Puzzling alright. And what’s a fully repressed emotion?

Moral foundations? — TheMadFool

What do you mean here? Are you referring to learned or inherent?

Not what I said, this was the chosen term (have to be careful): repressed emotion. — Anthony

Whether it’s suppression of repression, your thoughts are still that ‘Probably most high functioning "professionals" in the market society have anger issues.‘

You also said:

Anger is no emotion, it's the absence of it; the result of living with stored up repressed emotion. The sum total of repressed emotion=anger. People who get angry believe their emotions can't be trusted and hence deny them.. — Anthony

What do you mean by anger when you say ‘People who get angry’?

“My sentence includes the locution "market society" which I do use a lot as it's important in understanding what, as I see it, is irritating many people - as they conform to it - to the point of anger.”

Again, what is this anger?

If I were to hazard a guess then one moral theory among the many has the least number of exceptions implying it works, say, 99% of the time. Which theory is that I wonder? — TheMadFool

That we are moral creatures.

Why are so many people angry? What's so comforting about anger and hatred? — Wallows

It’s possible that anger serves a purpose, it may be an action that actually stops us from taking the next step which is physical violence. Though it does seem that one does lead to the other. Possibly the problem is in the other ignoring the signals.

I think it’s a very interesting point. Maybe it does have no moral basis at all. But why assume it’s fear, which does feel sad. I don’t feel that I live in fear or others I know. I can’t help feeling that we’re looking at it the wrong way.

Edit: it’s like we understand there’s a point we should not cross.

It looks very broad by your definition of each of those responses being anger — Brett

Actually, on second thoughts I’ll take that back and say that anger might be one of the most complicated of our emotions.

Edit: Studies by Hochschild and Sutton have shown that the show of anger is likely to be an effective manipulation strategy in order to change and design attitudes. Anger is a distinct strategy of social influence and its use (i.e. belligerent behaviors) as a goal achievement mechanism proves to be a successful strategy.[22][23] Wikipedia

Anger is part of a sympathetic nervous response. It's the "fight" part. — frank

I agree, but the ‘fight’ for what?

Nope, it’s a broad term. Being angry that the bus arrived late, being angry that your team lost, being angry at your wife cheating on you, being angry at not being able to remember a song. Jim being angry at his boss. John being angry at his boss. Natasha being angry at her boss. Angry tiger when it can’t get any food. Angry birds. The subtle anger in anonymous Internet forums. Feeling hangry before lunch. Being hangry before dinner. Raging. Punching the wall. Grinding your teeth. A slight roll of eyes. See? Very broad. Its not a spectrum, no human emotion is. — Frotunes

A bit of sleight if hand going on there. It looks very broad by your definition of each of those responses being anger. But in fact those situations have many different responses, not just anger. How do you know the birds are angry? ‘A slight roll of the eyes’ is hardly anger. Being angry at not being able to remember a song?

These are triggers for anger, not anger itself.

Probably most high functioning "professionals" in the market society have anger issues. — Anthony

This is an ambiguous sentence, but I’ll address it anyway. In my experience ‘professionals’ (whoever they are) show or display less anger than I see in others. If you’re correct about suppressed emotional issues leading to outbursts of anger then surely they would be displaying acts of anger all the time. How could they not?

Oh oh.

That’s why I brought up the dishes. Where do these decisions a woman makes based on DNA begin and end, or are you saying every decision a woman makes is DNA based and always different from one a man would make?

Women more concerned with their mortality then men and evolutionary logical thought would dictate this is due to their dna. — christian2017

You were talking about women. I stayed on your subject. You said women’s daily decisions are based on their DNA. Thats a big assumption.

Are you telling me you've never read an article where a scientist attributes daily decisions to DNA? — christian2017

What, like doing the dishes?

I don’t know.

rather than realising that one and the same reality can be understood from irreducibly different points of view. — Amity

What does that mean?

'A fight against relativism' suggests to me that she was an absolutist. A black and white thinker.
That's not the impression I had formed in my mind.
What 'blame' is being talked of here? — Amity

My impression is that she meant that our morality is not subjective, that it is not relative to different cultures or ideas, that it is common to all people and behind our social evolution.

In regards to ‘culture’ she meant that our acts that have been so abhorrent, our behaviour, are not the results of our culture, as if it was something removed from us and directed our behaviour, but are the acts of an animal quite capable of appalling acts.

What she had said was that ‘ our inborn emotional constitution is our only source of ideas about what is good ... On the other hand, that constitution does not itself supply a ready-made priority system by which we can arbitrate among those wishes when they clash ...that’s why we have to find ... such a priority system ... why we cannot live without some kind of morality, and why in fact every human culture has one’.

Not just you, I would think.

