sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with biosociology

I was commenting to

cowgrrl the other day about how it seems like there aren't any major corporations that are in business to just simply make a product and sell it to people; they all have a business model that requires sticking it to customers in every inventive way possible. I couldn't actually think of an example (well, there's Ben & Jerry's, I suppose). But for just about every company I could think of, I can recall reading of ways in which those companies have done what they could to to stick it to their customers, competitors, and employees.

Is this 'just human nature'? "Caveat emptor" is clearly not a modern innovation; if anything, the paltry constraints of law and regulation to reign companies in and made them do at least roughly what they say they're going to do is the modern innovation. But are people born this way? Is this a side to human nature we just have to cope with? I've read that apes are born with an innate sense of fair play and know when they've been cheated, and people get a dopamine boost from doing good deeds. It seems more like cooperation and generosity are natural instincts, where deception and two-timing are learned behavior. So much for "that's just the way people are;" I don't believe that, and I think it's time for people to expect better from one another.

But then, Socrates argued in The Republic that the one who profits most is the unjust man who succeeds at convincing everyone else that he is ethical and upstanding. If this is true, than we can expect people with this ethic to be the most financially successful, and therefore to gravitate to the center of the business world, where they force everyone else to emulate their model just to compete. As justifications go, "we have to stay competitive" has the benefit of having some truth to it, if at the downside of being circular.

What companies are all afraid of is that if they were to unilaterally de-asshole-ify their business model, their costs would go up, causing their profits to drop, in turn causing stockholders to rebel and hire a new board of directors who will just turn around and re-asshole-ify the business model. What we more typically see is that businesses will partially de-asshole-ify their business model, sometimes under penalty of law, trumpeting this in ads as proof of their honesty and trustworthiness. A company like Wal-Mart, which we're used to thinking of as an evil behemoth, has the power to do great good simply by virtue of its influence by making a single decision, such as for example lowering the price on generic drugs they sell or declaring they will hold toy suppliers to a new standard.

Research on what would happen if every major company all around the world simultaneously de-asshole-ified their business models is scant. For one thing, academic economists refuse to admit the business world has an ethics problem. If they can claim they are within the law and playing by all regulations, what's the problem? (This leaves unasked the question of just who wrote those laws and regulations and what they allow.) Even those sorts of asshole business that are outside of the law are usually covered by plausible deniability ("Hey, we had no idea our suppliers had 7-year-old kids doing 13-hour shifts! We're innocent!"). And as the last resort, when the deception and exploitation can no longer be denied, we're told it's the only thing that makes the benefits of modern life affordable (if by "benefits" you mean cheaper products that wear out in 3 years instead of 20). But, really, how do we know that?

What we do know is that few of us would choose to live in a world with so much deception and exploitation if we had any real say in things. The human race will probably never live in a utopia of honesty where the asshole business model does not exist. But I do think it is possible to chip away at it, with coalitions (cooperatives and mutual aid societies) and with more & better ethics training starting in childhood (interfering with our society's tendency to sympathize with takers: bullies and winners-at-any-cost). If people are taught to be this way, they can taught to be another way.

ETA. I've speculated in the past on how neat it would be if we redefined the idea of "profit" to mean not just a positive difference between revenue and cost, but to reflect a socially holistic idea of utility. Maximizing profit in that scheme would mean maximizing not just one's own revenue while minimizing one's own costs, but also maximizing the social benefit while minimizing the social cost. A change in perspective along these lines would move us away from the asshole business model.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

I hear on a semi-regular basis — again, just the other day in fact — about what foils for the patriarchy transpeople are. How our undertaking of gender transition helps to support rather than to undermine the gender caste system.

And so now i’m frustrated with this to the point of being snarky about it. Because i’d really like to see on what basis, beyond the thoughts in their head, anyone can make such a statement. Please, someone, anyone, name one reward that one receives for being transgender. One kind of social privilege, however small. It’s been my life and i haven’t seen it, but maybe i’m too “close,” you know?

I can name the costs — economic, social, emotional; i can name the the barriers — economic, social, emotional, institutional, ideological; i can name the risks; but the only benefit i can name is my own health and satisfaction, which can never be perfect. So far as i can tell, it hasn’t won me any friends, prestige, acclaim, higher income, personal security, religious merit, a closer relationship to my family.

If being transgender were truly patriarchy-approved, then there would be some benefit or reward, somewhere. Some kind of official approval instead of static, red tape, and moralistic condemnation.

ETA. Suppose we are foils for the patriarchy. But then: who isn’t? Except for a very few who manage to exist as total separatists, who doesn’t, in some way or another, compromise with the demands of gender in order to lessen the day-to-day dissonance?

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

Being transgender is an enigma cloaked in mystery and dipped in murkiness. How and why does gender dysphoria develop at all? Why is it so powerful that many transpeople find it easier to undergo expensive and painful changes to their body than to “just live with it”?

Of course, if i can say, “I was born this way,” there is no longer any mystery. This seems especially true after reading this (h/t to Autumn Sandeen here).

A crucial question resulting from a previous brain study in male-to-female transsexuals was whether the reported difference according to gender identity in the central part of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) was based on a neuronal difference in the BSTc itself or just a reflection of a difference in vasoactive intestinal polypeptide innervation from the amygdala, which was used as a marker. … The number of neurons in the BSTc of male-to-female transsexuals was similar to that of the females (P = 0.83). In contrast, the neuron number of a female-to-male transsexual was found to be in the male range. Hormone treatment or sex hormone level variations in adulthood did not seem to have influenced BSTc neuron numbers. The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions and point to a neurobiological basis of gender identity disorder.

To summarize, what researchers have been finding is:

1. There are differences between the average man’s brain and the average woman’s brain,
2. Transwomen’s brains are in some ways shaped more like the average woman’s brains (and vice-versa for transmen), and
3. By exposing rat embryos to certain hormone levels during gestation, researchers can induce biologically male rats to exhibit female behaviors and vice-versa - establishing a causal link.

So, perhaps i have a brain that more resembles a woman’s than a man’s. I’m ready to accept this as a likely explanation, because nothing else i’ve ever heard makes sense.

