E-Book Overview
PREFACE
“He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke” Charles Darwin 1838 Notebook M
This collection of articles was written over the last 10 years and edited to bring them up to date (2017). The copyright page has the date of the edition and new editions will be noted there as I edit old articles or add new ones. All the articles are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and manifest words and deeds within the framework of our innate psychology as presented in the table of intentionality. As famous evolutionist Richard Leakey says, it is critical to keep in mind not that we evolved from apes, but that in every important way, we are apes. If everyone was given a real understanding of this (i.e., of human ecology and psychology to actually give them some control over themselves), maybe civilization would have a chance. As things are however the leaders of society have no more grasp of things than their constituents and so collapse into anarchy is inevitable.
The first group of articles attempts to give some insight into how we behave that is reasonably free of the theoretical delusions that are universal. In the next group, I show how these insights apply by reviewing some books in philosophy and psychology. Next I review books on science and religion and finally provide reviews and articles showing how understanding of both science and philosophy gives insight into the tragic delusions destroying the world. People believe that society can be saved by science, religion and politics, so I provide some suggestions as to why this is unlikely via short articles and reviews of recent books by well-known writers.
It is critical to understand why we behave as we do and so the first section presents articles that try to describe (not explain as Wittgenstein insisted) behavior. I start with a brief review of the logical structure of rationality, which provides some heuristics for the description of language (mind, rationality, personality) and gives some suggestions as to how this relates to the evolution of social behavior. This centers around the two writers I have found the most important in this regard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, whose ideas I combine and extend within the dual system (two systems of thought) framework that has proven so useful in recent thinking and reasoning research. As I note, there is in my view essentially complete overlap between philosophy, in the strict sense of the enduring questions that concern the academic discipline, and the descriptive psychology of higher order thought (behavior). Once one has grasped Wittgenstein’s insight that there is only the issue of how the language game is to be played, one determines the Conditions of Satisfaction (what makes a statement true or satisfied etc.) and that is the end of the discussion.
Yet... "Afin de bien apprécier le fait naturel, reconnu en le présentant dans cette inversion de tendances" [the inversion of the last achievements in biophysical estability, drawn in the first graphic of "La inserción del psiquismo en el arco sensoriomotor", http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/UK_patent_1582301.htm ; a graphic presented to the Argentinian CONICET in 1971], "il faut noter que ces facteurs disruptifs intrasystèmiques ne sont pas des accidents. Ce sont des institutions organisatrices intra-spécifiques permanentes et fondamentales dans la grande échelle planétaire. Elles ne dérivent pas de "pathologies partielles" (ventes d’armes, terrorisme, aggression individuelle innée, "argent sale", course aux armements, leaders neurotiques ou les "quatre insanités" de Huxley). Il ne s’agit pas de rechercher "à qui bénéficie cette vie envenimée" ni de découper un secteur pour lui attribuer une autarchie dynam