It's only recently that I felt this. It's as if all my life I have been deceiving myself, part of it unknowingly. It's as if I have kept telling myself that I don't need to compete in order to gain, while I am now starting to realize, however late it might seem, that life is competition, and its harsh and cruel as hell. No, it's worse than hell. People deceive you here.
It's as if no friend is a real friend. It's as if we are all alone, each of us. It's as if... Why do I keep using this phrase? It's not as if, It's how it is. When your friend makes fun of you, he doesn't mean to be nice. He might think he is, but his behavior has deeper roots than he knows. It's a way of deteriorating them so that their reproductive success deteriorates. It's competition, survival of the toughest. By being a nice person, people might love you and praise you, but you won't win. Because that is not how it works. By being nice you only sacrifice yourself at the altar of others' gain, and I knew this. I just didn't know how huge this sacrifice was.
By being nice you render yourself vulnerable to either cruel attacks or pity. Tit for Tat doesn't seem to be working. And that's not all, you lose your reproductive success as well. Human females seem to have an affinity for those males who are aggressive and competitive. There is no room for losers, and that is why they are called losers. So if you are a nice guy, stop being so, or at least, don't expect earning any kind of reward.
And yet I remain undecided whether to believe myself or not. What I just wrote might be the result of frustrations and very unrealistic. And even if I did believe myself, I would remain undecided whether to change my way of life or life, and I have no idea if that is even possible. I only know I will be more cautious from now on.
p.s: I feel I am unfit for this dirty competition, and that frightens me. I feel that all these years others have been preparing for it while I totally ignored it. as Bejamin Franklin puts it: "By fainling to prepare you are preparing to fail."
my blog had been down for some time, for an obvious reason: my limited access to the internet. but now i have come back and im gonna make this place as living as before...
p.s: i dont expect anyone to read this, that is the philosophy of my blog...
Ever since the dawn of our species, we have been quite a social one. Many of our behavioral adaptations oriented us toward a lifestyle in which other members of the tribe felt comfortable with. We hunted in groups, because sometimes we set out to hunt animals way larger than ourselves, mammoths, for instance. And also probably to protect ourselves against large predatory animals ,such as saber-toothed tigers. We lived in groups possibly because finding mates would be much easier that way, and because infant upbringing was of crucial importance among us, with our infants being particularly weak and having underdeveloped brains compared with most other mammalian species.
Our adaptations worked quite well. In fact, there is a hypothesis that says we outcompeted the Neanderthals in Europe because we cooperated much better with our tribe members. But the same brain capacities that helped us survive and outcompete rival species also made for a gradual, but exponential boost of technology in our cultures.
Technology, in my opinion, is not something human-exclusive. Simple tool making can be seen in numerous species of birds and mammals. Chimpanzees use narrow sticks to get insects out of wood logs, or use stones to break oil palm nuts. Crows are also excellent tool makers. One species of crows, the New Caledonian Crow (Corvus moneduloides) is especially adept at tool making. In one well known experiment, researchers put food in a bucket and put the bucket in a larger barrel-like container. The container was too tall for the crows' beak to reach the bucket. The crows were given a thin, flexible wire which they had never seen before. To the researchers' surprise, the crows bent the wire and used it as a hook to bring the bucket up.
We humans are way better than that. It seems very surprising for us to observe a crow do something like the experiment mentioned above, but for a human its baby work. Even when we weren’t much advanced in technology, we managed to tame fire. We managed to make weapons. We managed to create art. Under gradual and at the same time exponential growth of technology we managed to get what we have now.
The most obvious between Paleolithic societies and modern societies is their size. A typical human tribe 50,000 years ago would hardly be 50 strong, while a typical modern city contains hundreds of thousands of people living densely together. Hundreds of thousands, for a species that was evolved to live in groups of a few tens! To visiting aliens, this would be a very challenging question to answer. How is it possible that these barely social mammals (compared with social Hymenopteran or Isopteran insects-ants and termites, for instance) to live in such huge groups? And it's not just that, on a higher level, cities are united as countries, which often consist of millions of people grouped as one.
