Tuesday, April 11, 2006

finally... some time to blog
After trying to read some psychology for my test, i realized that trying is a key word that must be emphasized here. I also realized that for the most part, psychology is a subject full of flaws.
There is so much behavioural study that is done, from which psychologists think.. Wow! look i discovered that if a person is subjected to blah blah blah, then he behaves in this particular way! call the paparazzi! im famous, woohoo!
I think unless a person is given the freedom to do absolutely what ever he wants, you are not studying his true, unbiased behaviour. i'm talking about freedom of the order of being allowed to throw a refrigirator on you (when the ability to do so is innate) or fart on your face you when im talking to you, ie if i want to. if you give me a gun, my will to decide what i want to do with it is partly dependent on my behaviour, but also hugely dependent on the urge and pressure to conform to societal norms, which in this is case, i guess, that you dont generally shoot someone if you want to and dont like that person. But my real unbiased unconformed undistorted behaviour will come out only when im given complete freedom to shoot you. only then, will you know that i like you or dont mind you when i dont shoot you, or that i think you're a fucking prick if your dead. Technically, you wouldnt know so, because by the time you're this close to come to know, you' re dead, but that would digress from this topic and bring us to another dicussion that will go round and round like a lorry tyre. So, when an observer studies a subject, there are so many conscious and unconcious, known and unknown factors that control, confine and constrict the subject's true behaviour, or distort the way the subject actually behaves- the environment, culture, if the observer is a really hot chick, etc etc.
Secondly, most conventional behavioural psychology and psychoanasysis try to predict human reactions, based on case studies, clinical observations etc etc etc. But how ever congruent towards an assumption these studies and research may prove, and however well this hypothesis is backed by "scientific proof", it is simply not sensible to generalise human behaviour, from a set of studies that prove a statistical majority. It's obvious from so many things in a normal human life that science doesnt asnswer everything. Infact i would say, sceince proves or answers nothing. Now that psychology has gone through a lot of standardisation, the behavioral perspectives that are 'backed by science' are given maximum credibility. This, I think is something that has been secretly laughed at for ages. Science only answers everything we ask with respect to what we know. Our answers are dependent on our previous knowledge. Even the simplest of scientific or mathematical knowledge that we think we know, is subject to questioning, and has a massive potential to be seen as bullshit. We wouldnt know what the number 10 means if we didnt know what 5, 2, 1 or 0 means. And the 5, 2,1 and 0 that we know is only a materialisation of a an otherwise intangible quantity through our perspective of understanding quantities, which maybe wrong to a brain that undertands quantities differently and based on a different system of conception of logic and understanding.

13 Comments:

Blogger escarabajo de mierda loca de vaca said...

test comment

6:27 AM  
Blogger escarabajo de mierda loca de vaca said...

test comment 2

6:30 AM  
Blogger escarabajo de mierda loca de vaca said...

yay! now i have three comments.

6:31 AM  
Blogger escarabajo de mierda loca de vaca said...

test comment 3

6:05 AM  
Blogger Kaushik said...

The comments on this post are fantastic... anyway,

I've always felt that human behaviour and thinking is 99.9%, if not wholly, influenced by external factors, such as societal norms, teaching by parents and in school, and experiences in life.

Even if there were no legal consequences to your shooting a person, would you or would you not in your example consider the sorrow that his friends and family will have to bear as a result of your killing him?

Kaushik

6:39 AM  
Blogger escarabajo de mierda loca de vaca said...

well, yeah in the case of a freind-yes. but what if it was someone who isnt my friend? even if i hate him to the level of wanting to shoot him, there are restrictions that control my behaviour and dont let me shoot him. but anyway... i guess that is an extreme case.

8:51 PM  
Blogger sykora said...

I looked at the number comments and thought "wow, 6 people have commented". Then I find that there is 1, maybe 2 meaningful comments here.

You can never study what a person (or thing) would do when 'left to him/her/itself' because if you are watching it, then it is not 'left to itself'. The observer screws up the observation.

Science is axiomatic. You have to assume something. If you don't, and try to prove things without those assumptions, you'll go nuts.
Eg, you can easily say that 2 and 2 is 4, but trying to prove that would leave you more confused than you were to begin with. Science just assumed certain things which looked fairly obvious and proceeded. There are many laws as such which are "innocent until proven quilty" in a matter of saying.

6:55 AM  
Blogger escarabajo de mierda loca de vaca said...

what you say about the observer scerwing things up is right only when the observed is aware of the presence of the observer. take a case where there is no observer or on where the observed does not know of the presence of the observer. you would still get distorted results because everyone is always unconciously or in some cases conciously affected by factors that are societal, cultural etc that distort their behaviour.

7:55 PM  
Blogger escarabajo de mierda loca de vaca said...

thats another meaning full comment btw...

7:56 PM  
Blogger sykora said...

meaningful, yes. Maybe not meaning full though.

1:32 AM  
Blogger Dhruva said...

Announcement, everyone: I blogged again.

4:48 AM  
Blogger escarabajo de mierda loca de vaca said...

wooohoo!!

7:47 AM  
Blogger sthupit girl said...

nice post. i haven't read the whole thing. but i've scanned through. and me thinks that it is kinda dumb to form a standard reference to try and study a person's behavior and his reasons for it.

7:50 AM  

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