# Solving Psychological Problems



## Cait Sith (Apr 24, 2009)

I thought i'd share with you all a video from the wonderful ProfessorAnton on youtube. Hope this helps some of you.


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## no mas (Apr 1, 2011)

This is really interesting. I have always been socially anxious to a degree, and I can think of a few events that occurred in my past which may have contributed my SA becoming worse. However, I try not to dwell on those things. Ultimately, I feel that perhaps my natural tendency to be overly sensitive and internalize things more than a lot of people would is probably one of the main issues. I don't know what really caused my SA though. A combination of everything I suppose. 

That being said, I agree with what he had to say. You can't change the past. Ruminating over it does not serve you in the present or future. It really doesn't matter how things came to be the way they are. All that really matters is what you are doing to get to a better place today. Thanks for posting this.


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## Daktoria (Sep 21, 2010)

I dunno.

His general premise is begging the question over the existence of a problem to begin with. I mean if you really just wanted to solve problems instead of understanding them, then you could simply ignore the circumstances. You could drop your ingenuity and simply not care.

Fine, be endlessly apathetic. Why is the problem or solution relevant then? How can productivity even exist? How can there be meaning without understanding?

He's just being absurd. He refers to the future and moving forward, but you have to understand those concepts to begin with.


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## Daktoria (Sep 21, 2010)

Here's another one of his videos which comes off as nonsense:






Meaning has nothing to do with digital versus analog communication. The distinction isn't a matter of semantics, but a matter of physical data transfer.

It's really just that simple. When you have conversion from one form to another, there's no additional meaning provided. Communication is just presented differently. It's still up to the receiver to interpret the signal.

Dialectic universal pragmatics always beg the question over whether communication is really taking place.

Take his loud versus quiet example. Now if you had multiple people engage in mutual analysis to determine the core of information and the requirements of listening to it, then you wouldn't need synthesis at all. They wouldn't have to say it's too loud or quiet because they would both come to independent understanding, and it wouldn't just be a lucky guess.

Likewise, take his umpire example. For all we know, an umpire calling a baseball pitch a ball or a strike could be random noise. It still has to be interpreted to be meaningful. The generation of sound itself doesn't represent information.


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## Cait Sith (Apr 24, 2009)

Thanks for your replies people. Not checked this thread in a while. 
I understand your concerns Daktoria, though I don't think his video suggests a total disregard for 'understanding' of problems and situations. Sure, understanding by means of analysing past events can be very useful, though i think what he was more concerned with was when such pratices result in excessive rumination and almost blaming ones condition on past events instead of really getting to grips with what can be done about it. This is much the same as Albert Ellis' (founder of REBT) concerns with psychoanalysis. Ellis saw that psychoanalysis too often spent all the time digging deep into how one came to be in a situation and focusing on the deep-seated conditioning that led to neuroses, instead of adressing ones current situation. Thus REBT was developed as a means of addressing present thoughts, those things that are actually sustaining the problems right now. I think this is similar to the logotherapy approach addressed by Professoranton. One can only give meaning to what has happened before by what is being done about it now, if nothing is being done, there is really little sense in addressing the problems at all. Thanks for your reply.


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