And i’m ready to accept this as a causal explanation, because there is nothing in my upbringing that would have led me to consistently lean towards having a female identity. Since i was born people have treated me as male. When i started showing transgender inclinations i was leaned on even more heavily to be male. How could anything purely psycho-social persist in the face of lifelong constant negative pressure?

A lot of the feminists i know are nervous about the idea of biological determinism when it comes to gender identity. Perhaps some of them mistrust this because of their own differing experience of gender (see my post about this a while ago).

But also, any scientific examination of gendering in the brain is dealing with averages, ranges and statistics. The central tenet of feminism — that women deserve equal esteem, equal opportunity, and equal freedom — is not undermined if there happen to be innate differences, because any “innate differences” as such exist only in general, statistical terms. Any generalization reflects a range of likelihoods and has exceptions. So the key to fairness is establishing a society in which individuals are not bound by expectations based on these generalities.

This can be solved quite simply by establishing individual merit and ability as the focus by which we judge aptitude for a given task, and not averages or stereotypes regarding gender (or race, etc.).

And, furthermore, these differences have no bearing on whether or not women should have control over their own bodies or destiny.

Edited to add. Upon reflection, i feel it necessary to add that i am not trying to say that all transsexualism or all gender dysphoria comes from a neurobiological origin, or that it is the only origin. But i do think that it is a piece in the puzzle. Maybe a key piece, maybe not. But either way, in my case at least, it is an idea that resonates with my experience very strongly and provides the likeliest explanation i’ve encountered so far.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

This diatribe by Paul McHugh, at one time Psychiatrist-in-Chief of Johns Hopkins University, against transsexualism is not news. But since encountering the text of it online last week, i have been pondering how to respond. I think the best response i can give is a line-by-line answer.

When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity (“gender” was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?

McHugh is a gender essentialist. That is, he believes that at some point in our early development it is determined that we will be a man or a woman, and once this differentiation occurs it is complete, profound, and eternal. Furthermore, this differentiation is based on externally-verifiable clues; in cases of ambiguity an answer can be imposed on someone by society or by an expert with absolute certainty.

This external imposition has nothing to do with one’s individual experience; experience is squishy, unreliable, not to be trusted. Individual variation is seen as aberrance, which is most properly dealt with by being corrected in accordance with the proscriptive norm. For example, the woman who is not subservient or sufficiently maternal is aberrant and must be corrected.

This position is normative; it breaks the human experience down into categories by which individual experience and performance is given a value judgment as “normal” or “aberrant.” In other words, in the gender-essentialist view of the human condition, you are either a “normal man,” a “normal woman,” an “aberrant man,” or an “aberrant woman.”

This position does not recognize transsexualism. People who report an experience of gender incongruence between their body and mind are aberrant, in that we must be delusional.

Once that the gender essentialist declares that i am delusional, there is nothing i can say to him or her. The gender essentialist, confronted with my account of my experience which cannot be reconciled with his or her belief system, has chosen to resolve the dilemma by putting his or her hand over my mouth. So we know from this that the entire article will consist of speaking at transsexual women rather than speaking with us.

Prepare to be depressed. This is long, so i’m putting it behind a cut.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

This weekend i spent a fair amount of time pondering what peace is and how it should be achieved.

Whenever we have a war, there's a bunch of shooting and bombing and fear and rape and famine and torture and maiming, and whole nations are deeply traumatized and face environmental and economic crises for years or decades. And after the primary spasms of horrific violence end, there are "peace talks." Or, often the "peace talks" happen when there's been some terrorism and skirmishing and threats.

This whole idea of "peace talks" though enshrines a number of unspoken presumptions and agendas that i want to unravel a bit.

First, look at who gets to be party to the peace talks: the generals and warlords and state leaders and other people who masterminded the war in the first place. Does anyone ever speak for, or listen to, the refugees, the broken families, the orphans and widows, the children who were prostituted or drugged and made into soldiers?

Also absent are the war profiteers. They would prefer to stay in the shadows, because they benefit most when no one pays any attention to their role in all this and everyone just assumes that they are passive merchants, not power brokers. They want people to think that it wouldn't matter if they stopped selling arms or hiring out mercenaries because the demand exists independent of their supply, so if they got out of the war business someone else would just offer the same products anyway.

The people who do get to participate in peace talks do so in order to advance their agenda -- and i assert this to be the case for all parties no matter what ideology or doctrine they epouse: they want to duck any kind of accountability they might otherwise face for war crimes, and they want a seat in the cartel that has a monopoly on violence in the region. Throughout the peace talks, it is in their interest to make it seem that they are willing to return to violence at the drop of a hat -- as if being violent is the easy option, and not being violent is a perpetual struggle. Running and outfitting an army is not cheap, the resources for training, weapons, and provisions have to come from somewhere, and yet we are to believe that being nonviolent is the harder option? At peace talks, the biggest asset one has is the appearance of having limitless capacity for violence, and how backward is that?

So the idea of "peace" promoted by the state is the absence of factional organized violence, enforced by a cartel who assert the unique authority to use sanctioned violence in that region. Anyone else uses violence, they are criminals; the state uses violence, it is just and heroic. This is "peace:" unrealized potential violence. The state wants you to believe that peace comes at the point of a gun.

Which is where, like so many of the matters i consider, this comes down to one's view of human nature. If people are fundamentally unruly animals, for whom it actually is more difficult to be nonviolent than brutal, then pacificism doesn't make sense, and neither does compassion. Under the pessmistic view of human nature, we should be thankful if we live in an area with a strong state and a healthy culture of fear-respect for God, police and military.

However, i'm not inclined to think that way, for several reasons, not the least of which is that what we are witnessing is not the action of humans in our natural habitat but the action of humans under the severe stresses of crowding and being caged. If our unruliness is fundamentally the reaction to this stress -- along with stress from various other stressors -- then adding the stress of perpetually-threatened state violence cannot be a lasting solution. The better solution, it seems to me, is a more direct response to the stresses which cause our unruliness.

Is peace more than the absence of war? I believe instead that it is the steps we take to foster greater understanding, less prejudice, and reduced stress. If this is the case, then we all have a stake in promoting and developing peace. And we, all of us, not just the ones with the guns and bombs, have a voice in saying what it looks like.

