We have two Edens, neither exist.
The first Eden is the obvious one, the low hanging fruit of hedonism one. Where you only eat cake, have sex all the time and are drunk everyday. (or whatever your preferences are) Everyone can describe this place all you have to do is ask them "What would you do, if you could do anything without consequences?"
The other Eden is more complicated to describe. It is the lifestyle that would optimize your physical and psychological health. It is the world where you slept just enough, ate exactly what your body needed, spent enough time connected with loved ones. You'd wake up happy, healthy, body buzzing with natural endorphin's. A perfect balance of stress and relaxation, fulfilling activities during the day. But all the simple pleasures in the first one would be denied you.
Look at how different these two places are. One is easily described by anyone in an instant, the other would be a matter of some great debate among all kinds of health professionals. Not to mention all the spiritual and psychological opinions you could collect on the subject on the perfect life balance and proper kinds of relationships. But there is in principle an accurate description of that second Eden. Its just that we don't know what it would be like, or how to get there.
Furthermore both are impossible in their own ways. The simple Eden leads to immediate trouble. Embracing your Id's demands like that would be a disaster. You'd all but instantly have ruined health and relationships, even in a magical world where you could do anything you wanted the physical and emotional reality would crush you. And the enlightened Eden would be ruined by the constant temptation of small deviations from the ideal. Surely one drink, or beer couldn't pull you away from the idea, but that you could not longer stay up late or eat badly would drive you crazy.
But consider the purpose of each ideal, from an evolutionary perspective. The easy Eden is a collection of drives and desires that is available to introspection. This collection of instincts got us from our evolutionary home to where we are now. There is a context in which these desires mesh with our ideal state. The second Eden isn't knowable to each person, because it wouldn't have been necessary to our forebears. In a world with no technology, processed food and mass media, all those desires that we currently count as unhealthy, or prurient, or sinful, would have lead (and in fact did lead) to evolutionary success.
Your Id isn't an insane force for destruction, it is a compass on the wrong map. These two Edens were the same place in our evolutionary past, it is only the contemporary context that has split them. We still have the drives and instincts that made sense 40,000 years ago.
The story that we are fallen and sinful is a destructive and misleading myth. We are not bad, or weak or morally corrupted, we simply are no longer where we grew up. Cut yourself some slack and know that you are not mislead by some inner darkness, but guided by instincts that are out of date.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Saturday, April 5, 2014
addicition versus supernormal stimuli
Supernormal stimuli are stimuli that have an overpowering effect on an animal. There is a bird that when it is a fledgling will peck at a tongue depressor with two red dots on it instead of its mothers beak in a futile attempt to get food. The bird have evolved to peck at things with red dots in order to get food and the psychological mechanism is easy to hack because there is no evolutionary pressure for the fledgling to be good at figuring out that its being tricked. Evolution is sometimes a very efficient craftsman and in this case the the feeding motivation is very simple "peck at things with red dots" and because of whatever peculiarities of the instinct, more red dots is more attractive to the fledgling bird.
Could we say that this bird is addicted to red dots to the exclusion of food? That it has lost itself in its attraction to basic and over-simple pleasures to the detriment of its nutrition and future well being? This seems obviously wrong.
Its an animal with simple drives and it is being tricked by an artificial environment designed to exploit the way that it thinks. And is it in anyway a failure of the bird that it was not given the capacity to discover such a perverse fraud? That seems like blaming a rhino for being bad at ballet, its true but you can hardly expect it to matter to the average rhino in the wild.
I've been thinking about all of this because of a book that I'm reading Supernormal Stimuli. But while I was considering the implications of this an old debate came to mind, that of behavior addictions. What is it when someone plays too many video games?
It clearly isn't the same thing as alcoholism, or cocaine addiction. But it (in the strong case) is clearly compulsive and damaging in a related way. That the person is doing something that they themselves will tell you that they would rather they weren't doing. That the afflicted person is out of control of themselves in some problematic way. That the felt rewards of gaming have fallen out of alignment with the actual rewards of (going to work, socializing, hygiene, you get the idea).
Perhaps there is something supernormal about gaming, or subnormal about a customer service job. Addictions is a strange category and clearly has too many disparate members to be a coherent category. And I think, especially in the case of the behavioral addictions the role of (super/sub)normal stimuli is at least interesting.
Could we say that this bird is addicted to red dots to the exclusion of food? That it has lost itself in its attraction to basic and over-simple pleasures to the detriment of its nutrition and future well being? This seems obviously wrong.
Its an animal with simple drives and it is being tricked by an artificial environment designed to exploit the way that it thinks. And is it in anyway a failure of the bird that it was not given the capacity to discover such a perverse fraud? That seems like blaming a rhino for being bad at ballet, its true but you can hardly expect it to matter to the average rhino in the wild.
I've been thinking about all of this because of a book that I'm reading Supernormal Stimuli. But while I was considering the implications of this an old debate came to mind, that of behavior addictions. What is it when someone plays too many video games?
It clearly isn't the same thing as alcoholism, or cocaine addiction. But it (in the strong case) is clearly compulsive and damaging in a related way. That the person is doing something that they themselves will tell you that they would rather they weren't doing. That the afflicted person is out of control of themselves in some problematic way. That the felt rewards of gaming have fallen out of alignment with the actual rewards of (going to work, socializing, hygiene, you get the idea).
