Ever wondered why you didn’t speak up to your dad again after he gave you a smack on the bum? Because you knew the possible implications.
This is the same way that nature works. If we look at older species or contemporary family species (Monkeys, other mammals), we see the same behavior in ‘discipline’ of the young.
What does that mean, a cultural system, how does it evolve? Culture is “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.” (Cambridge University) As a defining aspect of what it means to be human, culture is a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. (Wikipedia)
Since social groups evolved in nature, or groups in general in living entities (plants or animals alike), culture has been a general concept of how certain species create a temporary statis or coherency in way of living within the group. This happens within bacterial cultures, insect cultures and all other species that live in groups.
Smart enough or too dumb?
Religion only exists in species that are able to observe causality (but fail to recognize the actual causality due to missing data and technology to determine). This requires some brain functions that humans have, but are lacking in other species (‘key areas of the brain for intelligence were the left prefrontal cortex (behind the forehead), left temporal cortex (behind the ear) and left parietal cortex (at the top rear of the head) and in the areas that connect them.’ – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2128457/New-brain-study-maps-parts-brain-make-intelligent.html)
Now, how does a smack to the bum relate to religion?
We as children are learning to observe causality. We also learn discipline from our parents in very diverse ways. Some parents address the cognitive abilities of a child directly, some use physical signals, others use both. We learn language, trust, dependency and after that how to conceptualize causal connections. When these are not taught properly, we will fail to recognize connections later in life. Where we can’t recognize connections, we will assume. Often we are a following kind and assume what another person tells you the causality is, you can accept. This is partially laziness, but often depending on the way you were raised: Don’t speak up against authority, accept without questioning. This is exactly what religion is: Accept without questioning. IF you question, you are only allowed to question within the boundaries of what supports the religious base.
Inner circle
Within any religion, most often there is a ‘teaching’ that is comprised of three things: Text, music and ‘guidance’. The text contains the following structure: A story representing why the religion exists and a promise to anyone who will follow the rules of this religion. The text most often will show extensive ways how misinterpretted causality shows that what ever happens to the follower of this religion will be for the better. The second part in the text is based on the way evolution has taught every species to survive: Fear. By getting the individual to consider the intangible danger to be connected to acting against the rules for the promise, the individual itself will cause a ‘causality-loop’ between emotion and rationale.
Example
You will go to a community place, or you will not benefit from the promise (good fortune, eternal life, etc). Being a social species, an individual human will want to be surrounded by others. If one has many friends outside of the religion, it is unlikely this ‘disguised threat’ will influence the specific individual. What happens often? An individual of interest is being approached and ‘loosened’ from its friends and family. ‘If you stay with your friends, you will never learn the real secret’, ‘They don’t understand you, but it is written that those…etc’ (especially in time of emotional crisis, for instance loss of a dear one, this is used).
You choose from the options you are given
But, you will say, there are many who step into the religion on their own choice. Yes, correct, however the same threat is evident. However it is not by influence of ‘guidance’, but simply the lack of friends and family that will cause people to turn to the community of faith. Rationalization happens afterwards. Because religion is build on promise (curiousity and longing), and enforced by punishment (superstition and fear), every iteration of the motions, causes a person to make a habit of the motion.
A different kind of soul music
How about the music? The human brain is only half the work. We are still mere biological species that have evolved from ancestral species. All species respond based on instinct/reflex/emotion. Music is the creative way that religion uses to cause the neuro emotional response to accept cognitive concepts easier. Some sound combinations are simply and without scrupules hijack the instinctive responses to them to influence the emotional parts of the individual to accept binding to these emotional responses of illogical concepts. Of course, it all starts with ‘guidance’ of the religion. These people are (sometimes ignorant themselves, but more often very well in the know of how irrational the concept is. They will have a very difficult task to influence the individual to accept the parts that are becoming less and less acceptable due to change of time and culture.
Concluding
To be short about it, as the smack on the bum is meant for the child’s pain receptors and fear instincts for pain to cause it to not take certain actions again, the religious promise of pain (bad luck in this life or afterlife) or pleasure (good fortune in this life or afterlife) causes an individual raised with these distinct disciplining actions, to follow even on same fear regarding things they don’t understand.
So, using humanity as a principle, how does that work?
Well, as a person who likes to ‘normalise’ things as much as possible, I see things as entities.
What is the prime entity for care?
You can imagine that from my point of view, this is a human being (or living being if you will, taking the level above just humans). A human is the driving force, the central measurement, main subject and actual linchpin concerning his/her health. A human is even a part of the health of humanity. Like a cell is a part of the health of a body. As is the behavior of a human of influence of the health of his environment. But more important, every human, whether they are living their lives, or living to improve other people’s lives, are looking from themselves as a perspective.
How would that be visualised?
Well, for one: The center element is the life of a person (lets keep it to human health care for now). A person, with history, future, current state, body, mind and environment.
Great, so now you have the base of a human life…so…er…how are we going to incorporate that in a system for health care?
Imagine someone goes to a physician or hospital.
