Biology

Human Origins

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

 

We have false national narratives, and we all know we do, because we sure know the other guy does, same as Dawkins’ argument about religion, we already don’t believe in all but one of them, so they’re a thing. I’m always getting lost, so if you don’t know the term, false national narrative, investigoogle, it’s an important one, but I’m going to move on, try to stay on track. We also have narratives regarding the origin of not just our own currently existing nations, but of the human species itself, a thousand mythological stories and a few somewhat more scientific guesses as well.

The one of those last that seems to be the most accessible or acceptable these days is a story about group cooperation morphing into altruism and group control of destructive individuals through instances of such cooperation . . . I want to believe it myself, but I don’t. I believe this is the same story that in the next step becomes civilization because of laws and such, a set of rules that protects some of us from our nastiest selves.

Here’s my version. Not so much laws, as what the laws prescribe: abuse, the major, most indispensable component of group control, I say this every blog . . . OK, my just-so-genesis.

Some accident of group conflict among apes five million years ago or so accidentally got us selecting for abuse, like child abuse and “moral” punitive abuse followed somewhere along the way, and this is what Bible people call the Fall, when we discovered the dark magic power of abusing our own to make a more aggressive troop and move us towards more entrenched warrior lifestyles.

What ensued seems to have been an ongoing tournament where all technologies were developed, including this social one, abuse to leverage genetic and psychological changes in the troop, and many whole species of hominid are now selected out as well as certainly many less divergent human groups as well. The dominant present ones all have elaborate systems of laws and punitive abuse.

This is the dark side of the usual human origin stories about morality and civilization, and I’ll grant the usual story isn’t untrue exactly, but it’s more like ten percent of the causation in our origin story, more like a side effect, while this take of mine is the main thing. I think. Surely both my readers know Star Wars? They touched on a truth there. The dark side is indeed where the power is, of course.

Once you’ve been where I am on this for long enough, you’ll hear them try to explain a WORLD WAR as some aftershock, some eruption from our un-buried past and not as a sign of a trait that is growing and getting worse, something we are nurturing, you’ll be amazed that anyone believes it.

Ridiculous.

Absurd on its face.

 

Jeff

Oct. 14th., 2019

The Sunny Side of Life

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

It’s waiting for us.

It’s out there, the utopia, Jesus’ heaven on Earth, a better way.

Enough of us seem to think so, that it seems we have a gene for that, to use a twentieth century expression, for thinking so, at least. Questions abound, always, what does this statement of biology indicate? That we think it can exist – or the other part, that we think it exists “out there,” forever? Is that idea, it’s out there, a condition or an ingredient for something, the main reaction itself, or the by-product, the residue of some other interaction?

If it’s the first thing, a beginning, or a place to start, what brain process is it working to enable, that is perhaps not quite happening? If it’s the last thing, well, wishing for a better place, that is the residue of abuse. What was the middle thing again? Oh, God forbid. If that is the function itself, just to have the thought and then get back to work, just a happy fantasy, provided by your genetics to balance out the apparent failings of this world here . . . if that’s all it is? Wait, “all?” What am I saying?

Sigh. Well then, I guess I’m happy to have it, aren’t I? Aren’t you?

Thank Darwin! How hard would life suck without that? Eesh!

Tease me, please! All the mercies are not small. Hope, built-in with your DNA is no small thing, and give it up at your peril! The road to Why Bother is littered with the most miserable of corpses. I’ve always tried to prepare myself, always tried to be open to the idea that it’s possible that there is no better way, or that we’ll never find it if there is, but I am not “open” to knowing that for sure!

What’s the point in that?

I, were I your intelligent designer, have just worked out that you need this possibility in your programming, and I would not cut that corner: that’s yours, you keep that. I’m keeping mine, is the point, it’s one of my sacred cows, a premise for me.

If it’s not the case, well, science requires proving the obvious too. There’s still value in it. If it’s silly and we would be further ahead to grant the point and do the serious work of care and treatment in this nasty old world, well, I don’t think I’m taking a lot of people away from that, and anyway, you can still think this and do that. But granted, someone else is going to have to do any thinking involved in that, I’m off on this other thing.

But the dream is not the end, take heart! Yes, I’ve made an old time philosophical case to show we have the thought, that we would need it, true or otherwise, but that does not prove the reality cannot be, same as paranoia is not proof of safety. Just because we need the thought whether it’s true or not doesn’t prove it’s not. In fact – if we have a built-in meme that doesn’t care whether it’s true or not, if that’s true and necessary, then that suggests a function that must operate at all times, or under all circumstances, doesn’t it? In either condition! We need to think the better way is out there, even if it really is, because, well, what’s the point in an interactive world if you don’t know it is, or rather, we use deception sure, but the basic function of this organ is to perceive the world at least in some of the ways that it really is, and it wouldn’t what’s the word, exist, if it didn’t succeed at it to some degree.

