Giambattista said:
Well, since humans NATURALLY evolved to have such complex emotions, certainly NATURE must have had a purpose?
The purpose of emotions are numerous and specific to each.
In a general way emotions are meant to cloud the mind's reason and make it react intuitively, often against its better judgment.
It makes creatures reactive (instinctive) rather than rational.
If bonding, which is EMOTIONAL (at least for humans, hopefully) is to facilitate BREEDING and PROCREATING, why something so inefficient as EMOTION?
“Inefficient” compared to what alternative? Do you suppose that we’ve reached some evolutionary pinnacle where no improvement is possible?
After all, emotions have caused distraught mothers to kill their own children. Or fathers to behead their girls on suspicion of rape, in order to uphold personal honor.
If emotions evolved simply to facilitate procreation (and keeping a certain genetic identity alive) WHY ON EARTH WOULD THOSE EMOTIONS CAUSE A PERSON TO KILL THEIR OWN OFFSPRING???
And here we see how memes replace genes in the mind.
Why someone would “KILLL THEIR OWN OFFSPRING” has to be looked at on a case by case basis.
In the wild, when resources are low a mother might kill her young so as to allow the group to survive.
Here the young are seen as a liability that can be easily replaced when times get better and before too much has been invested in them.
In other cases such actions could be a result of mental illness or memetic imperative - morals, social pressures and so on.
Oh! "Well, the offending children were seen as impractical from a biological standpoint (a subjective observation, might I add), and so the parent simply terminated them in order to make room for more VIABLE offspring!"
OH! IS THAT HOW SIMPLE IT IS? So, honor, which is a subjective, emotional, HUMAN concept, suddenly dictates what is biologically viable???
Exactly. Ideals replacing instincts. Memes replacing genes.
THAT is what emotion does. There is no other example in nature of the complexity of human emotions. Certainly if emotions evolved simply to facilitate procreation, they could do a much better job of it, eh Satyr, you cloven-hooved one?
You take a single phenomenon and consider it from a very limited horizon.
The motives behind emotional acts might have long-term concerns and be completely irrational in the short-term.
Nature has her own logic.
But who’s arguing about emotions? Emotions are reactions to environmental conditions – social or natural.
Exactly! We only have to look to bacteria and their meiosis for a perfect example of EFFICIENT reproduction, WITHOUT the vagaries of HUMAN "LOGIC" and EMOTIONS to obstruct the perfect replication of genetic lines, let alone the imperfections of any kind of social interaction or bonding.
Then you would agree that emotions are evolutionarily recent, meant to facilitate certain cooperative unions and enable larger brained individuals.
The original motive is harsh and cruel and pragmatic: procreation.
Creatures evolve and so require more resources, longer gestation periods, a longer maturing period, or existing in threatening environments they require the safety of groups and unity with others so as to increase their survivability.
This in turn creates different dynamics and a suppression of some individuality. Emotions make this possible.
As the group grows – due to its own success – the individual must suppress more.
The safety of the group also creates the conditions for the emergence and nurturing of certain genetic mutations, which have no genetic fitness – in that they cannot reproduce on their own – and act as social lubricants.
In any group there is only room for one dominant male. The others are forced into subordinate, more effeminate positions. In fact their acceptance by the dominant male relies on them mimicking female behaviour enough so as to not appear threatening to the alpha male.
It would explain homosexual acts in the wild.
Some do it as a way of biding their time and waiting for an opportunity to take over.
But this is not homosexuality in that there is no exclusive attraction to the same sex.
In some species an excess of males forces some into all-male temporary groups living on the peripheries of procreative groups, making attempts at usurping power.
In lions for example males challenge dominant males. The females support their original male, hoping to save their investment in time and energy. If the challengers win the cubs are killed and the females become ready for a new investment.
In human modern groups, institutions have replaced the role of dominant male, forcing all males into more feminine roles. This would explain the “
Feminization of man” but also the emergence of ‘homosexual’ memetic ideals which make effeminate behaviours into social virtues.
