notes-pycheAdviceAsNeuralCommandSignals

Pychological advice (a component of the self-help literature) is like the commands one part of our brain sends another when we tell ("will") ourselves to do something like "pay attention to the blackboard" or "i resolve to try harder to ___". you and the speaker are acting somewhat like a borg -- it's not just information which is being passed around, it's command signals, despite the signals taking the grammatical (and seemingly semantic) form of declarative sentences. this can be seen by realizing that the referents of the words used are ill-defined subjective objects, yet unwarrentedly strong statements are made about their interrelationships and interactions. what is happening is that the mind is being invited to search within itself for referents for these words; the mind responds by create referents for these words which satisfy the interrelationships stated. in effect, the psyche advice has specifed a new API for the reader's mind. but since, of course, the mind itself is the client of that API, and "the mind" already controlled "the mind", the true effect is simply to alter behavior in some way by rearranging the relations between psychological structures. this is, in some sense, a hack or a trick -- although not in another sense, because it is (mostly) consensual.

sciencey or mathy ppl have a diminished capacity to participate in this sort of interaction b/c the way the process usually works is that the command signals are only interpreted when the listener processes the incoming sentences as if they were declarative, incoming information vested with some amount of trust (otherwise there is no need to search for referents, which is what leads to the creation of new structures). but sciencey or mathy ppl clearly see that the sentences, taken literally, make unwarrented assumptions about the ill-defined subjective objects -- they skeptically bear in mind the possiblity that there are no non-trivial referents to the terms used (i.e. the possiblity that "it's all BS") -- and hence, their minds are not 'tricked' into creating those referents.