What is THE THINKER?
The Thinker is the original source for two other websites. It is the conceptual home for them, but it is no longer public. Instead, the conceptual material of The Thinker is divided into the content for two websites, thecons.info and americanadolescence.com, each of which are public websites.
This is a site for understanding meaning in your life: the meanings of your behavior, that of others, and how they differ and interact – and how this affects your relationships and happiness. We pursue meaning in its many forms — religious meaning, artistic meaning, musical meaning, the meaning of a relationship, or the meanings of our lives — yet seldom discuss either “meaning” or how we can understand it.
What is its purpose and what can I learn?
THE THINKER guides you through a description of the problems of finding meaning, “The Meaning Maze”, and provides you with elements of “The Meaning Map” that enable us to find meaning. Two types of quotations provide additional guidance, context, and orientation:
“Voices” present the comments of individuals throughout history, humanistic scientists, about significant phenomena encountered in our lives and the meanings that underlie them.
“The Scientific Spotlight” presents descriptions of underlying biological or physical mechanisms by neuroscientists and other scientists that are relevant to a current topic.
You will learn how to have a more accurate understanding of the meanings of the actions and communications of others, and, most importantly, a better understanding of the meanings of your own actions and communications.
You will learn about life’s treasures and trials, games and ghosts, pleasures and pain, loves and lies – what happiness is and how we find it, or not. You will learn to See Your World, realistically, in its fullness and its distinctive detail.
How is it organized?
A new post generally will be published each Friday and Tuesday.
THE THINKER helps you See Your World through “Tastes of Life”, learning to recognize and describe meanings of human behavior that you previously failed to see, through the experiences of films, myths, stories, commentaries, science, history, music, images, literature, biography, and journalism.
Many factors influence our vulnerability to failing to see and understand what occurs in our interactions, all clustering around the complexity of information presented to us for analysis and decision. A single example is how this information is presented to us. What we see is not a long, continuous scene; what we read or hear is not a long, continuous story. Instead, we are exposed to scenes and stories that are discontinuous, commonly out-of-order fragments requiring that we begin to piece them together, motivating us to solve the puzzle.
Moreover, we are not experiencing the scenes and stories of a single narrative; as we live our lives we are putting together the pieces of puzzles associated with many narratives, multiple scenes and stories. A seemingly endless number of voices are speaking to us in these scenes and stories, providing the information from which we learn to find our way through their mazes, or not.
The story, or the narrative, is so essentially significant to our capacities to understand increasingly complex meanings in our relationships with others, that narratives will be the focus and form of information presented in posts each Tuesday, beginning with Post 8.
Another way to understand this is that, among human behaviors, signal skills (learning how to interpret and respond to signals) are critically important given that signals continuously, actively influence us. In this sense, for example, signal skills in response to a con man’s behavior can become survival skills.
The less education you have about human behavior and your own behavior, the more easily you can fail to understand your world. Regrettably, this education comes through experience, as it is infrequent for families or other groups to provide “formal” education in these matters. Yet, information is available that can reduce the ease with which you might fail to understand meanings — effective and efficient skills that will enable you to see your world of meanings in greater definition.
Become a THINKER:
Watch the entire film, not just a clip. Read the entire book, not just a quotation. Listen to the entire musical piece, not just a minute or two.
Learn to recognize and understand meanings in your life and relationships with the help of THE THINKER. Learn to recognize others who understand meanings in their lives and relationships.