Biology doesn't know how to define a species anyway. People with serious scientific credentials have questioned Linnaeus's taxonomy. What is humanity? Is it just a religious holdover from the past?
Is humanity a religious idea?
Biology doesn't know how to define a species anyway. People with serious scientific credentials have questioned Linnaeus's taxonomy. What is humanity? Is it just a religious holdover from the past?
Humanity is a moral standard.
Religion is not only about morality, but also about supernatural, religious rituals, and daily life
Souls know their way back home
Yes, "humanity" is often talked about as if it was something metaphysical with a destiny of its own. People are not even aware of it. I agree with Jung, humanity doesnt exist - You and I exist, people exist. Even if it could be proved that there exists a human species, that would be merely biological and is no base for a metaphysical "humanity".
You can compare with things like "quadra". It's simply a group with shared valued functions. A useful concept that reflects reality. A technical concept. No reason to draw metaphysical conclusions, that people sometimes do, often Ni types, I think.
The decisive thing is not the reality of the object, but the reality of the subjective factor, i.e. the primordial images, which in their totality represent a psychic mirror-world. It is a mirror, however, with the peculiar capacity of representing the present contents of consciousness not in their known and customary form but in a certain sense sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat as a million-year old consciousness might see them.
(Jung on Si)
I don't know what a religious idea is, I don't know what is a religion.
Sometimes you don't have motivation because you lack purpose.
Sometimes you don't have purpose, because you lack self-knowledge
Sometimes you don't have self-knowledge because you lack love
Sometimes you don't have love because you lack self-love
Sometimes you don't have self-love because you lack guess what? Ask Gulenko!!
Superstition predates humanity and our species, but humans were likely aware of their species without reference to religious beliefs. People have always been aware of themselves, their families, their group and other groups, and in relation to other species.
Yes, but as a moral standard, it often seems self-reductive, because it's supposed to be something that applies to all of the modern speaking hominids, yet it seems like it inevitably cannot. I mean, have you even seen most people? And it shouldn't matter if most people are good enough for power at all, because I am under the impression that's what the idea of genius was about: genius means "to lead/guide." Even if most people cannot make independent decisions, we can have democracy etc. if most people are guided by the best people.Originally Posted by Squirrel
So even more progressive ideas imo don't really say everyone is actually equally competent or powerful, they just say everyone can be guided to becoming equal if whoever gets there first pushes or pulls them that direction, which I think is a grand source of confusion in the modern age that leads many people to embracing conservative ideas because of course some people are smarter, better, etc. than others, but that doesn't mean we should all become a bunch of Silicon Valley or neoliberal fascists, and yes, that ideal is literally fascism, though pop culture promoting violence and militarism as always the answer when in real life it's a terrible answer also has a lot to do with it in my opinion.
Language use plus a physical form could possibly be a basis for a metaphysical "humanity," but even that seems tentative to me, thanks for getting me more interested in reading more Jung!
People were aware that there were tribes. Many endonyms translate as "people" and exonyms often translate as "not-people." For example, Deutsch as well as Dutch etc. originally meant "people." However, regarding the idea humanity is a moral standard, the Pirahă call themselves "straight head" and other people "crooked head," and there seems to be one level where this could be considered moral since it doesn't seem to be literal.
Monkeys and the non-human apes do too, and many other species, so I think that sense is pre-human. And I don't think it's something that requires superstitious belief of some kind. Bacteria are "aware" of other bacteria, but I don't think they have ideas at all.
If you're talking about "humanity" as a philosophy, that's certainly going to be deep-rooted in us vs. them thought. Meerkats and roosters are able to give different calls based on different threats or at least alarms, but I doubt they have especially complex thought.
School education should to had that.
A specie are beings who are able to born children, who then also are productive with each other and with high chance on many generations.
New species may appear after ~500k years in isolated groups.
> What is humanity? Is it just a religious holdover from the past?
To think humanity as several biology kinds is long time idea of hithleristic approach. Also has the link with aristocratic, nazistic, rasistic approaches.
Main Abramic religions are against this and relatively humanistic. Hithlerists which arise at now from USA base, wish to: 1) suppress Abramic religions, 2) force unscientific idea that existing humanity is not one kind, and later artifically separate it on several kinds (significanly different biologically groups, at least).
I think that "Humanity" as a moral concept is a survival imperative. We are the one of the rare if not the only mammals that come to the world incomplete and utterly defenseless against the dangers of the environment. We are genetically programmed to protect and give care to the new generation, first it was within the "family" cocoon and then within the group (neolithic). So humanity is a concept derived from our own gregariousness. We take care of our own. Now the expansion of the concept to every human being is something pretty recent and attest of the elevation of the sophisticated soul so to speak and its influence on human groups, it's one of the aspect of universal humanism initiated by religions such as Christianity and Islam to name only two .