Seems that change and hope are not always apparent looking outward, and that would be enough to give the idea of a better world an evolved reason to be. I’m just saying, if it’s true, if things really can be better, that doesn’t making thinking so dangerous or costly, matching thought to reality, that’s still the plan most of the time for an organism that enjoys viability! Of course, the basic version of this gene is, you need to think it to get you out of bed or get you in there not alone, to keep the ol’ genes alive and marching into the future and wow, put it that way, it doesn’t sound less deterministic and humancentric than the Bible, does it? Never mind!

Focus.

Anyhow, even the conservatives, even the Bible people, even those apparently committed to a static world as God made it and denying our power to affect things such as climate or war, even they have this meme, a utopia, even a sort of a map. Crazy as it is. Either there are many versions of the allele for what the utopia looks like, or there is no specific utopia allele at all, just the feeling that it’s out there and the urge to invent it.

Warning: employ some of your evolved, built-in hope: “not impossible” is likely to be as positive as it gets. I’ll try, but I’d have to be fooling myself, I think.

And again, take the mercies, none of which are small when you need them. If I prove to myself the utopia really is impossible, you won’t see this blog and this conversation never happened! Couldn’t hurt to have a go, right? Can’t dance and too fat to fly, as Mom used to say. I loved Mom, but she used to say some awful stuff, don’t we all.

OK, to it, what brings me here today.

So we have the gene for the urge. Do we have the genes for the utopia?

My entire blog has been an exercise in turning that question upside-down and saying: we have the genes for Nineteen Eighty-Four and we should stop selecting for them and activating them, and that feels like an answer to me, but I’ll grant it doesn’t to everybody. If you read me, you know, I think my version is the question we have in front of us now, and if we answer that, then maybe we’ll be in a better position to take the next step and start talking about positive things. But I suppose I should have a foray down that road, see if we can see around the first corner.

I always liked the following Tom Waits lyric –

Don’t you know there ain’t no Devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk?

But it seems my philosophy has taken me the other direction, it seems I see a world where there ain’t no God, just the Devil when he’s feeling sorry. Ah! There’s my way out of this!

Of course, we created both those entities. That is entirely up to us. I love Tom, but I’m tired of that world, his God must be wasted twenty-four seven. What, prithee, is the upside of assuming only good things about people or gods and then spending all your time trying to explain the discrepancies? Some folks are always selling, always spending their time on polish, improving the appearance of things that maybe require real, deep repair work. I don’t mean Waits, it’s just a meme. I mean the thought he voiced, not the particular individual voicing it, I mean something rational, thought-related, word-based . . . don’t get social on me now!

Sorry, the current pet peeve, taking me like a seizure. It’s not the person, it’s the thought. Don’t be listening to the mob, talking about people, specific people or groups of people! Don’t you know crowds are famously stupid? Find the smart few and listen to them talk about ideas, you know, like school and church – teachers, readers! Not your crowd of friends, talking about people! You know this, but we manage not to, but you know this and when you talk to me, I am going to hold you to it: crowds are stupid, yours too. Of course! A committee is a creature with six or more legs and no brain – so how smart is your crowd? How smart are the millions on social media, then?

You know this. You owe humankind that you act like it.

“Social” isn’t open-ended, it isn’t global. When you allow your people to talk such rubbish, when you go with the local flow, you are being social, prosocial with the folks around you and antisocial with the folks around you, and antisocial is where the power is because as I say every week, we have abuse-controlled genes – again, sort of assuming we don’t have the equal and opposite ones, because, well, empirical and anecdotal observation over six decades almost, I won’t lie. But maybe they’re in there. Maybe there are other reasons things appear, uh, one sided.

Wait – is my “genes for” meme wrong? Is it more like versions of genes, meaning we activate the mean version of a bunch of genes, that genes have two sides? If this is how things are, then there is no search to make, they’re right here, or right here buried, and if we managed to create an environment that touched those genes the other direction, then perhaps I would be having to wonder if it were possible to ruin a person instead of wondering if it’s possible not to.

Ouch. The truth hurts, so I guess that’s the case, or at least it’s my belief that it is.

Hey – do I do writing backwards?

