Hello, I'm Envelope

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Envelope
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Hello, I'm Envelope

Post by Envelope »

Hi, my name's eddy. Envelope is just my alias as music producer and graphic designer.
In my free time I like to read psychology and neuroscience literature, which makes for great philosophical inspiration. But in my day to day life I find it hard to find people that enjoy or that are in the right situation to take the pleasure to speak at length about a subject, and so I'm constantly feeling a strong desire for having this kind of interaction with someone. Funnily enough it has only recently occurred to me to have a look at philosophy forums. I suppose I've always preferred face to face interactions, but recently I've started writing and that's probably what made me realize that having a written conversation with someone could also be really nice.

I'm writing about a philosophy/ideology that I call neotribalism and which I see as the solution to the myriads of problems of today's society. To make it short, it is based on the idea that the psychological development of the individual is the crucial stepping stone that can allow us to level up in the way we organize the collaboration of human communities in society. I thought I'd drop this stuff here right away so if anyone is interested in it you can contact me and we can chat about it and maybe grow some ideas together.

But feel free to hit me up about anything really, I always love to listen to people and explore our minds in the process.
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

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Envelope wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 10:23 pm it is based on the idea that the psychological development of the individual is the crucial stepping stone that can allow us to level up in the way we organize the collaboration of human communities in society.
I guess by psychological development of the individual you mean his (or her... will use male pronouns from here on, meaning females as well) altering his emotional structure and his reaction structure to the outside world, mainly to the social environment. For instance, people, if they alter their psychology to be less egotistic and greedy, then society would operate smoother.

This is indeed a very good and actually true idea. The ultimate embetterment of society via social change can only be achieved by psychological changes in each individual.

My objection is that human psychological response in the sense of the above, is inborn; it is DNA directed, although the behaviour response can be altered to some degree. But the behaviour modification dies with the individual, it needs to be repeated at great pain, expense and energy for each individual each generation. And indeed society does that: we teach our children not to fornicate on the street, not to steal when visible, not to kill humans when it can be easily proved and we can easily held responsible that we did it.

But to change the psychology so, that these teachings would not need to be taught, because they would be indelible parts of our innate psychology, well, that must be done on the DNA level.

That would bring up a whole bunch of problems: How do you find the gene that needs to be isolated or altered; and also, a bunch of ethical ramifications would ensue, as well.

But the idea is great, as far as I can see.
Envelope
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

Post by Envelope »

-1- wrote: Sun Aug 04, 2019 3:51 pm
I guess by psychological development of the individual you mean his (or her... will use male pronouns from here on, meaning females as well) altering his emotional structure and his reaction structure to the outside world, mainly to the social environment. For instance, people, if they alter their psychology to be less egotistic and greedy, then society would operate smoother.

This is indeed a very good and actually true idea. The ultimate embetterment of society via social change can only be achieved by psychological changes in each individual.

My objection is that human psychological response in the sense of the above, is inborn; it is DNA directed, although the behaviour response can be altered to some degree. But the behaviour modification dies with the individual, it needs to be repeated at great pain, expense and energy for each individual each generation. And indeed society does that: we teach our children not to fornicate on the street, not to steal when visible, not to kill humans when it can be easily proved and we can easily held responsible that we did it.

But to change the psychology so, that these teachings would not need to be taught, because they would be indelible parts of our innate psychology, well, that must be done on the DNA level.

That would bring up a whole bunch of problems: How do you find the gene that needs to be isolated or altered; and also, a bunch of ethical ramifications would ensue, as well.

But the idea is great, as far as I can see.
Safe buddy, thanks a lot for the encouragement and for the inputs you gave. Do you not find that our genetic heritage simply instructs the domain of possible behaviours that we can have when we start out our lives, and that only then, thanks to environmental pressures and subsequently self-awareness, the "specific" behaviour (as opposed to the behaviour domain) is shaped? In other words, we are born with brain structures dedicated to defense responses (this is what I called behaviour domain), which we could develop into angry and murderous behaviour (specific behaviour), just as well as we could develop them into colloquial behaviour, or avoidant behaviour, for examples.
I'm gonna guess here, tell me if it's the case, but are you thinking that, since we evolved in a world where deathly conflicts and a lot of other currently socially unacceptable behaviours were in the order of the day, now we have a hard-wired bias to keep behaving in those ways even if the environment is completely different?
If that's the case, what I found in my studies of psychology and personal exploration is that we indeed have certain tendencies, but that our physiological nature already has the malleability necessary for environmental pressures and self-awareness to shape the kinds of "specific" behaviours that would give humanity a chance to integrate itself in a functional community/organism and enter a symbiotic relationship with the earth rather than a parasitic one.
The doubt you're expressing seems to me to come from the idea that genetics shape "specific" behaviour, while my understanding of it tells me that DNA only informs the expression of the molecules of our body which means it shapes our physiology, yes, with all its biases, but also with all its potential.
Curious to hear your thoughts!
Cheers
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