It is often said that the non-violent philosophy is naive, especially when proponents of non-violence insist that violence cannot be used to contain violence. There are just bad people in the world, so the response goes, and what are we going to do, give them a flower and hope it touches their heart?

But what does it mean, to say that a person or an idea is naive? I've been thinking about this, and it strikes me that this seems to be a way to judge or insult someone for having a certain lack of knowledge, or harboring a refusal to acknowledge the truth of a certain set of understandings.

But it is not just any lack of knowledge that will earn you the label of naive. What naive people have not accepted or cannot accept is what i've previously called the Cannibal memeplex. It also goes along with this lemma i proposed a year ago: The degree to which we have to desensitize ourselves just to function in society is directly indicative of the level of injustice in our society.

Furthermore, and this is where it gets controversial: it seems to me that the word 'naivete' refers to the way people are naturally inclined to think before exposure to Cannibal. It is thus a strategy meant to dismiss and denigrate the way people naturally respond to violence and promote desensitization and acceptance of a violent status quo.

A lot of this hinges, i think, on what you believe about human nature. Many believe that it is utterly inevitable that there will be some portion of the population willing to lie, cheat, manipulate, abuse, exploit, and persecute -- and that the only thing that such people will understand is force in return. But i question this presumption and this conclusion as self-perpetuating, and i observe that the use of violence to suppress violence doesn't work.

Authoritarians use the existence of abusers and sociopaths to argue that we need, as a society, to appoint people who have the right to use violence without recrimination to reign them in. On TV and in the movies, this works great: you have bad guys, who do mean things to innocent bystanders and don't feel sorry, and then you have good guys, who do mean things to bad guys (and sometimes hurt innocent bystanders) but this is a good thing because the bad guys would go on doing mean things if there weren't good guys to stop them. And then the good guy kills the bad guy, and it's all over: the problem is solved. Women and children can sleep safe at night.

Only, in real life there seems to be a never-ending succession of bad guys. And people who do mean things to other people are not always, or even usually, on examination shown to be subhuman, sociopathic, or remorseless. In fact, quite often they did mean things because they bought into an idea that convinced them it was justifiable, or that they were entitled to do it.

And on the other side, the mean things done by the good guys are often racist, classist, or sexist -- in short they fit the same patterns of violence as that committed by the abusers and sociopaths. Those of us who question this whole scheme do not think this is accidental, because we hold that the sanctioning of some violence essentially implies the sanctioning of all violence. One sort of violence justifies the application of another sort, which will in turn lead to more acts of the first sort (in revenge), which will in turn... etc.

Are people naturally inclined to feel entitled to hurt other people? I would dare to venture that the direction of our quest for justice hinges on this question. It bifurcates sharply here. If people can naturally feel entitled to hurt others, as conventional wisdom says, we go one way (basically the way we are going today); if they are not, we must choose a more effective path.

I'm not willing to accept that people are naturally inclined to hurt one another. IF this is true, then the entire culture of violence is an abberation. IF this is true, then violence cannot be used to quell violence.

Two people commit the same horrific act, but one is praised and the other cursed, because one is acting as a duly-appointed representative of the state. It is considered "naive" to point this out or question it. It is naive to even wonder if state-sanctioned violence is really the best response to illegal or unsanctioned violence, or is even a valid idea. The effect on someone who is killed or maimed or widowed or orphaned by either kind of violence is the same; but the defenders of statism want to cover up this troubling observation by saying "collateral damage" is necessary.

They don't want us to think about war profiteering or the employment cartel or the connection between repression of pleasure and tendency to violence. To even think this way is compared to treason, because if lots of people began to think this way, it would threaten the hegemony.

To call non-violence naive is to say that it is not worthy of a further thought, which is more than just dismissive of someone naive like me. It distracts attention from where it belongs, namely, the failure of fighting fire with fire. How many more wars, revolts, skirmishes, and terrorist attacks will we have to suffer before we realize that this strategy has failed?

What do i advocate instead? The bravery to face the cycle of violence head-on and refuse to respond in kind. Teaching people compassion. Teaching people to question their privilege.

In the past i have written about guiltless pleasure as a radical act against authoritarianism. When one's relationship to pleasure has been damaged, one is more pliable to follow authoritarian schemes. At the base of this pliability is a certain kind of proneness to violence (especially in men) resulting from this damaged relationship to pleasure which can be channelled into the currency of rulership.

Some of us have the instinctive idea that a cadre of 'sacred whores' can lead the way by demonstrating the pleasure-positive life in ways that bring goodness to people individually and society as a whole.

However, there's a difficulty here which is subtle and not easy to articulate. But i think a few pieces of the puzzle are coming into view for me.

imomus gave one important piece in his post about "raunch feminism," which he says defines the 'lewd choreography' of raunch as empowerment:

My main objection... to raunch feminism is this. Feminism as a project has two sides: the dismantling of patriarchy, and the empowerment of women. Raunch feminism proposes that women can be "empowered" without dismantling patriarchy... in fact, by embracing "the male gaze" entirely.

If a woman wants to be sexual on her own terms -- especially if she understands the psychology and politics of freeing oneself and others from restrictions on pleasure -- she faces a gauntlet of social censure, taunts, jeers, and occasional violence, for being a 'traitor' to patriarchal demands for chastity. (It is important to note that a woman cannot be safe from sexual mistreatment by choosing to be chaste instead.) To free yourself of these fetters and be unabashedly human can feel empowering.

But the patriarchal catch-22 is that women are also rewarded for making themselves sexually available. Sexual availability on demand is, after all, what patriarchy ultimately demands of women. So the empowerment of being sexual on one's own terms can be lost to the financial rewards available for playing to men's desires and commodifying one's sexual availability. You run from one demon right into the arms of another.

Being rewarded for doing something one enjoys can seem empowering... but once sexual availability has been commodified, this empowerment is lost. (Consider, for example, the points made here by

ginmar on the link between prostitution and rape.) The momentary praise one receives from individual men for giving them easy access to sexual gratification is a cheap substitute for true self-determination. (Trust me on this.)

