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Human History, gods, and the Projection of Values

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posted on Jun, 19 2018 @ 10:40 PM
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The recent book 'Who We Are and How We Got Here" is an intelligent and extremely informative book by the Harvard geneticist David Reich on the various migrations and transformations of Homo Sapiens over the last 100,000 years.

The book details the genetic origins of today's various human beings. For example, contemporary Europeans and East Asians share 1/3rd of DNA that has been successfully correlated with a 24,000 year old skeleton from Mal'ta, Russia, indicating that a long time ago a North Eurasian group of humans went westwards into Europe, and eastwards into Asia, and inrerbred with the local populations there.

Around 9,000 years ago, near east farmers came into Europe where they subsequently interbred with the hunter-gatherers (who were by now a partial mixture of north Eurasians and western European hunter-gatherer).

Around 5,000 years ago, around the northern black sea, the Yamnaya culture spread out and spread Indo-European culture to Iran and India in the east, and into eastern Europe, and then western Europe.

An interesting finding of this book is that present day male Indian populations, particularly North Indians (i.e. lighter skinned, non-Dravidian speaking Indians) share around 40% of Y chromosomal DNA with other west Eurasians (i.e. Indo-Europeans). On the other hand, about 90% of Indian males have mitochondrial DNA that is unique to Dravidians, or "south Indians". To make this insinuation clearer: Brahmins have been shown to have a higher rate of west-Eurasian (Indo-European) ancestry than other north Indians.

The conclusion is quite clear: the Indo-European speaking Yamnaya culture, in entering (and probably, destroying) the Indus valley civilization, killed the inhabitants (as the Rig Veda describes) and took the local females as wives.

The higher percentage of Indo-European DNA in Brahmins is interpreted by Reich as suggesting that the Yamnaya people's also spread their religion along with their language and culture (they were probably all a single deal). And hence, the Brahmins persisted for a monstrously long time in a position of authority, as their genes attest.

It is interesting to look at human history through the lens of paleoanthropology, where archeology, genetics, and psychology, come together to make sense of what humans believed, why they believed what they believed, and how important technology is to the transformation of the psyche so that the mind comes to reflect the 'tools' with which it interacts with.

The Yamnaya invented the wheel and cart, and also were the first ones to hitch a horse to the wheel and cart to create a chariot. Archeologists believe that the Yamnaya were important trading partners with Uruk, the Mesopotamian civilization that had been blossoming at around the same time. The thought is, the Yamnaya peoples were rough; they worked the mines; and they were metallurgists. In exchange for these precious raw commodities, they may have absorbed some of the traditions that were than popular in the near east.

gods, values, and projection



If one considers the Yamnaya as the first "Aryans", then it is pretty incredible that, after nearly 5,000 years, that this invidious force still controls so much of the world.

The whole of civilization appears to have been traumatic - as scholars and researchers are beginning to better appreciate. We weren't built for this sort of way of living; being sedentery, interacting with so many strangers - it was bound to transform how our brains experienced itself, and therefore, how we understood teh world around us.

Values and gods are exactly the same thing. Very rightly - and logically - did the ancients think in terms of 'gods', when they considered what really mattered. Life was built around 'gods', because, indeed, in everything we do - in every act of our assertiveness, we are giving expression to the values that are regulating our bodily engagement with the world. And what are those values? And how do they form? Is precisely what the "god" represents: it is the canalized history, the attractor, the 'teleodynamism' - the 'spirit' which "moveth" through the particles, cells, and rythms of your hierarchically organized organism.

What is not normal, or healthy, is having suffered trauma, and to know you have, and to still think you are capable of reasoning in a way that departs from a sense of moral responsibility to the 'others' around you. Since this is a normal motivation, and not all people are, as chaosorder has written in another thread, motivated to "destroy".

We are only free when we understand the conditions which constrain our choice. Asymmetry is the biggest constraint of all: it makes us act in a 'dissolute' way - literally, our brain undergoes what the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson called "dissolution", where external brain areas that evolved in mammals degrade to a reptile fight-flight response in the midbrain, and if this too fails to secure defense for the body, the system will enact its 'emergency' system, and fake death i.e. freeze, become limp, which from a neurological and homeodynamic perspective is a profound shift in metabolic functioning in the body. Trauma takes away choice - not enhancing it. Dissociation as a mechanism of self-regulation delusionally creates the impression that you 'don't need' your environment, when your environment is always 'feeding back' into your ventral brain, which in turn yields its results to produce a feeling of 'good' in you.

Just because you don't notice or recognize the origin of your feelings from a previous cause doesn't mean there isn't one; nor does it mean that the universe doesn't obligate you, as a reasonable - i.e. 'reason able' being - to know, and learn, because semiosis is the nature of this reality of ours.

Mattering MATTERS. Brain matter and mattering, coherency in psychological perception and neurogenesis, are simultaneous facts; concurrent processes that make reality.

You, in other words, are already enacting a sort of 'magic' within youself simply in existing.

Are we gods, as the inferiority complex, defensively focused serpent says in genesis? We are powerful; but this power requires a brain-mind that fully knows itself, and this world, with its problems and its aggressions, makes that an exquisitely difficult task, nevermind laden with traps and snares and false positives and delusions that pull us off our track by our understandable need to regulate ourselves.

