I know you’ve stressed this previously, finishedman. You’ve stressed it a thousand times all over ILP. The problem is not everyone fully agrees with you.
But do you think that a man raised in the wild would never look around at his surroundings and understand that he’s in a world? That there are surroundings? Could he not mentally take in all the elements of his environment and thinking of them collectively, as a whole? Is this not at least a proto-reality?
I’ll agree that society significantly embelishes our concepts of reality. I doubt the wild man would ever contemplate galaxies, quasars, Big Bangs, and an expanding cosmos, or perhaps reality as a divinely created realm with that divinity outside it watching over us, but surely he sould have the mental ability to look at his surroundings and at least recognize a world.
What I think would be from the perspective of a self consciousness that’s formed from what I call a thought-sphere. The thought-sphere is the totality of man’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings passed on to us from generation to generation. In this context I want to mention that the brain is not a creator, but only a reactor. It is only reacting to stimuli. What is called thought is only the activity of the neurons in the brain. In other words, thought is memory. A stimulus activates the brain through the sensory perceptions and then brings memory into operation. It is nothing marvelous. It is just a computer with a lot of garbage put in there. So it is not a creator.
The brain is not interested in solving any of the problems created by us. It is singularly incapable of dealing with the problems created by thought (like your thought experiment above). Thought is outside and it is extraneous to the brain. Just as it is incapable of contemplating or thinking about things more detailed … and inasmuch as your question is born out of answers/knowledge that you already have … the brain cannot and did not create the knowledge or the context from which an understanding can be derived to answer your question. I question whether unprocessed raw data from sensory stimulation can be ‘understood’ without something in the past (memory) to guide or create that understanding.
Thought is very protective of itself, it wants to maintain itself and that is probably why any experimentation concerning raising a human being deprived of its contribution is forbidden and considered abusive.
I’ll take this as a ‘no’ (as in, “no, gib, a man raised in the wild will never understand that he’s in a world as no one has ever taught him what a ‘world’ is”). But then again, maybe I should take it as a “I don’t know” given that you said:
In any case, if the invention of answers to these kinds of questions is never a creative process, how did all these answers and knowledge and thoughts come about in the first place? Someone had to create them in order to deploy them into the thought-sphere in the first place, didn’t they?
We don’t know the beginnings of it. We are caught up in the field of logical thinking, and that there is no beginning, that there is no end, is something which shatters the whole fabric, the foundation of our logical thinking.
You are applying your way of understanding to this scenario, while possessing refined and sophisticated methods of thought, and defending such possession to the point where it’s distorting the fact that there is no way to know or experience what it would be like bereft of it. How could you possibly know how it would be not to know and then proceed from that situation?
Okay, if you had zero in memory, no past experiences, no knowledge at all, nothing to sustain or support a ‘self,’ nothing from the past to go to for any kind of guidance whatsoever …. from that state of affairs …. where is a ‘you?’ Let alone where are you going to go?
Unfortunately for me, this means I can’t fill in the hole I perceive in your theory. I like to think that all our knowledge and language and ability to think evolved as our civilizations and cultures evolved, which means that all that knowledge, language, and thought had to be created at some point (perhaps not over night). You can say that this is just the result of what I’ve been taught, and you may be right, but it also stands as the reason (or one of the reasons) why I find your theory so hard to swallow.
The only alternative I can think of is that this system of mind and knowledge you speak of came out of the sky one day, like an invisible alien force, and took over our otherwise unconscious brains and has been running the show ever since.
Humans are born helpless, vulnerable and dependent. Whereas newborn animals instinctively ‘know’ how to go and get fed by the mother. So, on our own, if left alone, we’d perish in those circumstances.
If, though, a human newborn was assisted and nurtured by an outside agency, it’d survive. The provision of the basic physical needs would ensure the sustenance of the life of the body.
The signals that the senses are registering (?) in the brain are probably being recorded somewhere. Hmmm … but these sensations are not yet recognizable. There is no recognize-or. There needs to be a separation from the unitary movement of the way the signals are directly transferred from nerve endings to the areas in the brain where there’s looking – in the case of the eyes acting as cameras. There is no ‘one’ there seeing as I am defining the act of seeing as involving translation per some other separate activation in the brain that comes in between the stimulus and response mechanism and ‘tells’ you what is being stimulated and what the response is. The faculty of interpretation, I am claiming, has as its basis knowledge. Inasmuch as human babies are helpless and possess no automatic responses to their environment, something else has to intervene for purposes of physical survival and then to start the mental process of the way the human brain produces, through neuronal activity, a conditioning so as to go beyond complete dependence.