Since females are more easily integrates into groups (Due to temperament evolved because of their procreative role and dependance on others), males that exhibit more feminine traits become more socially viable.
So maleness becomes socially unwanted.
It is these SAME emotions that cause men and women to fall in love with each other. It is these SAME emotions that cause men to fall in love with other men, or women with women. It is these SAME emotions that cause men to abuse the ones they claim to love. It is these SAME emotions that tell one person that heavy metal is awesome, and another says that it's lame, but classical music is awesome, or the Talking Heads are a righteous musical creation.
These SAME EMOTIONS also tell certain people that they should prevent NATURAL procreation from occuring, because it is "wrong" or unsupportable etc.
Exactly!
Memes (ideologies, moral) can infect a brain and make it behave – as in the case of the
Lancet Fluke - in ways that go against their genetic programming.
Emotions become the method of control.
In nature they serve natural selection, making individual minds go against their immediate interests so as to enable species interests.
In social environments emotions act in the same way, but this time to facilitate memetic interests.
The lower lifeforms have no qualms to this proliferation of life and reproduction that are observable or ascertainable.
Bacteria don't need emotions to reproduce, and guess what, they do it with far more efficiency than humans could ever dream of. They don't need sexuality (only asexuality, and hence, no bonding) and they have no definable concerns for their offspring.
Bacteria have “concern” for their offspring?
Concern (love) comes into paly when a longer maturing process is necessary. Then emotions acts as that which makes a parent sacrifice personal interests for the offspring’s benefit.
It’s a way of making the brain supress its original concern and refocus it on another.
Emotions always cloud reason, they never enhance it.
If emotional bonding is meant merely to facilitate procreation, it's doing a VERY POOR and INEFFICIENT job of it. I'm sure, though, that you're aware of that.
That’s funny, are you not living in a civilization constructed on procreative motives and driven by emotions?
How is not “efficient” when it has resulted in us dominating the Earth?
Of course, I have this feeling that you're merely being sarcastic towards Buddha1, and that is why you made such ill-founded remarks.
It’s too bad that you so desperately want to preserve your idealized view of the world, that you find my remarks so unattractive.
Can't help that.
Emotion does not always facilitate procreation. Often it HINDERS it.
If an insane or depressed mother can drown her PERFECTLY VIABLE children in a bathtub (because of emotion), how does that support the bearing of offspring, or the continuance of her genetic heritage?
So, we are to take extreme mental disorders as proof of what?
Like everything else, the mechanism isn’t fool proof. The human mind is so complex that, often, things go wrong in it.
Homosexuality is such a phenomenon, where a hormonal imbalance creates an alteration with no genetic purpose. It's a genetic dead-end, just like the memetic phenomenon that infects Shakers.
It gains purpose when it is protected and allowed to flourish or when the social environment finds it enhances uniformity.
When a meme cannot reproduce on its own, it relies of infecting others. It becomes parasitical.
Homosexuality is attempting to become so.
And keep in mind they don't have to be hearing voices to do such things. People can also kill themselves (or others) because of unresolved problems, emotional or other. Some people who see nothing but empty biology in a hollow universe can be driven to suicide for the lack of meaning. That is emotion. How many animals kill themselves because of a lack of higher meaning in their lives? And I'm not referring to animals trapped in small cages.
So, you take illness to prove health?
Some people are born with six fingers, does that mean that the norm is not five?
Some people are born retarded, does that mean that intellect is not healthy?
Animals do not need meaning.
Humans do, because they have been taken out of their natural, more austere environments and made comfortable and safe.
Ennui makes them seek out an alternate purpose.
They cannot and so they become ill, dis-eased.
Does this biological imperative they supposedly have give them this meaning?