So we can imagine a hierarchy of human organization, with the lowest level being the individual, proceeding upward to the core family, and the extended family, in the simplest human societies (the hunter-gatherer societies). It would be very plausible if there were no stable level above the mentioned two in a society where the main replicators were genes. Such is the way it is in most animal groups (with the social insects' exception). There is little benefit of coexisting with a none-relative, and if there were tit-for-tat strategies at work, which are cooperative strategies between distantly related individuals, the society would not grow beyond certain limits, because if it did, individuals could cheat and get away with it easily. Thus in extremely large societies, tit-for-tat would not be an ESS (Evolutionary Sustainable Strategy). Therefore there must be some other explanation for the unexpectedly large human societies.
The human brain is exclusively capable of generating, storing, and transferring ideas. Ideas, or Memes, can be seen as genuine replicators, evolving in human societies much faster than the genes (that is, in my opinion, the apparent 'cease' in human genetic evolution in the Pleistocene). By being replicators, I mean to imply that any characteristic they might have that could somehow increase their number of copies in the next generation, or in a sense, their speed of replication; means they will become more abundant and will replicate even more. Such characteristics may include human behavior, and sometimes collective human behavior which can be a social convention, a norm, a set of laws, a belief system, or an ideology.
With such ideas as those mentioned above, it seems possible that humans could actually find a way to stick together in larger groups than a few tens. However, if I were a hunter living in a forest, I would never give up my simple way of life for one in which I had to farm and herd in order to get food. Why wouldn't I? After all, life in a village is much more peaceful and stable, and my human greed would tell me to do so. But on the other hand, it lacks the sense of excitement and freedom we were used to. So even if a number of lazy humans would want to settle down and live a life of horticulture, I doubt this could mean any transition; since for an entire tribe, and after that, for many tribes to settle down, there must have been a driving force working behind. Imagine a tribe of humans living in, say, southern Europe. They live their lives of hunting and gathering, in relative peace with other humans, with social equality, and almost no wealth. There is simply very little tendency for such a tribe to fuse with some others or grow much larger to form a horticultural society living in a rather permanent village. Individuals would not easily conform to leadership, and they would find it rather difficult to live alongside people they couldn't trust as easily. And for an entire tribe to submit into a new lifestyle as such, all or most members of the tribe probably had to agree. So why did our ancestors do that? Simple: because they had to.
Scientific data reveals a rather large period of famine around 10,000 years ago that was the most probable evolutionary pressure for many humans to become horticultural. Imagine yourself living in a hunter-gatherer tribe and seeing that life is not the way it used to be. The elders complain there was more hunt in the past and the spirits must have turned against us. The old ways of life are not working anymore. If you are lucky, your tribe will learn from other tribes and begins to invent new things, or new ideas. And eventually, learn that in order to survive, it must cooperate with other tribes way more than it did in the past, maybe even agree to live with them and become one, very large tribe, which has chosen to settle down at least much of the year. There is little to hunt, so you must rely on poorly farmed plant material, and your domestic goats or cows (if you have any).
But for members of such a large society of more than a few tens, sometimes a few hundred in horticultural societies, and in higher levels up to industrial ones which may consist of millions to coexist, while many of them are not from the same families (not even the same extended families), there needs to be some sort of adhesive. We discussed that neither altruism for close relatives nor tit-for-tat will do. I assume we must search for the answer in memes such as social conventions, laws, etc.
It is almost obvious how a set of laws can let a large number of humans live together. Criminals, or in a Game Theory sense, the defects or the cheaters, are punished, and thus their strategy won't be able to spread. Social conventions are not genetically inherited, but individuals in a society learn them to interact with other individuals in a way that keeps the society together (if the conventions aren't good for that purpose, they will be eliminated through the process of natural selection-in this case, cultural selection). A belief system holds the individuals together by making them believe they have to be together in some way. Religions, for example, give their followers gods to worship, and unite under. Patriotism says that individuals must always remain loyal to their countries and give their lives for it if they must. Ideologies such as Socialism tell the individuals that they must share in order to have a better, and richer, society.
Once again I feel the urge to point out the importance of memes as replicators. The 'fitness' of a meme/gene, is its share of copies in the total of next generation's memes/genes, sometimes called the meme/gene pool. That can also be called its evolutionary success in a sense. The individual does not matter at all for the replicator, it only cares about itself. The reason for altruism in many species is that sometimes, a squirrel ensures the survival of its genes by sacrificing itself and letting a close relative, who shares many genes with the individual, live. The individual dies, but the gene survives. So we can obviously see that the individual's behavior is oriented towards the survival of the replicator only. The same is true for memes. A soldier sacrificing himself for his country is terminating his own life, as the patriotism meme complex commands him to.
