Humans woke up

Humans woke up. Their brains developed to a level of general intelligence through a survival arms race. They made two major logic "errors" as a collective. One error is assuming life is not a "machine." They made this error because they couldn't see the moving parts (molecules are small). Second, most created a concept of afterlife. Maybe not so much an error, but a way of dealing with a survival instict combined with an intelligence great enough to see all the way to the end of survival. Basically cognitive dissonance on a massive, organized scale. The idea of a spirit in addition to the body fits with both of these errors - it's the unseen force that animates the body, and it's the immortal part that doesn't die. The thing is that congnitive dissonance is know to be beneficial to people who use it, in some cases. These are not so much errors as they are carefully crafted constructs freeing (ancient) people from realities that would hijack logical portions of the brain and make them less likely to be productive. As far as evolution is concerned (evolution as the curator of human belief and culture), sometimes you're just better of believing a lie and being happy. However, maybe it's time to accept reality, now that it is staring us in the face. We now can see the moving parts of the machines (life forms) and we understand that the forces guiding them are the same forces that guide every atom, dead or alive.

Club analysis

Part I

I thought I recognized some dudes from talking in line, turned around and did like a hand shake thing and a smile or whatever. They looked kind of surprised but reciprocated. Then I realized they weren't the same guys. My face recognition wasn't really tuned in exactly yet. (Again this is party-like environment.)

It's interesting how much positive energy there is locked away in a set of people selected at random.

Even though I've known the JW's (former religion) were wrong about how people were created for many years, I think some of their philosophy about the human race is still getting rinsed out of my brain. It's rinsing that can only be accomplished through experience.

Because... they consider all people who aren't members of the religion to be sort of creepy and degenerate, with some potential to "get better" but in a lost state.

They would consider stuff going on in the clubs totally off the hook bad.

But I see it in a totally different light. Just people trying to enjoy life, one brief little flash of existence called life. There are so many barriers to people having fun. Clothing, inhibitions, stupid social tendencies. In the club, people are trying to break down a lot of walls, and it isn't easy, but the environment works pretty well.

Western religion tends to claim that joy will be in another life and not this one. To me, assuming they are incorrect (and that seems to be the case), then the lie they are propagating is truly evil. They are robbing people of their lives for the sake of preserving an afterlife that doesn't exist.

Anyway, I can't hate on religion too much. Part of my thing is just being naturally shy, a tendency that has nothing to do with ideology. A tendency that I'm breaking down piece by piece.




Part II


Some girl once said that the world sends back what you project out. Technically it doesn't. If you smile at a toaster, it doesn't really care. If you smile at a saber tooth cat, it might decide to kill you and eat you.

However the girl was just thinking about people. And, for the most part, people are apparently wired to return some emotions that are projected to them. It's a pretty good principle.




Part III


Key point is that people do *not* reflect back so much in terms of semantics and words. Only emotion. They naturally come into or out of sync with a cascade of nonverbal cues that come from all over a person's body. The last thing they consider is words. That's why the clubs just blast the music enough to cancel out the words completely, as if to say they truly don't matter.

It's a bit strange to me, because my nature is to largely not care at all about nonverbal cues (either out of me or from others). I'm naturally more tuned to the actual words, the message, stripped from all the over stuff, like writing (without smilies).

So it's strange, but it's making more sense over time.

What is dancing really - it's an amplified cascade of nonverbal cues.

Logic is the most insane thing ever

Logic is the most insane thing ever

Evolution of beauty

Sometimes the evolutionary underpinnings are far removed from the thing they generated. (Like a faded memory or some translucent thread of impetus that's barely differentiated from a dream.)

Pretty good example is physical beauty. The evolutionary underpinning is that it's a health & fertility metric. The human brain approximates health and fertility with visual information and higher value is more beautiful.

However, once that neural system is in place, the one that takes an image decides on its level of beauty, it takes on a life of its own. Keep in mind that it doesn't truly measure health and fertility, it's just a method of approximating that with visual information.

The beauty system can't evolve very fast because (mostly) it's burned into the network at the level of DNA programming.

Once that system is in place, people can actually evolve toward what happens to be beautiful... regardless of what is healthy or fertile (because of sexual selection). Although eventually, evolution will always make sure that choices are made to favor survival and reproduction.

Anywaze, point is something like a flower ends up beautiful - and it isn't a fertile human at all. Probably because of the interplay between (1) our beauty system designed to favor nice symmetric smooth curvy things and (2) the flower's own evolution to look nice when animals see it. Because flowers are there just to get the animal's attention after all.

Why women like to travel

In chimps (our closest cousins), females leave the community to go off and breed. Males pretty much stay in the same one all their lives. That's why women like traveling so much. It's an inbreeding avoidance mechanism. But to the women - consciously - it's basically a perception of other places as really interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQPek8bHjGk

Teenage rebellion

A documentary called Walking with Beasts is talking about how a mother kicks her child off on his own. This is a programmed action. Human children tend to kick themselves off on their own.

Teenagers are probably programmed by nature to rebel to some degree so that they will go out on their own rather than repeating possible mistakes of parents. If nature programmed them to be this way, there probably was an advantage to it. Otherwise, nature could have programmed them to be less rebellious in general.