You would have to proactively start studying it, with a little genuine curiosity - it’s something you need to take a little interest in, then you need to do some homework for yourself. I can’t hand it to you in a pill, or with a snappy quote.
Chill, today ain’t coming back, guess each of us has a choice on how to deal with it.
What will you be present to
That doesn’t really sound like evolution so much as some vague spirituality. most talks about evolution I hear is that it just boils down to traits that favors survival, or rather traits that win out.
Arguing that morality come from evolution instead of just being a social construct (along with notions of “good” and “bad”) sounds like a universal. Maybe I’ll be direct about what I mean with language:
“I haven’t listened to this episode but might be able to provide some context on Lacan.
Lacan’s idea of love … let’s call it giving something I don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.
To understand this sentence, we need to understand how Lacan thinks about signification, the unconscious, and the symbolic order. When we are children, our mother at some point has to abandon us even if for a few minutes. As we grow older, our fantasy of being whole with our mother is increasingly ruptured as she devotes more time to other things – her job, house chores, heating up a bottle of milk, etc. We have to create some explanation for why this is, why she is not with us 100% the time as when we were a newborn (even though she was never truly with us 100% of the time). Lacan calls this initial signifier the nom du pere , mom’s enjoyment: dad’s ‘phallus’: we have to construct a fantasy that our mother has an object of enjoyment other than us, spending it with dad. So we signify this lack (our not-being-with-mom) as an initial signifier of ‘phallus’. This will be relevant in the next paragraph:
As speaking subjects, let’s just say functional adults (we can note newborns have not grasped spoken language yet — hence why the infant can fantasize wholeness with mom), we constantly use language (signifiers) to explain things that are not really there. When I say ‘apple’, it is a socially accepted signifier for an actual apple. I can say apple to you and you can imagine the-apple-itself even though it doesn’t have to be in the room with us. Thus there is a “dead” quality to language: signifiers—words—always have an implicit lack, naming something that doesn’t exist. A speaking subject, someone who can communicate, is well integrated into society (not a psychotic), exists in a never-ending chain of signification, using words to signify things. For Lacan, this means being a [speaking] subject is an inherently split existence: between the symbolic (spoken, “dead” language) and the Real. Subjects exist in this “symbolic order”, an infinite chain of signification that we use for our entire conscious lives.
Subjects reckon with this lack for a term very famously associated with Lacan, the petit objet a. We can say when we are in love with someone, we elevate them above all else, almost in a transcendance or sublimation. I would recommend reading Bruce Fink’s book The Lacanian Subject if you want a more detailed and clinical explanation of this. Thus, the loved one is a petit object a. For Lacan, we can never truly reach the objet a. We sort of orbit around it, even becoming obsessed with it, but our love for it never reaches its destination. Our desire for the object a is enjoyment. For Lacan, although we might feel chemical pleasure in the brain, as subjects we can never actually enjoy.
The “infatuating” neuron-like pleasure you talk about fits into Lacan’s theory fine. We can experience pleasure, but never enjoyment. Enjoyment is what I experience when I try to reach the person I love. In Lacan’s symbolic order, though, I never truly reach them. I can tell my girlfriend I love her, I can shower her with gifts, but what evidence is there that I truly see her? Do I understand her essence, can I know her in her entirety? For Lacan, not really, because of this inherent lack in language. The moment I signify my girlfriend, signifying the word “girlfriend”, I am giving into the dead, lacking quality of language. As a speaking subject, I am inherently mutilated by language itself, signifying things instead of truly grasping them.
I am giving something I don’t have to my lover when I say “I love you” because I am inherently lacking as a subject. I can never give the-thing-itself (object a) to my lover, a true “wholeness”, because I don’t have it! I can merely circle around the objet a in desiring it. I am giving something I don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it because my lover is her own subject, with her own desiring drive. I don’t truly know what my lover wants because she is in her own chain of signification, trying to grasp her own objet a.
If you listen to some of Todd’s thoughts on Hegel, I think there is actually some optimism to this theory. Since I never truly reach the object of enjoyment (its wholeness doesn’t exist), it means our existence is infinite. There will always be something new in the signifying chain, some new object of desire that drives me forward. I can always orient myself in a more ethical way to my loved one. Maybe we can say it’s possible to love more ethically. Although Lacan’s conception of the unconscious is unsettling at first, I think it shows we are conflicted creatures who in fact contain infinite possibilities — and there will always be a way to reach these possibilities in a more ethical [healthier?] way.
This was written quickly, and my terms for Lacan are broad so I welcome anyone who wants to correct some definitions here.”