Can we say that the soldier sacrificed himself against himself? What is the meaning of the benefit for an individual? In my opinion, it means nothing; at least, not for any species other than humans. In the soldier example, the soldier sacrificed its genes for the memes. If a soldier went to war while he had no offspring, his genetic fitness would drop significantly. One might say that, in an altruistic sense, the soldier ensured the survival of his relatives, which are his country mates. But that argument is invalid for several reasons:
1. The soldier's role in decreasing the risk for his country mates is very little.
2. The soldier gains very little in a genetic sense, because most people in his country are extremely far relatives (sometimes even farther than the foe) and will count not as people for whom one might want to risk his life for, but rather people whom one might want to compete with.
3. The risk of losing one's life in a war is very large.
We can now see that, according to Hamilton's rule, such a behavior cannot be kin selection (altruism toward relatives), because rB<<C, with r being genetic relatedness, B being the benefit gained by the recipient, and C being the cost to the individual performing the act. With the soldier's genes' fitness falling in almost every sense, we must rely on a memetic explanation for this behavior.
What we can see here is a competition between genes and memes to control an individual's behavior. Imagine the soldier, faced with a situation in which he can either die and make for his nation's progress in war, or flee, and save his genes. There is a meme, I believe, called 'your country above yourself'. If the meme is strong enough in that soldier, he will probably sacrifice himself despite the feeling that he must survive.
Let's bring up another example. Christian priests of many sects abstain from having sexual intercourse. This, too, is a huge disadvantage for the individual's genes, so there must be a strong meme behind this behavior: Christian faith.
The gene/meme competition can also be viewed from another perspective rather than their ability to control individuals: their ability to survive in the multidimensional social space. Let us analyze the soldier's sacrifice and the priest's abstinence from this point of view. The soldier's sacrifice is very likely to contribute to the success of his nation in the war and the meme's fitness will increase by either the observation of other individuals of the sacrifice behavior and them choosing to take the behavior as they see their nation win, or by the survival of a nation in which such behaviors are valued, or most often, a combination of both, each contributing to the other. As for the priest's abstinence, religious faith seems to have a very strong appeal to most people, and that should be the major way of its survival. However, the abstinence itself can have an appealing effect, as many people might think abstinence can make for a more peaceful and virtuous life.
Not all memes orient us toward social stability. Remember the criminals, or cheaters. They too have their behavior driven by a gene/meme combination. The combination commands them to steal, for instance, to get some bread to survive. There are multiple genes and memes at work, and one of them is the social convention of 'do not steal'. But in a thief, that one has lost its weight, while at the same time, in many members of the societies it hasn't. The meme is powerful because if it died out, the society would fall into chaos.
The criminal is a somewhat extreme example. Let us imagine a simpler one: a philandering man. Getting involved in sexual relations with different partners may not be a crime in many cultures, but it is still frowned upon. Why would it be frowned upon when the philandering man causes no apparent harm to the society? In my opinion, it’s a huge meme complex called 'respect the social conventions, and expect others to respect them'. The philandering man seems to be disrespecting the monogamy social convention, and/or several others.
Yet another simpler example would be a radical thinker, or even an artist. A radical thinker might bring up ideas that are not very much liked by the rest of the society, thus slightly making others despise him. The same is true with an artist that does not tend to 'follow the rules'. The society, sometimes unconsciously, tries to impose their generally accepted ideas to those who think differently. I would call this general social intolerance and rejection.
This can be true even for people who act slightly selfish or arrogant. Such traits are considered bad and unlikeable because a person possessing such traits is less likely to get along well with others, and is more likely to ignore 'respect the social conventions, and expect others to respect them'. However, selfishness can be very beneficial for individuals and their genes, even some of their memes. A selfish individual gains more in a human society where you are very unlikely to meet another individual twice, but still, are societies don’t (or yet haven’t) broken apart. That is because of the much powerful 'respect the social conventions, and expect others to respect them' meme, partly at least. So we can somehow say that there is a constant conflict between an individual, his memes and genes to be precise, and the much larger and complex social memes, mass planted in most individuals of the society. Those individuals who tend to be more independent are more likely to disobey such memes: written or unwritten rules, or social conventions. And at the same time, they are more likely to follow their more personal interests, while being slightly or heavily frowned upon, or sometimes even laughed at, by the members of their own society. I believe it has a price such individuals pay, in order to take joy in achieving their personal aims. And it is most often these individuals that perform remarkable feats, and the reason behind that is if they didn't let go of the mass memes, they would never do anything new and different. Very simple logic.