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Envelope wrote: Mon Aug 05, 2019 12:44 pm
The doubt you're expressing seems to me to come from the idea that genetics shape "specific" behaviour, while my understanding of it tells me that DNA only informs the expression of the molecules of our body which means it shapes our physiology, yes, with all its biases, but also with all its potential.
Curious to hear your thoughts!
Cheers

Fair enough. I can accept that DNA commands not specific behaviour, but biases, and they can be shaped into specific behaviour by environmental education: by adaptation to natural and social environments, and by active indoctrination, if I may call pedagogical efforts that.

So then the question is transformed from "what is necessarily happening" to "what is possible to happen".

Obviously your theory hinges on humans' ability to accept and internalize behaviour that is not necessarily their natural instinctual behaviour.

So far so good.

But then the question still remains, a huge question: what different behaviour responses, if indeed different ones are required from the currently normal ones, are to be put in place, and what the societal conglomerate of these behaviours should yield? That is the million dollar question.

Curious to hear what you have achieved so far in this quest.
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

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One thing is for sure: so far in human history the mass behaviour modification in any given society has been focussed on serving the ruling class -- be this ruling class one certain elite or select stratum of society, or be the ruling class the entirety of society.

In socialist countries, back in the iron curtain days, democracy was replaced by central planning, and so was economic decision making. In western democracies the ruling class in theory is the voting public, and the economy (capitalism) has been based on the free market economy. This has changed in the USA somewhat, but changed in larger scales in other Western democracies, where the gov involvement regulates societal movements more rigorously.

In both the USA and other societies, however, developed recently an oligarchical system, where the voting is hugely influenced by meaningless propaganda, which requires money, which ensures only the rich people have their ways in these societies.

Would the rich be willing to implement your system, Envelope, should you find one? or is the implementation a different task from first creating the conceptual framework of the utopia you set out to design.

Let's work on one piece at a time. The task at hand is to decide by speculative methods what behaviour modifications that CAN be implemented on a mass scale which will produce what changes (beneficial ones, hopefully) in society's responses.
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

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-1- wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2019 6:05 am
Let's work on one piece at a time. The task at hand is to decide by speculative methods what behaviour modifications that CAN be implemented on a mass scale which will produce what changes (beneficial ones, hopefully) in society's responses.
Ok, I've written down a little draft and kept it short because I'd rather follow the thread of your questions than that of my thoughts.

A human in our current society is still essentially an animal in a struggle for survival, a creature at the mercy of its environment and its needs, therefore only surviving because of our sociality. Our psychology reflects this state of being and therefore we adopt and solidify all sort of defense mechanisms of our perceived self in order to remain alive. The situation is not black and white of course, there are many people that are less survival oriented, but in general this is the condition we come from.
Instead, the Neotribal society is not based on such a human anymore. The individual of Neotribalism should be:
- Soulful: able to run on curiosity and passion (which entails the ability to soothe one's own sense of survival anxiety and the ability to find meaning, and that leads to horizontal collaboration/connection with others)
- Mindful: aware of their sense of agency as a consequence of their creativity and therefore happy to take responsibility for preserving themselves and their environment
- Process-Skilled: able to let life flow into its process and hence overcome any obstacle

The more I study neuroscience and psychology the more I'm confident that a person can be educated and shaped since birth into having these traits, or one can even learn them from adult age.

These behavioural modifications, when reached a certain critical mass, will produce a society that doesn't organize it self in little families that stick together for being stronger against life's harsh conditions and survive and reproduce, but humans that connect skilfully and mindfully with each other out of a deep connection with their purpose and care for each other, forming functional affinity groups that easily take care of survival needs and set out to experience and explore the world in all its depths. Not a society where if you want a person to work seriously and be productive you have to pay her, but a society where passion, curiosity, and mutual care are the natural drive of human work. Therefore not a society where human collaboration is hierarchical, but one where collaboration is horizontal.