This is the part you miss. He solves the Lacanian problem of language by opening up the infinite possibility that lies beyond it. We aren’t enlightened and free enough to constantly move forward with our understanding in every moment of everyday. We fall back into the day-to-day details of our animal needs, but with a little mindfulness, we can “stop and smell the roses” and open ourselves to wonders that we can’t put into words or signifiers.
(Afternoon Addition:)
A big part of the problem is your words (your signifiers) have meanings that don’t jive with mine, and I would say they jive with very few people, including Lacan or the Reddit post. Humans evolved to be social creatures, so you should expect that our knowledge is socially constructed. There is a famous work “The Social Construction of Reality” by Peter Berger. It’s old, but still relevant in most ways. So, there isn’t an “instead of”. The one, “evolution”, leads to the other, “social construction”.
But you come up with statements like this:
and think we don’t understand you. We do. We know that we don’t “truly know” what is happening over there with another person. It’s even a logical fallacy if you claim to. If you claim to know what someone else is thinking, that’s called “mind reading”. You want a world where that is all we do, where there is “direct and unmediated connection”. But that’s not this world.
Let’s take a look at the beginning of the Reddit post
It goes on to describe that in more detail, and how we label things and come up with explanations that make us feel better about being abandoned. As it progresses to adulthood, it continues to use terms like “fantasize wholeness”. When we reach maturity, hopefully, we have gained some understanding that words are merely signifiers and can’t quite describe the Real (he used capital “R”, which I guess means some “ultimate” reality, the reality that we have not discovered, and may never). Next, he tries to explain mature love, not the baby kind he started with, the kind that feels transcendent, but we also know that there are a lot of chemical reactions happening, so we can’t say what is “real” about it. (here I’m using scare-quotes because I don’t what “real love” is for certain, and can’t put that into words)
I’m not going to bother with the rest, because it’s making a distinction about a “speaking subject” and “true wholeness” that are important, but they aren’t what you are saying. You take all of this one step further, somewhere the Reddit post or Lacan isn’t actually going. You want there to be a connection beyond anything possible for human beings. You are so bothered that we can’t, so troubled that language is language, that you find it difficult to function. He says:
I’m not arguing that point, but you think I am. I agree, we exist in a never-ending chain of signification. That is us, that’s how we evolved. You can choose a magical escape, and think that something is outside of our consciousness, guiding us. You can believe that you can use your mind to discover a way to communicate directly with other minds. You can argue endlessly about what a problem it is that you can’t know what’s true and real. None of those will integrate you into society. None of those will help you be the social animal that you actually are.
There is nothing wrong with you for wanting this. As he says in the end (the first quote in this post) “we are conflicted creatures”. Knowing that we are conflicted creatures doesn’t end the conflict, but it makes it easier to live with.
But I later on in my comment to him, in the same link, said that there aren’t infinite possibilities because they all end the same way, that being you never reach the object of you affection or desire. It’s even said in the quoted post how the most you can hope for is pleasure and not enjoyment. Like in his comment he LITERALLY says that there is no reaching the object of your desire you can only orbit it, which means there aren’t infinite possibilities.
It even mentions it here:
The “infatuating” neuron-like pleasure you talk about fits into Lacan’s theory fine. We can experience pleasure, but never enjoyment. Enjoyment is what I experience when I try to reach the person I love. In Lacan’s symbolic order, though, I never truly reach them. I can tell my girlfriend I love her, I can shower her with gifts, but what evidence is there that I truly see her? Do I understand her essence, can I know her in her entirety? For Lacan, not really, because of this inherent lack in language. The moment I signify my girlfriend, signifying the word “girlfriend”, I am giving into the dead, lacking quality of language. As a speaking subject, I am inherently mutilated by language itself, signifying things instead of truly grasping them.
The Real in terms of psychoanalysis from what I understand is the reality beyond language: The Real - Wikipedia
I’m kinda hoping there is some solution, because knowing there is no direct connection has me doubting the feelings I had for past partners and the intimate moments I shared with them. If that’s all just me and nothing “real” between us then what is one to do?
What do you know about evolution, from your words. all you have is some nebulous notion. It’s more than a label.
For starters, the biology of evolution is not about final results, it is about processes. It’s about living the moment.
Survival is an outcome, that enables good-enough biological processes to be passed down, resulting in further refinement during the next generations.
Not to be forgotten, Earth’s environmental conditions are always changing so the fittest today, isn’t necessarily the fittest tomorrow.
Can you process the distinction being made here?
Not surprising that you find something to disagree with. Whatever you mean by “reach” and “desire” makes sense to you, but not to me, and I n think, not to most people.