In the above image, you can also identify the ‘group’ identity. An individual hardly ever lives entirely alone (or should never). Such group has the same characteristics as a accumulation of the individuals it is comprised of.
A health institute doesn’t really deals with the individual as such, but rather a part of its sympthoms. Institute is a very broad item here: Local doctor, physician, physiotherapist, psychiater, psychologist, pathologist, etc. Especially if you incorporate the connection the group the individual is part of. Imagine pandemics, epidemics, forensics, etc.
Why would you want to change the setup? Can’t you just adjust the existing systems?
I honestly don’t know whether they can, but I think it is important to have an architecture worked out that takes the honest and right approach towards the ownership and entity base of information.
Writing words isn’t just making the characters connect, or making a word of a string of characters. Writing means a process of changing non-tanglible ideas into a concept, into a protocol of signs that are understood by another.
A simple word can have a simple meaning, but a simple word can also have a complex meaning. Worse even, a simple word can even be a complexity in itself and the connected emotions. It can build a world or just a short flick of the eye.
Consider the word Word. It is a concept of everything you have read right here. It is simply the defining combination of symbols that should translate in someone’s mind into: A concept of combined characters that has meaning in or outside a context. Here you see, that the simple word Word, already gave more words as an explanation of itself. And even now, as you read this, you are even wondering whether I am right about it. Whether your definition is the same, or more extensive. Perhaps your mind lingered from this text and you started to think of a poem about the word Word, or you have suddenly seen recollections of texts that resembled this. So much happens when you read a word. So much a word can mean.
So when you write, you aren’t just writing words, you are writing ideas.
These are interesting times. Because the US is in this scenario that much of Europe was in 30-40 years ago, we seek to find ourselves in this. Where do we, as individual, as group, as society, as culture, as humanity, where do we stand.
Of Apples and oranges
The thing is, discrimination is human, but it is also instinctive and animal. And yes, no matter how you look at it, humans are yet another species of animals.
As you might have read elsewhere on https://www.metawareness.com, the first emotion, is fear. Fear thrives survival. Without fear, most don’t survive, unless very lucky. Fear causes use to find safe spots, safe havens. As humans, like all other great apes and many mammals, we are a social species. We are born in the safety (most of us) of a community. Our parents initially keep us safe (most of the time), but the fact that they themselves live within the protection of a community, within the rules of a society, keeps us double safe. This causes two things:
We are aware that we need to protect our offspring
we are aware that we need to protect our community
Danger, Robinson
To make sure that we don’t get into danger, we make sure that the ones in our community, are the ones we know and the ones we know are the ones that think like us. We can identify them, because we can identify ‘as’ them. We immediately recognize (instinctive) their meaning, if they look a certain way.
Them and us
The further an individual differs from our ‘group-general-markup‘, we tend to be more cautious. This is all instinctive, because different means danger. Fear will make sure that you don’t think on it too much. Step back from danger, or die.
Choose to change
Humanity has evolved, but what we don’t accept as part of our genome, we can’t decide to change. Religion and general ‘leaders’ demand that people behave a certain way. The more power a person has, the more money they have. Riches are to be lost and losing creates fear. The more power one has, the more fear one has to lose what is connected.
Everyone is unique, so different
Each individual is different. There is no two humans on earth exactly alike, not even twins. But why do we tend to ‘discriminate’ and fall for the ‘etnicism’ (or called ‘racism’? Because of our marvelous intelligence. True, the more intelligent a person is, the less he/she will ideally be concerned about arbitrary things like skin color or bone structure, but it is our intelligence that caused use to go from simply protective, to discriminating and do etnic profiling on the go.
It’s just an idea
Here is why: Conceptualisation. When I tell you I went to the store. You don’t ask me what the store looked like. You know the function of what ‘store’ represents and mostly you will ask: ‘What did you get?’. The same happens when I tell you I bought a new car. You will not ask me what kind of wipers it has, you will ask me the max speed, the color, the more obvious traits that don’t require extensive knowledge of either brands or technicalities of cars.
How come we can’t differentiate (most of us) between one Asian person and another, just like you most likely can’t tell one from the other from any etnically different human from your own group?
Clean up, stand up
To keep our brains tidy, we group things: Balls (that can be big, small, blue, red, football, soccer, tennis, etc balls), we don’t think about the type of balls that can fall into the hegemony, we make it a homogenous group of balls in our mind. Same with Houses, with Money, with Feelings, with Cupboards, with Math equations. We group, to preserve space in our brain, and to (IF the need arises) do differentiation later on when it is important. We do the same with people: Brothers, Sisters, Siblings, Fathers, Mothers, Parents, Spouse, In-Laws, Daughers, Sons, Nephews, Nices. Nowhere while reading those words did you pick one specific image and did you think: Oh, this is about this person. Except possibly with Fathers and Mothers.
