Philosophy Discussion Forums

In other words,How much are human beings instinct? How much of us is environmentally determined(personal experience)? How much of us is enculurated(the way we are raised to be)? How much is individuated human thought(character based)? My opinion is that for most of us humans,instinct is a much more profound predictor of human behavior than any other causal factor. What say you? MR

Age is also a factor in relation to instincts.
Humans began with nature and nurture inhibits
and modulate the instinctual drives thereafter.

The modulation of instinctual drives is based
a neural inhibitors (sort of brakes).

Neural inhibitors also has a shelf-life, and if
these neural inhibitors lose their strengths in
the later stages of one's life, instincts may
predominate.

I believe philosophy (theorectical and practical) is the best option to build strong nurturing neural inhibitors that would last longer and has the ability to modulate the instinctual drives to optimize the survival of the individual and that of its specie.

I agree, at present the majority are significantly driven
by instincts.
However humanity must adopt the relevant philosophy and
turn the tide to enable the humane nurture to modulate life.

Etherman50 wrote:In other words,How much are human beings instinct? How much of us is environmentally determined(personal experience)? How much of us is enculurated(the way we are raised to be)? How much is individuated human thought(character based)? MR

Konrad Lorenz in "On Aggression" proposes that about 90% of human behavior is instinctive, even what looks like purposeful behavior has a component of instinct in it.

socialization produces a fundamentally Pavlovian conditioning to the sense of self. without breaking it down into the constituent steps of cognition or flipping between conscious vs subconscious thought, the 'unwashed masses' are significantly subliminally driven.

is it possible to be a smart person who can watch as the 'average' person goes about their choice-making relying entirely on self-gratification for example. a person who chooses rewarding feelings will self-select their own direction, acquiring memory and opinion which fortifies the certainty that they are right in how they feel an think.

the ability of Awareness, is the ability to disregard one's own subconscious response to stimuli thereby enabling the empirical evaluative mind (consciousness). unfortunately, that ability to feel emotion without blurting it out is something socialized conditioning has allowed people to avoid doing.

if a falsehood is a conviction which pleases you, you will continually reinforce that falsehood as our emotional response of happiness. deprogramming oneself of that tendency is difficult. it is painful, there is no overt reward to influence your behaviour to doing so. and the resultant awkward self-awareness that it inflicts on people will just seem impossible, ridiculous and unimportant to pursue. it is their habituated self which seeks external affirmation and distraction. and every experience which they perceive as pulling them the other direction will end up (on their part) as emotionally and logically conflicting, at which point they refer to the certainty of what they feel they know.

the change which occurs in society will drag them kicking and screaming back into awareness simply because they have trained themselves to not even see the possibility until after the truth has hit them.

Hello Foszae,

Foszae wrote:socialization produces a fundamentally Pavlovian conditioning to the sense of self. without breaking it down into the constituent steps of cognition or flipping between conscious vs subconscious thought, the 'unwashed masses' are significantly subliminally driven.

is it possible to be a smart person who can watch as the 'average' person goes about their choice-making relying entirely on self-gratification for example. a person who chooses rewarding feelings will self-select their own direction, acquiring memory and opinion which fortifies the certainty that they are right in how they feel an think.

the ability of Awareness, is the ability to disregard one's own subconscious response to stimuli thereby enabling the empirical evaluative mind (consciousness). unfortunately, that ability to feel emotion without blurting it out is something socialized conditioning has allowed people to avoid doing.

if a falsehood is a conviction which pleases you, you will continually reinforce that falsehood as our emotional response of happiness. deprogramming oneself of that tendency is difficult. it is painful, there is no overt reward to influence your behaviour to doing so. and the resultant awkward self-awareness that it inflicts on people will just seem impossible, ridiculous and unimportant to pursue. it is their habituated self which seeks external affirmation and distraction. and every experience which they perceive as pulling them the other direction will end up (on their part) as emotionally and logically conflicting, at which point they refer to the certainty of what they feel they know.

the change which occurs in society will drag them kicking and screaming back into awareness simply because they have trained themselves to not even see the possibility until after the truth has hit them.

