A Rush to Righteousness

<Thumps Chris on the head>

<chris looks up at the stars and smiles. he is not quite sure why he can't see his thumb>

I am not sure humanity is a given.

Depends on how you see it. If it is human to have the means to become self aware then I guess it is a given.

But to have the means and not use it, to resort to cravings and the impulsive animal part of our mind without ever seeking to end confusion and uncertainty, this is more the behavious of an animal.

Maybe we've been given the choice. We can be content as animals and suffer our way through misunderstood existence, or we can reach for our humanity.

well...

The way I see it, and of course it is a matter of each person's perspective, humanity may simply be a well developed extension of the social behavior we see in many animal species. It is hard wired into our brain and is part of the human passion.

We are animals after all and this, in itself, is not a bad thing. But our brain is one of the most advanced organic processors in the animal kingdom (except maybe for dolphins and whales). As we grow and mature, we begin to stuff it with countless bits of information. With such a growing database of information, the brain maintains its efficiency by putting this information into an associative hierarchy.

The manifestation of this associative database gives rise to something we cannot avoid else we go completely insane. It is discrimination. In other words, the brain needs a way to put sensory input into some kind of logical structure fast...very fast. Unfortunately, the mental process of discrimination is both a blessing and a curse. We should always be aware of this since it does invariably affects our social behavior; our humanity as it were.

I agree that we categorize information by arbitrary division, but to call it discrimination is a bit much.
Discrimination implies not only stating the differences, but also a judgement on wich is better.

Well this is not completely true. To discriminate is a mental process that saves the brain a great deal of processing power. It is not really a dirty word.

Maybe an example would help.

I am walking in the forest. I see a group of animals in a clearing. There is a rabbit, a rat, a squirrel, a wolf, a bear and a beaver. My brain must make a decision fast. Very, very fast. I put the rodents into a single category of minimal threat. I put the wolf and the bear into a single category of maximal threat. My brain does not have the time, withing those first few seconds of contact, to notice the individual members of the rodent species. Nor does it have the time to notice that there are two distinctly different predator species. This is a process of discrimination in the purest sense.

As time passes, and when I have taken the necessary precautions, only then can my brain continue with more in-depth processing. This is a survival tool. It is bestowed on us, and other species, by nature. Unfortunately, as we have "moved away from nature", this process of stepwise discrimination is still with us and affects our social interactions. There is nothing bad about those things given to us through evolution, but they present a problem in a more synthetic social environment.

Think about what fires through your mind in the first 3 seconds when you see someone, or a group of people, for the first time. If your are honest about it, you will notice a stepwise mental process. If it makes you feel any better, you can call it mental differentiation. But it's still the same thing.

And, yes, it is a judgement but not something we should fault nature for giving us. It is an evolutionary survival tool.

Your arguments seem to go towards that there is judgement...

I did not mean that judgement is neccesarily a bad thing.
But racial discrimination among humans show that this process can also be a hindrance on the way to understanding.

Discrimination requires opinion. Opinion can sometimes impede accurate observation even though it is a required ingredient of it.
I think that in this, as in everything else, the right way is the middle way...

But this is my point. Racial discrimination is a natural process as applied to a synthetic social environment. Would there be racial discrimination if there were no degrees of separation between our life and nature's perils. I think it is a result of the "world" we have created around us. This has come by way of technology and social infrastructure (again, not really bad in themselves).

My contention is that we should be aware of the way our brain minimizes critical function by way of associative, hierarchical processing. Being aware of it may help us toward objectivity.

Then it appears we're in agreement.

So how long did the discrimination process take to dissipate and did we really need it? But nature has hard wired our mental processes long before even the first group of humans ever lived socially.

I think that this process of stepwise mental differentiation (a sweet alternative to discrimination) is omnipresent in many aspects of our daily life.

I do like to think in primal terms.

What do you mean?

Did we really need it within this discussion thread? It just happened again between chris2a and Cyracuz.

In a most basic sense, human interaction is a series of advances and retreats. It reflects the internal psychological struggle between competition for survival and cooperation for survival.

I think this discrimination comes full circle when understanding is attained, and you are able to undersand everything as a whole.

And I believe it is neccesary. It is one of the ways we learn

The dynamics of human interaction is absolutely fascinating. It is both complex and simple. It is both pragmatic and counterproductive. It is both obvious and enigmatic.

You mean full of paradoxes?

Paradoxes are usually a clue that one or more of the premisses are wrong...

Not the only reason for a paradox. It is also evidence of the duality found in our normal existence. An indication, as it were, of nature's ambivalence.

In that case a paradox is what you get when you're trying to examine a dynamic process as a fixed object.
Or when you try to determine the essence of the individual parts of the dualism. They have none.