#khaichuin sim

Enchanted Duo

A species of lanternfly, specifically from the genus Fulgora, which includes species like Fulgora laternaria. These insects are also known by various common names such as peanut bug, peanut-headed lanternfly, or alligator bug due to the distinctive, often large, head structure. 

Khaichuin Sim

There are four species of blue-ringed octopus: the greater blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena lunulata), the southern blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa), the blue-lined octopus (Hapalochlaena fasciata) and the common blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena nierstraszi).

Location: Danum Valley, Sabah, Malaysia

“A delicate spider perches majestically atop a golden mushroom, its long legs poised in a display of elegance and control. The dark background contrasts sharply with the illuminated subject, highlighting the intricate details of both spider and mushroom. This image captures the often-overlooked beauty of small creatures and their habitats, showcasing the fascinating interplay between light and shadow in the natural world. It invites viewers to appreciate the complexity and wonder of even the tiniest inhabitants of our planet.”

Khaichuin Sim, Malaysia

A pom pom crab (Lybia edmondsoni) clutching its prized anenomes.

Name: Hawaiian boxer crab or pom pom crab (Lybia edmondsoni)

Where it lives: The Hawaiian Islands

Spinoza’s Surgery: Why Truth Heals the Life, but Hurts the Nervous System

Truth can rewrite your mental map in a single second, but your nervous system requires years to walk the new terrain; do not mistake the pain of spiritual surgery for the failure of the cure.

Spinoza teaches that with adequate understanding comes greater joy. So why, Mark asks, when he realized that his family, parents, and wife were narcissists and gained life force from it, which resulted in his leaving his wife and parents, but he didn't feel any joy at all. Is understanding related to joy, or is Spinoza wrong? This is an excellent question because it touches one of the places where lived experience seems to pull against Spinoza's theory.

The first thing to notice is that there is a difference between becoming more adequate and losing an illusion. In real life these often happen together, but they are not the same event. Suppose for thirty years you believed your parents loved you in a healthy way. Then you gradually realize they were narcissistic and that much of your life was organized around their needs rather than yours. The adequate understanding is the more accurate model of reality. But reaching it requires destroying the old model. That destruction is what we call disillusionment and this itself is painful.

From the perspective of predictive processing, your brain has to abandon a deeply ingrained model that once minimized uncertainty. Even if the model was false, it organized your world. When it collapses, prediction errors explode. The nervous system temporarily loses its map. That state does not feel like joy. It feels like grief, fear, anger, emptiness, or betrayal. So there are really two processes occurring. One process is subtraction. You lose an illusion, a relationship, an identity, and many expectations. That is experiened as sadness because something that organized your life has disappeared. The other process is addition. You gain a more accurate model of reality and become capable of acting differently. That is an increase in power. These two processes need not feel the same.

This is actually where modern neuroscience can refine Spinoza. An increase in objective capacity does not necessarily produce an immediate increase in positive affect. The brain cares not only about power but also about stability. During major model revision, stability decreases before it increases again. Think about what happened in Mark's life. Understanding his parents allowed him to leave. Understanding his wife allowed him to leave. These were enormous increases in his capacity to act according to reality rather than according to childhood conditioning. By Spinoza's definition, his power increased. But emotionally he had also lost his family, his marriage, his identity as son and husband, and many hopes about how life "should have been." Why should that feel joyful? It probably could not.

There is something else in Spinoza that people often overlook. Joy, for him, is not excitement or pleasure. He defines joy as the transition to greater perfection. But a transition can be mixed with many other affects. When a surgeon removes a malignant tumor, the patient has objectively become healthier, yet the operation hurts. The pain is not evidence that health has decreased. Mark's disillusionment may have been exactly like surgery. The disillusionment like the operation increased his freedom while simultaneously producing grief.

Where we could gently disagree with Spinoza is that he sometimes writes as though adequate understanding naturally carries joy with it. That seems too optimistic. Modern psychology suggests there is often a long interval between acquiring a more accurate model of and experiencing the emotional benefits of that model. Trauma makes this interval even longer. A traumatized nervous system does not celebrate truth simply because it is true. It asks, "Am I safe now?" If the answer is no, then the emotional system may remain dominated by fear despite a remarkable increase in understanding.

Mark could also experienced what is closer to what Nietzsche called the death of an illusion. When an illusion dies, the immediate experience is often not liberation but mourning. Only later does the increased freedom become visible. So we can distinguish three stages. First comes illusion, which may contain comfort but little freedom. Then comes disillusionment, which contains much truth but much suffering. Finally, if circumstances allow, comes integration, where the new understanding becomes a stable way of living. That stage may resemble what Spinoza calls joy because your increased power has finally become embodied rather than merely understood.

Tomorrow is an Open-Book Test (And You’re Allowed to Use a Pencil)

Anxiety is the tax we pay for trying to buy tomorrow with today's illusions; maturity is trading the safety of a borrowed map for the humility of a sharper pencil."

Every culture invents techniques for taming tomorrow. Some people mortify themselves today in the hope that life will reward them tomorrow. Others pray, visualize success, repeat affirmations, meditate, seek enlightenment, become detached observers, consult personality systems, or search for hidden cosmic laws. The methods differ, but the motivation is often the same. They promise relief from the uncertainty of an unknowable future. This does not mean these practices are always useless. Some may improve discipline, attention, emotional regulation, or social support. But when they claim to provide certainty about tomorrow, they cross from psychology into illusion.

The human nervous system is a prediction machine. It constantly constructs models of what is likely to happen next. Those models are indispensable because without them no organism could survive. Yet they are always incomplete. They are shaped by limited information, childhood experience, education, culture, trauma, hopes, fears, and countless cognitive shortcuts. If the future coincides with our model, it is always a matter of chance. Every prediction is therefore vulnerable to errror. This is why disappointment is inevitable. Reality is not obliged to follow our maps.

The scientific response to prediction error is simple. When reality surprises us, we ask what assumption was wrong. We revise the model and move on. The question is not, "What o God you did to me?" The question is, "What exactly did I expect, and why did I expect it?" That question improves the next prediction instead of protecting the previous illusion.The greatest mistake is to imagine that there exists a technique that permanently removes uncertainty. There is none. Not prayer, not visualization, not enlightenment, not positive thinking, not the law of attraction, not secret knowledge, and not perfect planning. Tomorrow remains open because tomorrow has not yet happened.

This realization is frightening because it leaves us without guarantees. Yet it is also liberating. If certainty is impossible, then failure is not always evidence that we did something wrong. Sometimes reality simply unfolded differently from our best available prediction. Many of us learned the opposite as children. We were told that one wrong decision today would ruin tomorrow. We learned to fear mistakes because mistakes supposedly determined our entire future. The result was not wisdom but chronic anxiety. Instead of learning to improve our own models, we learned to borrow the maps of parents, teachers, religious authorities, or social groups. We were taught not to think for ourselves but to listen and do what others say. The search for certainty replaced the search for understanding.

📷 Khaichuin Sim