In isolation the thought doesn't occur, in small groups it doesn't occur, in tribes the idea of transcendence and heroes occur with surmounting obstacles and traditions are born and its an absorbed state of mind. An acquired direction of philosophical understanding. A culture produces something in a synergy where i think the emotive power exists as a nothing state, to where accomplishments create a sophistication feeling of a trajectory into a something state, to where concepts are born such as ''humanity.'' The key is being overpowered in these numbers and events in where the self is a part of complex system.
Segue, it is there a prior as a substrate.
A religions idea is a desire to know the unknown, to become one with that. At -one-ment, or atonement.
This just an ad hoc hypothesis sitting here in real time in the Midwest.
Black & white is a shallow divide, division is the color that multiplies
Taking thing at face value is good only for a spell
Watch out for the quicksand, an hour glass isn't worth watching when the cook is done
Pick a straw man, and you'll find a scared crow
There are literally languages calling other tribes "not-people." How metaphorical or literal do you think this is? I think some people think of other people as animals. On a good day, I myself probably think of 95% of people as animals, though before anyone calls me a Nazi, I mostly think of white gentiles throwing their beer cans around after football games and speeding in their red cars as animals, and Jews probably have a far higher percentage of non-animals than virtually any other population. Most people can self-identify as human, but I'm not like most people, so what does that make me?
This is a false definition. Then, most people believe anything they hear in high school even when it's outright false.
Defining a species - Understanding Evolution (berkeley.edu)
See above.New species may appear after ~500k years in isolated groups.
Ignoring your Godwin here, I'm not calling humanity several races, I'm wondering if it's even a coherent notion to begin with. I tend to question if I'm human more than if other people are human, and I'm one individual, not a race. If people call themselves human, fine, they're human. Why should I care what I am? I am a brain with an organic life-support system. I am a monster, but other people are the problem for seeing me as the bad guy just because I'm not like them. Human tribalism seems a lot to me like nationalist tribalism, or football hooligan tribalism, basically something that only rather animalistic individuals without an independent mind would engage in.> What is humanity? Is it just a religious holdover from the past?
To think humanity as several biology kinds is long time idea of hithleristic approach. Also has the link with aristocratic, nazistic, rasistic approaches.
Main Abramic religions are against this and relatively humanistic. Hithlerists which arise at now from USA base, wish to: 1) suppress Abramic religions, 2) force unscientific idea that existing humanity is not one kind, and later artifically separate it on several kinds (significanly different biologically groups, at least).
If I'm not a nationalist, why should I be a humanist? Human as a race seems about as incoherent as black, white, Asian, or Jewish as a race. Some people say they only see the human race, but that now sounds like just as big of a red flag to me as if they were a black or white nationalist. I don't think I fit most people's conception of human and I know that, though that itself doesn't mean there's no objective such thing as humanity, just that many people for sure have very narrow views of humanity and sometimes I start to wonder myself if I'm actually human.
Elon Musk: I guarantee you I'm not a bad guy, I'm the most human human of all, and if most humans are going to Hell I would like to go to Hell too! I'm going to name everything XXXXXXXX and name one of my offspring Xavier, but I don't identify with the X-Men and I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that my offspring who I originally named Xavier disowns me, becomes a communist, and identifies as transgender.
Of course X-Men was the worst and most edgelord-y comic series (not that being an edgelord is always bad, just they had to keep retconning all the genocide and rape out because it kept devolving to that over and over,) if you treat humanity as a moral judgment even if you're not conscious of it of course you're going to make your posthumans as immoral as possible. Yet people read and buy a lot of it and name all their businesses after it because certain aspects of it make it inevitable, namely, that people have bought into aspects of the worldview despite not thinking that identifying with Charles Xavier is a good idea. Have you ever read real "gifted and talented" educational psychology? It's literally all about calling the "gifted and talented" basically disordered, deformed, and disabled on the basis of their intellect. Regarding media, there are other franchises which I think are similar, namely Harry Potter and to a lesser extent Star Wars. This whole topic is largely what turned me against all of popular culture to begin with, that and all the Satanism in pop music and the militarism in video games, TTRPGs, and many shows and films.
Those three topics made me essentially throw out all of pop culture, though I do urge caution that there is a distinct difference between populist media and things which just happen to be popular and the commercial mass culture which exists today. PBS and other forms of public television are not bad like commercial television and Disney, for example, even though I do think PBS still has plenty of questionable programming despite being distinctly better. A populist composer like Mozart or Liszt is not equivalent to a modern rock star because rock stars are commercialized and owned by record labels while Mozart and Liszt were just organically popular, in addition to the complexity of the populist classical music still being objectively higher in demonstrable ways. The so-called postmodern project of saying that pop culture is the new high culture seems driven by propaganda efforts to me, so look into Edward Bernays if you want to see where I'm coming from.
