Slouching towards Sanity and Reality
This morning I came across a stupid comment by a Vietnamese woman on a web forum about an alleged wrong choice of word used by a Buddhist woman when the latter said that the mother monkey acted quite like a human in expressing her grief over the death of her infant. The choice of word was correct. It was the "critic" who showed her ignorance by trying to show off. I have come across creatures like her all the time. I used to correct them. Now I just walk away. Humans have a wide range of aptitude and behavior. Those who are below don't understand those above. Our behavior is the product of our understanding.
Vengeance does have a lot to do with grief. Those who disagree with that assessment don't really know the finer points of grief and anger. Anger is very allied with grief. Grief is anger over loss. No grief means the loss means nothing, thus indifference, thus no anger. Anyway, there's no point to elucidate further the nature of grief. Either you understand or you don't. Some things you must work out for yourself, but first, don't think too quickly. Then, don't disagree with me too readily. Everything I say now comes from blood, sweat, and tears, and a long struggle with homicidal impulses. The day I remain silent in the face of stupidity and ignorance is the day I have arrived. That does not necessarily mean I am referring to you. You are not the only one who possess stupidity and ignorance. I do, too, sometimes, but only sometimes.
As I often pontificate ad nauseam, humans often use self-projection as a default mode of thinking in trying to understand other humans. We have universal needs and wants and aspirations. Buddha built up an edifice of ethics on human commonalities and yet he was astute enough to caution us of anomalies and to be ready to make up our own mind about them.
I am reading "The Bonobo and The Atheist", written by the primatologist Franz de Waal. It seems like the book was written by a wise man at the end of an illustrious career. He is now crystallizing his thoughts about his subject of study: primates and how much closer they are to us than we are making allowance for. Real Reading is an act of creative participation. The following are notes and take-offs from notes.
Primates have empathy and therefore manipulation and deception and group behavior. While in the "society"/group of humans, chimps, and gorillas, males are dominant, females are at the center of bonobo group dynamics .
Not only primates, but also lower forms of life like canines have inequity aversion.
Morality is not the sole province of humans.
Morality in humans not imposed from above but evolved from within.
Altruism and the subject of natural selection.:
Altruism in primates, even in lower mammals, is different from the perceived altruism in insects. Confusion and thus wild speculation and extrapolation about human nature comes from the failure to differentiate between the two.
Reason is a slave of passions. Man is not first and foremost a rational being. He is ruled by passions which are restrained by group behavior to ensure the well-being of the group. Morality comes from religion or science (eugenics was prevalent in 1930's in England, U.S., Switzerland, Germany, Russia, and Norway; the syphilis study at Tuskegee Institute) is both equally suspect.
Proper thinking is hard work. Predation is not necessarily synonymous with aggression. Lorentz defined aggression as within-species behavior, and why herbivores are not considered any less aggressive than carnivores---as anyone who has witnessed a stallion fight or an elephant rampage can attest. Confusing predation with aggression is an old error. I bother trying to improve my mind even as I am dying because I am proud I can think and theorize, but theorizing without facts is vain and stupid.
God and Man:
"Is Man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of Man?"
Nietzsche
God does not make Man in His own image. It's the other way around, stupid! Don't believe everything in a book put together by ignorant scribes. That is what I have been telling Christians. This was what I discovered all by myself at the age of 11. I am a retard in many fields, but I am quite good at metaphysics and languages (not in the number of languages I can master, but of the connection between language and thought, the magic of sounds and words and meanings. I knew about this shit at an early age when I was a stutterer, when words flashed through my mind visually when I heard them spoken. I picture words when I hear them, even to this day).
Wissai
Neurosis is a consequence of unmet individual needs and passions, a failure of integrating one's own wants and group's needs. Neurosis does not exist in solitary animals.
I know I am different from the human animals. Most of them fuck out of lust. I have a hard-on only when I am romantically involved. The human female genitalia is disgusting to me unless I am in love. I have a sense of aesthetics. That's why I am keeping my body in good shape. I want to look beautiful.
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
Humans have both the gentle, sex-oriented traits from bonobos and aggressive characteristics from chimps.
I used to be a militant atheist, but I soon felt ashamed of my militancy regarding theists. I was sick of sleeping furiously. People have a right to be stupid, though. Dogmatism is bad in any form, atheism included.
Most people don't realize that in this world, resistance to the theory of evolution is almost restricted to evangelical Protestants in the American South and Midwest.
