Stephanie Bell's Archive

Free Will and Unconscious

4 Commentsby   |  11.22.10  |  The Schools of Psychology (Part IV-B)

Our unconscious mind relies on previous experiences, on expectations, and on prior knowledge. We have control of the memories and facts that effect our unconscious choices. In the example given in class with the people’s pictures being flashed next to a figure that we had been taught in our history class to be either good or bad, we would then describe the person as being good or bad. Some people would argue that we have no control over how we relate the two picture to each other. I however, believe that we have control over how we view those people and the things that we associate with those people. We have been taught to view Hitler as an evil person who caused a mass genocide, so we would have associated negative qualities with Juice’s picture. But if we had chosen to associate Hitler as a good politician and successful leader, then we would have associated those qualities with Juice. So we do have free will over our unconscious because we chose how we will remember circumstances and people. We can remember the good qualities or the bad qualities and those are what will later play a role in how we judge similar situations.

Who Cares

3 Commentsby   |  10.25.10  |  The Schools of Psychology (Part IV)

I think that it is okay to test fears in children. The experiment with little Albert is a good model for how fears come about in any situation and we wouldn't necessarily criticize the other circumstances that are the same. Fears are all learned anyways and you can overcome a fear. I was able to overcome a lot of my fears as I got older because I realized that a lot of them were unreasonable. I was afraid of bugs, but I didn't have a reason to be afraid of them. I was afraid because I heard someone else scream when they saw a bug. I assumed that they were fearful for a reason, so I became scared. When other people scream it is like making a loud noise behind a child. We then learn to be afraid of the situation because of the things we learn to associate with it. I was always more fearful if I heard others scream then when I am alone. 

It’s in Us

1 Commentby   |  10.13.10  |  Announcements

I always thought religion was a personal choice and I still do. But I find it interesting that odds are that we will believe similar concepts as our family does. When we talked about genetics playing a role in religion it made me wonder how close my families' beliefs are to mine. I stray off a bit from what I was raised to believe, but if you look at my family a lot of us stray off from what we are originally taught and we all question what our parents tell us to believe. I didn't think about it a whole lot until this class but now I am curious as to what made them decide to start questioning religious teachings. 

In class this quote was mentioned: 
"When the life of the soul is connected in every detail by bodily organs and processes, how can it be detached from the body and survive it?" 

This quote made me laugh at first because I wondered if maybe all of those people who's bodies are still found after years of being buried where the people who didn't make it to heaven. But then I started seriously thinking about the question. How can we even prove what the soul is? It is a manmade concept so technically we can shape it into whatever we decide. But maybe (assuming it is all connect) the soul separates itself from the body after death like a chemical bonds. (For those non-Chemistry people) Chemical bonds help hold everything together, but certain procedures (maybe death when talking about the soul) can cause the chemical bond to break and thus you have two product chemicals. Maybe death causes the soul and body to separate and result in two products from one "body" (reactant).

How realistic is our perception?

2 Commentsby   |  10.04.10  |  Announcements

This lecture reminded me of a conversation my dad and I had prior to me leaving for college. How do we know what other people see is the same as what we see? On "FML" one time I saw a post about a dad who had taught his daughter the colors wrong because he thought it would be funny. After reading this I laughed but then thought about it. We only know what we are taught to be colors. We are taught blue is blue, green is green, and so on; but how do we know that the color we perceive to be blue or perceive to be green is actually the same as the color the teacher perceives to be blue or green. What if the people we believe are "colorblind" actually have it right and we are actually the ones who do not see colors properly? 

I also sometimes wonder if the events in our lives other people perceive to exist are different from the events we perceive to exist. Even when two people see the same event, they recall it differently, so what if this is how all of life is? Maybe we perceive what someone else says differently than how they perceive they said it. What if we only perceive that other people exist. We can not ever get inside someone else's head to be sure that they really exist. Our brain can perceive pain in a limb that no longer exists, so we can never really be sure that what we feel actually exists. What if when we touch other people it is only our brain thinking that there is another person there? 

“We were made for each other”

7 Commentsby   |  09.20.10  |  Renaissance/Premodern (Part II)

How far does free will go? I was talking to my roommate about this the night before we talked about it in class. We discussed how people often say that they are looking for The One. Did God make one person for each of us? If so then do we really have power over our life if God will make us choose this one person? Maybe God knows what choices we will make with our lives and based off of that he knows who we will ultimately chose and makes a person that will fit the choices that we make in our lives. My roomie talked about how when you say that God meant for you to be with a specific person that she thinks it is like saying that all of the events in your life happened in order for you to meet this one person. But is this really the case? What if the person who is made for you goes against God’s will (because I would assume that if I have free will that the other person would too)? Personally, I would not agree that all of the events in my life have led up to me meeting one particular person.

If our free will is limited then is it still free will? I feel like the answer to that would be no because we are not given full control of our own lives. And why would God make so many other people available to us if he had already chosen the one? Why would he not just create us to have some overwhelming feeling of finding the one when it happens. (Now I am not married and may not have found the person so I am not one hundred percent true that I would not know when I had found the one.) I feel like this is just another one of those small details that make our life what it is. If God is not concerned in the minor details of our lives but instead is interested in how we use our talents to help other people, then I feel like something like choosing a mate would not be on his top priorities. Unless perhaps, our mate is suppose to somehow influence the rest of our life and possibly change the course of where we are headed.

