Hello again, desolate blogosphere. If you were a tamagotchi you'd probably be dead. But you're not, so I have no digital guilt to deal with :)
Here's the usual disclaimer about this probably not making sense to anyone but myself, and about how I don't really care. This as as much a forum for me to try to express what is on my mind as it is to let other people know about it. Nothing I say here is externally sourced, unless explicitly stated, so understand that going forth. Without further ado, here goes:
The title has reference to the topic at hand: the word, and question, 'why.' (Anyone know the correct placement of a period with respect to a single quote?) Before I get to that, though, some context about our brains:
Everything we do, everything we are, everything we experience, is determined by choices. Our own choices as well as the choices of others. So let's dissect those choices a bit: we make choices because we desire certain outcomes. No accounting for taste, because everyone desires different (and sometimes even polar opposite) things. The guiding principle to look at right now is the fact that we make choices based on what outcomes we desire to occur. What ends up happening in our brains is a mapping of choice X to outcomes Y. In data structure words, Map<Choice, Outcome[]>. In other words, for every choice we perceive, our brain attaches consequences, or outcomes, to that choice. I'll give some examples and then talk a little bit more about this.
Example 1: for the choice "eating breakfast," some of the consequences my brain has attached to this are: "get energy for the day," "fill my stomach," "enjoy good food," "get less sleep," "have less money," and more. Clearly, the outcomes are not all bad, nor are they all good. However, they correspond with outcomes that I desire, such as "enjoy good food" and "get energy for the day." What clinches the making of the choice is not just that it fulfills some of my desires, but that the positive outcomes of the choice outweigh the negative outcomes thereof.
Example 2: for the choice of "robbing a bank," some of the consequences my brain has attached to this are: "get more money," "do something exciting and risky," "live with fear and guilt," "be arrested," "live in jail for the rest of my life," and so forth. While this choice has the potential to fulfill one of my desires, that of "get more money," the negative outcomes of this choice far outweigh the positive ones. Thus it is not a choice I am likely to make.
Hopefully this helps us understand the associations we create in our minds between choice and outcome, and how those associations, those mappings, guide our decision making process. However, it is important to recognize that those mappings of outcomes are not uniform in the weight they each pull. In other words, there are some choices whose outcomes we are very certain of, and other choices whose outcomes are not as certain. Even for a given choice, there can be outcomes that very between very certain and not very certain. This is because the act of mapping, or attaching an outcome to a choice, is creating a belief about that choice. No matter what the choice, our perceived outcomes are not anything that can be called "perfect knowledge." Even for something as mundane as "eating breakfast," my beliefs in the outcomes thereof are formed by my past experience. I don't actually have a perfect knowledge that eating breakfast tomorrow is going to give me energy for the day; rather, I have the strong belief that such will be the case. The strength of our belief of each outcome determines the weight that outcome plays in our consideration of the choice overall.
For example, going with the illegal-activity route again, it becomes very easy for someone who has stolen a lot to steal again. Partly because through experience they know how to do it better, but in their evaluation of the outcomes, the outcome "I will be caught" is very, very weak. Their experience has showed them so many times that they can steal without being caught, so that weakens that belief. Whereas it strengthens their belief that they can profit using very little work. Thus the choice is weighted heavily with positive outcomes, and lightly with negative outcomes. We can also experiencing a weakening in belief by lack of experience, or lack of recent experience, with a certain 'choice->outcome' mapping.
Okay, hopefully that all made sense. This was necessary background in order to understand the word, and question, 'why.' What is it we are asking when we ask 'why?' Well, there are many different circumstances where this can be asked, but I'll focus on one to start off. Someone tells me I should participate in a particular club. The question I ask is: "Why should I participate in X club?" or "Why this club?" Using what we've looked at above, we can see that what we're asking is really: "What outcomes should I attach to the choice of participating in X club?" or "What beliefs might I create about this club?"
The reason I have been pondering this is because on my mission I learned the importance of not asking "why." Something one of my companions would tell people all the time was to not ask "por qué," rather, "para qué." In English, it's best translated as not asking "why," rather, "for what purpose." And so it was that I was pondering what the question "why" really is asking. And it doesn't hurt that I was in the temple, either, while I was pondering this (I swear, it's like a window opens up in my brain when I go to the temple). But let's stay on track for a moment: the question, or word, 'why,' is only inquiring as to those beliefs we have assigned to the choices we make.