Does enlightenment depend on "smartness?" I know smart people who do not seem very enlightened, and people of "the unwashed masses" who seem much more so. Because we are animals, it is unlikely we will ever be free of "Subconscious response to stimuli", or instinctive behavior. Instead we may become aware of it and bring that awareness to bear upon our instinctive reactions. Given the track record, aren't societies more likely to push one deeper into unconsciousness than drag one back into awareness.

Gregorygregg1 wrote:Hello Foszae,
Does enlightenment depend on "smartness?" I know smart people who do not seem very enlightened, and people of "the unwashed masses" who seem much more so. Because we are animals, it is unlikely we will ever be free of "Subconscious response to stimuli", or instinctive behavior. Instead we may become aware of it and bring that awareness to bear upon our instinctive reactions. Given the track record, aren't societies more likely to push one deeper into unconsciousness than drag one back into awareness.

let's come up with a more adequate definition of smartness then. it is not having a lot of information at your disposal (because the mind can trust feeling more than memory). it is not IQ, because that is simply a matter of pattern recognition and and only influences behaviour after the conscious mind has evaluated that response.

my professional defnition by contrast is the relative frequency with which one re-evaluates those instincts. at the dumbness end of the scale would be people who rarely reconsider how they feel. at the other end people who frequently question how their 'self' responds.

society, taken as an entity, roughly follows the same scale. forgive me for being metaphoric, but a relatively smart society is one which witnesses itself and deliberately plans for improved behaviours. the dumb society will tend to stick to ideas it feels are perfect for how they feel.

but that entity, the putative society, is not actually self-aware. it cannot change itself, because it does not know it even exists. it can develop dumb habits, as if it were subconsciously convince itself it were right. but you can't even make an analogy that the society itself derives solutions to its problems (like a smart person would).

for an extrapolation of this example, let us look at the actual Enlightenment. that putative society again, was awoken by interesting stimuli. as if its subconscious tendencies received a signal that was beyond its capacity to respond and threw it up to the boys in the consciousness department for their more exhaustive analysis. Newton and Galileo brought two new paradigms to light, and they defied the "common sense" responses. the ideas were too interesting to ignore, and too contradictory to gloss over. so society responded. a rush of new philosophies, the dawning of the Age of Reason. the chance, at last, to work out things that seemed more likely to be true. then Hume came along and told us we couldn't really prove it and shut the whole thing down again.

what did we lose? the willingness to look for more accurate truths to build with. and why? well, it's almost as if society had a knee-jerk fight/flight response to something it couldn't cope with. ducked its head back into the sand and continued reassuring its constituent members that there were no other answers to even consider.

now having said that, yes, societies in general will work to the acceptable level of the majority. it's an exact reflection of how dumb people respond. i can cope with this much and i'm sure nothing else will matter. and that is a downstream, cumulative effect of the per capita individual following that same training and general direction.

but, as is true of brains and society, objective reality still exists whether you notice it or not. you can watch a person who believes a fantasy and still know in your own opinion how that person can be disproven. and as Science has progressed, external fact can disabuse the best of scientists of their own disprovable delusions. the sort of short form of the scientific method is "well, yeah we used to think that but..."

society will paralyze itself with indecision and fall back to habituation, yes. have you seen the state of modern Democracy? the primary assumptions haven't even changed. the crowd is not the source of new ideas. nor is memory where inspiration develops. they are nothing more than reference used to contextualize the potentials being considered by the smart part of the social brain.

creativity, imagination, hypothesizing and refining hypotheses verifies its own likelihood by looking back at the dumb part of what it knows and thinking about what could be ahead of us. relative probabilities are judged roughly along the lines of Idea A seems to be more probable than Idea B. so, let's focus our (collective) attention toward the more-likely outcome. it's how consciousness works.

