The Joy of Being an Animal

To be fully human, we must also be a fully embodied animal.

..."We still cling to the possibility that there’s something extrabiological that delivers us from the troubling state of being an organism trapped by flesh and death.

...So why does this matter now? Nobody is denying that humans are exceptional. The concept of human uniqueness is only a problem when we deny the beauty and necessity both of our animal lives and the lives of other animals. No matter whether our origin stories tell us we’re possessors of spiritual properties or our courts tell us we’re ‘persons’ with dignity, we privilege the transcendent over the physical. The root word for ‘exception’ is the Latin excipere, which means ‘to take out’. We have always longed to be saved, to be ‘taken out’ from what we dislike or fear of our animal condition. But the pursuit of escape becomes more serious once we have powerful technologies to engineer and exploit biology."

Hmm...I wonder, is the idea of God a mere escape mechanism?

(Apr 9, 2021 03:42 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [...] Hmm...I wonder, is the idea of God a mere escape mechanism?

The cosmos being a "managed domain" is unavoidable for those who either implicitly or explicitly view it as a process constantly outputting different states. As opposed to its heterogeneous developments co-existing as a permanent whole. With respect to the latter, the regularities of its organization are then only something our reasoning extracts, like formulas of geometry from perceptually encountered shapes and figures. As opposed to there literally being even the "indifferent agencies" of secular schools of thought constraining/determining the world.

But stepping back to the process context... Gods are concepts, bodies of laws/rules, patterns of nature, forces, etc that have been personified -- or abstractions outright reified as concrete entities. That kind of interface (not necessarily anthropomorphic, since they could be represented as animals, too) provided early humans with the belief that the managing agencies and cyclic modes of nature could be appealed to for help (collapse down from their lofty, generalized state to a local phenomenon one could communicate with).

Since they're often just that -- generalized ideas or formulas, rational objects like Plato's forms rather than discrete empirical objects, they're usually mediated by language or symbolism; and thus one of the traditional interpretations of them as being immaterial beings that exist prior to things substantiated in space and time (things having a location).

I was a bit startled by the coincidence of that silly, little series The Flash sort of picking up on this in recent years, or at least the "force" subcategory.

Flash gets his powers from the pseudoscientific "Speed Force", which in the observable universe is mediated by some gibberish combination of dark matter and tachyons. But it's also a field or some extra-dimensional realm that he's been trapped in before. Gradually it was revealed that it was proto-intelligent, and eventually the "force" even produced its own human avatar to interact personally and psychologically with Flash (it manifests itself as his deceased mother).

In season 7 there's the extreme of the Speed Force materializing as a physical body to Flash's team (not just virtually in his head). Upon encountering her physically, one of Flash's teammates (maybe Cisco) actually refers to the strange novelty of meeting a god in the flesh. The writers of the show get "gods", or maybe it actually goes back to the original comic books they model the series on.

Bob's Canada blog: "The Speed Force first took the form of Barry's mom way back in Season 2's 'The Runaway Dinosaur', and has done so many other times over the years. In each of those cases though his mother's image was just an illusion— an avatar created so that Barry could more easily relate to the Force.

This is completely different though. The Speed Force has now somehow taken physical human form! It literally just became a human being! And yet neither Barry nor anyone else on Team Flash seems the least bit astounded by this! What the hell?

Think of it this way— it's like the freakin' Sun turned into a person, put on some clothes and wandered into STAR Labs. Team Flash looks up from their phones momentarily and sees it, says, "Yeah, that's cool I guess" and then all go back to texting.

You'd think at least Barry would be a bit more affected by this, as there's now a god who looks like his late Mother parading around STAR!

I get that they've all seen some serious sh*t over the years, but it just felt like this development warranted a much bigger reaction than it got."

The essay: Why is this animal-denialism so entrenched in the human psyche, across cultures and millennia of time? [...] Unfortunately for us, this self-salience has left us with the bizarre sensation that who we really are is some kind of floating mind, our identity a kind of thinking, or rather, a thinking about thinking, rather than the whole feeling, sensing, sometimes instinctual colony of cells that makes up the entire unit of our animal being. Our selfhood gives rise to the sensation that we’re a thing trapped inside a body. And we can speculate that several things flow from this.

We have a heightened awareness of the threats we face as animals – not least an awareness that we’ll die one day. As W B Yeats put it in his poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1928), we are ‘fastened to a dying animal’. And, because we feel as if we’re somehow more than our bodies, we’re reassured that we can escape the frightening limits of our flesh. In other words, our sensation of mental distinctiveness becomes our hope for salvation.

