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Revenge Really Does Taste Sweet
Wizzy Wig writes "The Toronto Star is reporting on scientific experiments showing a link between revenge and the 'pleasure center' of the human brain, thus putting a nature spin on something heretofore thought of as a nurture based, or learned, emotion."
Is it a dish best served cold?
CJC
Awesome post, man.
My scoop:
The articles above consider 'survival' and the drive to it as top priority, which leads to those conclusions, self interest being top above all and everything. Revenge and other darwinistically explained social behaviors that exist, do so because the other behaviours simply died out, over time. But why is survival, or passing on of genes so important? Yes, we were born with these drives to operate selfishly, maximizing the individual "profit" even if it's irrational from a society's perspective, from the group perspective. But that doesn't mean we can't go against these drives - for instance, have these people study suicide - it's definitely not a good long term strategy for species. Basically, we're free beings, as the existentialists say it, in all of our actions we're doomed to freedom, everything we do comes down to a choice. They talk about the selfish gene, and biological beings simply being vehicles for the genes to create more copies, and all the complexity of life roots from these genes trying to make copies. Yes, after a certain time, only those tendencies will survive that aim to survive, but that doesn't mean at any point in time, a tendency like this is an absolute goal. If anyone chooses not to follow it, will simply die off, or his surivors will, sooner or later - so what? Who cares? Genes don't hold the answer to ethics, the way to live life, the bible doesn't hold the answer, and in this sense, we're left out in the open, to explore, without guidance. As far as stimulating that pleasure center, there are many ways to do it more intensly. We can love, if we want to. We can hate if we want to. We can admire nature, help others, we can sacrifice ourselves for something we believe in - treehuggers will sit in trees and starve themselves in order to protect trees. You may say this is just a compassion-malfunction, that humans developed towards each other, redirected to trees, but I don't think it's that simple. Most things happen random, without purpose, gene mutations happen without purpose. Time is the great judge, and makes random things into rules, purposes, drives, motives. But that doesn't mean these drives are absolute, something to take as a dogma. For instance, peacocks went down this dead end street of huge male tailfeathers, and they can't break from it. Nothing says they couldn't, if they really really wanted to - there could be a new epidemic, or fashion craze among peackocks, for whatever reason, where males with large feathers aren't preferred. Well ok, maybe not for peacock's, unless they get hit with a funny virus or something, but yes for humans - this illustrates how much freer we are simply because we can think more abstractly, instead of being just automatons. (Note: I don't think animals are complete automatons, and I detect feelings of love, and needs for, how ya say it, "self actualization", and other such human traits, even if very little.) Yes we retain the animal functions, the peacock-tailfeather nonsense things, we still get horny, hungry, sleepy, and all that, simply to exist and function, but once we step up on the hierarchy of needs,, these physiological things fall out of perspective, and the psychological needs become more the focus. As far as explaining the psychology through darwinism, through survival of the species, I don't completely go for it - I think nature is on an exploration, on a journey, with us, without clear direction. We can admire the world, admire mountains, cats, for no reason, and pretty much live freely. I'd like to think that our minds are not 100% slaves to our instincts, and we can rise above our instincts, and if we clearly see that a certain behavior, as a group, if made into a widely accepted status quo, collectively benefits us, then we can go for it, even if all the game theories and nash equilibriums predict it's a bad strategy. So what, what's so important about winning? Sometimes you just play a game, such as chess, for the sake of playing, you enjoy the be