What if the Theory of Evolution is Right? (Part I)

Life is about living. Or what we might call survival. That means ensuring that the life we have, the body, our organism doesn't die. Yes.

But life is complicated. It is not just physical. We live in the world that is physical + language (1). Yes, although language is partly part of the physical world (strokes of a pen on paper, pixels on a screen, compression waves in the air) and partly an abstraction that we mentally process. The second part of it is part of the physical/mental duality of the existence of beings like us, who are physical beings but also mental experiencers.

 The Relational Frame theory is about how language works. It is used in psychology to show how language traps us, and almost think for us. I was using it to show that our verbal network can either help or hinder us in living. If it does, then as a survival organism, we do everything in our power to overcome the verbal network. For more detail, you will just have to go the sources. Sorry, I lack the cogent arguments that you will find in the .

For instance, if someone says, I am going to kill you. Even though it is not physical, it does have an impact. Sure. We hear the words and process the information and are mentally affected--and we may be physically affected, as our heart rates may increase.

My point here was that our mind oftentimes does not differentiate between physical and symbolic/verbal reality. Language for us is action. I was using it to demonstrate the Relational Frame . 

Growing up, our survival depends a great deal on fitting in. Or getting along with our family and the society. We have to accept their rules. That's true. We also have to decide which rules make sense and which ones do not, which ones we want to flout, which ones we can flout with impunity or at least with a tolerably small price, and so on.

Religion can seem to be not about living, or freedom. It is as if it doesn't celebrate difference. 

This can feel suffocating, unreasonable, and feel like the religious people don't want you to live. I am not sure what you have in mind by these last two sentences. Are you referring to the sort of religious morality that tells you, "Don't do this and don't do that," where those rules go beyond "Do not kill other people" to "Do not swear" or "Do not have premarital sex" or "Do not lust in your heart"?

I meant if you are had a bad experience with religion, especially at the hands of the foolish, then for you the most important thing will be your life. Not trying to uphold somebody else's rules, that may either serve you or .

But Being is living. To live is to assert ourselves. To overcome everything that doesn't wish us to exist. That sounds like self-defense. I'm a pacifist, but I do not go so far as to deny the right to self-defense. Or do you have more in mind? Like, perhaps, that in living, you want to live your life *as you wish to live it* and to "overcome" everything that gets in the way of your doing so?

Yes pretty much so. I have been following Rollo May and Paul Tillich. They are interesting and good reads.

This struggle doesn't have to be physical. It can be verbal. Our parents have a huge impact on our identity (2). Who we are and what we can do. True.

As we grow up, we feel we have to overcome their authority. So the struggle. Again, true. We want to exercise personal autonomy rather than being constrained by what our parents dictate.

We have to find something 'real', or 'truth', something that cannot be denied, and believe in that. And live for that. It isn't entirely clear to me what you mean here. We certainly do strive to find what matters most to us, yes; we certainly do try to make sense of the world around us and of our lives within it, yes. That isn't quite the same as learning what facts are true about the world, the way scientists do, although we can make that part of our search for truth and meaningfulness. Note that bifurcation: truth vs. meaningfulness. There's what we realize is true about the world; and there's what we find meaningful in living our lives. They're not the same things.

I think if the meaningful is not true, it cannot be meaningful. And if the truth is not meaningful (dogs have four legs), it is also useless. That is what I have spoken about in my other posts. Scientific truths are not the only ones for human beings. There might be hard cold facts about the world and the universe. But for humans it is a bit complex: for instance, If someone says to me, I love you. I can determine if that is true. Or death. 

I can go on about that. If you take ToE, it talks about our beginnings. Not our ends. I mean ok we might say, that is not what ToE studies, and that death is for psychologists. My point here is that from a human stand point, when we use the word Truth, it has a bigger meaning. Almost the old philosophical question: what is the Truth? I think sometimes we are forced to answer it, or it gets answered for us by our culture.

Then their (the parents, the many authorities, the govt, etc) authority no longer counts. Only the 'truth' counts.

This 'truth' becomes our ground. And we hold on to it. I think I'd like to know what you mean by "truth" here. As in above.

The more they speak the more we oppose. That may be how it tends to work, but we have to be careful not to rebel against ideas just because of who propounds them and instead to rebel against them because they merit our rebellion. And in that we find ourself. That we too deserve to exist. We find our existence. Our being. It is not entirely clear what you mean by this. Do you mean that you ultimately generate a sense of "who you are" and "what your place in the world is" by this process? It seems to me that this is ultimately more closely related to meaningfulness than to truth about the world.

 "The substance of Geist is freedom, i.e. the absence of dependence on an Other, the relating of self to self.... But the freedom of Geist or spirit is not merely an absence of dependence on an Other won outside of the Other, but won in it; it attains actuality not by fleeing from the Other but by overcoming it." -- Hegel. 

I think we have to struggle to define ourselves. Who we are, as a person, what Satre (was it him?) called differentiated being. Some people climb mountains, others become doctors, but each believes that they are following some Truth; Love, Beauty, Honor etc

Once one makes the choice, one has to keep choosing, and keep discarding doensn't ring true.

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(1) For the idea that we live in language, there is scientific basis to it, called Relational Frame Theory. However, it isn't clear to me that that militates in any way against their being truths about the world, or against their being knowable truths about the world, or against their being epistemically appropriate and epistemically inappropriate ways of forming beliefs about the world.

(2) The struggle can be Oedipal as well. I think I'll forgo comment on Freudian theory, except to note that it was one of Sir Karl Popper's three paradigmatic examples of a metaphysical (unfalsifiable) rather than scientific (falsifiable) theory (the other two being astrology and Marxism). The Oedipal is pretty simple. Sometimes fathers do not want to look after their kids. It can manifest in many ways, overtly or covertly.