[...] And this is to say nothing of what our denigration of being animal means for the other animals. ... When we reconsider all that we gain by being animals, we’re confronted by some powerful resources for positive change. Just think of the gobsmacking beauty of bonding. If you have a dog beside you as you read this, bend down, look into her eyes, and stroke her. ... you’ll be feeling good, even in the dark times of a pandemic. And, as it happens, so will your dog, who will experience a similar physical response to the bond between you both.

We've never relinquished our animal cravings for food, sex, fighting, defecating (creating waste), competing to rise to the top of a group's hierarchy, etc. If anything, it's our holding on to too much animal heritage that's resulting in the runaway ruination of the world. Rather than the "animal-denialism" that gave birth to a rationally managed imagination that in turn spawned advancing innovation, civilized behavior, and a deep understanding of what's transpiring in the world.

Bodies are greedy -- being embodied has its pleasures, but the latter turn into monstrosities if there is little to keep those impulses in check. We don't have equivalent rival species to restrain us, we have to do that ourselves and that is arguably failing. 

Animals in the wild aren't like the supposedly loving pets and passive livestock we've artificially conditioned. They are destructive in a wide variety of ways. It's just that they have reciprocally evolved to defensively thwart and balance each other with respect to the damage, as well as exploit and recycle the detriment (so that the pre-human environment endured like a self-sustaining apparatus). Neither are our "tame beasts" wholly peaceable and refined when examined closer in behavior.

Those of us who accept evolutionary psychology embrace those animal instincts and hierarchies. And accepting those have no impact on the uniqueness of humans, theism, or anything else.

The direction towards the depths in ourselves is simultaneously the direction towards the mystical AND the animalistic. Jung taught me that. Our hominid ancestors were chanting wondering shamans as well as vicious hunting predators.

(Apr 9, 2021 10:03 PM)C C Wrote:

The essay: Why is this animal-denialism so entrenched in the human psyche, across cultures and millennia of time? [...] Unfortunately for us, this self-salience has left us with the bizarre sensation that who we really are is some kind of floating mind, our identity a kind of thinking, or rather, a thinking about thinking, rather than the whole feeling, sensing, sometimes instinctual colony of cells that makes up the entire unit of our animal being. Our selfhood gives rise to the sensation that we’re a thing trapped inside a body. And we can speculate that several things flow from this.

We have a heightened awareness of the threats we face as animals – not least an awareness that we’ll die one day. As W B Yeats put it in his poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1928), we are ‘fastened to a dying animal’. And, because we feel as if we’re somehow more than our bodies, we’re reassured that we can escape the frightening limits of our flesh. In other words, our sensation of mental distinctiveness becomes our hope for salvation.

[...] And this is to say nothing of what our denigration of being animal means for the other animals. ... When we reconsider all that we gain by being animals, we’re confronted by some powerful resources for positive change. Just think of the gobsmacking beauty of bonding. If you have a dog beside you as you read this, bend down, look into her eyes, and stroke her. ... you’ll be feeling good, even in the dark times of a pandemic. And, as it happens, so will your dog, who will experience a similar physical response to the bond between you both.

We've never relinquished our animal cravings for food, sex, fighting, defecating (creating waste), competing to rise to the top of a group's hierarchy, etc. If anything, it's our holding on to too much animal heritage that's resulting in the runaway ruination of the world. Rather than the "animal-denialism" that gave birth to a rationally managed imagination that in turn spawned advancing innovation, civilized behavior, and a deep understanding of what's transpiring in the world.

Bodies are greedy -- being embodied has its pleasures, but the latter turn into monstrosities if there is little to keep those impulses in check. We don't have equivalent rival species to restrain us, we have to do that ourselves and that is arguably failing. 

Animals in the wild aren't like the supposedly loving pets and passive livestock we've artificially conditioned. They are destructive in a wide variety of ways. It's just that they have reciprocally evolved to defensively thwart and balance each other with respect to the damage, as well as exploit and recycle the detriment (so that the pre-human environment endured like a self-sustaining apparatus). Neither are our "tame beasts" wholly peaceable and refined when examined closer in behavior.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm not too sure about that. I used to love this little speech but I am starting to lose faith in humanity.

"Popular views of nature are often regarded as more or less benign. Benign towards the species that comprise it. Even benign towards the continuation of life itself or the ecosystem itself. This ethos that used to pervade Natural History go something like this: Nature is self-sustaining and self-preserving. There’s a balance of nature, a balance of species within the ecosystem, such that all work for the preservation of the whole. Until man comes along with his exploitive, selfish, unnatural greed and ruins it. This disagreeable quality of our own species is not new, not unique, not peculiar to us and is very-very natural. It’s a universal quality of all life, which doesn’t make it good. On the contrary, it’s something to be fought against.