Think about it: if patriarchy were easy to undermine, a matter of straightforwardly doing one thing or another, women would have figured out how to undo it centuries ago. But patriarchy traps women in a sexual maze, where they are undervalued for being too prudish and simultaneously undervalued for being too brazen. One institution sings the praise of chaste women, while another, very different institution sings the praise of sluts; and together both build a maze around women.

It is not possible to "reform" social sexuality within this maze. As

imomus suggested, quoted above, it is not possible to empower women without undermining patriarchy.

So if we are to liberate ourselves from sexism and authoritarian pleasure-restriction at the same time, we must have a clear understanding of when we are trapped within the maze and when we have managed to transcend it.

I'm inspired here by an extensive piece which Aleister Crowley offered on this topic. In this quote, Crowley proclaimed the victory of women's equality achieved by loosing her from bearing the brunt of social strictures on sex, and the commodification of sex:

In vain will bully and brute and braggart man, priest, lawyer, or social censor knit his brows to devise him a new tamer's trick; once and for all the tradition is broken; vanished the vogue of bowstring, sack, stoning, nose-slitting, belt-buckling, cart's tail-dragging, whipping, pillory posting, walling-up, divorce court, eunuch, harem, mind-crippling, house-imprisoning, menial-work-wearying, creed stultifying, social-ostracism-marooning, Divine-wrath-scaring, and even the device of creating and encouraging prostitution to keep one class of women in the abyss under the heel of the police, and the other on its brink, at the mercy of the husband's boot at the first sign of insubordination or even of failure to please.

Man's torture-chamber had tools inexhaustibly varied; at one end murder crude and direct to subtler, more callous, starvation; at the other moral agonies, from tearing her child from her breast to threatening her with a rival when her service had blasted her beauty.

I don't know that there's a particular guideline that will ensure beyond doubt that one's efforts as a sacred whore have not been subverted. It seems to me that on this path one must look to one's will for guidance and avoid doing that which one does not wish to do. But what does this mean, to wish to do something, when one needs money to eat? What does this mean, to wish to do something, when one is starved for affection and approval?

For a while now i've been toying around from time to time with the idea that mind is a field. Under this view, mind is given the respect it is due as a phenomenon in its own right, but without a metaphysical dualism of the sort with which mind/body theories typically wrestle.

Some implications of this are interesting. Fields have properties like resonance, and theoretically extend over the whole universe. Noön particles would be quantum-interlinked just like other particles. So our individual minds, thoughts, feelings, are not as isolatedly individual as we seem to experience them. While noöns may be concentrated inside living brains, they wouldn't be found only there.

If noöns exist, why haven't we seen them? I think they possess a rather unique place in nature, in that they serve as an explication factor which draws spacetime reality into being from the melange of the holomovement. Trying to observe one directly would be difficult for the same reason it is hard to pinpoint the exact nature of first-person experience. Noöns are, in my hypothesis, what acts on quantum fields to produce what we perceive as the "quantum wave collapse." In other words, what defines "reality" as distinct from the fullness of existence is the influence of a noönic field. So to look at a noön would be analogous to looking at a mirror; you don't see an image, but only a reflection of what is around. Seeing anything at all *is* the process of seeing a noön.

(It sounds like i am proposing a duality here between explicated and otherwise, but i do not imagine a universe where explicit matter is free from influence by that which remains enfolded. If you said this sounds like a hidden-variable-invoking Bohmian interpretation, you'd be right. Heck, noöns themselves are a hidden variable.)

There is a lot that might be explained by the supposition that each mind extends over all of spacetime. It might partly explain, for example, instant attraction or repulsion. Have you ever met someone and felt like you recognized them immediately? Perhaps there is a strong resonance between your noönic fields. If however you meet someone whose noönic field is dissonant with your own, you might be inclined to dislike them, and you'd likely be right: that person would think and act in ways very different from you.

Many different aspects of collective human behavior might be explained this way, from mob consciousness to the intuitive appeal of ideas like Jung's collective unconscious, or Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere as the endpoint of human evolution.

It also allows for the possibility of noönic solitons or persistences. I could write a whole entry on what that means, persistent noönic waves floating around free of brains to shape them, affecting thought, feeling, and perhaps even matter. Some memes might be noönic solitons -- as might memories or experiences some people attribute to "reincarnation." Perhaps instincts and patterns of human behavior i referred to recently as "human nature" are noönic solitons as well.

There are interesting implications regarding will and causation, too. Jeffrey Schwartz proposed a notion he called "mental force" to explain the observable change in brain structure which can result from focused meditation. That the brain is capable of self-reprogramming is fascinating and opens a wide range of potential for human improvement. But this result also gives us hard evidence that consciousness is something real. (Contrast the views of Daniel Dennett and other eliminative-materialists who claim that consciousness and self are pure memetic illusion, on the basis of the observation that there is no place within the brain where consciousness resides.)

I've come to think that being abusive, hateful, and intolerant is evidence of having a weak will in the face of external influence. A person who displays these traits is less of an individuated person; they are blown about and easily carried along by external currents. In my opinion, the work of individuation, of learning to focus one's will by way of discipline (meditation, contemplative prayer, martial arts, esoterica, and other kinds of discipline) is inseparable from the work of cultivating a better human society.

Current Music: Love and Rockets "Sad and Beautiful World"

For many mothers who asked, "Where did i go wrong?" when her son came out as gay, the answer is in: you may have extreme X-chromosome skewing.

Next time, get your chromosomes straightened out before having a son. (Because, you know, being gay is a choice.)

A few people yesterday expressed some indignation about the phrase "human nature," and rightfully so. So let me clarify what i mean when i use the phrase.

Generally, people behave in accordance with roughly predictable patterns. When you tell someone that a person they care about has died, they are not going to jump up and down and shout "booga booga booga." When you poke someone in the eye, they are not going to laugh with glee.

These are outlandish examples, but the fact is, peaceful co-existence with other people requires the ability to understand what other people are experiencing and having a vague idea of what they are going to do in given circumstances. We take this ability for granted, but we dedicate a considerable amount of our brain to the capacity to watch other people and understand the motivations for their actions.

