Thinking Things Through
TTT.htm

Thinking Things Through

No one knows what happened before the Big Bang, including where the Energy that Created the Universe came from, but we can start at the point in time when the Universe came into existence.

The basic functions of survival and reproduction began in pools of randomly mixed chemicals that were environmentally mutated by solar radiation, cosmic rays, currents, wind, rain, severe storms, lightening, salinity, temperature, pressure, etc..

Some chemical reactions and systems, over billions of years, evolved to become self-sustaining and self-reproducing, then evolved into the earliest forms of RNA and DNA, enclosed cells, one-celled plants and animals, multi-celled plants and animals, and on "up" to us, through a mind-bending sequence of mindless Natural Selection, including episodes of de-evolution and re-evolution.

Everything that is alive today had ancestors that developed, maintained, and enhanced the instincts, preferences, and behaviors that perpetuated the survival and reproduction of their particular gene pool.  Gene pools that failed to do so died out.

There are many definitions of "Life."  It is hard to define what level of complexity constitutes "Life".  A virus survives and reproduces, but is generally not considered to be alive, rather, an example of "Proto-Life".  I propose that the defining dividing-line between "Life" and "Proto-Life" is the capability for complex Impulse Control.  My layman's concept is that the only "instincts" a virus has are not to consume other members of its own species too often (which is the most rudimentary form of Impulse Control), and to become dormant in a hostile environment.  Forms of "Life" employ far more complex Impulse Control, such as higher instincts that manage the base instincts for survival and reproduction.

For example, a Lifeform that has starved nearly to death will still be unlikely to consume another member of its own species if that member is perceived to be a potential reproductive partner.

Another example: The base survival instinct, and its higher-level operating "subroutine", fight or flight, are tempered by the even higher-level instinct to put one's self in harm's way to protect offspring.

Instincts evolve into ever more complex feelings and emotions.  Empathy elevates possessiveness to protectiveness and ultimately to fondness.  Xenophobia, vital to primitive survival, without sufficient Empathy, familiarity, and common experiences (like fighting side-by-side on a battlefield), stagnates into racism.

Being who we want to be depends on our higher-level instincts such as Impulse Control and, at the highest-level, Empathy, so we don't have to "think things through" for most of Life's conflicts.  It is Nature, Nurture, and ultimately our personal Self-Respect, that allow and motivate us to decide to "think things through", and achieve the levels of Fondness, Respect, and ultimately, Trust, we naturally desire.

Thinking Things Through is Hard Work

A living being perceives a constant flood of information from its environment as well as from the workings of its own information processing system.  The Human information processing system consists of our brain and its input subsystems - eyes, ears, sense of touch, taste, and smell as well as many other information gathering and producing systems such as reactions to the chemical states of every part of our body and changes to those states, the influence of chemicals to which we are exposed, including those produced by our own bodies, and even more mysterious sources the very reality of which may be questionable (clairvoyance, telepathy, other forms of mental information gathering, etc.).

The sheer volume of this flood of information would overwhelm the highest levels of any processing system (brain) if it did not have the capacity to prioritize and filter the information, making it possible for the highest levels (up to and including the conscious mind) to focus on important information (received from the subconscious mind - such as threats to survival), ignore less-important information, and referee between competing influences any one of which could, if unchecked, lead to drastically different behaviors than the others would.

The fundamental, essential process of refereeing competing influences is hard, stressful mental work, compounded by the huge amount of often conflicting ideas with which we are constantly confronted in the course of Human life.

The fundamental weakness of the Human mind is its ability to deal with this stress by overriding its natural ability to think things through, and avoid the hard work of thinking things through, by simply choosing to believe what we want to believe, particularly beliefs that comfort us, to our great, and often tragic, disadvantage, for ourselves, our loved ones, other people, and other forms of life, during our entire all-too-brief stay on our fragile little planet.

People always have and always will dearly need comfort-based thinking, but Humanity's Future depends on more evidence-based thinking and less comfort-based thinking.


"You can't solve your problems with the same thinking that created them."

- Albert Einstein


Being on our own is not as terrible an idea as it may seem.

The scariest and yet the most inspiring idea in Life is: on this Earth,

All We Have is Each Other.


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