The Human Spirit

Filed under: Summary of Philosophy | 5 Comments

The boss of “Miracle Mover, Inc.” makes a deal with a client to move some furniture and then pays three employees to actually do the moving. These are two straightforward tit-for-tat transactions. But then, when the three guys actually get down to squeezing a large sofa through a small door, they shift into a behavior …

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***”Our Two Minds, Emotions and Motivations in Human Evolution”*** The Book

Filed under: Author narrative, Dominance and Submission, Emotional Fossils, Evolution of Emotion, Evolutionary psychology, Group Selection, Language, Monogamy, Sexual Selection, Summary of Philosophy, The Ascension of the Human Spirit, The Deep Evolution of Emotion, Two Mind Hypothesis

This alternative view of human nature is a deeper, richer, and far more noble narrative of our exclusively human legacy: that of an indomitable spirit possessed of a will for justice and sustained through the millennia by the bounty that it fosters.

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A Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir;#11: Progress, 2 Visions, and Abe Lincoln

Filed under: God, Group Selection, History, Language, Summary of Philosophy

I came to an understanding that the secular progress in the history of our fallen species has been due the long evolved capacity for individuals to construct and subjugate themselves to rules of fairness in the form of secular law in ever expanding groups. Under the authority of law, political and economic competition has progressively …

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A Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #10: The Genius of Vanity

Filed under: Evolution of Emotion, Evolutionary psychology, Language, Summary of Philosophy

Freud’s observation that humans are hypersexual has become such a cultural staple to have settled in as the sitcom-with-canned-laughter cash-cow. Although I had long been steeped in Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and sexual display, I hadn’t put the two together until I read Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind (2000), the thesis of which …

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A Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #9: The Narrative

Filed under: Language, Summary of Philosophy

I concluded that, in order for the newly evolved hominid entity of group authority to coordinate group behavior, a new form of communication evolved in which all group members had to be constantly gesturing to each other in order to “stay on the same page,” similar to the mutual interactions with constant small adjustments of …

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Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #8: Another Dimension

Filed under: Group Selection, Summary of Philosophy | 2 Comments

I had had glimmers of spiritual yearnings with a dreamy schoolboy’s love of Wordsworth and which returned when reading Kierkegaard and Jung that year in the World Trade Center when this all began; but all that had been dormant for years. However, concurrent with my purely intellectual ferment, there were several events that began to …

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Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #7 From Politics to Monogamy

Filed under: Monogamy, Summary of Philosophy

I was aware of the Russian study demonstrating the ease with which foxes could be domesticated. I began to think that somehow a process of self-domestication had taken place as a precursor to the selection inclusion of the dominance and submissive mentalities. So, when I examined the momentous publication of the Ardipithecus ramidus fossils in …

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Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #6: Schizophrenia, Group Beliefs, and the Chasm of Politics

Filed under: Belief, Group Selection, Summary of Philosophy

Schizophrenia is the most mysterious major illness in all of medicine, made all the more fascinating to me because my own family’s secret was an afflicted aunt who had been banished to a sanatorium for her entire life. In a small room in the mortuary, I spend a half hour with her corpse meditating upon …

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Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir;#5 Major Depressions & Panic Disorder Point to Ancient Dynamics of Group Formation

Filed under: Summary of Philosophy

The first mental illness that revealed a major component of human nature was the most common variety of severe depression, which, due to a quirk of history, is called “atypical depression.” It is officially recognized that a major ingredient of this kind of depression is separation anxiety, blown up into an illness by the pathological …

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Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #4: Mental Illness as Feedback Reverberation

Filed under: Summary of Philosophy

My second major insight also was seeded in my prison work. At first I feared that observing men selected for their aggression, then all jammed in there together, would give a grossly distorted view of human nature. I was wrong. I found that viewing interactions in such a setting had the effect of placing one …

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A Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #2: The Magic of Sexual Selection

Filed under: Summary of Philosophy

I observed that prison society is arranged vertically and that the core interaction is dominance and submission. I clearly remember when my first major insight struck me. I was at a routine meeting with a group of inmates, heatedly discussing a recent incident. I suddenly recognized that it was as if I was sitting inside …

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