I personally fail to see how that is biological efficiency when emotions can make someone kill even THEMSELVES. And I thought preservation of life was right before procreation on the big To-Do list that controls us all. Why do emotions override that? Or is that somehow preservation?
People kill themselves for numerous reasons.
Most of which involve them not being able to live up to a social standards or not being able to be like everyone else and feel accepted and acknowledged.
So, how many women has the cloven-hoofed Satyr bedded?
None?
How many times has this heterosexual god Pan had intercourse ("natural" no less), where birth control was used to disrupt the normal cause-and-effect course of natural reproduction?
I’m a virgin.
A hairy-armed princess.
I'll be whatever you want me to. If it makes you feel better, go for it.
I’m a girlish-man.
How is that any different from homosexuality, when heterosexuals practice birth control? Not? If that's your answer, then you're correct. If you can't understand that, I guess you may also have trouble adding 2 and 2 together.
I’m beginning to see that you and
Buddha1 are on the same intellectual level. It would explain why you are so compatible.
When retards talk, it is best to not get involved.
I don’t, dear. I emote.
Lucysnow
Ah Buddha! Ya need a vacation man! Go to Paris. You can find many men at minitel who would welcome your conclusions and perhaps you'll encounter a Nico Claux to help resolve your obsession...it will only hurt for a little while.
You know I have no problem with exploring maleness and male issues, and in some ways I agree with this freak, but to start from the premise that sex has evolved for bonding and that sexual orientation is exclusively a social construct, is absurd and exposes a motive other than the exploration of maleness.
To say that sexual attraction is imposed on us from without only exposes this thread starters own experience and has nothing to do with most men. He sees what he desperately ant to see, so as to feel ‘normal’and to construct his thesis upon which he psychologically relies on.
Imagine nature creating the feminine form to attract males and must be forced to find it attractive by a society that evolved ages after sexual identity came to be. This is so remarkably stupid, that most have not even bothered with this moron.
I do because I love mocking stupidity.
Gender expressions are socially determined and contained, but genders are naturally constructed.
Females are not physically smaller and weaker than men, by accident - vagina’s aren’t a mistake.
Each sex evolved for particular procreative purposes and the environment determined what characteristics, both physical and psychological, each would have.
Now, in recent times, the environment has altered making many of the sexual attributes lose their purpose.
Muscle power, for instance, is obsolete in a mechanized era.
So males wear muscle like ornaments of genetic pasts - symbols of maleness they are forbidden from using, unless sanctioned by the system.
The role of males has so diminished over the ages, that we find ourselves, today, in a time when even sexual orientation is considered a trivial characteristic and gender is considered a social construct with no natural function.
In a world of 6 billion and of restricted resources, procreation becomes a secondary concern.
It is no accident that in more affluent systems birth rates fall, dramatically.
Here we see the effects of superfluousness, coupled with the restriction to maleness, combining to create an atmosphere of adolescent privilege and where nature is reinterpreted to fit into our memetic contexts.
Sex becomes trivial and so does gender roles, as a consequence. Women do not need males to raise children, sometimes they do not need males to have children, and what made males necessary to a group is diminished though technology and the systemic safety network that protects each individual indiscriminately and makes nature something we experience on TV or at the park.
In these environments who you fuck doesn’t matter. It’s all for the harmonious coexistence of the group – bonding.
Here we see the institutionalization of the human mind.
Ancient Greeks used it to create more cohesive army units and social peace. In prison it is used for the same purpose.
Take man out of nature and you scramble his perspective, you make him adapt to artificial (manmade) environments. You force him to suppress parts of himself or make him find alterative routes to alleviate his needs. You make him feel stressed from the effort required to suppress his nature, causing a many mental illnesses and a sense of disconnection and meaninglessness.
Memes, as a relatively recent evolutionary phenomenon, and the full effects on the human condition have yet to be seen.
One only wonders how our involvement in the process of natural selection will affect our species. So far medicine has taken over the role of repairing the damage we’ve done.