I tweeted today on a meme post about someone feeling conflicted:
Original tweet:
My tweet:
Edit: Link to original tweet
Hmm. So the text in the meme says:
why would my own brain ruin my day like who’s side are you even on bro
you took the tweet as saying something about wanting to do bad things.
maybe thats what he was talking about
but I think he was more so talking about stuff like:
- having a good day and then remembering a cringy moment
- having a good interaction with a person of the opposite sex, only for your mind immediately after to come up with a bunch of reasons why they actually didn’t like talking to you or something
- you overthink something someone says, get a bad emotion out of it and ruin your day
like standard thoughts around depression where people say that they’ll suddenly just get depressed and their day is ruined now.
i think stuff like this is what the tweet is referring to? and not necessarily stuff like being conflicted between something bad like stealing a drink or something.
Ohhh, I didn’t think about that. I thought the quote was about the person having a good day then they had negative thoughts that they believe and are conflicted about.
i was thinking about this one too. Like a person’s mind makes them remember something unpleasant. Like really unpleasant
yeah it doesn’t make sense to me with bad stuff like that. I think when I said “bad” I meant something that is clearly wrong and one shouldn’t do it. Like idk overthinking or putting one’s self down, or thinking the worst case scenario. I think stuff that makes someone their own enemy. “Bad” to me sounds a little cryptic when I said it
Try to brainstorm some potential conflicts between ideas involved in each of your 3 bullet point examples.
Hmm.
One conflict(?) that comes to mind is not being content(?) with a cringy moment. Or like not understanding that people make mistakes and thats fine. Lets see whats a standard cringy moment people have?: saying “you too” back to a waiter who says “enjoy your meal”. I think people are wrong to cringe over something like that. “you too” is usually an automatic response and even if it wasn’t its a common mistake that can happen because maybe you were too caught up in something or whatever. I think a related idea people have here is about being seen as “perfect” in social scenarios and anything else is embarrassing and bad.
But why would it randomly come up? Hmm. I don’t know if this is related to conflicting ideas but maybe its not random. Who knows. You have a good day and you walk by a restaurant and see a waiter and remember that cringy moment.
Mmm. You have conflicting ideas about someones attraction to you and things just takeover at a time. In the moment you think the more positive things (that could be wrong) and then later some negative things may take over (that could be wrong). You haven’t really addressed the ideas you just kinda swing between your emotions.
So something I know of Japanese culture (thought this is a thing in other cultures) they say a lot of things indirectly. A story I heard recently was that a Japanese man complimented a western business partner on their watch. The western man thought it was actually meant to be a compliment. It turned out that the Japanese man was trying to give the man a hint that he was going over in the meeting.
So back to conflicting ideas: maybe you come from a culture like Japan or a mix of both Japanese and western cultures. So you end up hearing a compliment. Depending on the ideas you have that compliment can be: a compliment, an insult, or something to make you notice a hint.
Hmm. Yeah. I think I get what you were originally trying to say. I think I was just kinda confused by the word “bad” in your tweet.
To approach this more like a precise philosopher, expressing a conflict of ideas should involve stating two ideas, 1 and 2, then stating the conflict or contradiction.
Hmm. Something like this?:
1.) Compliments are about praising or saying something nice about someone
2.) Compliments are a tool to give people hints.
Hmm. The contradiction here would be that in 1.) compliments are seen as positive remarks about something while 2.) is about using them as a tool. Now its ambiguous whether the remark was positive or just words to get you to do something. Hmm. I’ m unsure if this is a contradiction. In my head contradictory things should be opposites. This doesn’t feel very opposite.
These are two ideas you’d commonly expect to find in the heads of two different people. One person believes 1, and someone else believes 2, and this leads to some kinda conflict, problem or misunderstanding between the people. That’s different than one person having two conflicting ideas in their own head.
Can you think of any other ways to explain what a contradiction is? Do you know how to come up with examples of contradictions or evaluate whether two statements contradict?