Ultimately, it seems in our best interest, to behave in the ways the universe works, and also to see anything that occurs within us as being "of us" - being a psychodynamic property of our own being-in-the-world-with-others. So much happens here; every day, we affect within ourself and are affected by others. It is this, these forces created between, and then within our own beings, that the complexities of our semiotic dynamics unfold.

A person who wishes for something 'more' is being unrealistic. They are still caught in the reinforcing feedback loop of impulsively enacting their need for something 'to be so', not to mention the social pleasure/pride that comes from making assertions and feeling the effect of your actions on the interpersonal ambience around you.

edit on 19-6-2018 by Astrocyte because: (no reason given)



posted on Jun, 19 2018 @ 10:58 PM
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a reply to: Astrocyte

I bet it's a good book, I don't know what it has to do with the second half of your OP?

The universe is bigger than humans, it doesn't give a flying # about humans and matter is only a byproduct of information.



posted on Jun, 19 2018 @ 11:06 PM
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a reply to: Peeple


In tracking the migration of humans, it also spurs one to think about 'what they believed', and therefore, the whole psychology of the process.




The universe is bigger than humans, it doesn't give a flying # about humans and matter is only a byproduct of information.


So, first you say, its probably a good book (and it is a good science book; I highly recommend it) but then go on to make a really impulsive claim to 'know' that the universe doesn't "give a #" about humans.

As to "matter is a byproduct of information". Do you get the difference between semiosis and information? Information as a concept is already a difficult thing to conceptualize, since it doesn't exist outside the semiosis of a human mind. Yet - you say matter is 'information', as opposed to...meaning? In the scheme of things, information is contingent on semiosis; not the other way around.

If "matter" and "mattering", are the same thing, then the universe must then be awake, conscious, alive, "mattering" things in the way it does because it 'matters' that it be that way.

Laws of nature are basically 'reading Gods mind'. God likes to create quarks, protons, atoms, etc, in terms of the contextual dynamics of the surrounding environment. Indeed; there is some 'extra' force, hidden, making things.

The fact that things flow into the vortex in both galaxies and in the dissipating dynamics of cells, implies a close similarity between the two.



posted on Jun, 19 2018 @ 11:14 PM
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a reply to: Astrocyte

It just bothers me that psychology seems to think of itself it could assume everything is matter and brain functions while in reality quarks, or however you want to call the tiniest particles, I call them information, are creating much more.

If you only want to focus on the human mind that's fine but admit at least it's only 0,000000000000001% of reality. And by far not "everything".



posted on Jun, 19 2018 @ 11:28 PM
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originally posted by: Astrocyte
....

Ultimately, it seems in our best interest, to behave in the ways the universe works, and also to see anything that occurs within us as being "of us" - being a psychodynamic property of our own being-in-the-world-with-others. So much happens here; every day, we affect within ourself and are affected by others. It is this, these forces created between, and then within our own beings, that the complexities of our semiotic dynamics unfold.

A person who wishes for something 'more' is being unrealistic. They are still caught in the reinforcing feedback loop of impulsively enacting their need for something 'to be so', not to mention the social pleasure/pride that comes from making assertions and feeling the effect of your actions on the interpersonal ambience around you.

That's what I'm having some issues with. The rest was good.



posted on Jun, 19 2018 @ 11:42 PM
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a reply to: Peeple

And yet everything you or I can do happens through this brain of ours.

That means everything we think is 'undermined' by the semiotics of psychodynamic processes.



posted on Jun, 20 2018 @ 12:14 AM
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a reply to: Astrocyte

But the rest still exists. If our brain exists or not is entirely irrelevant.



posted on Jun, 20 2018 @ 06:23 AM
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a reply to: Astrocyte

Would he be the fifth, or sixth reich?

I've lost count.




posted on Jul, 4 2018 @ 09:27 PM
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firstly

en.wikipedia.org...


Second, Derbyshire finds the science "not well explained",[1] leading him to re-read some passages to work out what Reich had meant. Thirdly, Derbyshire finds the last part of the book, where Reich discusses the impact genomics may have on social inequality, race, identity, and archaeology, a lamentable attempt "to twist a dull but informative book into ideological orthodoxy."[1]





Derbyshire is unsure whether the combination of Reich's directness andhis "PC pablum" on "race realism" is due to the need to maintain funding from his sponsors, or a genuine mental struggle between reality and ideology.[1]


en.wikipedia.org...


Unfavourable

An open letter "by a group of 67 scientists and researchers" including anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and others takes Reich to task for his book, under the heading "How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics".[11] The group welcomes Reich's challenge to the "misrepresentations about race and genetics"[11] made by the science writer Nicholas Wade and the molecular biologist James Watson, but warns that his skill with DNA "should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups."[11]

The group argues that Reich's understanding of "race" [their quotation marks] "is seriously flawed",[11] and that "biological traits" like sickle cell anaemia have "nothing to do with"[11] race, but are simply found in parts of the world, in this case where malaria is common. The same goes, the group argues, for other distinctions that Reich makes in the book.[11]


now that we got that out of the way



The whole of civilization appears to have been traumatic


I really am at a loss how a book by a geneticist allows you to make connections and high claims about your favourite "go to" subject "Trauma"

Where is the connect?




makes that an exquisitely difficult task, nevermind laden with traps and snares and false positives and delusions that pull us off our track by our understandable need to regulate ourselves.


By your own admission you suffered Trauma, and as stated above, you maybe ensnared


"Physician heal thyself"







With your consent I can experiment further still

Nothing is quite what it seems,
Sometimes entangled in your own dreams.







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