So this is what i mean by "human nature:" the vaguely predictable and reliable patterns of response and behavior that human beings exhibit. It is a product of both nature and nurture (which i do not see a hard distinction between, by the way), of both instinct and culture.

I do not use the term to refer to anything that is even vaguely metaphysical. For example, i am not an essentialist. I do not believe there is some fundamentally distinctive 'human essence' that separates us somehow from other living things.

But i concede that in common use it often carries a metaphysical sort of connotation, so the term might be problematic in that regard. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Our ability to understand and make judgments about our environment evolved out of the need to know what is going on around us in order to find food or keep from becoming food. It is linked to some of the 'oldest' parts of the brain such as the amygdala, a portion of the brain that sifts through sensory data for threats and governs emotional responses like fear and fight-or-flight.

The human capacity for thought is still connected to the amygdala. The need to understand is fundamentally an emotional need. Failure to come up with an answer to an important question is deemed a threat.

The brain is capable of holding myriad complex and even contradictory thoughts at once, because it is not a CPU but is more like a house with several rooms. One room can hold one thought and another room can hold another thought which is in direct contradiction to the first.

This kind of inconsistency does not always cause dissonance. When it does, though, the dissonance creates an emotional dilemma, activating the amygdala which adds an exclamation point to demands for a resolution to the crisis.

When this happens, the brain looks for a quick answer it can apply to make the distress stop. There is even a biosociological theory of religion rooted in this observation. A while ago i built on this and suggested that it creates an opportunity for memetic parasites to thrive in human culture.

There is another way in which emotion can get in the way of logic, and that is the emotional investment which most (if not all) people put into thoughts, concepts, ideas, or cultural labels. These things become a part of our identity, and so information that contradicts what we have invested in is perceived as a threat to our well-being.

It was because of all this that i was not surprised by results which i cited a couple of weeks ago about the way in which emotion prevents some information from being processed logically or rationally.

Now, let me be clear that this does not mean that we are totally helpless in the face of our emotional response. One of the beauties of the human mind is that we have the capability to override our emotions with force of will. But this emotional response makes it difficult, and also makes it possible for memes to override logic or rationality.

[By the way, awareness of this does not make one automatically immune to it, which leads to some interesting sensations when you realizing you're reacting in ways you 'know' are "irrational" but which still make sense, because they reflect your experiences rather than the concepts you are able to parrot back on demand.]

I bring this up now because there is also a dimension of restriction that comes with the experience of trauma related to oppression. It is very difficult to communicate beyond this trauma, especially if someone associates a certain kind of language with the mistreatment they received.

For example, it is very hard for me (and many of the people i know and/or love) to remain rational when we hear certain kinds of religious language which we came, during the course of our lives, to associate with mistreatment. When this happens, the words are not "communication of ideas" but "signal of impending threat."

I make the effort to see things rationally, but do not always succeed.

These are all powerful impediments to peaceful co-existence and rational dialogue between people, which it should be a cultural priority to address.

This fits in perfectly with things i have been saying about "the hypostatic reverie," the "conscious censor," and pseudo-religion memetic parasites.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

from Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds (thanks to chipuni for the link)

A link on the friend's list this morning had some interesting information on the Fed's decision to stop reporting on M3 and suggesting that this is to cover up a Federal Reserve plan to hyperinflate the dollar. So far, so good; that's the kind of evil i can see happening as a result of the Fed's relative impotence in the face of Congress's utter fiscal irresponsibility. Printing lots of money is every junta's favorite way of paying off its debts.

I should have stopped reading the comments though when i saw the word "Bilderburgers." Ordinarily, i would have; LaRouchean-style conspiracy theory doesn't sit well with me.

If there were truly a conspiracy to shape the course of world events, it would not look like a secret cabal. A secret cabal could be too easily exposed for what it is. Just the fact that there is widespread speculation about secret cabals precludes the existence of one, because no secret cabal worthy of the name would tolerate open speculation about the existence of secret cabals.

No, it would look like something else entirely, something much less obvious.

I think that a lot of people are drawn to the idea of a conspiracy because, after all, there are a few people in the world who have a lot of power, money, and influence, and there are many of us who have little or none. And this is a situation with which the majority of us accept quietly, due in no small part to the presence among us of people with uniforms and guns who take orders from the influential folks. It's also a situation that exists because there are people in the world who feel completely entitled to take whatever they want, without any thought for who is put out in the process.

It's been recently established that primates have an innate sense of fair play; and so even on an unconscious level we look at the world around us and know that there is something vastly unfair going on around us. But we can't see it. That's because we've been very effectively blinkered to its existence.

THAT is what a real conspiracy looks like. It would be something we all buy into, a presumption built in to all of our language, culture, and ideology fnord. Something considered "common sense" so that the defenders of it seem rational and straightforward, can defend the unfairness of it all with a calm rational voice. Something considered "natural" so that proposals to replace it with something more fair and egalitarian sound wacky and far-out. Something we are all recruited to play a part in, unable to see it because we have been cultured from birth to see it as a normal part of the way the world works. Something we have no words to describe because we have been numbed and desensitized and because, even more subtly, we employ a censor on our consciousness to keep it from active awareness. Our own scrambling from day to day for survival keeps us from seeing it, because we are too busy worrying about our own lives and sanity. And lastly, those who do happen to look up from the grindstone to see that the emperor has no clothes are led to dualistic "us vs. them" thinking that makes it difficult to understand (and therefore criticize) the full ubiquity of the conspiracy and our own individual participation in it.

Hannah Arendt's appraisal of evil as banal holds in this case, because the conspiracy shaping world politics and events, preserving privilege for a few, looks exactly like the kyriarchy.

During my very productive conversation with

daoistraver here, i wrote this:

i don't see any way to prevent an aristocratic power-grab from happening in the absence of a population-wide regulatory structure to keep them from taking everything. That's why i'm a socialist and not an anarchist. Even then the people at the upper echelons find ways to manipulate the existing system, including government, to suit their purposes -- which is something i agree with you completely on -- but on balance i think the population as a whole are better off with welfare and regulation enforcement, however corrupt, than they are without that at all... unless someone could prove to me that the next revolution would be permanent and would not just result in yet another class stratification.

