Unconscious thought forms 95% of all thought

Naw, as long as 99 percent of humans live in the same fantasy world, it doesn't matter much. Even if the ratio were to be reversed, we'd still be in the majority - or "normal."

We conceptualize and infer things directly from our perceptions.
It sounds like the brain is hard-wired to do this directly and quickly,
just as you might expect an evolutionary process to wire a brain.

For the man on the street, what this means is:
To throw a football REALLY well, ... practice throwing. Feed more
perceptions into the brain, to evolve better concepts and inferences,
and that will create a better throw. Woo-hoo!


My theory: Evolution has created not only the brain, well-wired for the task at hand,
it has ALSO created the concepts and inferences that we currently use in real-life,
well-constructed and efficient for the task at hand.
We already have the optimum solution. It is the solution we are using now.
And it changes over time, at an optimum rate, not too fast and not too slow, as our environment changes.

If our environment or society changes radically, then our wiring and concepts may have to evolve faster. Throwing a football (or rock) hasn't changed in a million years, so that particular part of our brain ought to stay wired as is. But as our technology and daily work become more abstract and conceptual however, we may need to add new parts to our brain, evolved with today's experiences, for today's needs.

And if we were really smart, we would jump the gun and anticipate the future. We would design the new brain functions, cognitive functions, and types of conscious thought that we anticipate will be needed a hundred years from now -- without empirically evolving them. Not merely understanding how we think today, we should design how we want to think a hundred years from now. Wouldn't that be more useful?

Azi...

Your theory begins with the assumption that we humans have the ability to change our nature, which the process of evolution has taken billions of years to evolve. I think you will need to find a more accurate assumption.

Coberst -- Are you asserting that humans cannot change our nature? How so?

Yes, I am assering that humans cannot change their nature except haphazerdly over a very long period of time. Human nature has changed somewhat, I guess, over the last one hundred thousand years; but it was seldom a result of conscious action. We change our behavior quickly and often but not our nature.

coberst, you're talking like you know what the term "human nature" refers to. The definition is not so easy, I think. Can we refer to it in any other way than through the study of behavioural patterns?

Actually, "human nature" refers to everything man thinks and acts.

You are correct. Who is prepared to define human nature? I just wanted to put down the conjecture that human nature can be changed easily and with conscious effort. We can change our behavior but not our nature, even if we could define it.

But if we cannot know anything about our nature save what we learn through observing our behaviour, how can we tell what's changing? Circumstance has a finger in it, I think. I think human nature is an empty term. There is just nature, and how humans behave in it. Unless the true meaning of the phrase is something like "how nature works on humans".

I think that human nature can be comprehended, perhaps no better than can the nature of the atom but nevertheless it can be a useful enterprise just as is QM. It appears to me that the sciences of psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology can tell us a great deal about human nature. However, that knowledge is very subject to argument. A "science of man" is badly needed because we are about to destroy our species and must do something constructive quickly.

What we need is to shed the arrogance that seeps into everything we touch here in the west. Western pride and arrogance is the reason we "discover" things that have been known for thousands of years in other parts of the world.

Which explains what is going on in the legislative process

I don't think it's a necessity for "The man on the street" to know this, though I find it to be highly enlightening, it is definitely not something that can generally better our survival in general. As human beings, the majority of the time, it seems that our gift of intelligence can be our downfall. Our ability to be able to think and act upon more than means of survival has thrown us so far away from the basic necessities for living and into a more emotion-based field of thought. We have re-prioritized things, and human beings seem to be/have been putting the need for knowledge before means of basic survival. Given, we have discovered many things that help us cope with various threats and help us over-come mother-nature (as I like to put it). Though, people under-estimate mother-nature; it seems that our ability to think past our basic needs of survival has given us the ability to be controlled by emotion, ideas, and various other unnecessary things that sort of clash with necessity. Humans now keep the human population in check with war, which was originally a spawn of thinking past the basic needs of survival, giving us a bit more emotion than your average organism. That's for questions of discussion. Some other thoughts on this subject, a lot of this perception and conception idea has to do with the relation between words and concepts. As an infant our minds seem to attach everything we think of to their general concepts as opposed to when we learn any form of language, we then attach concepts to words. When someone says the word book, or you see a book lying on the counter you involuntarily think of the word "book" or at least a voice in your head says it; as an infant we attach them to pictures: when an infant sees a book they their mind is, most likely a mirror reflecting what they see. Eventually, as our minds mature, we begin to form a sort of map, and our first concepts as points of reference: Say you first see, and take in, what your mother looks like, as you see other things as an infant, you tend to compare and contrast them to what your mother looked like and it sort of creates an intangible map in your mind. What I and many other philosophers wonder is, if there is a point where you can peel the shells of concepts off (Shells being things like: words, pictures, ect...) and just comprehend the true essence of what something is. Actually, there has been extensive research on this and this feeling of "isness" has been said to be generated from the effects of various drugs and mind "Impairing" substances. I suggest anyone as interested in something like this to go out to a book store and buy "Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley, it provides, with more than amazing clarity, the effects of mescaline on someone who can properly articulate the feeling of being under this influence of "Isness" into words. Either way--sorry for getting a little off subject but this very subject is something I've researched with passion for quite some time now--once again, I apologize.

Abouhamdam

It would be a great help for the reader it you were to use paragraphs.

Yeah, I'm really sorry about that, I'm kind of new here, for some reason when I post something up it just collapses into one big block of text, I'll try to fix it.

Abou

Are you writing your posts in word or wordpad, then pasting them onto here?

Sometimes, when I do that, and I've used the TAB key to start a new paragraph, A2K doesn't register, and the text comes out in one block. Better just to leave a line of space to separate paragraphs. That way more people are likely to take the time to read what you write.

I found out what the problem was, I'm really sorry about that guys.
Paragraphs=win.

Regarding the concept of "human nature." It seems that psychology, neurology, physiology, anthropology, etc. have discovered and reported much about the way we are constituted, how we behave (consciously and unconsciously) and how our forms of society operate. But if we are talking about a "metaphysical" notion of the "essence" of man's nature that's another matter altogether. The pursuit of such an "objective" notion may be a fool's errand.
As an aside, the so-called mystics have, of course, declared that we have a "true nature" but "knowledge" of this nature has to do with private-subjective rather than public-objective truth. Individuals MAY acquire this "knowledge" but without the ability to share it with others.

I like to call this the secret that everybody knows but no one can share. The reason for this is that when it is broken down into dualistic components, as is neccesary to communicate it, it becomes untrue. Since you can never relay the entire foundation of your reasoning in few enough words, what you express can never be absorbed by another person exactly as you expressed it.

That is why there's all this trouble in the world. Everyone knows "the truth". What christians and muslims are arguing about, internally and against eachother, is how to interpret written words on subjects that cannot be expressed in words...