Perhaps there is something supernormal about gaming, or subnormal about a customer service job. Addictions is a strange category and clearly has too many disparate members to be a coherent category. And I think, especially in the case of the behavioral addictions the role of (super/sub)normal stimuli is at least interesting.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Abstract
Homo Sapiens evolved to survive in an evolutionary niche that looked very little like what we now surround ourselves with. Several of our physical, psychological and behavioral adaptations, which drove our success, are now deeply out of synch with contemporary life. And in the last 2 - 3 hundred years technological and cultural change have sped up to the point that traditional values have become less and less adaptive. The values that got people through the middle ages are not the same that got them through the renaissance which are not those that will help someone through the challenges of today's global economy. What I am proposing is a new set of crutches to help people with the cultural environment that we currently face.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
The Four F's
Feeding
Fighting
Fleeing
Fucking
These are the four basic drives for all animals. I bring this point up to say that fear, hunger, lust and anger are not just inborn, not just unavoidable, but necessary for the survival of any animal. These four feelings are the basic virtues of animal life. If you aren't willing to fight, flee, eat and reproduce then you are an evolutionary zero, no one will even find your bones.
The problem with these drives in us is that we have changed our environment such that our drives our out of synch with our surroundings. Our needs are so easily met, and the risk to our lives are so vanishingly small (for those of us lucky enough to avoid the underbelly of our great country) that fear and hunger are powerful all out of proportion to what it takes to keep safe and fed. And so we end up anxious and overweight, not because we are bad, but because we are, in some sense, animals in captivity.
Animals taken outside of their natural habitat need special treatment in order to stay healthy. You cant just put a tiger in a cage and expect it to be OK. (Well you can and we have but its obviously a bad plan at this point). I think that this basic idea of tigers and cages applies to homo sapiens and office buildings. We have taken ourselves out of our native environment and allowed ourselves to build up a new environment without taking a long distance view of what we have done.
We have built our own zoo, which sadly is too much like the inmates building their own asylum.
Fighting
Fleeing
Fucking
These are the four basic drives for all animals. I bring this point up to say that fear, hunger, lust and anger are not just inborn, not just unavoidable, but necessary for the survival of any animal. These four feelings are the basic virtues of animal life. If you aren't willing to fight, flee, eat and reproduce then you are an evolutionary zero, no one will even find your bones.
The problem with these drives in us is that we have changed our environment such that our drives our out of synch with our surroundings. Our needs are so easily met, and the risk to our lives are so vanishingly small (for those of us lucky enough to avoid the underbelly of our great country) that fear and hunger are powerful all out of proportion to what it takes to keep safe and fed. And so we end up anxious and overweight, not because we are bad, but because we are, in some sense, animals in captivity.
Animals taken outside of their natural habitat need special treatment in order to stay healthy. You cant just put a tiger in a cage and expect it to be OK. (Well you can and we have but its obviously a bad plan at this point). I think that this basic idea of tigers and cages applies to homo sapiens and office buildings. We have taken ourselves out of our native environment and allowed ourselves to build up a new environment without taking a long distance view of what we have done.
We have built our own zoo, which sadly is too much like the inmates building their own asylum.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Bibliography (on going)
Compass of Pleasure
Regina Rini
Joshua green
Supernormal Stimuli
There is no God and he is Always with You
pg 79: The brain is an organ whose job it is to make sense of the world we encounter so that we can operate efficiently. It does this by ignoring most of the input it receives and then slicing the rest into usable chunks.
Sex at Dawn
Principia Discordia
The Power of Myth
Why We Get Fat
The Design of Everyday Things
Thinking Fast and Slow
Kinds of Minds
thinking fast and slow
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weakness-will/
Regina Rini
Joshua green
Supernormal Stimuli
There is no God and he is Always with You
pg 79: The brain is an organ whose job it is to make sense of the world we encounter so that we can operate efficiently. It does this by ignoring most of the input it receives and then slicing the rest into usable chunks.
Sex at Dawn
Principia Discordia
The Power of Myth
Why We Get Fat
The Design of Everyday Things
Thinking Fast and Slow
Kinds of Minds
thinking fast and slow
Stumbling on Happiness
Stanford Philosophy encyclopediahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weakness-will/
Monday, March 10, 2014
A defensive preface note
If at first you don't understand, go look up the fucking words. I hate the idea that every sentence should be accessible to every reader. This book is build for the person who has read all the primary sources and just hasn't noticed the patterns that I have. The only time I'm going to reiterate the primary source is when that source sucks. If I'm making a reference to a good read then you're going to have to go to either wikipedia or amazon before you find out what I'm talking about. And if you don't like it then you should have read the preface before you bought the book.
the organizing idea
What can we learn about how to treat ourselves from existent wisdom and science once we admit that we are animal that don't have souls.
Why are you unhappy?
1) Because you've been told that you are better than animals, and not just the smartest one
2) That your feelings are flaws in your cognition, not the foundation of it.
3) That pleasure is sinful and dangerous, as opposed to just an unreliable compass
4) That the key to understanding human nature is found in the bible, not in the scientific study of the human animal.
With these 4 ideas (to be reviewed and amended as we go forward) I will reexamine established wisdom and show which are helpful for a secular person in the present day and age.
Why are you unhappy?
1) Because you've been told that you are better than animals, and not just the smartest one
2) That your feelings are flaws in your cognition, not the foundation of it.
3) That pleasure is sinful and dangerous, as opposed to just an unreliable compass
4) That the key to understanding human nature is found in the bible, not in the scientific study of the human animal.
With these 4 ideas (to be reviewed and amended as we go forward) I will reexamine established wisdom and show which are helpful for a secular person in the present day and age.
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