For about a year i've been looking for a way to formulate what i saw expressed quite succinctly yesterday: the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which i summarized in yesterday's post: "all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies."

I see this as a serious problem, perhaps THE serious problem: all revolutions are in their turn either suppressed, or are undermined and appropriated and become the oligarchs' key to our hearts and minds -- they cannibalize us while making us think it's in our best interest. This has happened so often and so faithfully that imperialism and kyriarchy have been seriously proposed by biosociologists as the natural tendency of our species.

So, how do we solve it? What slogans, principles, ideologies, churches, movements, chants, protests, guillotines, etc., will not eventually be turned around and used against us? We can storm the boardrooms and congress and subvert the media and march in the streets, but to what end, if a generation or so from now, we've got the same status quo all over again, but using the name of "revolution" as happened in Russia?

We need a revolution not just of people in the street (though that might be a component of it too); we need a revolution that erects an eternal fountain of compassion and loving-kindness in each person.

Current Music: Electronic "Make It Happen"

I know that sociologists since Max Weber already have terms to describe the phenomenon that's been on my mind for a few months now, but i'm developing my own, because i'm finding it somewhat useful to re-invent the wheel a bit. It's edifying to see that i come to the same conclusions as sociologists and economists who have gone before me.

There exist many "naive needs." These are needs that are not created but result simply from being alive or being a member of society. Hunger and thirst, for example, are naive needs; they do not arise from culture or memetic programming (despite what the breatharians claim) and cannot be talked away; they have to be met. They do not exist because of someone's political agenda and are not the invention of an ideology.

The principle of "returns to scale" tells us that, up to a certain point, a larger operation can return increasingly more benefit than a smaller one. A larger raiding party can win more bounty than a smaller one; a larger defensive force can repel larger raiding parties than a smaller one. So we find it in our interest to pool our efforts and resources.

Therefore we create institutions that help us to meet our naive needs. Irrigation canals to make for better farms, roads and markets to help distribute the food.

How is it that many of these institutions, intended to create solutions, become problems? And then we have to implement new solutions, which become the next round of problems?

The answer i'm working with requires me to start with a metaphor. Imagine that you 'come to' and find yourself in a room. At first everything in the room seems new, but eventually it fades into a background wash. I'm calling this the "hypostatic reverie," because it is a kind of neural apathy that develops. The brain has a well-documented way of washing out the familiar, because survival depends on recognizing what is different about your surroundings. If something new were to appear in the room, you would notice it, because it would stand out against the background.

Smells, tastes, sights, and sounds become "background noise" that we do not notice as much, because we have to remain alert for changes and threats. Neuroscientists call this "habituation," but i am not using this term because i want to extend the idea out into the effects it has on our conceptualized image of the world.

If you watch a building being built, it is new to you and stands out as special; it is not part of the landscape. To someone who comes along a couple of years later, there is nothing special about it, it is just another building like all the rest. For the first person, the building is not a part of the hypostatic reverie like it is for the second; it is not just another bit of background noise to be whitewashed.

Once a thing has been built, it quickly (within a few years) becomes part of the popular hypostatic reverie. It is an established part of the background that we do not question until something extraordinary happens that causes it to draw attention to itself. Because of this we do not keep in the forefront of our minds the reason why an edifice or institution was created; and it can be easily drawn away from its intended purpose by those who take it upon themselves to use it to their benefit.

Here's an example. The need for safe medicines is a naive need: we never stop needing to avoid medications that harm instead of help. So the FDA was established to set standards for medicine safety. A few generations later, the FDA has become a part of the established landscape; we cannot imagine a world without the FDA. And it is only a rampantly greedy pharmaceutical industry (in recent years one of the most profitable industries around) pumping a large set of harmful medicines like Vioxx or Paxil that draws the FDA back out of the background and makes us scrutize it to wonder, what went so wrong? Complacency caused by the hypostatic reverie allowed the FDA to be staffed not with honest watchdogs but with pharma cronies.

To take this a step further, something similar happens when original, fresh thoughts are hypostatized into ideology and doctrine.

A locked post on my friend's list this morning has me thinking about the role and nature of personal conduct as a topic of public interest.

The very thought of public intrusion into certain aspects of private behavior makes Americans go nuts. Americans do not want the government to tell us to wear helmets when we ride a motorcycle (this has been an extremely contentious issue), we don't want restaurants to tell us we can't smoke in here, and in general as a culture we have very mixed feelings about things like drug laws, alcohol restrictions, firearm registration, and so on. We don't want people to tell us to lose weight, to watch less TV, to drive within the speed limit, to restrict our sex lives, and so on.

On the other hand, it is entirely accepted that our behavior is restricted in other ways: we accept punishment for things like murder, rape, robbery; even for insider trading, espionage, embezzling, and so on.

One distinction suggested is that in the second class of behaviors there are clear victims, whereas in the first class, there are no clear victims.

From a particular point of view, though, one could say that society is collectively impacted by poor personal choices. A principle of economic thought is that any cost ripples throughout the whole economy. So the medical costs of tobacco or alcohol, for example, affect everyone. The economic effect of a distant individual's choice to drink alcohol has a negligable effect on you or me, but the combined costs of millions of drinkers has a noticable effect. These costs have been known for thousands of years and this offers, in my not-so-humble opinion, a prime motivation behind moral codes.

But the real distinction between vice (so-called here not to make a value judgment but to use a handy term we all know) and crime isn't the lack of tangible victimization; after all, many crimes and ethical violations like insider trading or pollution similarly have no clear direct impact on specific individuals. The key is that vice is enjoyable and often does not have directly negative individual consequences.

The other dimension to this is the psychological effect of having your access to pleasure controlled by people in authority. I've argued before that controlling access to pleasure has the effect of making people more placid and malleable. It is our implicit understanding of this that makes complex the politics of pleasure control, and marks the reason why so many of us have instinctive objections to attempts to restrict our personal behavior. Maybe some of you feared that above i was gearing up for a rationalistic assault on vice and therefore on your liberty. (Or, alternately, maybe you thought i was being eminently more sensible than usual.) This effect, a kind of pleasure-control principle, has also been known for thousands of years and offers, in my not-so-humble opinion, another prime motivation behind moral codes.