Did you read that? It says it’s impossible to reach. You are upset because you can’t do the impossible, defined by the link you linked.
The short version in the context I’m citing it is that you can’t get what you want. The idea is that desire cannot be fulfilled because to fulfill it is a sort of “Death”. There is also something about language also being the reason for that.
I’m not trying to reach the Real, that’s like when I asked on reddit and everyone was talking about how you’re never going to reach that perfect state of getting everything and I had to keep saying that’s not what I want. I’m more referring to any sort of success, not perfection but the answers I got were that it’s impossible.
It’s like in the quote I linked to you, saying you can never know another person, only orbit around them so to speak. Even calling love giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it (I still don’t understand that).
When I asked what Slavoy Zizek said about sex being bad this was the response I got:
”FYI. No, Zizek does not say sex is bad, he is pointing out that it “lacks”, is not harmonious and does not make “two into One” etc.”
The main point going to what I said above about human connection is what does one do then, are we all just fundamentally alone with our own feelings and thoughts and not able to reach anyone? The quoted post talked about infinite possibilities and different ways of relating but if they all meet the same endpoint, the same fate, then it’s not infinite. It’s a dead end. It’s like jumping out of a plan, whether you parachute, free fall, glide, whatever, it doesn’t matter because you’ll meet the ground.
That’s kinda why I thought he wasn’t thinking much when he wrote that because the entire previous aspect was talking about how connection isn’t possible, so there wouldn’t be any possibilities.
So how do people deal with realizing how alone they really are…
To give a better idea of the picture I’m citing:
More the second link than the first.
I never said it was final, I said it cares about survival and what works, it’s not about living in the moment.
I’m aware of what is meant by fittest, I even made that distinction that it’s not some “strongest survives” but just what works. The dinos died out because the environment changed too much for them to survive despite their size and strength.
You’re right, I totally agree.
When it works right - two becomes an awesome partnership. That’s the most fundamental thing behind successful couples.
Two becoming one sounds like another hopeless idolized poetic notion, and about as nightmarish as the thought of being trapped in an eternal life.
But Evolution doesn’t care about survival!
Survival produces result for us to see, but Evolution doesn’t see itself, and doesn’t care, take Mars for example 
As for the survival part, that’s all about physical outcomes. You manage to procreate or not.
Basically, that’s it.
To call it Evolution’s plan, or strategy - is a big misunderstanding of the reality of “evolution.”
Okay so you know about fittest being a bit of a myth.
Next we deal with appreciating that Evolution doesn’t have a plan.
Physical reality determines outcomes,
and that is something that is beyond Evolution’s power to plan, or dictate, or cheer along.
If you want to get deeply philosophical - Evolution only really occurs in the living moment - the Now. Of course, it’s depends on all the moments to get to where it is today - but Evolution doesn’t know or care about history. All it knows is what it is doing in this particular now-moment, before it slides on into the next now-moment.
As a side note, this everything happening in the Now-moment is the answer to Chalmer’s contrived Hard Problem, of why something feels like something, or why the experience of experience is so extraordinary.
Because it is only when you are in the process of the now-moment and your body is physically experiencing this now-moment and processing it’s signals through said physical-being that produces your mind
(or that your mind inhabits- if you want to look at it that way).
Does any of that make sense?
Oh an inthedark, do you have any sense of humor, or simply at the pub sort of hanging with pals, or new acquaintances, relaxing, chewing the fat and all that.
This really is a very cool video. Crack a beer and giver a try.
Being a relatively new Dog Person (guess it is pushing a decades, still …) having built this little bond of communication and trust with this little four legged creature, that intellectually stuck at three years old, with touch of autism - but we’ve gotten to know each other. She’s not’s just a dog, she wants affection, and lets me know when I haven’t been paying enough attention, she wants walks, and sniffing for shit to eat, yeah quite literally. Guess turkey shit is truffles for some dogs. She loves her independence and keeping 20-40 yards away half the time. But always keeping an eye on me. we literally do the eye contact thing like in the movies. Recognizing my different call, me vocalizing and single and her being totally draw into it and energized by it. Understanding those fence lines’ and respecting them. Establishing call that she reacts to.
Then I read your words and all the emptiness and cynicism, which is easy to fall into - but there’s something else going on too. . . . . . . Human have gotten too easy to hate, too many of us on top of each other, to many engine monsters and Ahs. but you are an alive being, and dogs are alive beings that have learned to understand humans and communicate with us on levels that are real and important since they touch on emotional connections - and amazing for those who have experienced them. And dogs are a lot less judgmental than people. It’s real, they need you, if they’ve established that partnership relationship with you, commitment that matters.