Acu and the cave allegory

3 Commentsby   |  09.06.10  |  Pre-Renaissance (Part I)

Last year I was the only person in a Bible study in my dorm who was
not Church of Christ. I realized that a lot of the freshman were quick
to jump on the bandwagon and were like people in the cave. My views
were still Christian but a little different and when I challenge their
beliefs their were quick to say I was wrong. I felt their views were
distorted because they were only looking at the situation from their
side and not trying to understand what someone else may think. Some of the girls in the Bible study were really offended and tried to say that I obviously was not Christian just because I questioned how they were saying you should treat people who do not believe in Christ. They claimed to believe that the best way to teach people about Christianity is to go build churches and take them to them. I was trying to argue that the best way is to live the way the Bible teaches us and then people will be more interested in what you try to tell them. I have been to countries where Christianity is not the main religion, and people think that their religion is best. If we try to go tell them that they are wrong in their beliefs and that our views are right, then they are going to think that we are trying to be disrespectful to them. This is like when someone challenges a person in the cave and they refuse to believe what they have not seen.
Stephanie Bell

Stephanie Bell's Comment Archive

  1. Stephanie Bell on Free Will and Unconscious
    2:39 pm, 11.22.10

    But we chose how we originally decided to view Hitler or the word in the association game. For someone who had been taught that success was unattainable, I would be curious to see if they still had better performance. When we remember events like prior dating, we can look at them as good or bad. When we associate things with our ex’s are dependent on how we viewed our relationship with them. For me, I have very few negative feelings about previous relationships, so when people ask me about my ex boyfriends I remember the positive experiences. For some of my friends, they had “horrible” relationships and when you ask them about it they only remember the negative aspects of the relationship.

  2. Stephanie Bell on Subliminal Messages
    2:32 pm, 11.22.10

    I never noticed this subliminal message before, But I think that it is interesting that they used it, if it was intentional. But I also think that we may be seeing this because we expect it to be there. Growing up, I was taught that parties that had alcohol often lead to people taking advantage of other people, which usually leads to sex. So maybe the only reason this image is there is because we want to see it there.

  3. Stephanie Bell on Psychology Theories
    2:28 pm, 11.22.10

    I agree that there is not just one theory that fits the way I believe. Through experience, I have learned how a lot of the theories fit together, and I think that being presented information and choosing what to believe is part of what college is trying to teach us. We don’t pay thousands of dollars to learn to think a certain way of thinking, but instead we learn to use the things we have been taught and learn to apply them to our lives.

  4. Stephanie Bell on Kierkegaard
    2:24 pm, 11.22.10

    I have found personally that when I strayed from the group think of the church and created a more personal relationship with God, that I was closer than I had ever been. I was able to question why my beliefs and find my own answers and I felt more like it was mine. When I believed what other people told me to I would go through the motions of the church, but I never really took the time to understand why I had done the motions. When I took control of my relationship with God, I was able to find the meaning behind the motions which I feel strengthened my faith and helped me find a better understanding of God.

  5. Stephanie Bell on All things must come to an end...
    2:19 pm, 11.22.10

    I think that when people learn that they cannot control other people’s decisions they take a lot of blame off of themselves. A lot of people live in the what if I had pointed this out to the person before they had gotten hurt or what if I had said this. But we forget that everyone has the ability to make their own decisions. Our friends chose to enter a bad relationship, we had no way of knowing the significant other would chose to treat the person badly. And when we learn that we create our own happiness then we do not need to depend on the uncertainty of other people’s decisions to have happiness. And personally, I would rather be certain that I will be happy than to only have a chance at happiness.

  6. Stephanie Bell on Watson and the Devil
    1:40 pm, 10.25.10

    I think that all fears are learned. I used to be the most fearless person when I was little. And I hung out with guys most of the time and so I loved bugs and everything, but when I started hanging out with stereotypical girls I learned to be afraid of bugs. Then I realized that I really didn’t have a reason to be afraid. So I think if parents don’t make kids afraid, their friends will.

  7. Stephanie Bell on "Brilliant Deduction Watson"
    1:27 pm, 10.25.10

    I think doing experiments like this in less extreme ways would be beneficial to psychology. If the child is young enough, I think they may be able to unlearn the fear. I do not think experiments like this are necessarily right, but it is beneficial. I do not think it is right to hurt a child, but maybe there are other ways this experiment may have happened like a parent dropping a pot/pan on the floor while the baby was doing something.

  8. Stephanie Bell on Bandura and his Bobo doll
    11:28 pm, 10.13.10

    I don’t necessarily believe that teaching kids to respect adults is what leads them not to question an adults behavior. Instead, I think that the reason children do not question adults is because they have no reason to question the adult. They do not know any better (at least at first) because they do not have prior experiences of a “bad” behavior.

  9. Stephanie Bell on Reinforcement and social learning
    11:24 pm, 10.13.10

    I think that no matter what you do there is always some type of reinforcement. Like when you do something that no one else knows about you still have yourself to provide reinforcement. And internally there are hormones and other chemicals that help to provide reinforcement and make us feel “good”, which is really the only reason external reinforcements work.

  10. Stephanie Bell on Keeping up with the Jetsons
    11:19 pm, 10.13.10

    I really enjoyed reading your post. I think that because machines are made by humans there will always be some human error in their programing. Because of this error I believe that the best machines will only be able to achieve a level as high as any human being. And if they did out do us in intelligence, would we even be able to test it or know otherwise?