That you believe the entire course of history can change within one lifetime. When you say we need to understand deep time, to get evolution visecerally, what do you mean? If our emotions come from our amygdala, an ancient part of us, how do we overcome those gut reactions with a few facts? If there are powerful people deliberately distorting information and preventing the spread of knowledge how do you blame the ignorant for not knowing?
I blame the lack of curiosity and lack of critical thinking skills.
When the dishonesty is recognizable, why go along with it?
With some self-starting curiosity, and introspection of the days of your life?
I managed it, but that was thanks to a whole series of quirks and experiences and insights. Starting with my escape for humanity’s GOD Trap at a very early stage of my life - “a speck of dust that wanted to be more”, and all that flowed from that revelation.
On the one hand deep-time is a pretty easy concept to start wrapping your head around.
It didn’t start with, but it sure was supercharged when I (in my late 30s) took the time to created a time-line of evolution using that continue matrix printer paper we used to have. One millimeter equaling a million years, sketched it out, and then adding in the milestones, realizing that the scale isn’t going to work for more modern times, and having to adjust according.
It does start soaking in, add in a decent amount of reading up on the science, and introspection and meditating in natural surroundings and becoming personally more attuned to the natural environment around me.
I got lucky there, though my mind and sensibility were also tuned towards receiving the message. Back when I was 20, I worked in a Swiss metzgerei (butch & sausage maker) for about six weeks, as I was waiting for my summer job on Susten Pass.
It was a favor to my uncle and I was treated as an apprentice, so was introduced to all the phases of butchering and sausage making.
They came up with a great first day initiation to see if I could handle it. My first day, started after the Cattle kill day (actually very early morning). I walking through the door, with the work space a few steps lower, and right in front of me was a long table, with over a dozen cows heads staring right at me. It was startling for sure, but after the first adrenaline rush, I was okay.
So I was taught how a butcher uses a knife and shown how to cut and part up those heads and spent the rest of that day reducing those heads to their basic components. It was interesting, actually amazing, how similar (once scale differences are disregarded) incredibly similar those cows and pigs and my own anatomy was.
But the real zinger happened a couple years later when I started an actual Apprenticeship at Hotel Hirsch, a Michelin Star restaurant, meaning fresh and constantly changing food. I was tasked with butchering a gutted deer, and after the first few minutes I was left alone with that carcasse and reducing it into its various cuts and again . It turned into a literal religious experience as though we melding and I were slicing up my own innards.
It was an epiphany, meaning a profound experience that significantly alters one’s outlook from that day forward. So that later as (scientists &) I learned more about the details of evolution’s breakthroughs and how the components that make up us humans were slowly developed over eons, it plugged right into a ready inner awareness.
Where did I ever imply such a thing?
But change has to start somewhere.
Plus like I’ve mentioned before, the physical reality will slam us with relentless change that will take us lightyears from our current lazy complacency. Today’s mindset doesn’t have what it’s going to take to survive in the brave new hellscapes we are relentlessly building for ourselves.
It’s going to take minds capable of looking beyond today’s greed petty fixations, and capable of taking in the actual reality of other creatures and our planets biosphere and how we are all bound together.
I know how I can do it or you can do it. I know how to encourage it in someone open to the possibility. Someone who will engage with me in a reasonable conversation. The problem is getting more people to be willing to turn down the heat and spend some quiet time together, listening. learning our individual stories.
This is the question that you have never addressed and don’t seem to even understand that I’m asking it, “How do we alter the landscape of society, change the zeitgeist, build the community, and create a better environment so millions of people who are in pain and expressing it with violence and addiction will come to realize their strengths and their power to change?”
I didn’t say today is the same, I said humans are still humans. How long have hominids been here? When did we become homo sapien sapiens? But you believe that what you learned in your lifetime should change all that? You know more than most people on the planet, mostly through your of winning the birth lottery. You are denying that the people who are supporting the 1% don’t know they are doing it because they didn’t have the advantages you did.
How is it you know this, but then expect people to spontaneously un-numb themselves? You’re like my aunt who said a kid who grows up in a place where they have to walk by drug dealers to get to a crappy school should just go to the library and educate themselves.
Not at all. Straight from the heart.
I’m hearing that you are very frustrated that things aren’t changing, or aren’t changing fast enough.
Fortunately that’s beyond my pay scale.