Do you guys think that there was some design in nature’s process of evolution that humans should be set apart for some grand purpose and so developed a self consciousness in man? Looks to me like nature put a defect in the way man thinks so that he will destroy himself and then nature can start over with a new kind of human species. I don’t see any designed purpose in nature, do you?
What would be the end human product in the evolutionary process?
Foxes kill more than they need to survive. We think more than we need to. More importantly, our relationship to the planet may be like a cancer, or like a parasite. But these are natural things, and are not essentially deluded. I don’t understand your extreme division between material and mental, between body and thought. It’s as if you believe everything about mind/body duality that many religions teach, but you reverse what’s sacred and what’s degraded. I can’t figure out how we’re any better off with that approach.
Finished man: the verdict is not out yet. And even if we come to the final judgment. It may be, that we will be spared the consequences, my feeling is we will never know, because the judgment is a minute by minute , convoluted process, and it is the God who has to eternally renew the whole scheme as an act of contrition, that he can't design this differently. Unless, he really is deceptive by necessity. What if he couldn't create except by a method of creating smoke screens?
To be or not to be? That is the question, god cannot ask himself, his creations keep that question into the realm of necessity. We exist, because we choose to. We choose to be, made of material. It’s immaterial to doubt. So Descartes “doubt” has to be sewn up. Faith has to be reduced to nonsense. This is why the belief in materialism is the only truth we are coming to allow ourselves to believe.
Better off than what? From where comes the demand that one has to be something other than what he is? The thought that tells you there is something more purposeful or meaningful for you to do than what you are doing is extraneous to the brain. What is the natural function of the brain other than taking care of the basic needs of the body? Anything other than that is the beginning of self deception.
From where comes your idea that we’re better off thinking of thought as extraneous to the brain? I admit, this post of yours seems nonsensical to me. I don’t get it. What ‘demand’? We’re all posting about approaches we think are better or worse than other approaches.
Society makes demands. Society creates the purpose and we maintain it for its purposes. If we question that we get in trouble. So we accept it as functional, but it is not a reflection of the uniqueness in each one of us. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a mold to which all must conform. It’s grotesque.
For the comparisons that thought makes there is no problem with our life as it is; and there is no other life. It is precisely our thought of a better state that prevents us from coming to terms with our life as it is.
Compared to man’s jungle, nature’s jungle is simple and sensible. In nature animals don’t kill their own kind. That is part of the beauty of nature. In this regard man is worse than the other animals. The so-called “civilized” man kills for ideals and beliefs, while the animals kill only for survival.
To be an individual and to be yourself you don’t have to do a thing. Culture demands that you should be something other than what you are. What a tremendous amount of energy — the will, the effort — we waste trying to become that. If that energy is released, what is it that we can’t do? How simple it would be for every one of us to live in this world.
Now, you’ve made it relatively clear that we don’t know how all this knowledge and thought started for the human species, but here you seem to be getting at the fact that a similar beginning must occur at some point in the development of individual humans. Presumably, a newborn infant begins life as a tabula rasa (and hence no ‘self’) but at some point acquires all the knowledge and insight his/her society has in the waiting, and at that point there is a ‘self’ (or an illusion of self?). What sparks that transition?
It’s probably part and parcel of our species–maybe even earlier–but we’re not talking about my views.
I’m not that cynical about human nature (or his mind, self, thought, etc.). I know thought has lead to some catastrophic blunders on the part of man in the past, but I’m not quite convinced we’re on our irrevocable way to oblivion just yet.
I don’t think evolution has any foresight. It doesn’t “plan ahead”.
I disagree. First of all, a newborn human comes with a lot of tools for life–it just can’t walk or defend itself. (Leave it on a desert island and it would probably die of starvation.)
What I’ve underlined isn’t really true, either. Animals will fight and kill each other for dominance and territory–and food. One could say all of these things, including ideals and beliefs, are necessary for survival.
Society makes demands, but we each meet those demands to some extent or another, as individuals, in order to maintain our ‘social security’–our security within the group into which we’ve been born. While that labels us, the label is a general one–an abstraction that doesn’t define the individual.
On the other hand, I agree that most Homo sapiens have forgotten we’re animals with animal instincts and animal survival traits. And we have no competition, so we’ve thrived. We may not be able to do so given another version. But that other version isn’t going to spring up overnight–barring any cataclysm, I think we’ll be able to adapt and intermingle with, and contribute to, what comes next. I find that an exciting thought.