Isn’t Hemmingway laying down a lot of personal pain and experience and it works because we all have those feelings . . . and aren’t I laying down global truths and having personal feelings about those instead? Trying, I mean, trying for truths and trying for universality . . . trying to be . . . “global-social?” Trying to transcend groupness, trying to find a “social” that isn’t largely antisocial. I don’t say “them” or “they” much, do I? I’ll plan to do so less, whatever that answer is. I know it’s usually “us” or “you” . . . hmm. OK. Maybe when I say “you” I’m often only addressing some version of “my people,” some group I feel I have a right to talk to or criticize. I’ll try to be more aware of that, I bet I’m failing that way. It’s supposed to be the universal “you,” but I suppose I complain about memes from here, about Christianity when a global version would be “religion,” like that. It’s xenophobia to specify some distant group when I need to talk about a group, though, so it’s not clear how I’m going to change that. Groupless language doesn’t exist, that’s one way to express our whole problem.

So, I haven’t gotten anywhere here, spent fifteen hundred words setting it up, then an obvious, single paragraph answer that adds up to my usual prescription, stop activating the worst versions exclusively, then maybe we’ll be able to stop fighting and talk about some positive future . . .

Don’t you know there ain’t no Devil, there’s just Darwin when he’s abused?

That’s better. Like I said, if I had proven there is no God, just the Devil hung over, we never would have had this talk. The versions of genes thing certainly echoes any psychological take on the situation, that when you take one option, the road not taken disappears, that I feel a need to search, because it is my cover-up in the first place, the answer I seek is written on a post-it note on my forehead, never to be seen looking outward. We have turned off our better natures, the genes we seek are the ones we have made invisible.

But it does mean they’re there!

Right?

It’s not no hope, right?

 

Jeff

September 29th., 2019

AST and the Ape with Two Brains

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

Can’t use the guy’s title in my title, can I?

I like the Steve Martin reference anyway, because, well, I’m not right, am I? What the Hell has that got to do with anything?

I was already in a state, either some medicinal cock-up, toxoplasmosis, or just the three-year anniversary of losing my life coming around, but I’ve been having short nights and day naps and way too much fun talking to myself until I’m really not and I’m writing all day and night . . . and again, when I’m in this suggestible condition, some clever idea comes along and takes me away.

It’s this Iain McGilchrist dude and his Divided Brain idea.

It’s not a revolution for me, I wasn’t walking about invested in some meme about a single, integrated brain or consciousness, nothing like that. OK, wait, maybe I was, but that was the project, the plan, not my assessment of the current state of affairs. Not sure I had settled on such a clear statement of exactly two, mind you, horrible and honest to say, I was till sort of coming from the old ghost in the machine idea, I wasn’t trying to match the divisions in everything to any physiology, taking the I’m not a physiologist sort of stance – ha! That’s the politician “I’m not a scientist” stance – so reality doesn’t matter! Good Lord.

Iain knows this.

As a television watching member of the great unwashed, I hadn’t heard anything about the hemispheres since it was calculation vs emotion either, just as he said – this is frustrating. I mean it’s fun at times like these, when we get the next sensational update – but every update means we’ve all been stagnant, left behind and stupid for much of the recent past. Not to mention the guy bringing us the update is all pissy about it  like it’s our fault! Get over it, Man. You’re happy now, the headlines and the money are flowing, your department are the ones reaped the benefit of that stupid press last time, not the public.

That’s your deal with the Devil, don’t blame us!

I should talk, my pissiness is bloody boundless. Anyway.

No, not “anyway.” Let’s go with that. A great source of irritation for me has just been made clear by Iain, a great deal of the wind I try to blow against is just this situation, maybe. I don’t want to say “for me,” that is arrogant and braggadocious, and certainly we all suffer this – when our right brain has worked out something complex, like it does, a flood of human left-brained minutiae rubbish shows up to argue about it.

Right?

We need a safe gun policy!

No, “AR” doesn’t stand for “assault rifle” and it’s modeled after the M-16, but it has . . . irrelevant minutiae doesn’t even address the question – this is standard fare on social media, not one of the logical fallacies that show up from time to time. The bread and butter.

Do not elect these fascists!

Actually, America is a republic, and the current policy is crypto/pseudo/post modern . . . starts with a simple binary choice and now there are a hundred versions, and if I sound like I meant the wrong one, then they win or something.

Our left brains are trolls!

Trolling is an exercise in pushing left-brain dominance – and yes, look at the disintegration.

I noticed early on that the people around me weren’t synthesizing things like I was, that they didn’t seem bothered by dissonance, that they carry around conflicting ideas and principles and don’t seem to mind, when one fails, they put it away and pull out another one. Country music on my mind, so

Some folks leave church all buyin’ in and tryin’.

And some folks shake it off!

We ain’t in church Son, just you get the rope.