I stepped into the backyard. I felt the breeze on my cheeks. I felt the light in my eyes. I sniffed and breathed to the maximum. I was in love with all that life. I was in love with the lemon tree, the little orange tree, the mango tree, the two date palms and the four rather young tamarind trees. I was in love with the flowers. I felt my eyes fill with tears. I wondered what their future could be...
I put my hands on the mango tree. for one last time, I was going to climb it. And I did, like never before. I went higher and higher and higher, to a point where there were no more branches to grasp. The tree had not fruited this year, but it was full of newly growing plants. I wonder what becomes of them. I wonder if the next people to come and live here would be as kind to them as we were. I wonder if the mango tree will still be there at all, letting little kittens learn how to climb. As it taught myself how to climb...
I've got to dry my tears now. Don't want anyone to see me crying.
It is indeed a very useful mechanism in the brain that people we once loved will eventually become distant, vague memories. It begins with a hatred, but once you have new love to replace it with, they will fade, fade in the ashes of the past. And you will not remember the good memories well, and that is very good indeed. Imagine what would happen if you didn't! We would live our lives with constant pain and torture by the sweet nightmares of the past.
Viva natural selection! Viva human brain!!
We humans evolved in a rather simple environment. African grasslands is the current leading hypothesis. Men went hunting everyday, women stayed and took care of the children. They also gathered edible plants, because men couldn't hunt enough. That is very simple compared with the world we're living in right now, although very complicated itself.
That's the sort of world we metaphorically "grew up" in. By growing up I actually mean evolving. Especially our brains, the most complicated system known to us, with a hundred billion neurons each being connected of an average five thousand others. Seems very powerful. It is a very powerful computing engine indeed. We are only approaching to a very weak understanding of what this system is actually capable of, but...
There is no way we could call this complicated brain perfect. It's a work of natural selection, not some intelligent design. That is why we tend to forget things. That is why we don't always behave appropriately. That is why we can't calculate as fast as a computer, although we have the capacity to do so. That is why we can never think perfectly.
It is, in my opinion, the ultimate cause of most human-caused problems. Wars, for instance. Why would we need wars? Kill one another, for what? If we were perfect, if every single of us thought perfectly, we would never have wars. We would never have had any weapons which its purpose would be beyond elimination of predatory animals potentially dangerous to us, or animals that were our prey. Let us face it: we are so imperfect. So imperfect that we forget things. We are illogical. We fight each other, over pointless matters. We might sound wise compared with other animals, but ask me, and based on the definition of wisdom, I will say we are indeed very unwise. Thus, the name given to our species, Homo sapiens, the "Wise man", seems very untrue to me. I'd rather call our species Homo insipiens, the "Unwise man". Yes.
We evolved in the African Savannah. Our brain was nearest-to-the-best apparatus we could have in order to survive and reproduce there. If one could in any way call natural selection purposeful (which is so stupid to say) I'd call the evolution of the human brain the worst, and at the same time, the most intriguing mistake it ever made. It is so intriguing it can analyze itself! That is just marvelous! But that comes from it's ability of abstract thinking, and abstract thinking, along with some other minor abilities it has, leads to philosophy. Philosophy as opposed to plausible logic of "accept something when there's evidence for it". Somewhat opposed to logic itself. The brain obviously puts itself into trouble. Its imperfection confuses itself. But where does the imperfection come from? Natural selection. Nothing can ever be perfect in the process. That is, in my opinion, very self evident because natural selection is a process that works purely based on change in the environment.
So we evolved so to the Pleistocene era. Then our brain somehow stopped evolving. Why did that happen? I think it was probably because a new ability formed in the brain. An ability that helped the humans alter their environment drastically. That would be real trouble! Imagine the process of adaptation to the environment becoming slower than the changes in the environment! That is one of my hypotheses. Another is that memes (ideas, in a sense) began to form in our brains. And these memes were replicators just like genes, with the difference that they replicated themselves way faster. They evolved faster. Culture would be their collection in a certain given human society. Cultural evolution began, being much faster than genetic evolution. Still, we come to the same trouble, the environment (culture) changing so fast the brain itself could not get adapted to it. The apparatus almost perfectly fitted to the African Savannah now finds itself in a human society of hundreds. Thousands. Millions! With an environment way more complicated it is supposed to deal with. Problems arise.
