99.99% of the population consistently avoid sleeping in the streets. — BC
Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love!
Music has been flogging the importance of love for decades. All you need is love sung in 10,000 different songs. Quite often "love" is another term for sex. — BC
On the one hand, hormones are the primary motive for us to go find somebody to fuck. — BC
The pleasure of climaxing is fundamental. The preference for it to be done this or that way and directed to someone else in the first place, seems pretty culturally driven. It is there in the culture before you can even reflect on it much to say otherwise. It seems instinctual from a non-reflective vantage point, perhaps.Fucking is fundamental — BC
There are culturally defined standards for prospective sex/love objects. Just any old slob won't do; a very exciting partner might be too unpredictable. We are expected to find a beautiful or handsome mate, curvaceous or muscular, blond or brunet, nicely dressed, etc. People are judged on the quality of their partners--someone you could confidently take home to meet your folks. — BC
To be a bit graphic for an analogy:
1) To have a bowel movement is natural.
2) To have a bowel movement feel vaguely "relieving" or "good" is natural
3) To have a bowel movement in a toilet bowl is cultural. — schopenhauer1
The "natural selection" for which we mean genetics leading to variations that lead to survival is one thing. But "natural selection" as simply a "strategy" (like certain stories that work) that work towards survival is different, and I think we should use a term like "cultural strategy" or something like that. — schopenhauer1
So I think we are almost on the same page, but it is where the delineation should be made that we are disagreeing.
You seem to be saying that various appearances of the person and qualities are probably culturally derived, but the very drive "to fuck (someone)" is not.
I am saying on the other hand, that it is simply "pleasure" that is innate, and directing it "to someone" is STILL cultural. I gave the analogy to my previous post: — schopenhauer1
We are singing from the same hymnal at least; not sure if we are on the same page. I agree that pleasure-seeking is biologically driven, but we are also driven to achieve it with somebody else. Who that somebody else ought or ought not to be is a cultural matter. We are not naturally onanistic. We're a social animal. — BC
Sex and pleasure with somebody else or alone is a basic biological drive. My guess is that the basic "how" is pretty much baked in. The rest of the animal kingdom manages to mate without a guide and I think we can too, even if the Kama Sutra isn't hard wired. We require touch as infants and are driven to seek out touch, but where, when, with whom, and where not, when not, and with whom not are culturally defined. — BC
Evolutionary biology accounts mainly for the ground floor. Evolutionary psychology maybe 2 & 3, but its relevance wanes as you go further up. — Wayfarer
but I did my best.
Have a nice day. — Srap Tasmaner
I beg to differ as reproduction is not a "physiological need". — schopenhauer1
I think the pleasure associated with sex is rooted in evolutionary physiology. — Wayfarer
it is natural that the reproductive urge harness all the pleasure centres in seeking to express itself. — Wayfarer
Humans, uniquely, are then able to detach the associated pleasure from its biological origin and pursue it for its own sake. — Wayfarer
To be a bit graphic for an analogy:
1) To have a bowel movement is natural.
2) To have a bowel movement feel vaguely "relieving" or "good" is natural
3) To have a bowel movement in a toilet bowl is cultural. — schopenhauer1
For some reason, Freud springs to mind here, but I have to go and engage in other cultural pursuits (i.e. gym) so I'll come back to it later. — Wayfarer
culture could have contingently been "good enough" to take the place of some naturally selected instinct. — schopenhauer1
But do you understand what the measure of "good enough" is? — Srap Tasmaner
it would have to be at least as reliable at producing rates of reproduction at least as high as the genetic solution; if not, natural selection will fix that, so long as the old genes are still somewhere in the population. — Srap Tasmaner
For the old genes to just drop out, this culturally sustained level of reproduction will have to go on long enough not only to have the old genes miscopied into oblivion, but to catch up to and surpass any beneficial traits or behaviors that might happen to be riding in individuals with the old procreative genes, else natural selection will keep rewarding them. — Srap Tasmaner
In essence, the genes for procreative behavior are competing against nothing at all, so it's very hard to see how natural selection could ever definitively weed them out. Procreative genes could even just continue to proliferate as a redundant free rider; even if the cultural mandate to reproduce were more intense than the genetic, those individuals would reproduce their unnecessary genes at that higher rate.For natural selection to take any interest, the individuals carrying the procreative genes would have to be less fit, less adapted, less suitable as sex partners, and less fertile. Why would they be, especially with the 'procreators' continuing to 'interbreed' with the 'culturalists'? — Srap Tasmaner
Now, how on earth would such a culture arise? You want to chalk all this up to human self-awareness and positive feedback: that thing we all do, because we are biologically disposed to, we all agree so hard and so long that we should do that, and preferably do it even more than we are naturally disposed to, that eventually the biological disposition just withers away. It's easy to see what would sustain the genetic solution here; it's just how natural selection works. But what would sustain such an intense and long-lasting cultural mandate? Especially given that biology is happy to take care of this without taking up cultural resources: there's no gap being filled by culture, no problem being solved, the mandated behavior was already taking place. Culture, then, does this for no reason at all, just because, it seems to you, it can.