No one can deny the economic costs of vice. But here, finally, we encounter the price we are willing to pay in exchange for pleasure-liberty.

One way to express this in a very general way is with the use of an equation:

K x Price of Vice = Socially-Acceptable Degree of Personal Liberty

Now, this should not be seen as an "equation" but as a description of an equilibrium-state society constantly seeks. The terms of this statement are constantly changing in value and are not entirely independent. Since the values of these variables are changing and are interdependent on a wide variety of things there is no one best answer to this equation for all time; each society collectively moves the dial like the pointer on a Ouija board in search of equilibrium.

Here we have, in a nutshell, the essence of our long history of struggles between authoritarianism and libertarianism, and an indicator of why social attitudes about things like sex, alcohol, drug use, and gambling vary so much from place to place and from time to time.

"K" is a term representing the varying social mood with regard to authority and liberty. The higher K goes, the more permissible a society is; but with more permissiveness comes an increase in the economic cost of vice -- or at least the perception thereof, very important -- throwing society away from the equilibrium and in favor of reactionary authoritarianism. Blue laws, helmet laws, the War on (Some) Drugs, and so on, or the repeal thereof, represent tokens in the seeking of this equilibrium.

This equation actually shows one way in which authoritarians have a hand-up, because most people, including most hedonists, want to be economically responsible. And so when a new reactionary vice-restriction law is being discussed -- like, for example, the reduction of the federal speed limit to 55 miles per hour in the 1970's -- the economic cost angle can be deployed to sway some of the fence-sitters. All the libertines have in their corner is the age-old argument against the abuse of power, and a keen awareness of how very difficult it is to restore a freedom once it has been ceded to the authorities.

Why did farming spread at all? The answer might seem to be obvious -- for example, that farming makes life easier or happier, or that it provides a genetic advantage to the people who practice it.

In fact, it seems that farming did not make life easier, nor did it improve nutrition, or reduce disease. The British science writer Colin Tudge (1995) describes farming as 'the end of Eden'. Rather than being easier, the life of early farmers was utter misery. Early Egyptian skeletons tell a story of a terrible life. Their toes and backs are deformed by the way people had to grind corn to make bread; they show signs of rickets and of terrible abscesses in their jaws. Probably few lived beyond the age of thirty. Stories in the Old Testament describe the arduous work of farmers and, after all, Adam was thrown out of Eden and told, 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' By contrast modern hunter-gatherers have been estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a week hunting and have plenty of time for leisure. This is despite the fact that they have been pushed into marginal environments far poorer than those in which our ancient ancestors probably lived. Why would people the world over have given up an easier life in favor of a life of toil and drudgery?

Tudge assumes 'that agriculture arose because it was favored by natural selection' (1995, p. 274) and therefore looks for a genetic advantage. He suggests that because farming produces more food from a given area of land, farmers will produce more children who will encroach on neighboring hunter-gatherer's lands and so destroy their way of life. For this reason, once farming arrives no one has the luxury of saying 'I want to keep the old way of life.' However, we know from the skeletons of early farmers that they were malnourished and sickly. So was there really a genetic advantage?

(Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine p. 26-27)

This is a mystery to which there is no widely-accepted answer. It seems to me though that there must have been both opportunity and necessity.

Some theorists suggest that atmospheric CO2 levels shifted in a way that opened a window of opportunity for agriculture to develop. I haven't investigated this enough to form an opinion about its likelihood. But something special happened that led to the simultaneous development of agriculture in nine different places about 10,000 years ago.

I'm leaning towards a combination of population/resource pressure and climactic favorability, as the likely cause. Housing and clothing played a role, too; people in cultures with permanent housing and adequate clothing require 40% less food.

A couple of pages with notes about the origin of agriculture:

http://www.indyrad.iupui.edu/public/ebraunst/Agriculture.htm
http://courses.washington.edu/anth457/agorigin.htm

I recall being taught in sociology and anthropology class that the current theory about the origins of government, social stratification, and the division of labor is traceable to the development of irrigation systems. See for example this link. This thought might be worth exploring and examining further.

Human beings, as products of evolution, have not been engineered for maximum efficiency, but contain systems and faculties which came, over successive generations, to operate at varying degrees of sufficiency.

There is no true "hardware/software" distinction with the brain. It may turn out that the "hard dualists" are right, but otherwise, the mind and body are interlinked in a single system. Thoughts are made not of binary electrical signals (like circuits which are either on or off) but analog chemical signals conveyed by over 60 kinds of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides.

Learning involves actually changing the neural configuration of the brain, which is why children learn more quickly than adults -- the brain is much more plastic when people are young. Once a pattern is established, it is difficult or impossible to change, because changing it involves destroying some neural connections and growing other new ones. This is why for example we have thoughts or behaviors which we know are less than efficient but which we have difficulty changing. Some people are more capable than others of achieving this change.

Nervous systems are not made up of "general-purpose circuitry" -- IOW, one nerve or node is not as good as another for a given purpose. Generally speaking, each faculty in the nervous system developed piecemeal in response to a given need.

It is only because of accidental flexibility that certain pieces of the brain can be used for "higher" kinds of thought. A lot of our abstract thought, for example, occurs in the motor regions of the brain, because at its root, abstract thought is contemplation of actions we have to take (even if that action consists of engaging the vocal system in order to speak).

Much of our cognition occurs via various 'inference systems' which serve mainly to minimize the amount of effort required to analyze a given stimulus and formulate a response. These systems operate at different degrees of urgency and have different levels of dominance. For example, the predator-detection inference system is capable of grabbing the mind's attention away from whatever else it may be doing -- because this is what needs to happen. My recent comments about predisposition for certain kinds of thought and cultural pattern touch on this.

It is sometimes very difficult for the mind to "see around" the cognitive shortcuts taken by inference systems. My recent comments about gender essentialism reflect this observation.

The brain is a parallel processor. Each stimulus is examined by several different pieces of the brain at the same time. For example, when someone is speaking to you and using hand gestures, a special part of your brain hears the sound and routes it to the language parser; non-verbal cues are interpreted by another special part of the brain which handles the social relevance of what the person is saying; and a special motor part of your brain figures out what the hand motions look like from the other person's perspective and works out how to imitate them and provides some input on what meaning these gestures convey.