and now, pursuant to your actual question, it is perfectly possible for society to change into an active and evolving form as opposed to an inertial and unchanging beast. but the problem is, still, that people haven't come to terms with some ideas being "better" than others. as a scientist, it is my obligation to constantly be searching for the better idea, even if it annoys me to be wrong about what i previously thought. and honestly, yes i can think of innumerable ways that we could 'refine' our ideas of society. there are plenty of people who do consider the wholesale overhaul of everything we do.

have you heard of the Venus Project? a collection of scientists and engineers who are simply willing to come up with new ideas which could work better. the arguments are perfectly sound in science and would make a perfectly lovely plan for improving global human culture. and i find it personally appealing because i can trust that as scientists, they will be willing to unlearn that they currently espouse at such time that better ideas come up. and that would pretty much be the society which would defy your current expectation that society is inherently stupefying. but honestly, even bringing it up with masses of people would be pointless. it challenges too many of their primary assumptions and so each of them will individually self-select denial and the comfort of their own delusions instead. they won't even hear the possibility simply because it exposes the craziness of their own beliefs. think of 300 million Americans suddenly having to accept that they're wrong. what are the chances they will even be interested in hearing what science might suggest?

Foszae wrote: let's come up with a more adequate definition of smartness then. it is not having a lot of information at your disposal (because the mind can trust feeling more than memory). it is not IQ, because that is simply a matter of pattern recognition and and only influences behaviour after the conscious mind has evaluated that response.

my professional defnition by contrast is the relative frequency with which one re-evaluates those instincts. at the dumbness end of the scale would be people who rarely reconsider how they feel. at the other end people who frequently question how their 'self' responds.

society, taken as an entity, roughly follows the same scale. forgive me for being metaphoric, but a relatively smart society is one which witnesses itself and deliberately plans for improved behaviours. the dumb society will tend to stick to ideas it feels are perfect for how they feel.

but that entity, the putative society, is not actually self-aware. it cannot change itself, because it does not know it even exists. it can develop dumb habits, as if it were subconsciously convince itself it were right. but you can't even make an analogy that the society itself derives solutions to its problems (like a smart person would).

Sounds like a liberal attitude. Wasn't Democracy designed to keep us aware of our behaviors as a society and permit changes in response to unacceptable behaviors like torture and preemptive warfare? How conscious does a society have to be to see and respond?

Foszae wrote: for an extrapolation of this example, let us look at the actual Enlightenment. that putative society again, was awoken by interesting stimuli. as if its subconscious tendencies received a signal that was beyond its capacity to respond and threw it up to the boys in the consciousness department for their more exhaustive analysis. Newton and Galileo brought two new paradigms to light, and they defied the "common sense" responses. the ideas were too interesting to ignore, and too contradictory to gloss over. so society responded. a rush of new philosophies, the dawning of the Age of Reason. the chance, at last, to work out things that seemed more likely to be true. then Hume came along and told us we couldn't really prove it and shut the whole thing down again.)

What did we lose? the willingness to look for more accurate truths to build with. and why? well, it's almost as if society had a knee-jerk fight/flight response to something it couldn't cope with. ducked its head back into the sand and continued reassuring its constituent members that there were no other answers to even consider.)

It is almost as if you are implying a "social mind." But you give individuals power within that mind. you are contending that conservative individuals have greater impact on the "social mind" than free thinkers. I read this as path behavior by the herd. Wasn't public education supposed to solve that problem?

Foszae wrote: now having said that, yes, societies in general will work to the acceptable level of the majority. it's an exact reflection of how dumb people respond. i can cope with this much and i'm sure nothing else will matter. and that is a downstream, cumulative effect of the per capita individual following that same training and general direction.

but, as is true of brains and society, objective reality still exists whether you notice it or not. you can watch a person who believes a fantasy and still know in your own opinion how that person can be disproven. and as Science has progressed, external fact can disabuse the best of scientists of their own disprovable delusions. the sort of short form of the scientific method is "well, yeah we used to think that but..."