The main effort that has to be done to create this critical mass is to diffuse a culture of self-development with clear information and useful tools, which I find to be already happening at higher and higher rates.

What do you think? What are the doubts? I'm sure there are many, open fire! :)
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

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Envelope wrote: Thu Aug 08, 2019 5:13 pm- Soulful: able to run on curiosity and passion (which entails the ability to soothe one's own sense of survival anxiety and the ability to find meaning, and that leads to horizontal collaboration/connection with others)
- Mindful: aware of their sense of agency as a consequence of their creativity and therefore happy to take responsibility for preserving themselves and their environment
- Process-Skilled: able to let life flow into its process and hence overcome any obstacle
- Curiosity and passion: most of them are inherited from the survival game. Some examples are hoarding, getting to know the environment, being liked, performing and getting praised, leadership roles, improving processes and inventing new ones, compassionate responses. Some passions are uniquely human and somewhat unrelated to survival: the visual arts, music, dancing, although elements of survivalism borrowed these activities and built them into their routines.

If you want to get away from survival-related passions, and rid humans of all of them, I don't think there would be a passion left.

- Horizontal collaboration. It is one of the strongest survival elements not only in our species, but in all society-forming species: that we live in hierarchically structured social constructs. You say you can change this by psychological upbringing... but that means controlling some others, and bang, you're back in square one, in the hierarchical structure.

- process-skilled: I can't operate my cell phone. Nuff said.
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

Post by Age »

Hi envolope

I like the way that you are looking towards the future and what is possible. This is very refreshing, as I have found when trying to discuss with a forward looking perspective most people tend to just reply with what happens now or what has happened in the past, and they look at this with a defeatest attitude. I wonder if you have found this also?

What I see you saying is completely possible and is really a very simple and easy thing to do and achieve.

Once people learn and understand why they are greedy and continually behave in the obviously wrong ways that they do, then they will know WHY they do what they do what they do, once you know the WHY some thing happens only then you are able to prevent it from reoccurring and/or stop it from continually occurring.
Finding people who are honest enough to admit that they are greedy and behave in very wrong ways so that they can learn WHY they do what they do so that then they can truly change for the better is another matter.

But anyway of course dna plays a part in this but it is only a miniscule part and in fact dna had no real bearing in the way we actual live. The "world" we live in and create for ourselves is created from our behaviour, which I see comes not from dna but from thoughts only.

dna has an affect on our reactions to the environment that we live in, but how we react is not the same as how we behave, or misbehave. We have control over, and thus can control, the way we behave or misbehave, but we have no real control over our dna because we are obviously born with it.

Thoughts change, but dna does not.
Thoughts control our behavior, while dna controls our actions, or more correctly our reactions.
Behavior or misbehaving creates the "world" we live, dna just creates the way a body looks.
We can very easily change our thoughts, and thus also very easily change our behaviors.
So, then we can also very easily change the "world" that we live in now and create one that we all truly want to live in.

We have absolute control over our behaviour and thus we do have absolute control over the "world" we live in also. We, however, for the most part, do not have control over the body that we live in. But this does not matter at all as it is the way we behave and not the way we look that really matters.
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

Post by Impenitent »

plenty of mentally "disturbed" or "ill" or "deficient" people exist...

not everyone has control as a biological fact... we treat them as if they do, but some brains are wired differently...

-Imp
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

Post by HexHammer »

Hi welcome to the forum, plz enjoy your stay! 8)
Envelope wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 10:23 pm I like to read psychology
Let's see your skills, what's the dangerous aspect of 'groupthink'?!?!
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Impenitent wrote: Sat Aug 10, 2019 2:05 am plenty of mentally "disturbed" or "ill" or "deficient" people exist...
There are other adjective names you can call them, too, Impenitent. Some such are:
- deviant
- mutant
- Republicant
- perverted
- kinky
- sick
- psychomaniac
- misfit
- demented
- subversive
- resistant
- disordered
- unbalanced
- uneased
- strange
- voidous
- stupid
- ignorant
- retarted
- developmentally / intellectually / socially / legally / philosophically challenged
- differently abled (thanks Vegetarian Taxidermi!)
- morbid
- XXY chromosomed
- antisocial
- psychotic
- unsympathetic
- dehedonized
- Boorish
- foolish
- loser
- whipping boy
- victim
- drug user
- alcoholic
- gambling addict
- sex maniac, sex addict, satyr, nymphomaniac, hedonist, epicurean
- pathological
- pathetic
- loner
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

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HexHammer wrote: Sat Aug 10, 2019 2:57 am Let's see your skills, what's the dangerous aspect of 'groupthink'?!?!
I'll take a stab at this.