Well there’s the last sip of my second beer, time of this old man to go to bed and do some snuggling. Go luck inthedark.
Cheers, and good night.
Lacan was a therapist. And apparently not a very good one. You’re reading what people think he was trying to do but, who knows. Therapy is a relationship, it doesn’t work the same on every person. What might work for one person might not work for someone else. Quit trying to make sense of it as if there are rules for thinking that you can apply to your life.
Until you can be more clear about what ”success” is, it’s really hard to answer anything you ask.
Not really, the “reality of evolution” is something we created to understand what is happening and from what can see survival seems to be the main point.
I wouldn’t say that either because evolution is measured in terms of a timeline, that meaning it’s not “occuring in the now” but more across a continuum.
That doesn’t really solve the problem of consciousness, hard or not. Just because things are happening now doesn’t explain how matter yields consciousness.
Well it’s more like Lacan was trying to explain the reasons human do the things they do and trying to describe the human condition. The second link I gave in my reply explains how we exist in imperfect world with signifiers, that there is no pure sorta relationship and everything is mediated by something:
This same logic extends to Lacan’s statement that there is no sexual relation. He’s not denying that people have sex. He’s denying that sex can ever exist as a pure, direct, symmetrical relation between two subjects. In human life, sex is always mediated by the symbolic and imaginary - by language, fantasies, social roles, memories, expectations, gender norms, desires and personal histories. Every sexual encounter takes place inside structures that already define what that sex means. There is no moment where two people meet as purely sexual beings outside these mediations - so a more accurate (but less provocative) statement would be “there is no purely sexual relation.”
The nature of desire contributes to this. Each person’s desire is organized around their sense of what’s missing in them, which is the sense of lack that makes them want at all. In intimacy, each person tries to use the other to fill what they lack, but because both are incomplete in unique ways, the fit never works perfectly. What looks like mutual desire is really an encounter between two separate, often incompatible fantasies. This leads to the many ironies of sexuality in the real world, like the “fuckboys” who obsessively pursue someone, only to sleep with them then become repulsed by the person they idealised moments before, or the person who desires a real relationship yet consistently goes for these fuckboys.
You can also see this in the experience of sex, supposedly a romantic, ideal union of two bodies and souls coming together “as one” in mutual ecstasy, but often accompanied by thoughts completely at odds with that idealised image - no doubt you’ve experienced these, like “am I doing this right? Do they like that? My leg hurts… why did they just make that face? Do I look weird from this angle? Is it too soon to finish?”, etc. So even during sex, the relation is social, cultural, performative, psychological, with sex taking place within those relations, just like all other shared activities. With the same logic, one could say “there is no (purely) chess-based relation”, which seems a lot less controversial.
Sorta like saying everything exists in a sort of “web” of meaning.
Even how we don’t react to people but to our stored perception of them or reification:
Just being able to accomplish what you set out to do, regardless of the consequences. Like saying that you’ll get what you what even if it doesn’t make you happy, or is better than you thought or worse.
I’d also add this comment from the first link:
You’re right to be skeptical. psychoanalysis often sounds like a bunch of people making up stories that “sound true.” But the difference is that it’s not about believing a story, it’s about noticing how stories are already running you.When Lacan says the unconscious is “structured like a language,” he doesn’t mean it’s a mysterious basement full of secret truths. He means our lives are already speaking us (through slips, jokes, dreams, symptoms) and most of the time we don’t hear it. The analyst’s job isn’t to give meaning, it’s to make the structure of our own speech visible. So when someone “discovers unconscious knowledge,” it’s not them inventing a new myth. It’s them realizing that what they thought was random or meaningless in their life (the thing they always repeat, the word that slips out, the pattern in relationships) actually forms a kind of grammar. That grammar reveals desire, and desire isn’t something you can just “get rid of.” Desire is what makes us human. It starts because something’s missing what Lacan calls “lack.” That lack appears the moment we start speaking. Language cuts into our raw experience and leaves something out. We spend the rest of our lives orbiting that missing piece, trying to name it, fill it, love it, work it, whatever. that’s the structure. Learning to “live with lack” isn’t pessimistic. It’s freedom. It means you stop chasing the fantasy that there’s some perfect state where you’ll be complete through love, work, enlightenment, or whatever. You start to live with your desire instead of trying to fix it. And about the Real it’s not “reality outside perception” like Kant’s noumenon or some scientific objectivity thing. The Real is the stuff that doesn’t fit into your sense-making at all. The thing you can’t put into words but keeps returning such as trauma, death, the body, the impossibility of perfect understanding. It’s the limit of your world. You can’t “master” it; you can only circle it through symbols, jokes, art, and speech. Science tries to reduce the Real to equations. Psychoanalysis treats it as the point where language fails. That’s where truth slips out. So yeah, it’s messy, The point isn’t to “explain” everything, but to listen differently. To see how your speech already knows more than you do. That’s what makes analysis not storytelling, but a kind of archaeology of your own language.