Far from being the most selfish, exploitive species, Homo sapiens are the only species that have at least the possibility of rebelling against the otherwise universally, selfish, Darwinian impulses. Humans are no worse than the rest of the animal kingdom. We’re no more selfish than the other animals. We’re just more effective in our selfishness, and therefore, more devasting. All animals do what natural selection programs them to do, which is to look after the short-term interests of themselves, their close family, and their allies.

If any species in the history of life has the possibility of breaking away from this short-term gratification, and to participate in long-term planning for the distant future, it’s our species. We are Earth’s last best hope, even if we are simultaneously the species most capable of destroying life on the planet, but when comes to taking the long view, we are literally unique, because the long view is not a view that has ever been taken before in whole history of life. We have to capacity to override the imperatives of evolution. If we don’t plan for the future, no other species will."—Richard Dawkins

(Apr 9, 2021 11:11 PM)Syne Wrote: Those of us who accept evolutionary psychology embrace those animal instincts and hierarchies.  

I can’t find it now but there was a meme with this photo saying, "Don’t give up your guns!"

Allen Wheelis said that all groups make rules that limit individual behavior. These limitations are deemed necessary by the group to secure its survival. That survival then depends on the ability of the group to enforce its rules. So begins morality.

The authority of groups is hierarchical; the last word belongs to the group that has the authority to lock you up and to kill you, and likewise, the authority to put you in uniform and send you forth to kill others.

He said that the good and moral life within an orderly society is contingent on the amorality of the state that makes it possible.

If the state wants you to give up your guns, will you embrace it?

(Apr 9, 2021 03:42 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: To be fully human, we must also be a fully embodied animal.

..."We still cling to the possibility that there’s something extrabiological that delivers us from the troubling state of being an organism trapped by flesh and death.

...So why does this matter now? Nobody is denying that humans are exceptional. The concept of human uniqueness is only a problem when we deny the beauty and necessity both of our animal lives and the lives of other animals. No matter whether our origin stories tell us we’re possessors of spiritual properties or our courts tell us we’re ‘persons’ with dignity, we privilege the transcendent over the physical. The root word for ‘exception’ is the Latin excipere, which means ‘to take out’. We have always longed to be saved, to be ‘taken out’ from what we dislike or fear of our animal condition. But the pursuit of escape becomes more serious once we have powerful technologies to engineer and exploit biology."

Hmm...I wonder, is the idea of God a mere escape mechanism?

Firstly, I object to the idea of relegating God to a mere belief. The existence of God is no longer a question in modern Physics. Don't let your lack of scientific knowledge and understanding stand in the way of you embracing the truth. Just because you do not have access to a higher reality does not mean that the reality is not there. Ignorance is no substitute for knowledge.

(Apr 10, 2021 04:19 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: Firstly, I object to the idea of relegating God to a mere belief. The existence of God is no longer a question in modern Physics. Don't let your lack of scientific knowledge and understanding stand in the way of you embracing the truth. Just because you do not have access to a higher reality does not mean that the reality is not there. Ignorance is no substitute for knowledge.

You’re just bitter because you’re still hoping for something outside of yourself, outside of life itself, beyond the observable universe to justify your existence.

(Apr 10, 2021 03:45 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:

(Apr 9, 2021 11:11 PM)Syne Wrote: Those of us who accept evolutionary psychology embrace those animal instincts and hierarchies.  

I can’t find it now but there was a meme with this photo saying, "Don’t give up your guns!"

Allen Wheelis said that all groups make rules that limit individual behavior. These limitations are deemed necessary by the group to secure its survival. That survival then depends on the ability of the group to enforce its rules. So begins morality.

The authority of groups is hierarchical; the last word belongs to the group that has the authority to lock you up and to kill you, and likewise, the authority to put you in uniform and send you forth to kill others.

He said that the good and moral life within an orderly society is contingent on the amorality of the state that makes it possible.

If the state wants you to give up your guns, will you embrace it?

That's quite the mental gymnastics. Since groups tend to make and enforce rules for both group and individual survival, it does not follow that that group survival alone is the basis of morality. If it were, we wouldn't have any rules that protected the individual, like the Bill of Rights, and all morals would be socialistic, where the individual is expendable for the "common good". Just because hierarchies are natural does not mean all hierarchies are good or moral. While "might makes right" happens in nature, nothing about being stronger or able to kill makes things moral. If it did, there wouldn't be morality at all. We would just accept the brutality that existed in nature. Instead, our morality is largely about moderating brutality...including that of the Holocaust. No authority is absolute. The Nazi's were defeated by others expressly because they were immoral. The amorality of that state led to one of the greatest atrocities in history.

That's why we have checks and balances and distributed power to local authorities over fully centralized power. People still seek to protect their individual survival, even within a group, seeking survival of the group. And individual survival usually trumps that of the group, which is why people rebel against authority.