Relativity

Let me preface this by saying that I got the delta-epsilon proof. It was not easy, and it didn't snap into place (though a lot of people wanted to hear that it did), but I did get it and I am prepared for my exam - the way things should work out. Nonclimactic, yet positive for all involved (primarily me). Yesterday was interesting in other ways as well. Aside from math, I had very interesting relevations in my other classes.

Chronologically.. First was Abnormal Psych. We had been talking about ADHD, autism, childhood schizophrenia and other child disorders. A few days ago I noticed something very interesting: in a film we were watching on autistic children playing, the way they behaved was very similar to children with extreme ADHD. One child was in his backyard continually moving. He would kick a ball, and walk over to where it stopped rolling (by a fence) and ignore the ball and start walking along the fence, feeling it with his hand, then move on to something completely new soon after. It seemed that this child had little or no cognitive process going on - it was sensory stimulation that he was drawn to rather than being pre-occupied with one task. However, this is not to say that there is no cognitive process because he is secure [apparently] knowing that he will get food and will be taken care of. In another study, normal, mentally retarded, and autistic children were presented with a stimulus-reward system comprised of three stimuli at the same time (a light, a sound, and a feeling). The normal children were able to respond to all three when presented independently, and the mentally retarded children were also able to do two/three, but the autistic children only responded to one (and different ones between children at that). Now what does that say? That they have cognitive abilities to some level, but it appears that in situations with sensory overload they shut down and are only able to do minimal functioning. Now, as I pointed out in class, everyone has these thresholds. If you were being bombarded by noise and lights that were strong enough, you would probably curl up into the fetal position and try to shut your senses down. This is what they do, only their threshold is much lower. Much much lower.

What was most interesting yesterday, though, was our talk on childhood schizophrenia. The teacher had presented it like another cognitive malfunctioning disorder, and was talking about the etiology of it. She brought up schizophrenigenic mothers - mothers who 'caused' schizophrenia in their children by giving them stressful mixed messages when they are forming their cognitive senses and their sense of the world around them, which is fascinating, but it even holds true for the current model on Diathesis..which basically states that children have an inherent susceptibility to cognitive overload/malfunctioning and when environmental stressors trigger that, they can lose or become impaired in their cognitive abilities. This makes sense, and as I have said many times, so much of psychology exists on these thresholds, and what I am really interested in right now is where do these thresholds come from (purely environmental, purely genetic, etc).

What was the most interesting was the concept of trigger this threshold through stress from cognitive applications within the mind (i.e., going crazy through realizing logical, baffling truths about the universe following a logical cognitive though process). Which, I maintain, is absolutely possible. It's not a matter of what you learn, rather, but how one can handle that information, and each individual varies in both their thresholds and what they expose themselves to. It's this...reflexivity of environment on self on environment, or vice versa, that manifests itself across so many scientific fields. It's absolutely fascinating. I mean, we look to see if its genetics because that's something we can understand, it's not a variable - either it is there or it is not. Aside from the actual findings, we have to look at why we are climbing up certain trees instead of others.

This brings me, I suppose, to a second interesting thing, the scientific theory of relativity. Which, after being explained to me, is really quite similar - virtually identical - to the philosophical concept of relativity. My professor was explaining it to me using the idea of light: that because light travels at different speeds depending on your non-inertic frame of reference, time varies with it as well. And because we can never have a truly non-inertic frame because the universe is constantly expanding, we can't have an absolute definition of speed of light and, consequently, time. Therefore, all attempts to actually gauge speed and time are arbitrary depending on what frame we choose to use, and we generally accept as true all frames that are relevant to us (i.e., since we cannot sense the Earth moving, it is an acceptable frame based on the fact that we will never be able to comprehend anything outside our senses as true, making it that unattainable truth, etc etc which we then modify other things as true to fill that conceptual place). Basically, I took this as another disproof of the scientific concept, though through an empirical means which made me quite happy. Sort of completed my reasoning.

Finally, in biology we were talking about non-learned behaviors, such as the rooting impulse and, more interesting, a baby marmot instinctively knowing to avoid the colors of the coral snake. When chicks were presented with a broom with those colorings, they stayed away, all other colorings were fair game for pecking. Now, what do you make of this?

i) these birds have evolved to be afraid of that color, certain birds who were not afraid of it were eaten, and selection acted against them.

ii) it is a natural part of the bird psyche, an archetype if you will, sort of a Jungian pool of collective information that affects the culture of that species.

If it's (i), can fears be inherited? Are emotions part of genetics? If that's true, that is the very basis of the argument in favor of the mind being independent of the body. If that's true, everything is biological, random, explainable, etc.

If it's (ii), what does that tell us about ourselves? These archetypes that shape our cognition? Do we use logic because of an evolutionary adaptation? A means to escape death? What is evolutionary success when you contrast it with cognitive archetypes such as these? And I could go on forever.

Fascinating.