To be honest, it’s one of the hardest questions in psychoanalysis: when does it end? (Trust me, I’ve asked myself the same question for a long time during the training)
The frustrating yet beautiful truth is: there’s no fixed endpoint, because analysis isn’t a treatment in the medical sense. It’s more of an ethical process, a dialogue with truth. You don’t finish because you’re “cured.” You finish when you’ve shifted your relation to desire, to lack, to the stories that keep looping your life. At some point, symptoms stop being the main issue. They start to lose their grip not because they’re “solved,” but because they’ve been spoken, drained, understood in their function. The symptom becomes a kind of old friend you’ve finally learned to live with. In Lacan’s words, cure is just a “bonus.” The real work is learning to assume your desire to accept that the thing missing in you, the lack that keeps you moving, will never be filled. That’s not tragic; it’s what makes you alive. You stop searching for the perfect object, the perfect love, the perfect truth and start living with the gap. By the end, something fundamental happens: the ego’s illusions collapse. The person realizes the ego was just one image among many, not the core self. Lacan said, “non-being comes to be, because it has spoken.” That’s the heart of it speech creates a space where non-being finds form. But there’s also a darker turn. The real end of analysis the training kind is when you face what Freud called Hilflosigkeit, that state of absolute helplessness where you see that no one can save you. That’s the point where you stand alone in front of your own death, and somehow, survive it symbolically. Lacan called it traversing the fantasy, seeing through the core illusion that structured your life and realizing it’s just that: a fantasy. Once you’ve crossed that, you’re no longer driven by the same compulsions. Desire becomes lighter, freer. You’re no longer at war with the truth of your own limits. That’s why there’s no single moment where the analyst says “you’re done.” You don’t leave analysis like you leave a dentist’s chair. You leave when you can stand in front of your lack without needing the analyst to hold it for you. When your speech is truly yours.
And doing it poorly
I’m done reading your links. I’m not interested in more Lacan. He’s a dead end.
I can’t tell if you understand this.
This sounds different than a lot of the other stuff you say. When you put it in your words, you sound much more grounded, not lost in over complicated philosophy.
He does surprise now and then.
That second sentence impressed me. Very astutely framed.
Although I would still disagree - I think modern neurobiology along with non-neural details, such as what our fascia tissue turns out to be doing, does indeed show the way to how the moment gets distilled into impulses and neural and hormonal cascades, etc. that lead to thinking.
Even if every last link isn’t comprehended, the more we learn the more be appreciate how inhumanly complicated, and interwoven our biology is.
The physicist Steven Weinberg famously said that the more we understand the universe, “the more it also seems pointless”: It has no meaning. But that is to misunderstand what meaning is: an attribute produced by living things, not one inscribed in the laws of physics. It is no more useful to say that the more we understand the universe, the more humorless it seems. (Some might wryly suspect the opposite, I suppose.) These are not attributes we should seek in the cosmos at large.
Not necessarily, what I’m linking does address what you’re saying about meaning.
I do, it reminds me of eastern philosophy and their idea of everything depending on everything else, and because of that nothing has any true essence or existence, it only exists in relation to something else.
That’s just what I mean by it. But according to psychoanalysis you cannot ever get what you want or know yourself because the subconscious is forever hidden from you.
You’re switching from things having meaning to things having essence. I’m not going to keep keep chasing that bad logic
I didn’t think you know enough about analysis to make this claim
That’s why we have each other, to see ourselves from another perspective.
It’s not bad logic, there are related because the principle is the same. In how everything depends on everything else to exist and therefor has no inherent existence, meaning works the same way and depends on everything else in order to make sense and thus has no inherent meaning or worth or value.
That doesn’t help against the unconscious which is unknown, in fact that was a point made in one of the links I gave to you and in the quotes I linked in regards to whether we can truly know someone else. Like I said above the links I listed refute your arguments about meaning.
Even the evolution argument works against us because it shows us to be little more than robots acting out drives and following social conditioning like the answers here demonstrate: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/132743/why-do-we-chase-after-things-which-make-us-happy/132745#comment428927_132745