Doesn’t differ to me
We discriminate because it makes life easier. Circles are circles, squares are squares. However, there are people who are very much aware of this, and they will use it to advantage. Fear is the strongest emotion and therefore the easiest to invoke. ‘Divide and conquer’ is how wars are won. It is how communities are controlled. You know who you CAN trust, so all one has to do, is make sure you don’t trust people that fall outside that scope and you are set for control.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
When you see your own kin, you put them in a box, when you see non-relatives, you put them in another box. When you see people that are ‘images of self’, you will allow them in your box. When they differ on visual, auditive or other traits, you will first put them in another box. Why? Safety, quarantaine, ease of mind, conceptualisation for later.
Now is the time, that people can become honest. Move to a new neighborhood and unpack all the boxes. Go to ‘Earth’ and meet your new neighbours. Unpack and bring a cake. If you don’t like your neighbours, dislike them for their actions. That is something that represents their individuality. Not their skin, not their feet, not their smell.
They only divide you, if you let them
We are all human. We should shed the bad concepts like religions. Those are still causing great grief. We should fill our problems with solutions from all trades of life. So everyone can live the same kind of life and enjoy their life on Earth for how long it lasts.
Deja vu (as far as I have been able to investigate and incorporate existing research) is the moment the mind recognizes a pattern that has been (at some prior time) ‘considered’. This means that the brain has a response structure for it and at the moment of deja vu, it fills in the blanks. That is why the consciousness feels everything that transpires is predicted. But this only goes for the very basic response to stimulus.
Survival patterns
Humans are the result of evolution over a long line of organisms that were (for a long time) not the top of the food chain. Our brains is the evolved version of the brain of other primates. However, our line has had the luxury to gain so much overhead in responses, that we could counter possible threats, before they occurred. This means that our system has space and basal response blueprints (instincts) embedded that are not used anymore. These options made us, as species become self aware. The same options caused us to become ‘religious’ (seeking a parent outside, or generally called animism), plan extensive, become verbal in more complex ways and sometimes have been hotwired in the complex structure of neurons.
Reaction Chain
Our brain is behaving primarily to respond to threats. We don’t have those in all levels of society anymore. There are levels where most of these parts of the brain are used for more cognitive options. The structures in which the brain is wired is inherited to extend. The decisions are caused by impulses coming in initially. When we come to a moment of deja vu, some arbitrary part of such a decision tree, is activated and the brain shoots hormones and other neurotoxins into the bloodstream to activate defenses of the organism. Such gives the organism a hastened response (heightened awareness) and the moment the brain sees something. The organism has the idea it has already transpired. We as humans are aware of direction of time and know that we can’t act what has already transpired, so our consciousness tries to make the event fit and you get the ‘idea’ that it was a repetition of an earlier event (but as we KNOW we haven’t been in that specific situation, we tell ourselves it must have been a dream).
The brain is evolved from millions of years of neural synapses integrating (as said by others much like the processors we create for computers etc), when life was but worms, there were still only a few strands of nerves. A small lump in the ‘seat’. What was the ‘brain’ set to? For food. The worm is one long intestine and basically we are a intestine with vertibrates. Our brain has been evolving ever since life became multiple celltypes with specific functions. When complex animals arose, the brain was already a complex neural box. It was so intrinsic that even mice have basically selfawareness options (who says they aren’t?). But the brain still has the same function over all those millions of years: Making sure the body gains food and survives dangers in doing so. We as mammals have been on lower steps of the food chain for thousands of thousands of years. (imagine that. A life span of about 40 years and so generations every 15 to 20 years….imagine how many ancestral generations have gone before THAT point.). Then the weather changed, climate changed and we got less predators to take care of, but we still needed to find food. We ate what was in trees, bushes, die with failure, live with good food. Those choices are all embedded in the blueprint of our brain. They are the unlearned reflexes. Many of them come to pass each generation, without being triggered. And from that moment on, the brain needs less for certain type of reflexes. Eventually we are in our current era and we are the top of the food chain and we changed the ability of running from danger, to preparing for danger for many hundreds of thousands of years. Now, we don’t have to run anymore, but some of the reflexes don’t die that easily (hence religion and other fear aspects, causing diversion and anger).
We are in a time where the brain evolves on. It might become smaller, but not ‘lighter’ per se. The density changes, but also its functions ‘narrow’. Who of us still know from instinct what to do with babies? With a wild animal attacking us? With how the weather predicts the effects on crops tomorrow? We are all losing parts that are ‘irrelevant’ to the specific ‘bloodline’. Those in cities don’t know about carpenting or farming, while in the suburb there will be those that still know. Life still requires it from them to sometimes build something themselves. The same happens for many things, not just ‘job’ related, but also personal. In the country, people are welcoming to new (new blood, information, etc), but also cautious of differences (dangerous behavior, different unknown bloodlines and physical attributes). In the suburbs where all come together, it is a mediate, while in the city it is the same as in the country, but reversed. They are less welcoming (busy lives, close quarters and thus more shortlived interhuman contacts), but also less cautious. In all, the brain grows smaller, but not around the globe. There are likely locations where it grows.
It will also still depend on the activities within the bloodlines, whether there is either higher density or loss of reflex/cognitive abilities.
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