Extreme, click-bait example, way to build bridges there, Mate. But this was supposed to be me, discussing something within my scope – me.

I don’t enjoy the dissonance I have, it’s awful to come up against it, I understand we spend our lives running from that, and no kidding, “you’ve always been wrong about everything, or at least half” – that doesn’t just hurt, it takes the point and the motivation out of you, that’s like “how do I go on?” Or worse, depending, it’s brain stuff, maybe it’s “how would I even know if am ‘going on?’”

Debilitating, that is.

No doubt, we will move Heaven and Earth, make a million angels dance on a pinhead (is that a description of a microprocessor or what, shut up, focus)  and utterly ignore the bounds of truth to escape it. Knowing that, the conscious work would seem to be looking for a real way out of it first, because you are going to pick one anyway, real or not. Where is the harm in taking a shot at reality in that scenario?

Sure we say we won’t know it when we find it, but how would we know?

So I try. I learn something new, job one is do I have a place to put this? Does if it fit, does it clash? If it fits, if it has to fit, what previous idea is now defunct and has to go? I know I’m sure to be full of undiscovered inconsistencies in my mind, but I am trying not to add any new ones. New popular science memes and such, any new thing should go through this curation process, and I try, and I’m sorry, but, I’ve always been a little lonely, feeling like I’m the only one I know who tries very hard.

If it doesn’t fit, ridicule it and back burner it, I guess that’s my way.

Brain hemispheres didn’t not fit, I was just ignoring it – the calculation vs emotion meme didn’t seem to bear on my abuse focus anyhow, for me the abuse hurts both of that anyhow, you feelings and your IQ, so drawing that line didn’t come to bear on anything I was holding dear. But this new take bears!

It’s more small picture vs big picture, apparently, left vs right brain, like, hard little facts vs higher levels of complexity – there was an elegant little test with pigeons, by covering one eye at a time, it seems that one side of the pigeon’s brain finds tiny food among tiny non-food items, seeds in the dirt, while the other side of the brain sees the larger world around, the lay of the land, watches for hawks – bigger picture.

I have a small concern there, very small, but still: pigeons are fearless. I’ve watched them not avoid predation at all on my TV (huge catfish were one such predator). I hear the ring-necked doves on the mainland take to the sky in a lightning storm in some mad game of chicken! Perhaps you saw the Facebook video a few years back of that toddler grabbing a pigeon by the head and taking its cracker? Did you notice, the bird is utterly untraumatized and doesn’t even walk away?

LOL – it doesn’t hurt the theory, just that the hawk example may not actually work for this exact creature, and I don’t assume McGilchrist is a pigeon biologist. This right brained “big picture” is unhurt by one small left-brain detail example being off – but. Ha.

It does sort of suggest he hasn’t talked to Bob Trivers, who was indeed a pigeon biologist, and that’s never an endorsement in my mind! I sent Iain an email suggesting just that, got a polite answer from a student or someone. Ha, boy I’m having some fun here. Again, not a criticism, would be an appeal to authority anyway, and again, this pigeon detail doesn’t matter, pigeons surely have a big picture whether being preyed upon is part of it or not – and I know, it’s bizarre if it’s not, but it seems that way with them!

I’m just saying, dating service to the intellectuals, you two boys complement each other nicely, I plan to read McGilchrist, but it’s taken me three years, the last book, I’m having issues, so I’ll watch the films and project, conjecture, “extrapolate” I’ll say, if it looks good! Please let me stop having so much fun sometime soon. Here’s the thing.

Trivers’ Folly of Fools, the deception stuff, and the interpretive function suggested for the right brain by McGilchrist et al., I assume he’s not alone, that seems all one to me – and if right brain damage is truly a legitimate way to think about it, then maybe I am the third leg of that table, and it’s abuse causing it, right?

I jump ahead, part of the process for me, go too far and then see if it’s supportable, but stuff comes to me as one liners sometimes and I have to catch up –

Left brain dominance is a right brained idea that says “hey, we should listen to left brain” when we’re stressed, in the ol’ fight or fly debate.

OK, bloody obvious, you put it that way. All part of the what’s the word, the autonomic response? – no research required.

Stress makes you fast and stupid? No excrement, Einstein! No dung, Dirac. But OMG, is it that easy to shut down our higher processing? I mean, is it really half shut down all the time? The audit is proceeding at quite a pace.

He talked about “peaks of civilization,” Homeric age Greece, classical times, the renaissance – another foible, I think, classic European ignoring of Babylon and such, but again, not a deal breaker – he said they rose and fell on a crest of left brain dominance I think – rose on it? I think? – but his point was fell from it, and I see a crack for me to slide into there, too, my general split from the whole civilization meme. He said our attempts to control one another – civilization – is what stresses us out and leaves the right brain out of the loop, and yeah, sure. He even pointed to my cause – these ostensibly legitimate attempts!