In this case we have been able to see 'why' used as a query for more information as to joining a particular club. Let's expand our horizons a bit: this act of mapping consequences, of creating beliefs, to different choices, is not limited to conscious choices. This applies to choices we make consciously as well as unconsciously. This applies to our actions, our behaviors, and our reactions. Thus we can apply the spread of the question 'why' a little further. We've seen it applied to a query for how to populate our own beliefs. However, let's think of other ways we use the word 'why.'
I might ask someone "why are you sad?" What I'm really asking is two-fold -- 1st of all, what happened in your life, and 2nd, what are the beliefs you have created about those events that are effecting this response in you right now? In this case, it's not likely that the person took conscious action to be sad. No, it was more likely a reaction. However, it is still based on the same principles. They have defined the event in their mind, whatever happened to them, and assigned to it beliefs of "I am sad."
Again, there are more 'why's. Like I said, in my mission we would tell people to ask "para qué" instead of "por qué." This is because many people would ask 'why' of God -- why did this thing happen, why did that thing not happen? What they are searching for there is similar -- a way to assign consequences to the events they observed. This happens often when we don't have enough experience with something to have created beliefs about it. We try, subconsciously, to populate that mapping, give that choice, that event, some sort of response so we know how to deal with it.
Of course, there are other, impersonal, 'why's, such as "why is the sky blue," "why is the Statue of Liberty green," "why do we only see stars at night," and many others. While these do not fit explicitly into our model, they do have similarities. These kind of questions are brought on by unpaired phenomena. More often than not, we observe something, and ask "what was the cause of this?" In other words, what were the circumstances (the 'choice') that brought about this occurrence I'm witnessing now (the 'outcome')?
The question 'why' strives to match cause and effect. Very often what is going on subconsciously is a desire to understand what happened in the past to bring about the future circumstances; this understanding will then allow us to make predictions about what will happen in the future. Because ultimately we want to achieve our desires in the future, and if we understand what are the events/actions that most effectively bring those about, then we will do those more.
Of course, this is all very subject to human perspective, which is FAR from perfect. This is also why it is so much harder for us to consistently make choices that are for our spiritual good, than it is for us to make choices that are for our physical/temporal good. With physical things, such as eating breakfast, we often have very frequent, and very immediate, reminders of the consequences of our choices. When I don't eat, I very soon am brought to understand that that choice does not help me. When I do eat, again, very quickly I am brought to understand that that choice helps me out. And we come across one of those events multiple times a day.
However, if I go a few days without reading my scriptures, it can take that long or longer to be reminded of what the true consequences of that choice are ("lack of the spirit," or "ingratitude," as some examples). Thus the strength of the beliefs attached to that choice are not as strong as are those of eating breakfast.
It is important to understand that our beliefs are not strengthened or weakened through experience alone. Indeed, we can look at the example above, of asking someone 'why,' asking them to populate that list for us. Our beliefs can be created, strengthened, or weakened by hearing the beliefs of others expressed (of course the effect of that also varies from person to person, depending on the beliefs they have about trusting other people's opinions and beliefs. If that's too meta for you, just ignore it).
Thus we understand part of the importance of church and religious instruction: strengthening those spiritual beliefs. And indeed in things not strictly religious this is also present. There are countless instances of youth education doing exactly that: strengthening their beliefs about the effects of drugs, alcohol, and risky sexual behavior, among other things.
There are two takeaways that I've come up with through all of this. The first is perhaps a little trite, but I've realized that the word 'why' is somewhat of a weak word. It's an, albeit useful, placeholder for something a lot more complex that we don't realize. I personally am going to try to avoid its use, though I think it can still be somewhat useful in rhetoric (Look at that, correct use of "it's" and "its" in two consecutive sentences!).
The other takeaway I've gotten from this is a better understanding of how to affect one's choices. Something I've been struggling with lately is staying firm in the goals I've set since Christmas. It's lately become much harder for me to keep faithful to those goals. When I set those goals, I thought that I would just have to keep at them until such time as they became habits. Unfortunately, that didn't really happen. I realize now in retrospect that going through the motions of the goals did not allow me to see as much about the outcomes. As a result, my beliefs regarding those actions have weakened. So what I can do, I've realized since coming to these conclusions, is reinforce those beliefs. Just as one can listen to other people speak and thus have their beliefs reinforced, I can speak to myself in support of my beliefs, and strengthen them that way. There is true power in self-affirmation, especially when it is out loud.
Well I think that's all I wanted to express. Maybe this will interest you. Maybe not. どちらでも大丈夫です (Whichever one it is, that's fine). I do thank you, though, for taking the time to read through this.
As a reward, enjoy this thing I found on the internet.
And now it's....