Sad — Nasir Shuja

Do you mean me?

Then try it this way:

Give me the problem, then give me the objective, then give me the strategy for reaching the objective.

Just saying education, for instance, is neither. Give me specifics about the education and the results you expect.

if we educate people correctly, — Nasir Shuja

Where's the 'how'?

How to deal with the problem: — Nasir Shuja

I think you just continued to point out the problem. I might have missed it but I didn’t see a ‘how’.

I always considered “The Fountainhead” to be a criticism of the users, the con men and bureaucrats that soak up taxpayers hard earned money. The way governments waste money and the way those who don’t earn it spend it. The waste that comes about from spending money you didn’t earn, and the waste that comes about from government behaving as if they know anything about business, behaving as if they’re a successful business because they have their hands on so much money, none of it earned by themselves. Obviously hostile to socialism: it’s easy to spend other people’s money until you run out of it.

Edit. : sorry, I meant ‘Atlas Shrugged’.

I’m not sure what we’re disagreeing about, in fact I’m not sure if we are disagreeing.

The word ‘fiddling may have become a bit too literal. By ‘fiddling’ I do mean how we “correlate between entities, value and meaning“. That is being creative, maybe being conscious and being creative are the same thing: “how we process and integrate information”.

I disagree that it must contribute to survival in order to exist. — Possibility

I can’t see it any other way.

to call it a ‘result’ in terms of a ‘completed’ act is false — Possibility

Call it a step, then.

This is how the creative process operates alongside natural selection and rational thought, to increase overall achievement. — Possibility

The creative process and rational thought work together, natural selection has the final say.

Have you ever tried to describe it from within the act? As a participant - not as an observer or even a creator at the completion of the act, but as someone being creative right now? — Possibility

The act, participating, creating, being creative right now is the description from inside.

In its origins the creative act, the process, wasn’t a conscious act. (Is it today? I’m not sure). It had no intention, it was the behaviour of an animal that ‘fiddled’. There were creations that failed, disappeared with their creator, just as particular genetic features that hampered an animal’s success disappeared with the animal who could not survive.

The creative act is as random as that. Not all creations are good or moral. Even if the creative process is long and drawn out, taking and using, thinking and adjusting, even if it takes years for the realisation of an idea, nothing of it will survive if there is no beneficial result. The moment the animal (man) finally struck with the flint and made the connection he could repeat it, that’s the result. Without that you may still call it the creative process, which it is, but it’s still a mechanism, if you like, that contributes to survival.

Admittedly there were many previous little creative acts that went nowhere and appear to be done for the sake of being creative, but if there’s no result then what can it affect. If there was only the creative act, the process, and that was enough, would we be here? How long can this process go on without effect? To live like that is an indulgence, the threat to survival is not real if pointless acts are carried out and there are no consequences. No animal I know of can live and survive like that, except the domesticated dog or an animal in the zoo.

Of course the creative act opens us up to other potentials, but it can’t keep opening up potentials endlessly, forever. A potential is exactly that, the capacity to develop into something. What is a potential that never develops into something?

But to me, the creative act incorporates the integration of all the necessary information/experience in order to recognise one’s own capacity to use making fire as a tool for survival, and act on that awareness when the situation arises. — Possibility

This is what happens after the creative act. The creative act of starting a fire is followed by the use of it, being able to ‘recognise one’s own capacity to use making fire as a tool for survival’.

those who can create fire will survive, while those who don’t have sufficient experiences to make a correlation between the flint, wood and their own hand movements will... freeze to death? — Possibility

I would think that fire contributed to our development in more ways than just keeping warm.

What interested me about Mary Midgley was her ideas on morality; that we were moral creatures, even though we did not always act morally, and that we are social creatures. That we had a dark side, our animal nature, that should not be denied. That we don’t have a ready-made system priority system to deal with our conflicts, but that we must find one, we cannot live without some kind of morality.

So for her it was a fight against relativism, against the idea of morality being subjective. She was adamant that we could not shift the blame onto the idea of ‘culture’.

Her disagreement with Dawkins seemed to be against ‘the selfish gene’, the idea that altruism was an act of survival and not of our moral nature. That society was built not through people caring about one another but through caring as a selfish act. How could you even pretend to care about someone if you had no idea what caring was?

I see human creativity as an additional dimension of awareness that enables us to integrate information from both stimulus-response and memory to increase our awareness of potential. As described in my previous post, this potential is not necessarily limited to survival - rather it is our focus on survival that limits it by requiring a specific result. — Possibility

It’s hard for me to make clear, and I maybe missing something myself, that without a creative act that contributes towards survival there will be no second act. And as a consequence, only those who can manipulate that creative act will survive. The focus on survival doesn’t limit potential because of, as you say, requiring a result. It’s only the result, and a specific beneficial result, that enables that potential to live on. In the past any creative act without a tangible result, without contributing towards wellbeing, results in atrophy. Of course no one can know which act is going to be beneficial, natural selection sorts that out. Only the most beneficial acts survive because they travel with the creator who survives and thrives because of the benefits of the creative act.