Hey, there’s one out there like me!

I’m dropping the microphone.

That was the eureka moment, right there.

See you in ten minutes, probably.

 

 

Jeff

Sept. 24th., 2019

The Twin Studies Got it So Wrong

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Sometimes, when you learn a new thing, a new principle, a new scientific principle, some of your existing “knowledge” needs auditing, updating.

A classic case in point pretty recently, is the Rat Park story, where the classic study showed rats to be subject to addiction and opiates to be addictive to some huge percentage of them – but that on a more recent re-visit to the study, the basic environment was considered, the bare, concrete and steel sterile environment the original test was run in proved to be a large part of the puzzle, that when the rats had the semblance of a better life, the drug’s addictive power was lessened.

I’m a classic crackpot, a one trick pony. I have a single new principle I spend all my time on, Murphy’s Law of Nature – the idea that Nurture is real, it’s just not positive. The idea that abuse is a form of Nurture that has always and forever produced actual results. The idea it audits today is the twin studies, and the apparent victory of Nature over Nurture that they have been touted as.

Spectacular phenotypic results, right?

Separated twins, raised thousands of miles apart having very specific common behaviours, magic! Beware of magical results in science. Multiple Personality Disorder you would only believe if you believed in magic, in the transmigration of souls – what were all the “personalities” supposed to be? What I want to say about the reported results of the twin studies is this: it is absolutely first year biology that phenotype is genes AND environment, simple arithmetic, that the folks writing these studies up swept under the rug – yes, two and two equal four, and here’s your four – but one of the twos was really a one, or a three!

You can tell me the different household was a different environment, but four minus two equals two. You had another two there, your “different environments” weren’t, not in a way that actually affects what you are testing for later, period. Science troll boys – save your breath, I won’t be turned from this. You got it completely backwards, in the most basic sense.

But you have proved something we need to know, exactly that, that human child-rearing is the same, the world over! All the differences we argue about don’t add up to anything! If there’s anything good about it, we all do it – but, Murphy’s Law of Nature, there really isn’t, it’s the bad stuff that matters – and if there’s something bad about it, we all do it. This is what I’m always trying to say.

 

Jeff

Sept. 15th., 2019

Your Outsize Cranium

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

I believe the usual theory about why humans are so different goes to this outsize brain, isn’t that right? I’m going to talk about that although David Suzuki made a point in the Nature documentary about the latest Tyrannosaurus data that bird brains are very dense with neurons compared to ours and that the amount of real estate your brain occupies may not be as indicative of processing power as we think. He said birds are very smart, and the apparently small-brained dinosaurs, especially predators, were likely also quick on the draw. But we aren’t suggesting we outsmarted birds or lizards, just the other ancient chimps, so the volume of sand your cranium can hold is probably meaningful. I guess.

The theory of that, as I understand it, at least in our current, rather male and war-centric origin story is that the selective pressure for that brain to grow so was nothing other than us, other people, or other groups of people, and our conflicts with one another. A Red Queen’s game to be sure, all of us driving up our hat sizes to stay competitive, just to stay in the race, running in place.

So what comes next is a dualism.

On the one hand, our conflicts are sort of boundless, everything is in play, so to speak, and so these expensive organs have adapted to use everything, meaning, as Steven Pinker points out (within his job description, I think) that we have a sort of any purpose processor, we can plug many sorts of problems into it and work on them – in theory, even if said problems are not specifically evolved for, like all the new things we have brought into the world, for better and worse. It ain’t universal, of course, but somewhere on the path to that. Perhaps all the real estate is for that module, as Pinker put it, but I don’t think he said so specifically, I don’t think we know that. Do we assume it? I guess.

On the other hand, fighting is fighting. On the other hand, if conflict grew this thing, then maybe that’s all the damned thing does. That’s what selected it, that’s what grew it, fine, that’s all in the past, we say, Pinker says, maybe.

But surely that’s not what the bloody thing is for! Is it?

What I’m saying, what I’m always trying to say is, if it is, if that’s what it’s for, then we need to know that and factor that awful setup into our thinking. Conflict isn’t what is going to get us out of the present mess and it’s never going to get us to a better way of life, not the first tiny step towards the utopia if we just keep letting it do what it was made to do, if that’s what it was made to do. Plus –

What if, and this does seem the most likely, what if they’re both true?

What if all that real estate is the free-floating, general purpose processor, and it’s just us choosing to use it for almost nothing but our fights?