I believe relatedly small, but serious, changes during the 1970’s, '80s, even '90s could well have created conditions, a cooler economy, less progress, more appreciation for the vital important of this planet’s climate system and biosphere, less people, so more general elbow room - which is oh so critical for a healthy rational psyche - & civil society.
We kept warning about the runway behind us, being no good.
For the most part no one wanted to hear it, so didn’t.
Instead we managed to about every imaginable mistake, breaking all of the seven sins.
Sort of like that super carrier than didn’t think of ordering up a couple escort tug, who needed any precautions.
I have no answer for that, at least not since my idealism and faith in the future got beaten out of me.
But that still leaves me with myself and interacting with the people who are part of my life and the unfolding of my day by days.
I’ve no idea how to save the world.
But I did discover a foundation, a benchmark, a path for finding a profound understanding, that’s provided a personal level sanity, feeling at home, and if not at peace, at least I understand the dance, and still enjoy partaking of pageant, til death do take me.
.
It’s starts with recognizing the world around me is not a product of my imagination, but an actual real product of evolution, and given the complexity we see around us, it also seems self evident that this evolution unfolded in one particular unique sequence - the future being full of possibilities, and the past being confined to history (knowable or not)
Understanding that what my senses are gazing out at and interacting with is a solid reality, that my body and brain transforms into perceptions. This leads to an understanding for the difference between “honesty” and the mirage of “Truth”.
The Physical Reality ~ Human Mindscape divide, and all that goes with grasping that lesson.
From that comes the appreciation that I am an evolve biological thinking creature, the product of Earth’s processes.
This creates a kinship with Earth’s creatures & processes, as strong as those most people only feel towards their own blood kin.
This opened me up to realizing that my “consciousness” is the inside reflection of my body communicating with itself, as it’s dealing with the chores of living (inside & out). {Same as it is with all other living creatures according to their kind}
This opens me up to appreciating that I am a filament, a fiber in the never ending tapestry of Earth’s Evolution, and that this moment is mine. Though my mind’s eye can imagine the deep-time flowing before me and that led to my creation, and the eons that will follow.
That won’t save the world, but it has saved my soul, my sanity, and prepared me for dealing with the increasingly dysfunctional world around me, including the harder times careening at us, and then my inevitable downfall and death.
I’m frustrated and angry that we are destroying this world and why not be a bit angry that so little is changing.
Like that dog chasing tail that Philosophy has become, since it can’t figure out if it belongs to the Dark Ages with it relentless search for God and the Ultimate Truths - or if they should absorb the lessons science has been refining over these past couple centuries and get little more pragmatic and real.
Still, I continue doing my best not to let the anger own me, I strive to own it, and have learned how to rewrap it, return it to its niche, where the rage can be transformed into passionate energy.
Ups and downs, anger and despair, joy and passion, still remain, it’s their melodramatic extremes that get mellowed out. The Ego remains, but becomes less cloying. Then, of course, that feeling of having arrived and being at home is really precious.
1 Like
Thanks. I imagine that wasn’t easy. Or, you aren’t seeing how hard it was for me to arrive at this point.
I’m going to bookmark this post. Over the last few months, when I have shared my thoughts on what you or I can do you tell me what others should do. When I discuss human nature and the forces of history and evolution and the human mind, you lecture me about how my focus is wrong or ask rhetorically, “so what do we do, nothing?”
I’m exhausted from chasing your reasoning, one extreme to another. Now, you get to say, “I have no answer for that”. Maybe it would help if you had a little sympathy for all the other frustrated people in the world who can’t figure out what to do next, even though the problems seem so obvious to them and they can look back and see where we went wrong.
That’s quite the mash up you created there. More red herrings than serious critique.
What? Are you shocked I don’t have answer for how to save our society from ourselves. Is that what we been trying to figure out?
Although the answer for saving Earth, as we knew her, really was quite simple and straightforward and has been know since the '60s and earlier!
What would it have taken?
Widen our outlook & hearts to encompass not just our immediate family and tribal wants & needs, but to take in the whole of our planetary cornucopia as though it were our blood kin - which by god it is!!!
Since we were busy learning the tricks of the God, it was also time to learn a little wisdom. But, we humans had our priority, party hardy while the get’n was good, was more important.
Now we have the deadly hang-over to deal with.
