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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
i'm fascinated by this for reasons i'm not sure i'll be able to articulate. i think it's becoming clearer that one of my interests i keep coming back to is tracking changes in folk psychology over time, trying to understand how people conceptualize themselves and each other
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
one of the fascinating bits is that in the standard scientific reductive materialist ontology "you" are supposed to "be" your brain, so to see such a strong vein of disidentification with "the brain" raises the question: if "you" aren't your "badbrain" then what are you?
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
separately, i think representing ego-dystonic stuff as "idk i guess my brain is just bad" speaks to this pervasive medicalization of suffering, hence the choice of "brain" as a symbol as opposed to e.g. demons, since brains Officially Really Exist
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
a more trauma-informed perspective might be something like "i was hurt very badly and i adopted extreme strategies for relating to myself and others to deal with that hurt that feel too risky to let go of" (relevant to the OP) which has a totally different vibe to it
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
among other things it offers a *meaningful reason* that your "brain" is being "bad": it's trying to protect you from a form of harm you experienced in the past. that's a very different story from "idk i guess my brain chemicals are just wrong because of bad luck???"
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
in the meme the cute thing is explicitly being positioned as being not the brain (!) and implicitly being positioned as "really me"; this is also a theme in some meme comics, that the "real me" is cute and soft and squishy, an inner child kind of character
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
furthermore the cute thing's request in this meme in particular is to "be vulnerable with the people i love" (🥺) i read into this that the cute thing is 1) not the brain and 2) "really me" b/c it's functioning as a symbol for the heart, the part of us that loves
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
so, the cute thing part of the meme expresses something true and important, i think. i do wish the brain part were different, and the best way i can describe the difference is to point to a comic with very different symbolism
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
annals of "my brain" research
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Erynn Brook
@ErynnBrook
·
ADHD brains and dopamine is some weird stuff. I do something that needs to get done and my brain goes “Should’ve done it sooner, you asshat.” I save the world in a video game and my brain is like “finally, feels good to be actually useful, doesn’t it?”
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