cognitive thinking error

How My Belief in Law Affects My Philosophy

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My limited awareness bubble is based on laws and my need to follow them. To follow any law, I must first justify it as a law. My justifications create a paradoxical reality where reason considers philosophy as evidence in a cause-and-effect story. This convinces me that laws are real.

Therefore, I believe and obey external laws and their appearances of cause and effect in nature. In a similar way, I obey my internal laws, which manifest cause and effect of my philosophies in thoughts and emotions.

My internal laws seem as inescapable in their power over me as the undeniable power of external laws. My acceptance of fear as an internal law gives it as much power as the external law of gravity.

  1. External laws teach me about relationships within the natural world. This through a physical process. This insures that cause and effect are carried out in compliance with the laws that that process represents. Thus, I perceive interactions between forces of nature, like energy, matter, their functions and forms.
  2. Internal laws teach me about my *paradoxical relationship with self in its own world. This through a nonphysical process that insures that cause and effect are carried out in compliance with the laws that that process represents. Thus, I experience interactions of cause and effect in how I interpret my thoughts and emotions, choices and perceptions.

*A paradox is a statement that, despite apparently sound reasoning from true premises, leads to an apparently self-contradictory or logically unacceptable conclusion. Wikipedia

My Paradoxical Philosophy of Fear

My philosophies and the stories that define them are paradoxical. A philosophy keeps me accountable to laws through obedience. I feel I can’t control laws, yet, I can justify them using a paradoxical philosophy.

The stories I create to represent my philosophies string together the paradoxical effects of my thinking process. One law can have many philosophical cause-and-effect stories that defend it. For example, fear as a law dictates that my day-to-day story-lines should follow a philosophy that supports a fear of: lack, death, suffering, pain, being alone, etc.

Paradoxical Fear Equations

My logic equations illustrate how I process a paradoxical philosophy in defense of law. My equations protect and support my understanding and trust in law. This reminds me of an incident when I believed in and obeyed fear as a law while shopping. I backed that law with a philosophy of lack that supported it. At checkout, I realized I lacked the money for my purchases. That’s when a fear of lack kicked-in – “See, you were right to be afraid!” said my inner storyteller. My philosophy hijacked the law of cause and effect to justify my fear.

This fear-based illogical logic equation looks like:
Lack + Fear = Fear of Lack

A fear of lack is a fear of not having so, what I feared at checkout wasn’t about money. It was about not knowing what was going to happen next. That kind of not knowing can feel like an eternity of psychological torture. At any moment, I can find myself wanting to escape from a future I fear might happen. That experience confirmed that I am always subject to my beliefs through my process. I realized then that I was living with paradoxical equations that differ from my present intentions.

This fear-based illogical logic equation looks like:
Not knowing + Fear = Fear of not knowing

Ultimately, my thinking supports a process in which paradoxical philosophies defend paradoxical laws.

Convincing Words and the Third Degree

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I tend to use the word, “so” as one of several convincing words to end questioning. Same with the words, “because” and “then” – transition words that move a concept from consideration to conclusion. I use them as Second Degree of Illumination defense to avoid Third Degree of Illumination inquiry and convince myself of my rightness within my First-Second Degree of Illumination bubble.

I use convincing words to invoke consensus as a defense and to halt further investigation. As a conjunction, the word “so” means, “and for this reason; therefore.” (Google) “Because” as conjunction means, “for the reason that; since.” (Google) “Then” and “therefore” conjunctions essentially mean the same as “so”.

Convincing Words and the End of Inquiry

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What to Do about Misattributions

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In our last post we discussed that when I attach fear to an event or person, then seek to justify my fearful judgment, which validates and amplifies my fear, I get mired down into circular thinking. What might I do to break out of a fearful thinking vortex before I get pulled down the misunderstanding drain. Remembering that education tends to dissolve fear, I could benefit from learning more about the real nature of my world.

When I attribute a motive to a behavior I observe in another, I draw that attribution from my beliefs. I THINK I understand why another person did what they did, yet I have actually judged myself as I have imagined ME doing what the other person has done in that context.

That’s Because…

My experience is my perception of my experience. My perception of your experience is still my perception of my experience (of your experience). Same goes for the experience of any and all others and any and all things I observe in my universe. The common element is – “MY perception of MY experience.”

All that I attribute to causes outside myself is a window into myself.

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The Case of Little Misattribution

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I live in a bubble of limited awareness in which misattribution contributes to confusion, errors in judgment, and conflict. Confirmation bias reorders error to correctness and I feel better. For example, something “bad” happens to me. I do something. I escape a problem. “Whew!” I congratulate myself, “That was a close one!” I’ve confirmed the rightness of my actions.

I feel justified in doing what I did. To save thinking energy, I want to apply the same action to any similar circumstance or event, thinking, “It worked last time, so it will work again…”

Because I misunderstand the dynamic laws of nature, I tend to misinterpret my experiences within it, setting myself up for misattribution. In my ignorance I assign ONE supposed cause to an observed effect (“I failed the test because I didn’t study hard enough”) or ONE supposed effect to a controllable cause (“I’ll pass this year because I added a study period”). This sort of reductionism helps me set goals, establish trade agreements, communicate with others, and follow a path to a destination.

Cause and Effect

Yet, when I apply the same formula in another context, it doesn’t work. Why? Because of the dynamic nature of the law of cause and effect in the context of a complex adaptive system (life). Sometimes life processes can be reduced to a simple formula of intention-plan-action-result. Very often, however, unforeseen consequences enter in and change the formula at a fundamental level – as when intention gets clouded with unresolved emotional baggage, or the action part of the formula relies upon a trusted other, or the weather takes a surprise turn. SO many possible outcomes, SO many causes – enmeshed together.

To help me cope with this bewildering array of possibilities (and probabilities), I’ve developed a system of attributions. I pre-assign cause to effect and effect to cause based on patterns I’ve perceived in previous experiences. There is a thinking error involved with this strategy – due to incorrect pattern perceptions, I am prone to misattribute cause to effect and effect to cause.

My misattributions contribute to my tightly guarded perception of a reality in which I hold life accountable to me. I convince myself that I’m right and don’t need to seek further clarification. Then attribute benefits and/or threats to my perspective about life based on my fears and needs rather than on pure observation. I work to align my filtered philosophies with the Natural Law without knowing much about it.