Way too few want to do that. So, outcomes are inevitable. Don’t dump our failure on me.
Why do you ignore that I’ve stressed time and time again, that what I’m talking about flows from the question: WHO AM I? Why do you not allow that simple truth to soak in? And work out from there?
It seems to me like you’ve been too busy, defending the honor of the ancients, to bother chasing my reasoning.
You have taken umbrage at my questioning their validity.
Yet the more you force me to examine my reasoning on that matter, the more my original discomfort with the repetitive dog-casing-tail rhetoric of many philosophers (who don’t even recognize how much their search for the ultimate answer, are simply modern manifestation of an inner God struggle - which was born out of human self-absorption, as opposed to evidence driven understanding). - is growing into a reasoned contempt.
Though it’s been decades in the making. 
Citizenschallenge said…
I’ve been thinking about that drive-by comment above…
Bruckner’s essay is an excellent example of the mind’s need to weave together a narrative. But, it is also an example of the mind’s isolation from the real world of the day to day.
Science is the human antidote for the reality that we only see the world through our own eyes and that if we long for an objective perspective of the world beyond ourselves - one that get’s close to reflecting reality rather than merely mirroring our own mind - we must engage in an honest exchange where relevant knowledge is faced, rather then hidden from as Bruckner did throughout this essay.
Bruckner’s article is a long philosophizing journey within his own mind - but it is decidedly divorced from any objective appraisal of what’s actually happening upon our planet. Heck, I’ll bet Bruckner could write a five thousand word paper musing on the question: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make noise?”
Tragically the real world of today needs a more down to Earth pragmatic appreciation for Earth processes, one that won’t be found within a professional contrarian’s mind.
Im shocked that you keep telling me what I should do, what i should post about, what i should say about the world, but you, you get to say whatever
No idea where you got that interpretation.
Never had a problem with that. Understood from day one. That truth does not give you permission to tell others how they should think, or judge people who did not have the advantages you did, or simply learned differently than you.
There you go again
Solve the crisis caused by not understanding technology by doing more tech. What an idiot. I don’t call that philosophy.
1 Like
Isn’t that what this revolves around?
I’m not telling any one how to do anything.
I am pointing out the roots of our collective failure.
It’s a critique I have to offer.
Which I back up with some simple concise yet substantive fundamentals.
You say that but you seem to have a very big problem with my summary,
Abrahamic thinking that birthed our three major block-buster religions.
Which after all is said and done, can be reduced to being labeled, Self-absorbed thinking, followed by self-serving actions. With today’s world being plenty of evidence for how terribly unfortunate that mindset has been for everyone’s future.
My complaint that too much of modern philosophy still clings to echos of our innate God Struggle, now reflected in the constant search for “Truth” and the next ultimate question, looking for the next ultimate answer, that will finally show us the light.
The learned crowd telling me I need metaphysics to make sense out of human consciousness, when I know from personal experience and learning from books and getting to understand life’s evolution on this planet, that consciousness must be understood from a bottom up evolutionary perspective, before human’s complex consciousness can even begin to make sense.
Deep thinking simply means focused thinking. Such as focusing on appreciate that your body/brain(/environment) produces your consciousness and that the two of you are in this together, coming at it from two rather different places. Body, the product of eons of time/evolution, refining, and self awareness starting about the time our hand buds turn into fingers for us to suck on.
I don’t know why you come across feeling so violently threatened, I don’t remember ever telling you what to think. I’m too busy struggling with defining what I myself am thinking, since no one seems to understand the words I put on paper.
Being told there’s a nothing, where I know there’s a something worth recognizing.
It’s nice to have most that learning curve behind me. I don’t want to rub anything in anyone’s face.
Of course, I didn’t will my life and can’t take credit for where I’m at - I did not “create” nor “will” all I have today.
But neither will I deny what I have achieved, I managed to hang on for a heck of a ride, trusting life, respecting the people and situations that came my way. I learned bent into the rapids, and to hang on even better when pulled under, sure in the knowledge that I’ll surface again on the other side, and continue the ride. Dancing the swords edge of life, and it’s looking like I might survive past my 69th b-day. Possibly, the good universe willing, even to see an infant come into this world pumping my blood. I mean the head trips never end. Why shouldn’t I try to share some of that, or hope to bump into some who can relate.
The kid I’ve spent my life hoping never to meet, considering my low opinion of our collective future. Now, occasionally the thought of meeting this next little one almost makes me giddy.