Wouldn’t that be a sad state of affairs. Well, wouldn’t that have been a sad state of affairs, I mean. But what if we had the choice?

 

Jeff

Sept. 15th., 2019

 

If that were what it was for, or if we believed that, if that was all we used it for, then I suppose intelligence and fighting skills would all look the same to us, aggression might appear intelligent, duplicity might, treachery might – anything that wins a fight would be “smart.” Of course anything that didn’t would be “stupid.”

I get it. Letting yourself be killed probably counts as stupid.

Problem is, all peace is in that category. Peace is going to require some surgery, we have to separate your libido from your amygdala – and your aggression from your intelligence.

 

Jeff

In the Beginning

Jeff/neighsayer14 Comments

A neat little “just so” package that couldn’t possibly be true, except . . .

I think AST may have a suggestion as to how we began, how we got on this path to what we’re calling civilization, between three elements, the organization of group animals into hierarchies with the dominance of the alphas, AST, which describes the technology of abuse (including the technology of punishment and the human “moral” framework), and finally, perhaps a foundational case of Trivers’ evolved self deception.

The primate alpha starts the abuse, to establish his privilege, and his victims, stressed, hurting, or simply hurting socially, turn and take their hurt on someone they can, and so the abuse, like the stuff of plumbing problems, flows downhill in a champagne fountain of cortisol – I believe this is Sapolsky’s description of the average baboon troop, in my own words, of course. I think we see similar stuff in the chimpanzees and I think most folks think that was us at some point – even those who don’t think it’s still us today, that is – so that was the first condition and the first bit of science, biological dominance behaviours and deflection, and the resulting abuse-sharing pyramid scheme.

At some point, the champagne fountain of stress and pain becomes entrenched, and this is where maybe we engage the rationalizations, the self deception – “I meant to do that,” kind of thing. “No, I didn’t beat your ass because I’m a subordinate and the boss beat mine! I did it because I’m the alpha in our relationship and I say it’s good for you.” You know, prepare you for adulthood, when the boss’s kids do this to you – “my” idea, not clearly the boss’ agenda. And then this whole, species-wide crap about how it’s good for you, how you’re “spoiled” without it. So, that was the third condition, us lying to ourselves, and maybe the effect among these causes, to some degree, the baboon volcano of fear and violence that encompasses us all and starts with some alpha swine over-prioritizing himself and ends with us all explaining to our kids, “no, this was my idea, and this is good for you.”

I meant to do that.

Despite the lies we tell regarding why we do what we do and what effects our actions can have, though, there is and clearly has to be an actual reason or several that we do these things, a powerful reason this behaviour took our species over and won’t let go, and I have ranted almost endlessly trying to make the point that we antisocialize ourselves in service of conflict, of crappy old game theory. And I’m agin’ it. Whenever I’m reading some description of nasty old nature, I always think I’m hearing approval, advocacy for violent selection processes – not what I’m trying to do at all, I think I’m describing hidden, secret nasty old nature, not to say roll with it, but to say this is the trap here, the invisible fence, this is what we need to break out of.

Which comes first, the selection for abuse, or the cover story, I can’t tell. One would think they happen together, but perhaps there have been and still are places where no pretense of “good for you” is even made, times and/or places where “good for me” was all you got. So I think, in terms of causality and history, the deceit is the latest element, the modern, perhaps liberal adaptation we apply over our antisocialization – making people “good,” teaching them “right from wrong.” Surely your liberals beat their children to make them non-violent, at least that’s supposed to be the plan. So now they think that what was always a single purpose technology – violence and desensitization in service of the troop’s warrior goals – now they think it’s a magic wand, violence and desensitization in service of whatever we say! Nothing simple and understandable here, cause matched to an effect, no – we apply a single stimulus and get whatever result we wanted, is this a great country or what.

I liked Wrangham’s synopsis of capital punishment as an evolved way to deal with tyrants – we should try it sometime.

I mean it sounds great, but I’m not sure we ever did, not regularly, at least. The alpha sets the tone and it permeates everything in our lives, this human lifestyle is his. There have almost certainly been some shining examples, but the mainstream evolution thread here is the dark side, I think we should admit that before it’s all over, any minute now. Warrior society is where we all have Stockholm Syndrome and appear to love the randomly violent alpha (a predator of sorts) and if a bunch of reasonable men want to kill him, they’re going to have the whole world to go through first.

