Thursday, December 26, 2024

 Thursday, December 26, 2024

     Joseph and I got into a discussion about religious claims of absolute authority.  I argue that if God is infinite and unknowable, there is no way an individual or a group of individuals can capture the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I prefer an image of a generous God, one who offers a variety of paths of worship, a Smorgasburg of choices.  Each theory of reality, any reality, winds up in a cul-du sac,  including anything I generate.  The human plight.

   A new slight variation on a theory of interpersonal relationships.   They work because of the degree of overlap, as in a Venn diagram.  The degree of overlap determines our ability to get along with others.  This is complex. That degree may only reflect the quantity of overlap, but we need to take quality into consideration as well.  I'm not sure how to graph that.

   One platform for commonality in a relationship is a common structure, a set of social rules.  All small primitive cultures have rules. The closer the social group lives to physical survival, the more narrowly structured the social system. A military group under fire is an example of that. Relationships are all subsumed to achieving a single objective: the survival of everyone in the group.  Most social groups don't live that close to the edge of survival. Social rules are looser. 

  They become looser when the state of emergency has passed. We all know that to be the rule. People have an amazing capacity to work together in the face of a life-threatening emergency. The moment it's over, conflicts begin again. We function best with a pinpoint objective. Somehow, most of us know the 'rules' then.

   Since we don't live in a state of emergency in the modern era, we need a different way to relate to each other.  The salvific religions only popped up in the last 3,000 years. There were probably many previous attempts to make a salvific religion stick. The two I'm familiar with are Christianity and Buddhism.  They offer comfort to individuals and arguments for compassion to all humans in the case of Christianity and all living things in the case of Buddhism.  Good try.  Are we better off since these religions were introduced?  That's an anthological question I'm not prepared to answer, but I don't see that we've reached a golden state as a species.  We're still all scared animals.

   We've increased our ability to handle divergence among our species: divergent individuals, divergent strengths and weaknesses, divergent languages, divergent cultures, etc- at a distance.  Everything's OK if they're not my neighbor. It's understandable if you think your neighbor should behave according to your rules, and he says you should be living by his rules.   How do we find a satisfactory solution so everyone is satisfied?  What skills do we need?

   I've experienced several personal situations of interpersonal difficulty.  I argue we can work it out. They claim it can't be worked out. Some say you either get along with people or you don't. You can't work it out. Others say I'm in the wrong. I should know the right way to behave.  I have had some success where my negotiating skills and the skills of the other are compatible enough to make a negotiated settlement that's pleasing to both parties.  I consider myself to be very lucky. I've been with people with whom I can openly talk about what makes me comfortable or uncomfortable, and they can talk about it with me.  Of course, I cannot know if they were as open with me as I was with them. I also have no way of knowing if the limit they put on their degree of openness was because of a failure on my part or theirs. I know I achieved that comfort with my husband and my mother in the last 18 years of her life. Does that mean that everything was perfect? No. Just good enough.

       I had an appointment with fourth-grade GV.  It was clear he had an auditory processing problem.  He spelled help as hapl. He didn't attend to the phonemic sequence. In dictating sentences, he can't remember a phrase correctly, no less a clause or a complete sentence. Also, when he substitutes words that don't express the same idea as the original text.   Twin A, who the school considers cognitively impaired, makes substitutions that reflect the same idea as the text. GV is not considered cognitively impaired.

   I decided to work on GV's auditory processing problem.  In my experience of the last forty years, the part of the brain that works best is at the height of the left temple and 2/3 to ¾ of the way toward the center line to the right.  When I asked GV which part of the brain he used for listening, he pointed to the prefrontal lobe.  That's good for visual processing. It can be adapted for auditory processing, but that will take extensive work.   It felt weird when he switched to the left hemisphere for auditory processing. That was a good sign. It meant he hadn't been using it.  Therefore, using it may solve his problem.