On Sep 9, 7:03Â am, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:> On Sep 8, 4:35 pm, Joseph Humming
humanisation.org> wrote:
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>>> How are we to use our unique intelligence? Just to be a little more
>> skilled at this and a little more knowing at that? Or is there more
>> still?
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>> So, anyway, we set off, circumscribed and defined by our culture and
>> our creativity. Were we aware that we were a unique creature engaged
>> in a colonisation of the planet? I don't see it. At every point our
>> own range of human response - religious, artistic, political - seems
>> to have served our needs.
>
>> But not knowing anything of our evolution, of our connection to the
>> chain of life, of our global reach, of the genesis of the globe
>> itself, of the universe, of our essential individuality...we were
>> doomed to endless error. Such was the nature of our colonisation, shot
>> through with error and opprrssion.
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>> Andf then - quite recently - we found a way through. We embraced
>> technology, permitted knowledge and established freedom in many
>> places. So now what? Do we still just respond to circumstances  - as
>> we have always done - or do we take a deeper view of ourselves?
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>> But maybe we are wired to respond to our own creations? Maybe we are
>> incapable of responding to the fact of our uniqueness in the chain of
>> being? Or will there come at some stage a shift in our response, a
>> gradual acceptance and valorisation of our potential - and destiny -
>> as a species? And if such a shift is to come will it be mediated by
>> Asperger-like people who fail to be awed by the flawed products of our
>> creativity and cling instead to a dogged truth?
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>> Joseph Humming
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> If the basic premise of the book, The Paleolithic Prescription, is to
> look at the foods man's body evolved on, what has man been eating for
> the last 50,000 years, and asks pivital the question; how is this
> different from todays diet? How can this paleolithic diet be
> approximated with modern foods? What would the heath benefits be? How
> does the modern diet differ in salt content, fat content, carbohydrate
> content? What diseases are more prevalent with todays diet? Then maybe
> we need a wider Paleolthic Prescription for many other problems that
> arise from ancient human biases.
>
>
http://www.amazon.com/Paleolithic-Prescription-Program-Exercise-Desig...
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> The Savanna Principle is a theory about the evolutionary roots of the
> human brain. ...it asserts that the environment that molded the human
> brain through natural selection is drastically different than the
> world humans currently live in. This disparity between what man was
> designed to do and what he currently can do leads to a host of
> societal difficulties
>
Yeah, I get that. I just wonder how it is relevant to what I'm trying
to say.
> The human brain, and all of its psychological mechanisms, are adapted
> to the environment of evolutionary adaptedness and are therefore
> biased in favor of viewing and responding to the world as if it were
> still the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. The psychological
> mechanisms we possess in our brain today are still the same
> psychological mechanisms that we possessed in the environment of
> evolutionary adaptedness, just as our hand and pancreas are still the
> same as they were 10 000 years ago. The human brain may have
> difficulty comprehending entities and situations that did not exist in
> the ancestral environment;
Okay, but evolution did not happen overnight - and it has not
concluded.. A recent report at the British Association of Scientists
suggests that we are still evolving.
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> For example, ancestors who craved sugary and fatty foods lived longer
> and were healthier than those who didn't, in a time that such things
> were relatively scarce. Today, the abundance of such temptations leads
> to obesity and heart disease. ...It is not impossible to overcome this
> bias through conscious effort, but it is often difficult. This is why
> we still respond to sweets and fats today as if we still lived in the
> environment that molded the human brain through natural selection
> where such high-calorie foods were rare and malnutrition was an
> imminent problem for survival, and we have the strong urge to consume
> a large quantity of sweets and fats (even though many of us can
> consciously overcome the urge. ...the human brain [probably] has
> unconscious difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and
> situations that did not exist in the EEA.
But you seem to be moving too freely between body and brain....?
>
> For instance, one of the entities that we know for sure did not exist
> in the environment that molded the human brain through natural
> selection is television. ...humans [probably] have difficulty
> recognizing and dealing with TV. This indeed appears to be the case.