All I’m saying, and I can’t believe it’s taking me so long, and why it seems so strange from my angle or something, is that the baboon pyramid of abuse is very much still in effect, and it is still the major cause and effect loop in human society. The punishment/morality function we insist upon is a minor thread, as lovely and as fictional as Wrangham’s control of tyrants by majority action. Understandable sort of error, we’re trying to make the best of a bad situation, trying to salvage some good from the trauma. By the by, the only example that comes to mind is Julius Caesar, maybe the French Revolution – how many alphas have been taken down by their lessers in history? That’s the next alpha’s job, isn’t it?

My idea to call AST a condition, the second in our list, goes like this: AST is the practice of physical and social abuse in order to activate physiological and psychological genetic changes towards aggression. This I believe to be a species-wide phenomenon that supports our lifestyle of group conflict, making us all mean enough to defend the homeland and crazy enough to attack the enemy’s homeland. It is therefore, at present, a Red Queen’s race, with every human group basically as tough and murderous as the next, but one for survival, and therefore an important evolved function which manifests as systems of crime and punishment, rules and penalties – naughty steps, timeout rooms, prisons . . . hey.

It’s good for you – I mean if being tough is good for you, if life is a fight and only the tough survive, then some abuse is good for you, some practice at least, some practical knowledge, knowing how to fight – but it’s not all good, is it? I wouldn’t object to simply knowing how to fight, being able, I sort of hoped my kids would take an interest for their self-defence but they had zero interest, maybe because I tried not to abuse them or even punish them. I think though, antisocialization is an emotional process, a “strong” fellow who can fight and defend is generally one who started by wanting to hurt people, a trait perhaps present in us all by default, but certainly mostly enhanced by pain and abuse. My point here though, is this is what “good” means in contexts of child-rearing or adult attempts at behaviour modification, in conversations about law and order, crime and punishment –  antisocial, wanting to, able to fight. It’s what “spoiled” means – an early childhood free of abuse means that kid will never be the willing, driven, snarling soldier he might have been. Some things you just can’t teach.

This is what it means in reality, I mean, whether we know it or not. We punish someone – apply some legal and scientifically defined abuse as a deterrent – and they get “better.” They don’t always get better in a good way, don’t always stop breaking rules and such – but they get better the other way, desensitized, tough.

OK, I’ve lost track, giving my usual definitions, where were we?

It starts with random violence, maybe random alpha violence, then to deflection, and then to the straight up leveraging of abuse to produce aggressive soldiers, and finally to some upside down situation where we’re still employing that technology, still leveraging abuse to toughen our kids and criminals – but all this pre-existing structure is at odds with our modern, so far only ostensible desire for peace on Earth – so we just say “makes you good” – a word with no content whatsoever, a simple value judgement with no references to the how or why of the situation. Don’t worry, it’ll be “good.” You’re going to “love” this.

Again, it’s all good as long as we need these tough little psychopaths to protect us from all those tough little psychopaths, I guess. We have been stuck in this game forever, and despite that humankind is starting to have higher goals, this layer of self deception, this widespread conflation of what “good” we achieve with our morality of pain and coercion keeps us at the warrior society stage forever.

 

 

Jeff

Aug. 31st., 2019

Your Biological Goals

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

Some thing I keep losing, the thought I never get around to somehow, is this, for the warriors, for the Nazis: what I’m saying, AST, the conflicts, the wars – these are the goals, the goals of your biology, they are not a means to any end, the journey is the destination, the middle of the war is the victory this function seeks. The goal isn’t racial purity – who needs a Nazi soldier in a pure world? Then who would you kill?

The goal is the fight, eternally.

Many of us already grasp that one of Nature’s goals is not ours: maximizing your breeding. Many humans find their lives improved by getting free of that primate drive to whatever degree they can, I certainly have, and getting free of that will take some reason to exist away from the warriors of the world – but why can’t we see that’s the attitude to take with our natural urge to conflict as well? I mean, we think we do, and we do have some little success at it from time to time – but this is where I come in, where Antisocialization Theory comes in, what do we try to stop the fighting, punishments and abuse? And when that’s not working, then what, more of it?

I am objecting to this idea of morality as I acknowledge it: this is the stupid, violent behaviour we have that we have been calling morality forever. It doesn’t stop the fighting; it is the fighting.

Racial purity is the most impossible, most evolutionary uninformed concept ever voiced, the opposite of evolution, which is variation – so it’s an adaptive fiction, just keeps us in the fight. The purple ones hate the orange ones and the orange ones persecute the green ones  – the point isn’t which colour is better, even for the racists. The point of the ideology is life is a fight, we need to be fighting and killing somebody, and skin colour is such obvious and easy criteria, like God gave us team uniforms.

They want to choose their victims by race, we say “racist.”

They want to persecute LGBTQ folks, “homophobic.” (I have issues with aggression labelled as fear, seems the homophobes chose their label themselves, but it makes the list with its Newspeak name.)