It can quickly develop into a serious case of gruppensex?
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

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Impenitent wrote: Sat Aug 10, 2019 2:05 am plenty of mentally "disturbed" or "ill" or "deficient" people exist...

not everyone has control as a biological fact... we treat them as if they do, but some brains are wired differently...

-Imp
If this was in any way responding to what I said, then we, who think are not mentally disturbed, ill, nor deficient, can control and change our behaviors so that we then take care of, help, and support those human beings, which 'we' label as being "mentally disturbed, ill, and/or deficient".

Also, if you treat everyone as though they have control as a biological fact, then WHY do you do it?

When human beings work out WHY they do what they do, then they can change, for the better.

ALL brains are, so called, "wired" differently. Of course there obviously are no two brains that are exactly the same. There is also no such thing as a perfect brain. So, no two brains are the same and no one, of them, is perfect. So, it could even be argued that there are so many plenty of mentally unhealthy people existing that this actually refers to ALL people in fact. Unless, of course, there is some one who insists that they are in perfect mental health. If there is, then they should step forward and tell all the rest of us how to live properly and correctly. As for the rest of us, in the truest sense, we all have some form of being 'mentally disturded, ill, and/or deficient'. Again, unless of course there are some who believe and insist otherwise. And, could believing and insisting that one is in perfect mental health be a sign of being 'mentally ill, et cetera' anyway?
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

Post by surreptitious57 »

Three days ago you were asked a simple question Do you have a brain and your answer was an equally simple No
Now you write as if you actually do have one which is rather confusing so do you have one or you do not have one
What made you say that you did not have one as do you not think you possess a physical organ known as the brain
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Re: Hello, I'm Envelope

Post by Age »

This appears to be directed at me, so I will respond. But if it is not, then just clarify.

By the way if my username is not quoted, then I do not get a notification that I have received a response, so I am more likely to miss these kind of responses. If I have missed, or do miss, responses directed to me, then I apologize. I do not mean to.
surreptitious57 wrote: Sat Aug 10, 2019 7:13 am Three days ago you were asked a simple question Do you have a brain and your answer was an equally simple No
As far as I remember this is correct.
surreptitious57 wrote: Sat Aug 10, 2019 7:13 amNow you write as if you actually do have one which is rather confusing so do you have one or you do not have one
The answer is still no, and just because some thing is done "as if" it is some thing or 'as if" it means some thing, then that does not mean that it is that nor means that it is that.

For example, to you I wrote "as if" I was saying some thing, but, I was not saying that at all.

Also, if you were to look back at what I actually wrote, is there any actual thing saying that "I have a brain" in there? Or, is it just some thing that you assumed was in there?

If there is some thing in there that actually is saying 'I have a brain', then please highlight it here so we can all take a look at it.
surreptitious57 wrote: Sat Aug 10, 2019 7:13 amWhat made you say that you did not have one as do you not think you possess a physical organ known as the brain
The reason the other day I wrote 'no', in response to the question; 'Do you have a brain?' is because who and what the 'i', is and Who and What the 'I' is, is known. Knowing the accurate Answer to the question 'Who am 'I'?' comes with it the knowledge that neither 'i' nor 'I' have a brain, as such.

'i' am the invisible thoughts, (and feelings) within this body, which are just a result of the brain, which is within this body that has experienced through the five senses of this body, and as such 'i' do not have a brain. This physical body may include the physical organ known as the 'brain', but 'i' am in no position to possess any thing within this body. 'i' am just the result of, or the sum of, what this body has experienced.

And, 'I' am the Awareness of ALL of this.

'i' exist without having nor possessing a brain, nor any thing else, for that matter, and, it could be argued 'I' am responsible for ALL of this and so, in a sense, it could be said 'I' own every thing. But there is still a few more years before all of this will be fully able to be explained, and be completely understood.

i am still just in the process of learning how to communicate better. i still have a lot more to learn regarding how to communicate succinctly and sufficiently enough yet. But thank you for your clarifying questions. They help me thoroughly in my learning process.
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