What is the Human Character? - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14993132
Cartertonian wrote:Speaking as a mental health nurse, I'd say 'confused'.

Most mental health problems stem from the tension that exists between our primitive instincts and emotional reasoning and the application of logic and analytical reasoning from our higher brain functions. In other words - a battle between our monkey brain and our human brain.

The story of our species has been one of trying to distance ourselves from the animal kingdom and give primacy to our human brain, but the monkey brain (primarily the amygdala) is still fighting.

Image

Classic amygdala vs pre-frontal cortex confusion! :D

This is a good post.

It's too bad that, despite knowing this with such a clarity of detail and expression, modern psychology continues to glorify what we are now calling "lower brain functions" with things like the legitimization of sex-based personal identities and so-on.
#14993156
B0ycey wrote:Sounds like hallucingenics to me - which can have long term effects. Your friend could have spiked your drink to share the trip BTW. Or it could be something from your past (reoccurrence). Or maybe you just happened to come across a mushroom field and digressed some funky shit.
No. This experience doesn't match the pharmacological effects of any substance I know of. Maybe DMT, but we continued to walk normally as everything dissolved and there was bright white-ness (alongside my friend's energy silhouette). The chances of such an experience occurring at the same time in two separate individuals (simultaneously, as far as we can reference) doesn't lend support to the use of hallucinogenics (moreover, hallucinogenics rarely affect groups in a synchronized fashion, especially if we're to talk exclusively about the on-set of effects) ... We didn't ingest any drink or food prior to our hike and we hiked land I'm very familiar with. 5 years later we still don't know what happened. Believe me dude, after 5 years of wondering, I've considered short-handed explanations.

Of course, I expect ridicule from strangers on an online discussion forum. :) It's okay.

Here's another thing. When I said my intelligence or awareness increased (I don't know what it did to be honest...), I will intuitively develop what I think are original concepts, only to find the exact same idea(s) in a book or some other technological extension of consciousness (within a reasonable time frame, say few weeks, months, etc). This happens in an obscure and fantastic way, mind you. People share authors or I stumble upon ideas/information elsewhere (through various mediated channels) which align perfectly with my so-called original ideas. Why do you think I emphasize the noosphere, say identity is an abstraction, being present is an information bias, etc. We're enfolded in the unfolding of consciousness, and most people seem to be numb to the fact that a majority of their thoughts are actually pre-programmed packages given to them by everything else in existence. It's like I'm consciously aware of being an amalgamation of information and my task is to find the SOURCE. "We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection." -Plato.








Anyone privy to this kind of experience, please send me a PM (just don't gaslight me, if you're a spook).
#15033103
I would emphasize to find the human character would require identifying the thing which underpins the differences of people across time, which makes intelligible those differences.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/art1.htm
The difference becomes self evident if we consider the psyche of the single individual as the subject of social psychology. It is obvious that the subject of individual psychology coincides with that of differential psychology, the task of which is the study of individual differences in single individuals. The concept of general reflexology, as opposed to Bekhterev’s collective reflexology, also completely coincides with this. “In this respect there is a certain relation between the reflexology of the single individual and collective reflexology; the former aims at clarifying the peculiarities of the single individual, tries to find differences in the individual mentalities of persons, and show the reflexological basis of these differences, while collective reflexology, which studies mass or collective manifestations of correlative activity, is essentially aimed at clarifying how social products of a correlative activity are obtained by the correlation between single individuals in social groups and by smoothing away their individual differences.”

It is obvious that we are dealing here with differential psychology in the precise acceptance of that term. What, then, is the subject of collective psychology as such? There is a simple answer to this question: Everything within us is social, but this does not imply that all the properties of the psyche of an individual are inherent in all the other members of this group as well. Only a certain part of the individual psychology can be regarded as belonging to a given group, and this portion of individual psychology and its collective manifestations is studied by collective psychology when it looks into the psychology of the army, the church, and so on.

Thus, instead of distinguishing between social and individual psychology, we must distinguish between social and collective psychology.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
In Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.

Such that one can make sense of the different views of the good life for different times and peoples.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1926/educational-psychology/ch12.htm
Every nationality and every epoch, and likewise every class, possesses its own morality, which is always a product of social psychology. There is the morality of the Hottentot, who, it is said, responds when asked the question, “What do you consider to be good, and what do you consider to be bad?” by declaring, “Good is when I steal a wife; bad is when I'm robbed.”

Moral concepts and ideas vary depending upon the social environment, and what is considered bad at one time and in one place, elsewhere might be considered the greatest of all virtues. And if there are any common feature in all these different manifestations of moral consciousness that can be identified, this is only because certain common elements shared by every human society were once part of the social order.
...
It is said that in the schools of ancient Sparta, children were forced to wait upon a common table while the adults had their meals. A child had to steal something from the table, and he would be punished only if he couldn’t do this, or only if he were caught red-handed. The moral lesson of this experiment was to steal and not get caught. Such an ideal was entirely conditioned by the Communist order of the closed aristocratic society of Sparta, in which concern for property did not constitute the standard of morality, in which stealing, therefore, was not considered a sin, but where force, craftiness, cunning, and composure constituted the ideal of all citizens of Sparta, and where the greatest sin was the inability to deceive someone else and to control one’s emotions.

The way of life of humans has both its continuity/similarity and it's difference.

We should be able to discern the basis for both our baseness and our greatness. How we can be both courageous or cowardly, selfish or selfless, tempered or reckless.
#15033116
SolarCross wrote:Of course human beings are highly individually variable so each individual has a unique character so one may wonder how one can evaluate the average or typical character of humans as a whole species. Many other animals are also individually variable but we can recognise the baseline character of the species, for example we might recognise that cats are playful and ruthless. Rabbits are timid and gregarious amongst their own. So it should be for own species homo sapiens. What is our species character? I think curiosity is a major character trait. What else?

Interestingly we recognize rhythm and song well SolarCross. We have a voice box and are programmed for human language from an early age. We produce art and we tend to cook our food before consuming it. We have a lot in common with our other humans. Variation is a fundamental part of the natural world.

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