needs happened; it installed a new intelligence, which required to postpone ‘reactionary and speedy’ actions and behaviors. The new situation needed the innate intelligence to be blocked, so that a more thoughtful, calculated and informed choice could be made. The two contradictory, conflicting and competing intelligences had to be worked out by the totality and holism of the brain, even when handled by different brain regions. This required much more complex information processing and more complex neural networking. The human brain had to undergo a non-linear evolution. Novel emotional and perceptional requirements like planning, perspectives, retrospection, tolerance, sociability etiquettes, et al were necessary new elements to make the society and tribe succeed well. These could not match with usual reactionary and recognition-friendly brain processing done successfully so far by mammalian brain part known as limbic system. A non-linear and more effective and specialized brain addition and evolution was required in short time.

This happened as cortical layers of human brain evolved. The trouble is – Evolution does not dump the old and creates a new in place of the old. It can only upgrade and add more into already existing set up. The human brain also evolved this way. The new brain happened on top of the old brain but was so linked up that it worked in complex cooperation with old brain states. This uniqueness of human brain is the soil and seed of all conflicts and also the precursor of all scammed perceptions. This we need to understand.

As we have said repeatedly, we have ease in understanding a reality when presented as analogies or symbols; therefore, we present a very popular and common analogy from our life-living to understand the conflict probability and possible trouble of this uniqueness of human brain. We all know, how in modern governance system, the bureaucracy has become so massive and it is considered as permanent executive. This means, political leadership as ministers in the government may come and go but the bureaucracy remains constant. The huge plexus of bureaucracy however is considered both as asset as well as a big burden on smooth governance. The ministers can only present a vision or a policy and get the approval of legislative wing. However, it is the bureaucracy, which has the ultimate duty to execute a vision or policy. The politicians propose and bureaucracy executes. Interestingly, the politicians and bureaucracy always have a precarious and even bizarre marriage. They do not trust each other and still, cannot survive without each other. The politicians are quick to blame it on bureaucracy if their policies and vision fails. Still, they depend only on bureaucracy to even design their visions or policies. The same probably is the situation between subconscious and conscious brain states or what we popularly know as limbic system and cortex layers. The planning and ‘executive decisions’ are said to be handled by the cortex brain states but it is always the limbic system, which shall execute relevant motor actions for commensurate behavior-action, as per the ‘decided’ visions of cortex brain. One can hypothesize what this may mean for humans in their daily life-living routines and wellness! We all have our experiences with inner conflicts and confusions.

We do not have the space to detail all aspects of this complexity but we are in short talking only about an example to just make you feel, how important yet how difficult this uniqueness of our brain system is. Science tells that first single cell living organism happened around 3.5 billion years. We know, it had the chemical sense of crude Intentionality. However, multi-cellular organism happened only around 500 million years back. Scientists cannot say with singular certainty as why it took such long for the single cell organism to evolve into multi-cellular one but one of the key hypotheses is that it required the newly produced cell, which a cell reproduced, to lose and forego its ‘freedom’ to not detach from parent cell and remained ‘tied’ with the destiny of its parent cell. This is the domain of Intentionality. The word freedom must only be accepted as some metaphor or analogy for an ‘Intention’ in the newly produced cell, not to become independent and work in cooperation with parent cell to form a multi-cellular organism, which in turn could facilitate tissue formation, organ formation and complex organisms later. This intentionality could take billions of years, before it actually happened 500 million years back, when finally a multi-cellular organism emerged on Earth. This somehow reflects as how complex is the domain of intentionality, which works its way from as miniscule as a cell to an organism with 30 trillion cells like we humans. This chemical journey and complexities involved in it is mesmerizing. It is very tough to imagine how a brilliant and magical ‘chemical cooperation’ must be required to make a human brain work out its intentionality and express them in myriads of behaviors and actions. More stupendous and equally baffling is, how very early human consciousness engendered a metaphoric association of external situations with specific ‘feel’ and cognition of its internal mapping in the brain states. One wonders, how this ‘happy’ feel and cognition got its roots in mind consciousness in early humans, millions of years back. Has this ‘happy feel’ also evolved and got complex and complicated, as the brain states, in these millions of years? This we need to keep in mind.

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Unraveling Spectrum of Scam

As we move to deliberate on the scam of perceptional realities, which is probably the entropic evolutional fall out, rather than a systematic linear one; we must keep in mind what this uniqueness of human brain and its perceptional diversities; often delusional; has meant for humanity in its long march, especially in the last hundred thousand years, when the current species of humans came to stay as dominant species of the Earth.

It is relevant here to talk about why nature’s innate intelligence, shared by millions of species on earth, since thousands of millions of years, could not unleash any patterned insinuations of mass destruction, criminality, depravity, shamelessness, delusion, abstractions, pilferage and above all; the heinous brutality in animal world. They had the so-called animal brain. The humans boast of a ‘superior’ brain and the humans unleashed all the above mentioned realities. Why? Both humans and complex animals have mammalian brains but why this critical difference in behavior and actions, which is so drastic and extreme? We share almost 98 percent of genes with chimps yet, we are so different from them. What makes this very small two percent difference blow out of proportions in human brain perceptional landscape? This is what we need to understand. Once we arrive at this distinctiveness in human and animal brain, we may understand the core idea about the ‘factor’, which scripted all pathological propensities and insinuations in human mind consciousness.

We have now begun to know, what caused this big difference and uniqueness in human brain and what might have caused the emergence of consciousness and its propensities for brutal depravity. We probably can pin down where lies the ‘central command’ of criminality in humanity. We are hypothesizing this in this eBook to build a probability that scammed perceptions are the Criminality of Humanity. The languages we created only extended a ‘lethal tool’ to accentuate and aggrandize the pathological propensities. We shall use all available knowledge of modern science to arrive at the mechanism and process of this criminality. This may help us come out of this scam and facilitate larger and deeper wellness. It is very humbly stated that only science has this beauty and magnanimity to not only accept; but also respect novel and alternative philosophizing, which may initially look and sound very stupid. This alone makes me venture into novelty and alternativeness, when I write about ideas and issues, which need different perspectives than what humanity accepts and lives out.

As we enter the final pages of this eBook, attempting to zero down on aspects, which shall lead us to the hypothesis, we have accepted that much of human perceptions are scammed, including happiness; it shall be facilitative if we list out the progression so far. We shall point-wise list out key ideas we have deliberated upon so far, so that we have ease in understanding what we shall discuss now on. What next we talk about is not very complex