It is ignorant to ascribe near-death experiences to scientific evidence of the after-life:
"After a brush with death, some patients report having floated outside of their bodies or having entered a tunnel of light. (In the human brain there is) a small area called TPJ (temporal-parietal junction). This area gathers information from many senses (visual, tactile, and vestibular [of, relating to, or affecting the perception of body position and movement <the vestibular system of the inner ear>] to construct a single image of our body and its place in the environment. The body image is disturbed if the TPJ is damaged or stimulated with electrodes. Together with with the hallucinogenic qualities of anesthetic drugs and the effects of oxygen depletion on the brain, science is getting close to a materialist explanation of near-death experiences." (de Waal, pp 92-93)
Scientists are not always objective as they would like us to believe. They are after all human, and humans are driven by both confirmation and disconfirmation biases. A case in point is named Garcia effect, after the psychologist who successfully challenged a behaviorist dogma championed by B.F.Skinner who claims that all behavior is shaped by reward and punishment, which works better the shorter the time interval between the act and its consequences. But this dogma flies in the face of what we commonly experience as taste aversion. We remember food that has poisoned us so well that we gag at the thought of it, thus enhancing our survival. When John Garcia reported that rats avoided poisoned foods after just a single bad experience, even if the nausea sets in only hours later, nobody believed him but they didn't bother to duplicate his experience. Leading scientists made sure his study didn't appear in any mainstream journal.
Other examples include resistance to the wave theory of light, to Pasteur's discovery of fermentation, to continental drift, and to Röntgen 's announcement of X-rays. Resistance to change is also visible when science continues to cling to unsupported paradigms, such as the Rorschach's inkblot test, or keeps touting the selfishness of organisms despite contrary evidence. Science is not value free as widely believed. No less an authority than Einstein who denied that all scientists do is to observe and measure. He said that what we thinks exists is a product almost as much of theory as of observation. When theories change, observations follow suit. In other words, we don't look for observations that contradict our theory (confirmation bias) (de Waal p.93).
However, even if there the entire notion of unsentimental rationality is based on a misunderstanding that we can think without emotions, the difference between science and religion resides not in the individual practitioners but in the culture. Science is a collective enterprise with rules of engagement which allows the whole to make progress even if its parts drag their feet while religion is a practice of self-induced hypnosis which allows no room for disagreement. Religion's dogmas rarely change, if ever, and when they do, it's because the society culture changes, and rarely as a result of evidence. Science does best is to incite competition between ideas, a gladiatorial natural selection. The best ideas survive and reproduce.
Realistically speaking, convictions often don't follow straight from evidence or logic. They arrive through the prism of interpretations. A French philosopher noted, "strictly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain" ( à proprement parler, il n'y a pas de certitude; il y a seule te des hommes certains) Charles Renouvier (1859) cited by de Waal, p. 250.
Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, but it would be damn close, don't you think, when it comes to the thing called Love. When you show me you love me, that does not mean you do. But if you fail to show me, I am quite convinced, if not certain, you don't. Silent and undemonstrative love is very rare. But in the case of hate, it is prevalent. This has everything to do with deception. If I fail to show you I love you, this may mean I lack confidence, for I may fear you may not reciprocate my love or you may feel or think (but wait a minute, didn't I copy earlier that actually there is no difference between feeling and thinking?) I am not worthy enough of your love. Rejection is one of the saddest things a sensitive human can experience. Few humans are strong enough to give no shit about validation and affirmation. Yesterday evening I had dinner with Danny, an old Korean friend, 14 years my junior, whom I had not seen for 13 years. I ran into him at a health club a few days earlier. Over the course of dinner, he gave me a rundown of his life of the past 13 years. His wife left him after he had lost a lot of money in the stock market. He went through hard times for quite a while. He thought of suicide, but didn't go through with the idea. He cried after five minutes of telling me the trials and tribulations of his marriage. I didn't press for details. I just inferred from his red eyes and tears flowing down his cheeks that he was in pain and yet still does believe in romance. My inference was correct because after reassuring me that he now holds a good job in the rebounding real este market and he is saving money to get back to the stock market, he asked me for help in locating a nice young woman, preferably Hispanic, because he wants to have children. When women left me for greener pastures, I didn't cry. I wrote stories and poetry instead, full of mawkish, maudlin sentimental shit to transcend my lousy judgements born of a foolish heart. I told Danny that he must not let a bad experience to color his perception of women. Yes, while it is true that 9 out of 10 women are cunning and unromantic, the rare, elusive 1 out of 10 is the one we must be on the hunt for. And in any non-food hunt, the pleasure lies more in the chasing process than in capturing the prey. We must not really care for the outcome. We must derive joy from the hunting game itself. Danny looked at me as if I were from Mars while listening to my dissertation on the art of hunting. He kept rolling his eyes and asking, "Are you serious?". And I kept replying, "Fuck yes!". When I was through, he said, "Whatever. Just help me locate that elusive, rare 1 out of 10". I gave him a winsome smile and a wink while nodding my head with emphasis, "No problema, mi amigo." When I reached for the check, he said, "It's on me. I"ll put it in on expense account." I was glad because the bill came close to $100 just for two, and we didn't even order booze.