Foszae wrote: society will paralyze itself with indecision and fall back to habituation, yes. have you seen the state of modern Democracy? the primary assumptions haven't even changed. the crowd is not the source of new ideas. nor is memory where inspiration develops. they are nothing more than reference used to contextualize the potentials being considered by the smart part of the social brain

creativity, imagination, hypothesizing and refining hypotheses verifies its own likelihood by looking back at the dumb part of what it knows and thinking about what could be ahead of us. relative probabilities are judged roughly along the lines of Idea A seems to be more probable than Idea B. so, let's focus our (collective) attention toward the more-likely outcome. it's how consciousness works.

Is the "smart part of the social brain" the enlightened individuals or the scientists? As for more likely outcomes, it seems obvious that the big rock will fall faster than the smaller one. perhaps we should focus our (collective consciousness) on identifying and remaining aware of the illusions upon which our societies are based.
Better yet, can a society be based on objective reality and cleanse itself of illusion?

Foszae wrote: and now, pursuant to your actual question, it is perfectly possible for society to change into an active and evolving form as opposed to an inertial and unchanging beast. but the problem is, still, that people haven't come to terms with some ideas being "better" than others. as a scientist, it is my obligation to constantly be searching for the better idea, even if it annoys me to be wrong about what i previously thought. and honestly, yes i can think of innumerable ways that we could 'refine' our ideas of society. there are plenty of people who do consider the wholesale overhaul of everything we do.

have you heard of the Venus Project? a collection of scientists and engineers who are simply willing to come up with new ideas which could work better. the arguments are perfectly sound in science and would make a perfectly lovely plan for improving global human culture. and i find it personally appealing because i can trust that as scientists, they will be willing to unlearn that they currently espouse at such time that better ideas come up. and that would pretty much be the society which would defy your current expectation that society is inherently stupefying. but honestly, even bringing it up with masses of people would be pointless. it challenges too many of their primary assumptions and so each of them will individually self-select denial and the comfort of their own delusions instead. they won't even hear the possibility simply because it exposes the craziness of their own beliefs. think of 300 million Americans suddenly having to accept that they're wrong. what are the chances they will even be interested in hearing what science might suggest?

Science has not always been a stalwart champion of truth or even consistently shown much wisdom. As for better ideas: atomic bombs, biological warfare, nuclear power plants. One might question the wisdom of creating a scientocracy.

As Isis says:
"There is the anarchy of revolution
That tears down governments
Only to see new ones rise in their stead.
And there is the anarchy of the mind,
Which knows no governance except from within.
Anarchy of the mind requires enlightenment.
And until minds are enlightened,
Governments will serve.
Although they are a poor substitute for anarchy."

Gregorygregg1 wrote:Sounds like a liberal attitude. Wasn't Democracy designed to keep us aware of our behaviors as a society and permit changes in response to unacceptable behaviors like torture and preemptive warfare? How conscious does a society have to be to see and respond?

it's an interesting analogy you make. but i cannot really work with that idea as truth. society wasn't 'designed' specifically to fulfill the needs of emotional growth in individual citizens. it was designed (by Classical Greeks) as a method to fulfill their collective needs as white, wealthy, land-owning male citizens. if you want to assign a goal to it, that would most certainly be the perpetuation of their power. it enshrined their right as a narrow minority to control the lives of slaves, women, labourers.