Talk about dancing the sword’s edge.
I mourn every pregnancy I hear about, yet I can’t help but marvel at the wonder, love and beauty of a new child and the primal urges behind it all. Holding all in balance the horror and the beauty.
But damned we should have been able to do better, we knew all we needed to by the 60’s, late 70’s for sure! As for “uncertainties” sure they existed, but by the late 70’s they were down to chump change, as an honest reading of the record makes absolutely rational, honestly, clear!
Nope. That’s not the problem
“nothing happens by chance”
becomes
"we have zero “Will” "
“everything has precursors”
becomes
"we have zero “Will” "
It demonstrates that same sort of binary absolutism of the western mind, with it’s love for all or nothing statements, … its absolutes. If they (folks who dismiss “Free Will” outright) spent more time thinking about choices and foreknowledge based on experience, and mental strategies people use - the musings would become much more nuances and I don’t think nearly so clear cut.
So I did finally get to listening to that video, at least starting at 38:00 - not hearing what you’re referring to, so am going to start at zero for the first 38 minutes.
But I’m wonder why are you presenting that to me as some sorta gotcha?
I’ve mentioned plenty of times that all I’ve arrived at comes via a scientific education, via a mind with a materialist (Earth Centist) scientific bent.
I think Sapolsky is great, I can take his facts to the bank, but when it comes to some of his conclusions, they don’t go down quite so easily - and I haven’t heard/read him make a solid case for 100% no free will - since the universe of “desires”, “choices” and “forethought” gets shunted to the side and ignored. When I can, I’ll get back to his books, it’ll be fun to see if I can tease out the “free will” wrinkles that struck me. See if I can clarify my Petite Free Will notions, with his help.
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:93, topic:10724”]
“nothing happens by chance”
becomes
"we have zero “Will” "
“everything has precursors”
becomes
"we have zero “Will” "
“We don’t control anything, but we influence everything” (BrianKlaas)
1 Like
Presenting scientific information is not a gotcha. It’s a look at the things this forum talks about from the perspective of a biologists who knows neuroscience. Did you listen to Sapolsky’s answer to the Trump question? The question on everyone’s lips? Why do lower income people vote against their own intetest?
37:56
why do they look at somebody like Donald Trump who defines himself as Superior to them wealthier than them more powerful than them so they seem happy to have him saying he’s at the top of the ladder and supporting him while they’re putting themselves on wrong one and two. What’s happening in the psychology of your nation that that’s happening I don’t understand or or were stated in the way that like political scientists pull their hair out over here why is it that the poor over and over and over vote against their best interestsyeah they vote for people who favor the economics of the wealthy and decreased social services and less of a safety and they do it over and over and it’s sort of at the intersection of really interesting science that shows your temperament your emotional makeup Etc is a much better predictor of your political views than whatever it is you claim you’ve thought through carefully.
People who were made anxious by ambiguity and Novelty wind up being political conservatives if the future is an exciting place you’re going to be a political Progressive if the future is a scary place and the past is when it was great you’re going to be a conservative if ambiguity makes you feel like you are overwhelmed and you look for patterns and you look for structure you are going to love autocrats. You were going to have an orientation toward social dominance …
What am I supposed to get out of that? As far as it goes, it’s probably true enough. But to think that explanation is complete, is a reach.
45:13… amazing examples of people whose behaviors have changed if societies that have changed people change dramatically but the key thing is we do not change we are changed by circumstance and we respond to that circumstance as a function of the person we got sculpted into being.
And me thinks, part of that circumstance, is stuff we direct ourselves towards, with forethought and strategy. (Again the analogy of a kayaker’s “control” as opposed to the dam builder’s sense of “control”) Who will I hang out with tonight?
and so on . . .
Mine was an open question. There is no “supposed to”.
Okay, so it was an interesting discussion, but it was the same old, same old, though that was more the interviewers fault, than Sapolsky’s.
His books are way more engrossing.
.
.
,
Show me anyone else who gives an answer like that.
I’m not a scholar who get’s paid to sit and read my days away.
So why not simply focus on what was said here:
Sounds like stuff I’ve read in various articles over the years.
It makes sense to me, so far as it goes.
It feels incomplete though.
Sorry if I can’t do better than that.
What do you think is so unique about it?