I walked out of the restaurant feeling sad and glad at the same time. I felt sorry for Danny because he was really a very nice man, much nicer than me. I was glad because now I know he is in town, I can call him up and ask him to hang out with me if loneliness hits me hard. Emotions (loneliness is classified as emotion, or at least a state of being or a vague, nebulous consciousness called "feeling) are often misunderstood as instincts, but any student of meditation or Buddhism would know that they are not necessarily the same. In addition, Buddhism is great in helping humans who suffer (such as Danny currently and myself in the past) in arriving at an understanding that the cause of suffering came from attachment and from placing too much emphasis on the self. The real value of Buddhism lies in fostering individual emancipation through understanding and self-reliance. At its heart, Buddhism is a way of thinking and not a religion per se, but the fact remains that all our mental products are ways of thinking, including religions, and have nothing to do with the so-called elusive God. That's why I find most of Buddhism's views attractive (except those about reincarnation) because they are rational and logical, without relying on a fiction called God as the foundation, as other stupid religions do. To rely on or believe in a Personal God as a crutch is a sign of stupidity and cowardice. That attitude at its core reflects a slavish, childish way of thinking. There is no Personal God who listens to human entreaties and has power over them. To invoke God even in the darkest hour of need is an act of self-hypnosis and self-deception. It is an utilitarian act, but not dignified. It is far better to accept reality as it is and deal with it rationally and logically. Utilitarianism is a piece of shit. So is behaviorism.
Instinct refers to a genetic program that tells animals, humans included, to act in a specific way under specific circumstances. Emotions, on the other hand, produce internal changes along with an evaluation of the situation and a weighing of options. Right now cognitive scientists are debating if there should be a distinction between emotion and cognition. At any rate, they are intertwined, a fact that most unreflective and insensitive humans are not aware of.
"Primates offer great insight into group life based on both emotions and emotional control. Tightly embedded in society, they respect the limits it pus on their behavior and are ready to rock the boat only if they can get away with it or if so much is at stake that it's worth the risk.....We (humans) invest moral rules with authority. Sometimes the authority is personal, like a super alpha male, as when we claim that God handled us the rules on a mountaintop. At other times, we fall for the authority of reasoning, claiming that certain rules are so logically compelling that it would be silly to disobey them." (de Waal, p.154)
"Morality addresses the well-being of others and puts the community before the individual. It does not deny self-interest, but curbs its pursuit so far as to promote a cooperative society. This functional morality sets morality apart from customs and habits" (de Waal, p.156)
Morality predates religion, especially the dominant religions of today. Humans were morally enough when we roamed the savanna in small bands. Only when society grew and the rules of reciprocity and reputation began to falter did a moralizing God become necessary. It wasn't the Abrahamic God who introduced us to morality in the form of stone tablets in Mount Sinai, as a band of half-starved wandering Jews would like us to believe, but it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we ought to. The moral law of social beings is not imposed from above (God) or derived from well-reasoned principles (Philosophy). Rather, it likely arises from ingrained values that have been since the arrival of consciousness. The most fundamental value reflects the recognition of the survival enhancement of group life: the desire to belong, to get along, to love and be loved, prompts us to do everything in our power to stay on good terms with those on whom one's survival depends. I do know all this shit but why do I occasionally stubbornly cling to antisocial behavior, at great costs to myself? Alas, that's where Freud's genius comes into play: in some humans, the Death Wish is stronger than the Life Force. This is the only insight of Freud that I concurred. His views about sexuality are nonsensical. His other views (displacement, self-projection, no existence of Personal God) are commonplace and lacking originality.
Gene and Behavior:
There are many layers between genes and behavior, from the encoding of proteins (which is what genes do) to neural processes and psychology. We are driven by inborn values and emotions, which guide rather than dictate behavior. They nudge us in a given direction, but leave plenty of leeway. As a result, we have the capacity to care for those unable to return the favor, adopt unrelated young, cooperate with strangers, and empathize with members of a different species. Those who are unable to do any of the above are not quite human. That's why I keep referring them as animals. Being stupid and yet wrongly insensitive, they get upset at my characterization when they fail to exhibit the basic behavior of a social animal: protecting the group/tribalism/patriotism. They are too stupid or too stubborn to acknowledge that I am right, to admit that they are too selfish to be considered human. Yet what really has angered me is to see these fucking, despicable cowards love power and try to lord over their friends and peers.
Conclusion about Morality:
Morality has much more humble beginnings, which are recognizable in the behavior of other animals. Everything science has learned in the last few decades argues against the pessimistic view that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature. On the contrary, our evolutionary background lends a massive helping hand without which we would never have gotten this far.
Wissai
May 27, 2013
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