Comments

  • Human nature?
    I accept the idea of the collective unconscious described by Jung but not as some supernatural pool but perhaps as a memory inherent in nature, along the lines described by Rupert Sheldrake in his idea of morphic resonance. In fact, I think Sheldrake may be a missing link in connecting psychology and biologyJack Cummins

    I may be mistaken, but it sounds like your leaning towards the idea of memetics i.e the idea that there are codified memories passed on within the gene pool. I have often considered the idea that various primal instincts displayed in our species such as the fight or flight response are a memetic memory inherited through our ancestry to serve as an aid for survival.

    If by human nature we aim to look at the behavioural characteristics which are shared by the species then we could argue that it is our primal instincts and urges which we recognise as being present in the entire species, such as the fight or flight response that make up our nature and everything else about an individual is a result of how we are nurtured.
  • Be thankful that humans don't have Free Will
    The argument of a "master plan" would inevitably require the existence of a being that for the sake of argument we will call "God" i.e. a being capable of crafting a universe and setting each particle in existence on a predetermined path.

    Were we to assume the existence of such a being I would then need to question this "favourable outcome" as you call it. The argument could easily be made that any being capable of crafting a master plan of events and being able to predetermine events so far in advance could have easily crafted a better reality than this. I could go on but this would simply become a discussion of "if god is all powerful etc.

    The actions of humans are all primitive in nature, the "programmes" and "algorithms" we follow are the same ones our primitive ancestors relied upon to pull them through the ages i.e. fight or flight, the pleasure derived from sex, the built in fear of everything from death to spiders.

    The argument proposed that if not for the master plan people like Beethoven, Mozart, Einstein etc would not exist is a flimsy one. They were simply born with innate talents which is all accounted for the way their brains were, for lack of a better term "wired" such mutations are not uncommon in history and is the way genetics works. Without them sure things may not have happened the way that they have, but to say that a master plan exists and is evident because of there existence is not in my view a valid argument. Others may have existed in their place, perhaps is Einstein's parents had not copulated with each other the child she bore with another man may have had a different mutation and excelled in a different field altogether and made advancements elsewhere. We may have very well still arrived here at this very moment but with the sequence of events shifting or we may have arrived at an entirely different state of being from what we currently know (which ultimately leads on the discussion of multiverse theory)

    Overall the concept of a master plan would boil down to a religious argument in which neither could provide any suitable argument/proof one way or the other to irrefutably prove the existence of a master plan/pre determined fate or lack thereof.