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How Much Of Life Depends Upon Placebo Effects?

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Everything a human being considers is influenced by it's own psychology and the psychology of multiple layers of groups of other people and tinged with emotion painted in from the passions we feel about the issues involved. I submit that not only does every organizational body of humanity depend upon placebo effects to motivate and sustain both the involvement and cooperation of others in their plans, but also to interpret and render acceptable the failures and mis-deeds which occur.

The concluding thought then becomes that human life is just ultimately as brutal, and random as any other animal and insectile existance we can witness. The primary difference between us and them is the imaginary bias we place upon ourselves by the narrow focus we assign to our "normal" behavior... permitting us to rationally dismiss all the other behaviors because it was the madness of criminals, warmongers, and the insane, which are actually defined seperatly from us by VERY fine lines.

And that ongoing construction and universal accepance of those highly prescriptive definitions constitute our own continuous self-redosing on our own custom-made placebos.

Please reflect, comment, criticise, and confess as you feel passionate... then reflect upon the basis and orientation of your own passions.

[ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

EarnestEccentric 7 Aug 8
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Evolution by natural selection has no foresight, it merely adjusts any creature to be better at living in the existing environment, from the starting point of its existing adaptations to former environments. Therefore when the environment changes suddenly, as it sometimes does, all creatures are ill adapted, and only a lucky few may just survive, to go on and slowly get better adapted to the new conditions.

When humans developed language they gained a great benefit, they could pass on information better and thereby develop better technology. Which meant at first, many good things like, better tools, better hunting plans, cooked food with higher nutrition, etc. But they also, with that, gained, as a side effect, the ability to tell and pass on lies and fantasy, ideas quite divorced from reality, to a vastly greater degree, than ever before. Indeed to such a great extent that you could say that, lying, which is mainly the gift of language, is the really great human skill which sets us apart. ( The lion is strong, the swift is the fastest in flight, the whale dives deepest, and the human is the best at lying. )

That in turn meant that we could grow a vast body of collected lies, and pass it on as never before. Though being vain we like to give that body of lies a nice name, "lies" sounds a bit negative, so in our vanity we call it our "culture" and cultures. But there was no limit put by nature on the growth of culture, so that eventually, culture, (or our collective lies, ) became all pervasive for many people, so that most modern humans in fact live in a mainly cultural environment, where all their knowledge and understanding comes from culture, as does their food, shelter, and entertainment.

Yet here is the big problem. We are not adapted by evolution to live in the cultural environment. The cultural environment has grown to be our main environment significantly only in the last few thousand years, perhaps to a small extent in the last few hundred thousand at most. And that is one of the most rapid environmental changes any animal has ever experienced. We are not therefore even remotely adapted to life in the cultural environment, even though it was an environment we created ourselves. We are adapted to life in small family groups on the plains of Africa, and therefore we do not inherit any biological adaptations, or any of the tools we need for life in the cultural world. Such as, natural inherent skeptical inclinations, or the ability to resist junk food when it is pushed at us with social pressure, including intellectual junk food. We can therefore spot a lion stalking us though the long grass very well, most of the time, but a salesman stalking us through a field of adverts, no chance.

@EarnestEccentric Oh I have read your peices so far, and you are certainly not thick. Though if you don't mind, I have improved the comment a bit and may make a post out of it. Then we can see if the members shred it to bits.

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