In summary, no conceivable selection pressure against procreative genes, no conceivable cultural selection pressure for culturally mandated high rates of reproduction.
Now, if your answer is that there is no reason to think there ever were any procreative genes to start with, keep in mind that we had to come from somewhere. We have ancestors without language, without culture, and their procreative genes would certainly have been selected for, all else being equal. You have to explain how we got rid of them, and I don't see how you can. — Srap Tasmaner
it SEEMS like there must be an evolutionarily biological reason for why we direct our pleasure towards someone else. — schopenhauer1
However, "seeking out a mate" is a trope. — schopenhauer1
Boredom appears in animals with enough brain matter to get bored. Chickens don't get bored; bright parrots do. Animals that are caged (or live in our houses) who become bored can be very problematic. BTW, dogs don't hump our legs because they want to mate with us; they are engaged in a dominance display. — BC
This is called "moving the goal posts". — schopenhauer1
You are asking for a mechanism for how it came about when I am arguing simply what is the case, not how it came about. — schopenhauer1
you seem to make natural selection some kind of goal-oriented process — schopenhauer1
I don't have to explain how we got rid of them. — schopenhauer1
So tying it back to sex, pleasure feels good. — schopenhauer1
But you might say, "Aha! See marriage is thus evolutionarily evolved from genes". — schopenhauer1
Seems, Sir? Nay, it's a necessity. Were this abstracted atomized pleasure all that was necessary, evolution would have never got off the ground and we'd all be single-celled prokaryotes instead of multi-celled eukaryotes. — BC
I'm talking about how it came about because we're talking about what results and what does not result from natural selection. Your position is that our procreative behavior did not come about because of natural selection, remember? So it's what you're talking about too. — Srap Tasmaner
And I can't see any mechanism by which that changes just because we start telling stories and making pots. — Srap Tasmaner
Yes, you've mentioned this pleonasm before. Was there an option we narrowly avoided where pleasure would turn out to feel bad? — Srap Tasmaner
It's your thread, do as you like. Would you rather be blogging? — Srap Tasmaner
It's childish. — Srap Tasmaner
And then because the tribe wants more members -- for its cultural purposes, no biology involved -- it in essence manipulates (encourages, cajoles, tricks) people into having sex by teaching them that it's the kind of pleasure that feels good and thus getting them to reproduce.
Thank god culture showed up when it did, or our ancestors might never have had sex, and then where would we be? — Srap Tasmaner
Which is blindingly obvious, right?
I suppose it's no use noting how much cultural capital has been spent trying to get people not to have sex, or to only have pre-approved socially useful sex. (For all we know, it's just trying to undo hundreds of thousands of years of culture making people have sex. Sure it is.) — Srap Tasmaner
to show that I just have to show culture as a viable and more plausible theory — schopenhauer1
It's childish.
— Srap Tasmaner
Yet you are the one seeming to start it. — schopenhauer1
Again, the tropes are there before anyone’s individual experience. — schopenhauer1
No what I have to prove is our mechanism isn’t via natural selection but cultural propagation, not the exact story for this change. It’s enough to know it’s not natural selection that propagates our reproduction mechanism. — schopenhauer1
what happened next — Isaac
What I think we're all waiting for is your reasons for believing (2) is more likely than (1), not just your reasons for thinking (2) is possible. — Isaac
Which is natural selection's whole thing, hence my insistence we must be able to at least imagine a mechanism for getting from point A to point B. — Srap Tasmaner
The problem is there’s very little experimental evidence you can gather unless you forced people into isolated societies that did not have any cultural ideas about sexuality or relationships. — schopenhauer1
Let's imagine there was a world whereby sex was unknown. — schopenhauer1
Someone grows up with culture reinforcing X, Y, Z traits as attractive markers. These are the things that should get your attention, in other words. This then becomes so reinforced that by the time of puberty, indeed the connections are already made that this is the kind of things that are generally attractive. Of course, right off the bat there is so much variability in people's personal preferences (beauty is in the eye of the beholder trope), but EVEN discounting that strong evidence, let's say there is a more-or-less common set of traits that attraction coalesces around. Again, how do we know that the attraction, or even ATTRACTION simplar (just being attracted to "something" not even a specific trait) is not simply playing off cultural markers that have been there in the culture since the person was born and raised? There is the trope in culture, "When I reach X age, I am supposed to be attracted to someone and pursue them or be pursued (or mutually pursue or whatever)". — schopenhauer1
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.