I've posted about this topic in my thread on the psychology of the military-industrial complex so I won't repost that here since that would just offtrack the thread. I do see the sort of demonization of "the gifted" as being a very real phenomenon that also drives the military-industrial complex because guess who works for them, people like Elon Musk who have been brainwashed. This is a method of mind control, the other two main ones propagated through pop culture seeming to be the glorification of violence and militarism when violence is an ineffective and also permanent tool to be used as a last resort, and the promotion of Satanism as an "outsider" ideology when religions themselves say most people actually follow Satan and Satan should be literally the biggest normie of all.
I thought about this for awhile. There are groups of people that are easier to accept as "real groups". Like a family, or a group of friends. Or even a small village where people know each other. These are not metaphysical. But 8 billion people on this earth, and most people don't know each other? And then label it "humanity" and give it a special deep meaning. Seems like a projection.
Last edited by Tallmo; 10-21-2023 at 04:02 AM.
The decisive thing is not the reality of the object, but the reality of the subjective factor, i.e. the primordial images, which in their totality represent a psychic mirror-world. It is a mirror, however, with the peculiar capacity of representing the present contents of consciousness not in their known and customary form but in a certain sense sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat as a million-year old consciousness might see them.
(Jung on Si)
Maybe so, but I think humans had a concept of humanity before they had language. I think individuals of all species that are capable of thought though as children generally think of themselves as of the same kind, even perhaps if they have dogs or sheep in their family.
How, though? I don't think of myself as the same kind as just about anyone now, granted, that is deeply engrained and I recognized that on some level I was trained not to even if that wasn't exactly what people intended.
Ducks have imprinting, where they basically imprint on the first thing they see after they're born and start following it no matter what, I don't think humans are anything like that, but I have wondered why. I often see stories of goats and sheep and llamas and pigs home-reared in unusual situations and somehow thinking they're a dog/cat/human, at least according to the interpretation of the human observer which I think is in large part subjective (like how a lot of tests show that humans can't really read what dogs are thinking, dogs don't express guilt or something). But I do think infants likely don't see things anything like an adult does - they may not see a cat in their home with four limbs as a distinct thing as a human in their home with four limbs.
Young children get separation anxiety when apart from close family members, so they certainly naturally have some form of affinity. They may not immediately understand things like biological relations or group affinity distinct from their level of feeling of safety vs. anxiety. I guess I don't see infants being able to recognise the concept of humanity as especially profound, anymore than them being taught that a picture of a pipe is a picture of a pipe.
“Mozart and Liszt were just organically popular”
Were they?
In 2018 (by info of Andrey Fursov) there was a notable conference organized by NSA in Santa Fe Institute [note: on it's symbol you may guess black swastics]. Where was said among 4 possible humanity future development ways the one of artificial biology separation (2 major classes: privileged minority and lower majority).
I suppose, biological (including genetical) differences can be tried to be inputed also with the explanation by forced medical care (vaccines, for example).
Examples of artificially made or developed by an environment the difference in biology of today humans are sci-fi novels:
Aldous Huxley "Brave New World". Has not bad movie, though with significant not fiting to original text.
Herbert Wells "Time machine". Has a movie, which is made not badly.
Sergey Lukyanenko "Genome"
Examples of strict social difference, based on initial biology/mind predispositions in sci-fi:
Ivan Yefremov "The Bull's Hour"
Aleksandr Lukyanov "Black Pawn"
What is humanity anyway? Gene studies are showing people mated with other human species many times. Part of our genes now are mixed with Neanderthal, and Denisova hominins, and probably a few other types, as they found their gene relics spliced in our sequences.
So probably humanity is a concept and I agree its partly religious in nature. But does our awareness come from nature, pre-civilization (even pre-language as others are saying?)
I think that religiosity is what is keeping people from splicing animal and plant genes into people's future kids. Once that damn breaks, I think it will be a free for all designer baby type scenario and at that point intelligence will have succeeded in fast tracking a type of evolution, in which natural selection will have new "types" to work with.
I also think it will be a kind of abomination scenario world. How can people at that point claim human vs non-human (and therefore unworthy of fair, good, decent treatment?) I bet the next century and onwards major moral dilemma will be dealing with hybrids and their treatment.
If evolution had a perspective, it might be happy there was new forms to work with, which also ties into my ethic of what I think man's "purpose" can be for life on Earth. Think about how stagnant, although beautiful and balanced, the major continents ecosystems have become while dealing with ongoing ice ages. Sure we are a extinction event, but for some plants and animals, we took them across continents, hybridized them, mixed and match genes that would have ever met in 50-100 million years without us.
Now those genes, new combinations will have a chance to be the creatures of 100 million years from now.
But back to what you are saying, is there a human instinct pre-conceptualized world, as in purely animal, in which we regard each other and our ethos, treatment of each other, above and beyond our tendency for violence?
Good question. I don't know, what do you think ?
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