if you can pull a relevant quote from The Republic where they declare their intent to be the empowerment and growth of the individual, regardless of station, then i would your point. but thousands of years later, we don't seem to have any working democracy that actually offers that. we have democracies where actual decisions are still taken only by a narrow (elected) minority who line their pockets and create laws which profit their friends. Democracy can tackle the most objectionable things. but it seems unable to form consensus on how to improve things which don't horrify the hoi polloi. you can look at the history of Economics as an example. the boom-bust cycle has been happening for centuries (search wikipedia for "list of stock market crashes"). time and again, it causes damage primarily to the masses, starving and displacing the poor, not the people deciding how democracy runs day to day. but the decision that it is "unacceptable" has been that ruining lives is perfectly acceptable. i am a scientist, not an ethicist, but even i can see that the predictable failure seems to run contrary to simple moralities such as "most good, least harm"

Gregorygregg1 wrote: It is almost as if you are implying a "social mind." But you give individuals power within that mind. you are contending that conservative individuals have greater impact on the "social mind" than free thinkers. I read this as path behavior by the herd. Wasn't public education supposed to solve that problem?

i am trying to illustrate that the neuro-cognitive patterns of the human mind are reflected in the social discourse. i am not bothering with the politic of it. but to take the social mind as the example, then what we witness is someone caught in a pattern of failure to learn. the results are patently obvious, yet the behaviour leading to it does not change. we have no collective consciousness which re-examines itself and tries to modify its behaviour to produce better results; we simply repeat the pattern which ends in failure. the fact that we have done so for four-hundred years now just makes us look collectively oblivious.

Gregorygregg1 wrote:Is the "smart part of the social brain" the enlightened individuals or the scientists? As for more likely outcomes, it seems obvious that the big rock will fall faster than the smaller one. perhaps we should focus our (collective consciousness) on identifying and remaining aware of the illusions upon which our societies are based.
Better yet, can a society be based on objective reality and cleanse itself of illusion?

i don't see that we have a 'smart' part yet. we have politicians who are beholden to special interests. they could be. but they don't act anything like a 'thinking person' would. they fight to sustain the myriad illusions we face. in fact, the nature of politic is to accept that all ideas are equally valid and that emotional conviction leads our direction. as an example, we have to accept that Creationism is just as good as teaching Evolution and we treat it as a political debate. even trying to bring up the 'rational' viewpoint is pointless. perpetuating the delusion profits someone and the collective intransigence reassures (profits) the masses who believe the illusion.

Gregorygregg1 wrote:Science has not always been a stalwart champion of truth or even consistently shown much wisdom. As for better ideas: atomic bombs, biological warfare, nuclear power plants. One might question the wisdom of creating a scientocracy.

yes, you are perfectly right on that point. but science, by nature, doesn't have a lot of room to obey morality. atoms are crackable. there was no way science could have progressed without having discovered that fact. science didn't need to kill anyone to understand nuclear physics, nor did the laws of physics oblige us to slaughter innocents either. the applied use of that knowledge, though, was then driven by politics. the perceived morality that drove those end results has always come from that same social mind.

of course the social mind could reconsider its opinion. even if a politician had to start, there is no reason we couldn't have a public debate and actually move toward an idea which collectively seems better to us. but the way it currently happens is not that explicit or efficient.

we do learn to let go of 'bad' ideas. slavery is no longer considered acceptable to progressive societies. but if you say that's true, i will still raise my hand and suggest that i think i can still see it. it looks different than it used to, but people are born into positions of indentured labour with no ability to change their situation. we are forced to work, while a narrow minority makes decisions for us, controlling choices which relate to our freedoms and yet which we cannot influence.

could we improve the lot of every man, woman, and child on this planet? can we release them from the obligation to work? can we ensure them food, water, and shelter as free gifts just for being born human? yes, absolutely we could; it is technologically possible. it should, it seems, even sound appealing to people. i could dig up socio-anthropology to illustrate cultures where the obligations are minimal and people have freedom. and they do so without the miracles of modern agriculture, transportation and organization. simply because it suits their public mind.