Different parts of the brain are capable of handling contradictory information at once. For example, one inference system might conclude that the person to your left is a man, while another might conclude that person is a woman. What usually happens is that there is a brief period of cognitive dissonance while these thoughts compete for dominance.

The conscious mind is very clearly not in "control" of most of the brain and is not even aware of most of what is going on. The conscious mind is capable in fact of being mistaken about what the brain is actually doing. A possible explanation is that conscious thought is a largely memetic faculty which has been hobbled together as a barely-sufficient response to the challenges of civilization.

Current Music: Patrick O'Hearn "Equinox"

In a comment to my post about Predator, I mentioned some of the inspiration behind this post. Here is another bit which led me to this idea.

Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, argues that one reason which gods, spirits, ghosts, and ancestors ("supernatural agents") are so important is that our brains treat them as predators.

When we see branches moving in a tree, or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us, we immediately infer that some agent is the cause of this salient event. We can do that without any specific description of what the agent actually is. ... Some inference systems in the mind are specialized in the detection of apparent animacy and agency in objects around us.

... According to psychologist Justin Barrett, this feature of our psychological functioning is fundamental to understanding concepts of gods and spirits, for two reasons. First, what happens in religion is not so much that people see "faces in the clouds" as "traces in the grass." That is, people do not so much visualize what supernatural agents must be like as detect traces of their presence.... ... Second, our agency-detection system tends to "jump to conclusions" -- that is, to give us the intuition that an agent is around -- in many contexts where other interpretations (the wind pushed the foliage, a branch just fell off a tree) are equally plausible. ...

For Barrett, there are important evolutionary reasons why we (as well as other animals) should have "hyperactive agent detection." Our evolutionary heritage is that of organisms that must deal with both predators and prey. In either situation, it is far more advantageous to overdetect agency than to underdetect it. The expense of false positives is minimal, if we can abandon these misguided intuitions quickly. In contrast, the cost of not detecting agents when they are actually around could be very high. (pp. 144-146)

All well and good, but the limitation which Boyer sees in this is that we have plenty of "false positives" which do not linger as gods and spirits, but instead are dismissed as innocuous 'bumps in the night.' Boyer answers by explaining that predation-avoidance is only one of several systems in the mind which activate in the perceived presence of gods. To summarize the rest of this part of the argument very briefly:

Interacting with other human beings requires the ability to handle expediently a large amount of social information, and the human brain has several faculties which evolved to handle certain kinds of social information: information about certain people's reliability, the cues people use to indicate that they can be trusted, who has what relationships with whom, and so on. What people have been up to -- the kinds of thing that usually fill gossip. Boyer calls this strategic information, and adds that who knows what and who doesn't know what about what you've been up to is also strategic. But gods, spirits, and ancestors are person-like agents who have full access to strategic information. He illustrates by comparing two sets of sentences.

God knows the contents of every refrigerator in the world.
God perceives the state of every machine in operation.
God knows what every single insect in the world is up to. (p. 158)

These kinds of things are far less relevant to our attitudes towards gods than statements like

God knows whom you met yesterday.
God knows that you are lying.
God knows that I misbehaved. (p. 158)

Gods and spirits, then, are typically seen as person-like beings who know when you're awake, when you're sleeping, if you've been bad or good (so be good for goodness' sake!), and who, as predatory beings, have the capacity to punish ill-doers.

Current Music: Cowboy Junkies "Why This One"

A survey of academics at the University of Bath has found that male scientists typically have a level of the hormone oestrogen as high as their testosterone level. These hormone levels are more usual in women than men, who normally have higher levels of testosterone.

The study draws on research which suggests that these unusual hormone levels in many male scientists cause the right side of their brains, which governs spatial and analytic skills, to develop strongly.

... The study drew on work in the last few years which established that the levels of oestrogen and testosterone a person has can be seen in the relative length of their index (second) and ring (fourth) fingers. The ratio of the lengths is set before birth and remains the same throughout life.

The length of fingers is genetically linked to the sex hormones, and a person with an index finger shorter than the ring finger will have had more testosterone while in the womb, and a person with an index finger longer than the ring finger will have had more oestrogen. The difference in the lengths can be small - as little as two or three per cent - but important.

A survey of the finger lengths of over 100 male and female academics at the University by senior Psychology lecturer Dr Mark Brosnan has found that those men teaching hard science like mathematics and physics tend to have index fingers as long as their ring fingers, a marker for unusually high oestrogen levels for males.

... A further study also suggests that prenatal hormone exposure, and hence index finger length, can also influence actual achievement levels. In a survey of male and female students on a JAVA programming course at the University, the researchers found a link between finger length ratio and test score. The smaller the difference between index and ring finger - the higher the test score at the end of the year.

from Male scientists typically have a level of the hormone oestrogen as high as their testosterone level (thanks to akaiyume for the link)

This got me to thinking... could bullying of nerds in high school be another manifestation of the social pattern which causes sexism and homophobia? Evidence is starting to mount that homosexuality and transsexuality are reflections of certain hormonal exposures during fetal development. If nerdiness is yet another reflection thereof, and nerds get harassed and abused too, it makes me wonder if there isn't something about the dominant-male-abuser's body that reacts violently to cues (probably olfactory) that indicate high levels of estrogen in people.

As

lady_babalon put it this morning, anyone who is not sufficiently masculine will be punished for their existence.

A few years ago there was an episode of "The Simpsons" where Lisa, the nerdy daughter, discovered that nerds excrete a scent that makes bullies powerless against the urge to pound them. How strange it would be if that turned out to be true!

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with biosociology

the grabbing hands grab all they can

a snarky question

brains, biology, destiny, and being fair to one another

because it’s never too late to challenge a bad idea

peace versus the absence of violence

accepting bucky's dare

(no subject)

implications of the noönic theory

(no subject)

"human nature"

emotional barriers to rational dialogue

doublethink, captured live on tape

on conspiracies that shape society, politics, and the economy

say you want a revolution

the hypostatic reverie

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the domestication of the primate

A few general principles for examining human thought and action based on bio-psychology.

Gods as Predators

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December 2021

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