> People who watch certain types of TV shows are more satisfied with
> their friendships, just like they are if they have more friends or
> spend more time socializing with them in real life. It appears that
> the human brain has difficulty distinguishing between real friends and
> imaginary ones they see on TV, because it did not exist in the
> environment that molded the human brain through natural selection. It
> is this fundamental observation, that our brain and its psychological
> mechanisms are strongly biased to view and respond to the environment
> as if it were still the environment that molded the human brain
> through natural selection, which leads to the Savanna Principle.
>
> ...general intelligence evolved in order to handle evolutionarily-
> novel problems. The logical convergence of these two separate lines of
> research leads to the prediction that the human difficulty in dealing
> with evolutionarily-novel stimuli interacts with general intelligence,
> such that the Savanna Principle holds stronger among the less
> intelligent than among the more intelligent. Further analyses of the
> U.S. General Social Survey demonstrate that less intelligent men and
> women may have greater difficulty separating TV characters from their
> real friends than more intelligent men and women.
But...ancient man, from what we know, seemed to experience the same
identification: with heroes and with tribal totems and suchlike...?
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>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna_principlehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna_principlehttp...
>
> ...by appealing to the core principles of neurobiology, evolutionary
> theory, and cognitive science, practitioners of a new human science
> can reach a deeper understanding of why we feel certain courses of
> action to be intrinsically correct. They can help us to understand why
> we have moral feelings. For now, though, the scientists can offer no
> guidance on whether we are really correct in making certain decisions,
> because no way is known to define what is correct without total
> reference to the moral feelings under scrutiny. Perhaps this is the
> ultimate burden of the free will bequeathed to us by our genes: in the
> final analysis, even when we know what we are likely to do and why,
> each of us must still choose.
This is most interesting - and contentious. Since most, if not all,
of our actions are carried on in ignorance of what you describe are
you suggesting that knowledge of such processes would alter our
behaviour? I wonder.
>
> The challenge to science and philosophy to solve this dilemma is very
> great—in our opinion, there is none greater. Society, through its laws
> and institutions, already regulates behavior. But it does so in
> virtual blind ignorance of the deep reaches of human nature. By
> relying on moral intuition, on those satisfying visceral feelings of
> right and wrong, people remain enslaved by their genes and culture.
> Their minds develop along the channels set by the hereditary
> epigenetic rules, and while they exercise free will in moment-by-
> moment choices, this faculty remains superficial and its value to the
> individual is largely illusory. Only by penetrating to the physical
> basis of moral thought and considering its evolutionary meaning will
> people have the power to control their own lives. They will then be in
> a better position to choose ethical precepts and the forms of social
> regulation needed to maintain the precepts.
>
> Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
> Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson -
1983http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
>
> ...innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and
> unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality
> evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon
> be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human
> values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political
> practice flow.
>
> Philosophers themselves, most of whom lack an evolutionary
> perspective, have not devoted much time to the problem. They examine
> the precepts of ethical systems with reference to their consequences
> and not their origins. Thus John Rawls opens his influential A Theory
> of Justice (1971) with a proposition he regards as beyond dispute: "In
> a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as
> settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
> bargaining or to the calculus of social interests." Robert Nozick
> begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with an equally firm
> proposition: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person
> or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong
> and far-reaching are these rights they raise the question of what, if
> anything, the state and its omcials.may do." These two premises are
> somewhat different in content, and they lead to radically different
> prescriptions. Rawls would allow rigid social control to secure as
> close an approach as possible to the equal distribution of society's
> rewards. Nozick sees the ideal society as one governed by a minimal
> state, empowered only to protect its citizens from force and fraud,
> and with unequal distribution of rewards wholly permissible. Rawls
> rejects the meritocracy; Nozick accepts it as desirable except in
> those cases where local communities voluntarily decide to experiment
> with egalitarianism. Like everyone else, philosophers measure their
> personal emotional responses to various alternatives as though
> consulting a hidden oracle.
Yeah, I see what you're saying here. But I wonder whether this relates
more to the actual conditions of existence than to the inherent
processes of our brain. .
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> That oracle resides in the deep emotional centers of the brain, most
> probably within the limbic system, a complex array of neurons and
> hormone-secreting cells located just beneath the "thinking" portion of
> the cerebral cortex. Human emotional responses and the more general
> ethical practices based on them have been programmed to a substantial
> degree by natural selection over thousands of ...
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