I swear to God, maybe y’all don’t see it – but you are arguing about who we should persecute and kill all day long and the selection process is not the point, the point is by doing so you’re still allowing that we must kill somebody, like the haters are allowed to hate, they’re allowed to go on their rabble-rousing missions until we all decide, wait, no – save those folks. We like them.

You wanna be a wild, snarling animal like you portray your targets, fine, but don’t pretend there’s any end to justify the means – the means are the end, warrior life is a warrior’s goal. You blaming some “them” for the wars as you sneak off to your secret Nazi terrorist training camp? Biology fools us all.

You hear it all day long from the bad guys, we “don’t like,” “the bible says don’t” – and apparently for them, the rest doesn’t need to be said. Of course if you “don’t like” someone you have to kill them! This is what a core belief is, the one everyone has so you can never even know it’s there. We just argue about who gets the treatment, and honestly most of it is “my group shouldn’t get the treatment.”

No-one needs the treatment. I’ve often wondered why there isn’t a coalition of everyone not white and male among the resistance, among the complainers of the world, but as usual, AST brings answers where other theories obfuscate: we all think someone needs to be killed, so no-one is arguing against that, as such. No argument against war and genocide on principle, just who shall it be next? For instance, a lot of decent folks think that’s the solution for Nazis, I mean you can’t talk to the bastards – yes, I’m trying anyway. But seriously, even the nicest of us must hold this belief, because I don’t ever see anyone saying don’t ever kill anyone, ever, for nuthin’.

The real war is the struggle between the war and peace crowds and as long as we’re at war, the soldiers are winning against their own peaceful people. Admit it. If you’ve ever thought that far ahead, you know your war isn’t ever supposed to end. A nation built on war doesn’t retire and live in peace.

 

Jeff

Aug. 29th., 2019

Why Biology Blows Minds

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I learned some biology, read a few biology books after I turned fifty, and promptly suffered a medication-assisted mental breakdown that jettisoned me out of my life. A famous leading biologist suffered such crises while learning biology and while developing some huge theories (meant in the grander sense, not of guesses). Two fellows, that is hardly a trend, but this is only my knowledge, and honestly, I haven’t checked for a larger trend. Even if it’s only the two of us, it’s worth a look, considering one of them is me.

This was three years ago for me now, and of course learning the truth about the biological world probably wasn’t the problem, the problem must be the setup of an early life without biological knowledge. Learning something that you never knew before, that you knew nothing about before, that’s one thing, but if you learn something and it breaks you, then you were thinking something blatantly wrong about it and you didn’t probably even know you were thinking it.

That sentence could be a synopsis of The Blank Slate, and perhaps that’s part of it, it did help me see that I had some version of the ghost in the machine going on, that I thought of “the mind” as something ethereal, but really, these discrete, blatant conversations about invisible things or not, these we litigate out loud, we’re not shaken by questions of materialism anymore. I’m not, I don’t think. It’s got to be something less conscious than that, less debatable than that to break people.

So, you all know how this goes, now I have to finagle it so that it’s seeing, or nearly seeing my antisocialization thing that does it to us, I mean probably. I’ve come to expect it, it’s gotten to where I expect that every honest exploration is going to take me there – but I must say, it’s not obvious to me at the moment, not like the rest of these angles I’ve thought I had it rather easy with. That answer is what came along with the crisis I had, but I don’t think it caused it – although I should stop just before that and recuse myself. That was a trauma. If anyone is in a position not to properly analyze it, I suppose everybody else knows that would be me. There was a ramping up of trouble though, with this insight at the peak, not at the start . . . still.

Of course, the other fellow didn’t have my insight at all, few have, he had his own, many of them, and many proven and accepted and now a big part of the world of real knowledge. Wait – was the first one relatedness theory? Because that might read as a rather cold, brutal refutation of the loving world someone may have been selling us, that love and family really is a function of our microscopic parts and described with some arithmetic. That might hurt a sensitive person, it’s the same sort of emotional kick in the gonads as my idea, maybe. Ouch.

I think this one stops here for awhile, I think long and slow, and this is sort of news for me at the moment, that it’s not only me and my idea that . . . offend, when we learn deeper truths about the world. Big words exist for this, deconstructionism, decolonizing your mind, but that’s not how I talk, not how I need things spelled out for me. I’m rather taken with the other fellow’s language, deception, self-deception, and maybe it’s not even the clash of the lie with the new truth that hurts so much as all that, but rather that we fight these battles alone and the prize for victory is also solitude.

Wow, that got awkward quickly.

 

Jeff

June 2nd., 2019