Are we playing a fictional role in life?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by coberst, Mar 19, 2009.

  1. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    Are we playing a fictional role in life?

    Sapiens are a species that has lost many of their animal instincts and our “soul” replaces these instincts. I use the word ‘soul’ to signify what many might call consciousness, spirit, conscience, mind, reason, etc. We are thus thrust out of the arms of Mother Nature and onto our own ability to adapt and survive. We are forced into replacing the natural selection process, which has led to our evolution, and we are thrown upon our own abilities to adapt or to be extinguished. It is our “soul” that creates the games we play. These games replace natural selection; and determine our survival as a species.

    Socrates was an intuitive genius, who may have been the first to understand that man needs to function in a shared social fiction before he can earn his own social honor, and social approval. But even Socrates could not intuit the degree to which this need was rooted. He could not see how deep ‘social performance’ goes and the degree that it is rooted in the anxiety of all sapiens. Humans cannot recognize their own self-worth without the word from their own social group.

    We have successfully struggled against Mother Nature to gain great material wealth only to discover that, as Pogo might say, “we have met the enemy and it is us”. The enemy is our great material play-form itself; it is our own profit-and-loss economy, our money-over-the-counter game that is defeating us. We have lost all relationship with our nature. Our created fiction has crippled our ability to rationally adapt to our world we have created. We run as fast as we can from school to shopping center to the bank and back home in our new SUV only to discover that the gods have already made us mad. Our own fictions are killing us.

    War itself is a fiction, it is a game, and it is a play-form. Roman civilization itself was a great “potlatch spirit” (a ceremonial feast of the American Indian of the northwest coast marked by the host’s lavish distribution of gifts or sometimes destruction of property to demonstrate wealth and generosity with the expectation of eventual reciprocation). What begins as simple contests, develop into complex play-forms. “Poetry, art, law, philosophy, war—all are contests or play-forms.”

    To call them play-forms is not to say that they are not serious. In our great game of society we create meaning; fictional meaning but nevertheless these fictions are life-meaning fictions. Me and Earnest agree, our problem is that we must create better fictions to live by, because our present fictions are killing us.

    What is the difference between playing a fictional role in life versus a non-fictional role?

    Ideas and quotes from Beyond Alienation by Ernest Becker
     
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  3. draqon Banned Banned

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    What is the difference between playing a fictional role in life versus a non-fictional role?

    fictional role is when you don't act according to your own decisions...follow life like a sheep just like everyone else.

    non-fictional role is when you actually take a stand for what you believe in, your are being intuitive, and create new ideas unlike others, you lead not follow.
     
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  5. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Neither a leader nor a follower be. Just find your own happiness in life and experiance it the way you enjoy.
     
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  7. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    I do not believe that we have lost our "instincts," I think the notion that animals have instinct and we do not is a holdover from the era when men believed that humans were not animals.

    Humanity *is* a social species though, like many other primates and several other mammalian species. We have evolved to have ingrained social instincts and certain core behaviors (most notably, the ability to learn rules of the others around us, mimic their behaviors, and later to largely internalize those rules and behaviors as "norms" so that we can follow them without much conscious effort. We often confuse those learned norms (which are, individually, largely arbitrarily selected from the set of behaviors conducive to group living) with elements of "nature" and assume that the norm is the only one that makes sense. This brings us into conflict with others who have a different and conflicting norm to which they adhere.

    This can get to be complex in that the norms fully allow us to "cheat" but applying one rule when observed and a separate, more selfish, rule when we think we can get away with it. That apparent conflict is not evidence that the rule when observed is a pretense, but rather that the overarching rule is one of maximizing personal satisfaction within a social context. If the rules when observed were really a burden that weighed on our "souls", early man could have left the social unit he found himself in and been happy and alone. Unfortunately for him, evolution has made mankind fundamentally predisposed to liking social interactions.

    Social behaviors in this view are not a "fiction" places on top of the "real persona" of a man...rather stripping away the social behaviors and norms leaves you with the greater fiction: either Rousseau's noble savage or the Hobbesian "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short [lived]" savage. Neither really ever existed. Pondering "non-social" humans would be like pondering naturally herbivorous lions.
     
  8. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    949
    Pandaemoni

    We still have instincts but they play a much diminished role in our welfare. Our welfare is determined primarily by our artificial life of meaning that we have created.

    The great truth of human nature is that wo/man strives for meaning. S/he imposes on raw experience symbolic categories of thought, and does so with conceptual structures of thought. “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.”—Otto Rank

    In the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of opposition paradigms, science faced the dilemma: if we make wo/man to be totally an object of science, to be as this object merely a conglomeration of atoms and wheels then where is there a place for freedom? How can such a collection of mere atoms be happy, and fashion the Good Life?

    The best thinkers of the Enlightenment followed by the best of the nineteenth century were caught in the dilemma of a materialistic psychology. Does not the inner wo/man disappear when humans are made into an object of science? On the other hand if we succumb to the mode of the middle Ages, when the Church kept man firmly under the wraps of medieval superstitions, do we not give up all hope for self-determined man?