Through cultural evolution and under the heavy effect of natural phenomena, with the basis of the imperfect brain of the Homo insipiens, civilization arises. Wars begin. Countries arise, with people distinguishing themselves from one another through ethnicity, with the irony that races always mixed in the human history. Through language, with the irony that languages blended all the time. Through religion, and that one is the most foolish of them all... why would people distinguish themselves from one another through an ideology that is almost surely false? Cultural evolution, I'd say.
And there we are in the 21st century C.E, with about two hundred countries in the world, most of them relating themselves to certain historical races. That is foolish! Races have mixed enormously during the past few thousand years, the historic time many of these countries attributes their origins to. Very ironic and paradoxical! Very illogical! Why would we humans be so gullible then? Our imperfect brains would be the ultimate answer.
There we are in the 21st century with so many religions one can actually never count. That is even more foolish! How would these illogical ideologies that are based on myths survive to this day, with so many followers devotedly believing them, sometimes willing to give their lives for them? Once again, imperfect, gullible human brains.
But why can't we change this state of the world? Why is it so difficult to make things better for all of us? Simple, because that is not how evolution works, cultural evolution in this sense. What exists today is the cumulative result of what has been yesterday. Every single event in the past counts. Every single event in the past has in its own way contributed to the present. Now is the result of all before. So, in my opinion, it is time to stop being unrealistic about our world. It is time to open our eyes and our minds, and stop wishing things got better on their own, and stop imagining a perfect future, for nothing will ever be perfect in the real world. It is time to wake up and try to make a better future for our human race, by considering our past through educating ourselves, about ourselves. But at the same time, we must not forget that we are still the same imperfect gullible members of the species Homo insipiens, and that we can never reach imperfection, that even when we think we are doing best, we might be wrong. And that is not something that frightens me, since to me the meaning of life is to strive. I am a Homo insipiens and I accept that.
i feel happy and satisfied with myself. i guess that is supposed to be good :)
I still remember the first time I saw this house. We'd come here to buy it. Back then, it was not a bit similar to the way it is right now. Neither the interior nor the outerior. The house was changed extensively before we moved in. It was the summer of 1379 S.H (2000 C.E).
I think one of the main factors my parents chose to live here was because it was very close to my grandparents' house, only two alleys away. I remember that we used to visit them quite often back then. But why would we want to move in the first place? The answer is that we lived in a small apartment owned by a government company, and my father had recently been hired at the oil refinery. That meant a far better pay. And I guess it wasn't just that, I think his own business was doing better too. We were getting somewhat rich, and the apartment was too small for us.
So we moved in here. At first, I missed our old apartment much. I was only six and a half years old back then. I was very much attached to that apartment, after all, I had spent the very first years of my life there. I had a small child's lifetime memories bound to the walls of that apartment. But we had to move. It was too small for us.
And now, we are moving out of this house, not because it's too small for us, but because we cannot pay back the loan we got on this house. Cruel, isn't it? We tried to escape it, postpone it (we did that several times), whatever we could... But we're moving out now. I don't really care much how this happened, though.
When I first heard, maybe one or two years ago, that we might have to move out, I thought it would be very difficult. All the memories! All the stuff! Oh, the flowers and trees in the backyard... The tamarind trees, most importantly, weren't there at all when we came here. My mother loves all the plants passionately. And oh, the female cat that used to know me since she was a kitten! She has given birth to at least 30-35 kittens in our backyard by now. She still rests at the door during the summer because of the cool breeze there. Her four kittens are probably in the backyard at this moment. She talks to me. She has always talked to me. That doesn't mean she never acts aggressively, but... As strange as it might sound, I am going to miss her the most. Not my room. Not the kitchen in which I learned to cook. Not the walls and the doors. I am going to miss the living things. The flowers and the trees, the grass, the cats. Especially her. Many cats have come and gone, but she has always been here.
Still, I do not find it hard to leave. Not hard at all. Probably because I have grown up to a certain level. Maybe because I am going to leave for university anyway. Perhaps because twelve years is a long enough time. Whatever the reason, I can say I am happy. Happy with this twelve years and all the memories it bears. Happy with this house and how it tolerated us, as we lived in it and transformed it. And happy that at last we are saying farewell to her... whether she manages to survive or not. I will never forget her.
My eyes have got so damn sensitive to the color "orange"...