we could re-engineer the entire planet to provide free sustenance to all peoples. the obligation to "work" would be so unneeded that there would be too many people motivated to work that we wouldn't even be able to employ them. we simply have evolved our society past the point where labour is a necessary commodity. but for some (irrational) reason, that technically viable possibility has not occurred to the social mind. in fact, the social mind is convinced of completely the opposite. but there is no self-awareness in that social mind to recognize a better, more workable idea.

simply, the social mind is too proud. it is convinced that it is already doing the best possible. it congratulates and reassures itself that this is perfection. as such, it will turn no interest to ideas which challenge its pride. it is insulted at suggestion that it is not ideal, and will rail against anything which disturbs its fantasy. why does society reject progress which is potentially there? why do we not try to be better people given that immoral science can imagine more viable options?

Foszae wrote:

society wasn't 'designed' specifically to fulfill the needs of emotional growth in individual citizens. it was designed (by Classical Greeks) as a method to fulfill their collective needs as white, wealthy, land-owning male citizens. if you want to assign a goal to it, that would most certainly be the perpetuation of their power. it enshrined their right as a narrow minority to control the lives of slaves, women, labourers.

But then there were Moses,Socrates,Jeremiah, and Confucius, also two whom you mentioned before, Newton and Copernicus.Also all the poets and heroes such as Blake and Boudicaa, the lesser rebels against the stupid status quo of society. The imaginative individual is historical fact just as is the stupidity of the over-socialised man.All we need is the TOP criterion to assess which rebel against stupidity is the good rebel, and which the bad one.

The rebels who choose life for selves and others and the natural environment are the good rebels, obviously, as without life there would be no sentience anywhere to desire any God,any truth, any goodness, any beauty or any justice.

Foszaei wrote:

Gregorygregg1 wrote:Science has not always been a stalwart champion of truth or even consistently shown much wisdom. As for better ideas: atomic bombs, biological warfare, nuclear power plants. One might question the wisdom of creating a scientocracy.

could we improve the lot of every man, woman, and child on this planet? can we release them from the obligation to work? can we ensure them food, water, and shelter as free gifts just for being born human? yes, absolutely we could; it is technologically possible. it should, it seems, even sound appealing to people. i could dig up socio-anthropology to illustrate cultures where the obligations are minimal and people have freedom. and they do so without the miracles of modern agriculture, transportation and organization. simply because it suits their public mind.

we could re-engineer the entire planet to provide free sustenance to all peoples. the obligation to "work" would be so unneeded that there would be too many people motivated to work that we wouldn't even be able to employ them. we simply have evolved our society past the point where labour is a necessary commodity. but for some (irrational) reason, that technically viable possibility has not occurred to the social mind. in fact, the social mind is convinced of completely the opposite. but there is no self-awareness in that social mind to recognize a better, more workable idea.

simply, the social mind is too proud. it is convinced that it is already doing the best possible. it congratulates and reassures itself that this is perfection. as such, it will turn no interest to ideas which challenge its pride. it is insulted at suggestion that it is not ideal, and will rail against anything which disturbs its fantasy. why does society reject progress which is potentially there? why do we not try to be better people given that immoral science can imagine more viable options?

I am not saying that science is not valuable, it is a two edged sword, that without enlightenment will cut the hand that wields it.
Cutting wood, Carrying water. We are obliged to work in order to live. It is also part of our growth as individuals because we learn so much through work. If we regard our responsibility to become enlightened as an imperative, we should, as a species, understand that poverty, hunger and war are counterproductive to that end. Our goal should be to provide the opportunity for all individuals to reach their true potential. It does not serve the enlightenment of humanity to have economies and societies that promote poverty, hunger and war. We have invented these societies and economies, They are the product of the imagination of man, and are illusory. When we become sufficiently enlightened as a species, perhaps we will uninvent them. Now, they are what is. Spreading enlightenment prepares for a better now. Expose illusion and you invite enlightenment.

GG

The wiring is for a purpose. Nature and nurture are two sides of one coin - we think in terms of either or.