    “Yet, we want man to be the embodiment of free, undetermined subjectivity, because this is the only thing that keeps him interesting in all of nature…It sums up the whole tragedy of the Enlightenment vision of science.” There are still those who would willingly surrender wo/man to Science because of their fear of an ever encroaching superstitious enemy.

    Kant broke open this frustrating dilemma. By showing that sapiens could not know nature in its stark reality, that sapiens had no intellectual access to the thing-in-itself, that humans could never know a nature that transcended their epistemology, Kant “defeated materialistic psychology, even while keeping its gains. He centered nature on man, and so made psychology subjective; but he also showed the limitations of human perceptions in nature, and so he could be objective about them, and about man himself. In a word man was at once, limited creature, and bottomless mystery, object and subject…Thus it kept the best of materialism, and guaranteed more than materialism ever could: the protection of man’s freedom, and the preservation of his inner mystery.”

    After Kant, Schilling illuminated the uniqueness of man’s ideas, and the limitations from any ideal within nature. Schilling gave us modern wo/man. Materialism and idealism was conjoined. Wo/man functioned under the aegis of whole ideas, just as the idealists wanted, and thus man became an object of science while maintaining freedom of self-determination.

    The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts.

    Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”

    Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”??

    Quotes and ideas from “Beyond Alienation” Becker
     
  9. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Are we supposed to be arguing/discussing with Becker or Coberst?

    Baron Max
     
  10. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    It must be Becker. Coberst never had an original thought in his life.

    Where do you live Baron? Approximately. We could have a beer some time, lamenting on Coberst's peculiarities, then beat the shit out of each other as only a redneck and a left wing liberal can.
     
  11. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    Parrots are important in some cultures of the world! ...LOL!

    The Great State of Texas! Dallas to be more precise. And I no longer beat the shit outta' left-wing, bleeding-heart liberals anymore ...but it was fun while it lasted! I'm too old for that kinda' fun now, so I just shoot 'em when I get the opportunity.

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    Baron Max
     
  12. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    I lived in Dallas for two and half years. Carrolton to be more precise. Maybe you were on of the people who beat me up in '79.

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  13. Cortex_Colossum Banned Banned

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    A fictional role is usually in accordance with an authority such as a government or society. Can it be without? Those who dictate how we think and behave. By learning to use our minds to see through media and popularity images can we break free.
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Humans have powerful instincts. With our more complex brains we have a huge catalog of instincts. Many of them are what Jung calls "archetypes," instinctive motifs that are preprogrammed in our synapses by a combination of natural selection and genetic drift/bottlenecks. (That's a modern description of his model; he died before the explosion in DNA research.) Religion, for example, is nothing but a collection of archetypes, the fundamental one being a belief in the supernatural.

    One of the instincts that we've had to struggle with is our pack-social instinct. (If anyone knows a more scientific name for it, please let me know.) Most apes, in fact most primates, have the instinct to live in small extended-family groups and we're no exception. Up through the Mesolithic Era, we lived in nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers, depending on and caring about the people we had known since birth and regarding other clans as outsiders.

    But our uniquely massive forebrain gives us the ability to transcend our instincts, either learning to adapt them to new environments or simply overriding instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. The Agricultural Revolution, which began in the Middle East around 9500BCE with the cultivation of fig trees (according to the most recent evidence), both permitted and required us to learn to live in larger, permanent settlements, achieving harmony and cooperation with people outside our family unit.

    From that point on, every major Paradigm Shift required us to once again negotiate with the caveman inside us. We offer him a safer, healthier, more comfortable and interesting life in return for putting up with the companionship of an ever-larger and less familiar "pack." Civilization (literally "the building of cities"), the Paradigm Shift that began around 8000BCE at Jericho (again according to the most recent evidence), requires him to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers. The bribe of course is the city's massive division of labor and economies of scale, the surplus productivity from which provides him with full-time professional teachers, musicians, scientists, police, plumbers, automotive engineers and software developers.

    We're now on the verge of combining all of our packs into a single global civilization, regarding as pack-mates people on the other side of the planet who are mere abstractions. If you doubt that, look at the massive movement in America to stop the killing of people in Asia whom we don't even like!

    What you refer to as "fiction" is merely the organization of life we have constructed to take the place of the instinctive organization that we have transcended. The tribal instinct no longer serves as a survival instinct; in fact it works against us. We still have it of course, and in our darker moments we let it get the better of us. The Crips vs. MS-13, the capitalists vs. the communists, these conflicts are the efforts of tribes of cavemen to protect their hunting and gathering territory from encroachment.

    Religion is another instinct that works in concert with the pack-social instinct to tear at the foundation of civilization. Catholics vs. Protestants vs. Jews vs. Shiites vs. Sunnis--all talk of Jesus or Mohammed or Moses or the Pope or Ali or the Rashidun Caliphs is the caveman thumping his chest and shouting, "The way my people have always lived is the only right way." The conflicts among the various religions are the most intractable because our religions specifically teach us that everyone else is wrong and inferior. (Yes I'm not including the eastern religions in this diatribe. I don't know enough about them but what I do know suggests that they may not thwart the transcendence of tribalism the way Abrahamism does.)

