Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow.
Abortion.
Oh. Well, whether the ancients would have made a distinction or not they didn't have the means to do it safely or reliably.
We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
41–50 of 125 posts
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies Yeah. it's called fiction and a more significant portion of people in the world consume all that without committing mass murder. So please, stop associating video games or movies with whatever crazy people do.
His point was that you find something gratifying in the fantasy of murder and violence. If you don't find GTA to be abhorrent, then that means deep down some aspect of the anarchy and violence is appealing to you.
Assassin's Creed scares the crap out of me as I find myself enjoying, on occasion, just murdering a passerby who I happened to find annoying.
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies Yeah. it's called fiction and a more significant portion of people in the world consume all that without committing mass murder. So please, stop associating video games or movies with whatever crazy people do.
I enjoy those games and movies myself. It's not my intention to suggest that enjoying those means that our socialization has failed or that we are dangerous (which I do not believe), but that those games and movies appeal to something in our nature that still exists in many of the most well socialized Americans.
There's violence and there is violence. While I can enjoy an action movie or an UFC match, watching images from the Holocaust still makes me sick.
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our own cultures are mysterious to us. Why are we hurtling towards climate change? Why do we sacrifice countries full of people, like in Iraq? Why must we release toxins in water that lower people's IQs? Why do we need to cage so many humans? Few have satisfactory explanations. (The most common ones don't stand up to basic scrutiny. Folk answers, ideological answers to explain away the ideology's problems, etc.)
Another question I'd like to add to your list: why are the current presidential elections such an incredible mess? The answer to all these questions could be that democracy has stopped working.
I think it's because of the flaws in the Electoral College (search about it).
Also, only few voters vote in the party primaries.
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#45> What was the reason for all this carnage? Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit. A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy. Yet thousands are murdered eve…
Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and beaten up by bullies at school - "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying" It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. The only reason we try to eschew an…
I think you might misunderstand just how love is stronger than anger and hate. Love is reinforced by interaction with all types of others. Anger and hate can be socially reinforced but usually at most tribally against another group. It has a more limited virality because eventually it hits a limit.
Feelings are heavily interpreted. Some people find sexual stimulation painful, not just physically, but emotionally. In the end, all feelings exist as an interpretation inside the mind, and we know for sure that we can reinforce them through conditioning and other methods so that the full stack of causes which might initially cause a feeling aren't necessary to recreate it. Just a scent or a memory can be enough to evoke the full force of an emotion.
Violence isn't enjoyable for everyone, even simulated in movies or games. For a lot of people, putting it inside a safe context is a way to address something terrible and cope with the realities of violence, what causes it, and even find some common ground to empathize with the people who choose violence in real life.
Love is stronger than violence because we've seen the benefits and chosen to make it stronger. It's infinitely reinforcable and non-destructive. A system built around love can survive better than a system built on hate. As thinking beings, we don't just reactively respond to emotion. We build reinforcement systems into family, friends, culture, work, play and more, and all of these systems feed back into our behavior. Feeling good is just the beginning.
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're blaming culture for male violence, "animal culture" would seem the more fitting one, since violent males are a feature throughout the animal kingdom and exceptions are, well, the exception. American culture is not much different from iguana culture or toucan culture in this respect.
Yeah, there are definitely a lot of similarities between humans and other animals in that respect, but that's the problem. It should worry us that humans, an animal capable of resolving conflicts in many different ways, chooses violence so often. To put it another way, if throwing feces was common behavior among humans, you might say "this isn't a human problem, it's a primate problem." And you'd be right, in a sense…
My question is if we are going astray looking for a "human" solution to what is ultimately an "animal" behavior. :)
That is, I agree it is not an excuse to say "animals do it." But, it is also somewhat askew to me to have a barrier to our explanations that do not involve "humans are just animals."
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#47> What was the reason for all this carnage? Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit. A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy. Yet thousands are murdered eve…
Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and beaten up by bullies at school - "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying" It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. The only reason we try to eschew an…
>It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex
Actually sex, violence and dominance are intimately connected. More so than most people would like to admit.
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#48We are all our own culture.
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#49Mostly, this reminded me of one of my favorite short stories - "Von Neumann's Second Catastrophe", by Robert Anton Wilson. This story changed my view of why we have wars. The story is told from the point of view of a general in an insane asylum. He argues that war has been ruined by golems, creatures without souls. By golems, he means computers. The computers run scenarios for nuclear war, and always say don't do it…
I hope by "it changed your view", you don't mean that that is your current view. Look out into the world. It is not a model that makes any sense for why humans have wars. That model predicts not what we see, but an all-out bloodbath until civilization is dead. That model and civilization can not coexist in any form, and no, cynically trying to strike a pose that we aren't really "civilized" is not an out; even what we have, imperfect as it may be, would not be possible. It is not even clear that such a model would permit humans to exist as individual nomads, let alone stone age tribes. Such an attitude would be rapidly bred out of any species that somehow got into a state where that was its attitude, or the species would go extinct.
Models of the world must not just explain why it is all messed up; they must also explain why there is sometimes beauty, peace, art, science, civilization, love. It is not enough to only explain one side.
Re: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures
#50Mostly, this reminded me of one of my favorite short stories - "Von Neumann's Second Catastrophe", by Robert Anton Wilson. This story changed my view of why we have wars. The story is told from the point of view of a general in an insane asylum. He argues that war has been ruined by golems, creatures without souls. By golems, he means computers. The computers run scenarios for nuclear war, and always say don't do it…
Clearly he was ahead of his time with countervalue targeting.