I've never understood people
Not because people are irrational (although they often seem to be). But, because common explanations never seemed to explain very much.
Before MindStretched I was an optometrist, which means I learned biology. Then I was a science teacher. My favorite part of the year, by far, was the science fair. Students would have an idea, test it, and discover it didn't work. Nobody thought the students had failed. The hypothesis had been proven untrue, that's all. Good to know.
Most people don't stop there though. They say, "I'm such a failure." I say, "No, you're not. What you tried didn't work. There's a difference."
Years later I went to life coach school because I thought psychology might finally explain why people do what they do. Instead, I kept running into teachings like, "Change your thoughts." "Your thoughts create your reality." The idea wasn't necessarily bad. It just wasn't an explanation that worked. Same for my years learning Stoicism.
People understood the advice, even agreed with the advice. Then they went home and did exactly what they'd been doing before. If understanding something isn't enough to change it, then the explanation is missing something.
Finally, a friend told me the future is fixed. It's physics. I told him he was crazy, but I dove in anyway (curiosity, you know) . Not because I suddenly thought physics explained people, but because physics explains something I've always trusted, scientific laws.
Water doesn't decide whether to boil. A bridge doesn't choose whether to collapse. Physical systems behave according to the laws governing them. That raised a different question, What if people do too? Because, you know, we're absolutely physical systems. That's basically what I've been working on ever since.
Physics, evolutionary biology, cognitive and computational neuroscience, game theory, predictive processing, systems theory, computational modeling...it's all starting to fit together into one framework.
I'm just investigating one question at a time, and finally getting why people do what they do. Stick around a while. This is fascinating stuff.
Lani