    Speaking of religion, in the good old days you extol religion was one of the primary guiding factors in human life. And if you want to talk about "fiction," what greater fiction is there than the stories about gods and angels?

    People who regard their role in civilization--to give back to it as much or more than they take from it in order to keep it running--as "fiction" have not been educated well enough to understand it. They take their SUVs, their sitcoms and their vodka, and they don't see themselves providing any value in exchange for the salaries that pay for all that stuff--they don't see themselves giving anything back.

    This makes them feel like pets or children, with somebody giving them food, shelter and toys and asking nothing in return except docility. Of course this feels bad. Even our dogs have to be made to feel like they have an important job to do that earns their keep, even if it's only licking away our tears, patrolling the yard for bears and panthers, and teaching us not to take ourselves too seriously. If we can't feel that way about what we do for a living, it does indeed all begin to feel like "fiction."

    So if you feel like you're living out a fiction, take a closer look at what you do to support yourself. How much are you giving back to civilization in return for your house, car, food, medical care and safety?
     
  15. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    If you think that harsh see more at:
    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2201269&postcount=4

    I do not know much of Coberst, so I went to his page. (I saw both Cortex_Colossum & Ophiolite were the two others who been there before me.) As Baron said, sometimes parrots are useful, but I have only Ophiolite's POV to call Cobert one. Even some real parrots do understand the words they can hear or say. (The "Einstein" of parrots died about 6 months ago with obituary in Time etc. as I recall, but have forgotten its name already.)

    I do not know much formal philosophy. At least Cobert has read some and I found his post 5 interesting and informative to me. (In college I read some Kant, as was required, and learned from that experience to never do it again.) Part of post 5 states:

    "Kant “defeated materialistic psychology, even while keeping its gains. He centered nature on man, and so made psychology subjective; but he also showed the limitations of human perceptions in nature, and so he could be objective about them, and about man himself. In a word man was at once, limited creature, and bottomless mystery, object and subject…Thus it kept the best of materialism, and guaranteed more than materialism ever could: the protection of man’s freedom, and the preservation of his inner mystery.”

    As I have an original idea how free will might be possible without violation of the natural laws that control the firing of every nerve in your body, and thus your ever action, except for the escape I open with the Real Time Simulation, RTS. I.e. I claim we actually live in and experience a RTSed world, instead of the world perceived by our senses which would be delayed for our consciousness by the time required for neurotransmitters to diffuse across synaptic clefs (and by some important transit times of neural discharges down axons) by a significant fraction of a second - (Enough delay to make a fast game of ping pong, played close to the table, impossible, without the RTS.)

    Even having read only a tiny fraction of his works, I am quite sure Kant never spoke of any RTS. Thus, how is that Kant has freed man from being just a complex biochemical machine which is governed by deterministic natural laws? Was it just that Kant was ignorant of all that is now known about how signals propagate in the brain and the associated time delays?

    For me, most of classical philosophy seems to be founded on ignorance and modern philosophy willfully ignores that we are (for all our actions and speech) a muscular systems controlled by the discharge of nerves, which in turn obey the natural laws. This POV of mine is why I have not read any more philosophical writers since my college requirements (with a few exceptions, such as Hilary Putnam* and others related mainly to how words acquire meaning, which certainly is not from that giant circular tautology, the dictionary.)

    Does anyone want to educate me to a different POV? Or is philosophy about man’s nature, his “will”, his freedoms, his natural rights, etc. all just a very verbose complex structure sustained by ignorance (willful or otherwise) about the physical causes of neural discharges and how they contract or relax various mussels of the body?

    Soon, I hope, a link to some discussion of my RTS escape from this POV, which may make genuine free will NOT a violation of the natural laws will appear below by edit. The price for this liberation is high: I.e. you are NOT material, not your body, but just information in a Real Time Simulation being conducted (very probably in parietal brain tissue) while your body is awake or in dream sleep. At other times you do not exist (as the RTS is not running / executing). For evidence supporting this strange POV, see:

    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1294496&postcount=52[/url]
    It is a long read, about 8 pages if printed, and focused on the free will question, but the RTS is described and defended with evidence.

    ----------------------
    *I was privileged to hear him discuss his Meaning of Meaning just prior to its publication at a joint Un. of MD & JHU’s cognitive science dept staff in College Park, MD, and even asked a question or two. – It was a small group.)
    For more on this, see:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Earth_thought_experiment
     
  16. Dr Mabuse Percipient Thaumaturgist Registered Senior Member

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    It's all Maya.
     
  17. Bells Staff Member

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    What page?

    Year of publication?

    Anything

    You know, actually citing your sources?

    I have warned you repeatedly about this coberst. Either cite your sources properly.. or go somewhere else. It is all well and good to say your ideas and quotes are from such and such a book. But cite it properly or I will take this further.
     

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