I may or may not be making sense. I’m open to others who might be able to clarify what I’m saying, or prove me wrong.

As described in my previous post, this potential is not necessarily limited to survival - rather it is our focus on survival that limits it by requiring a specific result. — Possibility

The result is purely chance. Early man was not seeking a specific result. You cannot say I’m going to invent a specific thing, because you must already be aware of aspects of that thing. Once the original thing is made real then it can be applied in different ways. This is the advantage that ‘creating’ gives to man, the instinct or desire for ‘fiddling’ throws his genes forward.

Though your fire story could be regarded as a creative act, or thought, that has a beneficial result. I really don’t know how to classify that.
Of course there’s the possibility that it may never have happened.

I’ve read ‘Beast and Man’, ‘Wickedness’ and ‘Heart and Mind’. The last seems to require more concentration than ‘Beast and Man’, but that could be me. But there is certainly nothing complicated in her. Of all the people I’ve read she appeals the most.

This is the Macmillan meaning of ‘create’: to make something new or original that did not exist before.

Would you agree?

But a creative human not in immediate danger who observes this situation can recognise the potential of fire to deter wild animals. By integrating this new information with:

- what he knows from interacting with fire in situations when he isn’t trying to survive a wild animal but instead trying to survive a fire, and

- what he knows from interacting with fire when he isn’t threatened by either the fire or wild animals,

the creative human can then determine a way to harness the potential of fire in deterring wild animals, thereby increasing awareness of his own capacity - in this instance for survival. — Possibility

This is not the same is creating fire with a flint or rubbing a sharp stick against wood to create heat and then a flame.

Show one instance. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

You’re kidding, right? You want me to list people I know and then prove their existence to you?

I’ve found her books extremely refreshing and persuasive.

Probably of interest in terms of the future workforce is whether the rich: Gates, Beto, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Arnault, Slim, etc. hold onto their wealth and dominate how business is done and consequently what jobs are created: few as possible from their point of view. But they always need customers.

Their collapse is the only way I see of change in the workforce. I don’t see that happening.

That means less jobs. It also means more government spending on welfare. If corporations are taxed more (where else would the money come from) then they may agree, on the basis that they have some say where the money is spent.

Where would they want it spent? Obviously to their advantage, or according to their beliefs, not just about business, but society, what it should be.

China’s Social Credit system seems foreseeable under such conditions. Business wants a return on its dollars and taxable dollars: good citizens. But what use are they from there on if they’re not workers or customers? Maybe a reduction in numbers is necessary, an ideal population.

Have you ever tried to get a religionist involved in a moral discursion?

They run like beaten dogs. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Actually, I’ve found them to argue as heatedly as you do.

But in terms of evolution I wonder, for instance, how we determine that the live birth of a child, who is then completely dependent on an interactive parent for several years, is a survival feature. Do you get the feeling that we’re forcing some features and behaviour to fit the theory because there’s no alternative reasoning and it appears to work for everything else? — Possibility

Yes, I do sometimes consider that possibility. The birth of a child is not something I think a man and woman sat down and considered and decided that a child added to their chances of survival. But eventually it’s possible they saw having male children as beneficial to their survival when they have grown. It doesn’t take much thinking for a male to impregnate a female. Nature seems to have sided with rape here.

There’s a lot in your post I don’t agree with, but then it becomes a conversation about evolution, which I’m happy to have, but it’s for another conversation, unless everyone wants to go that way here. Though I have to say I don’t go for ‘the selfish gene’ idea.

Creation is at the heart of art; art cannot exist without it. — Pattern-chaser

Totally agree.

Edit: what I meant was that the creative act is not always artistic.

As pet owners, humans are also deficient. They often lose interest in you as a pet, and throw you out of the house. You can't sue pet owners for losing interest in you. — Bitter Crank

Not if people-pets were really expensive. If there was a big financial investment in people-pets then it’s in the owners interests to care for it. Maybe even create some sort of add-on value by educating it, teaching it new skills, then reselling.

In answer to your question, an intelligent person should remain open to all possibilities.

a genocidal son murdering prick of a god — Gnostic Christian Bishop

The irony is that your dislike for this god is so personal, as if he does actually exist.

My other point is that it sounds like you might accept the idea of the supernatural if it behaved the way you want. Your anger is directed at the destruction carried out by religion and the hypocrisy, but that doesn’t mean the supernatural is impossible, just that you don’t like it.