A few sociological/psychological theories have been floating around in my head lately. I am sure you brain scientists will correct me on my thinking, but the article on light (see below) got me thinking about the structure of inhibitions that make us tick.
Our brains are built on a foundation of ancient structures built up through evolution one layer at a time. The most basic layers simply react, in very simple ways, to stimuli - eat food, move away from pain, close your eyes when it’s too bright out, that kind of thing. Further layers added more complicated behaviors as we were shaped into a complicated social animal. A lot of instincts and behaviors are hardwired in so that we can do the basics - eat, shelter, mate, etc. As we evolved socially, and our brains evolved in a complimentary fashion, we learned to cope with varying situations and environments in a more flexible way - we developed instincts that modified our deeper urges - group hunting, cooperative childrearing, etc.
The evolution of a social awareness left us with an instinct to learn the ways of our culture, take cues from others, etc - there isn’t a specific urge not to fart in public, but there is an urge to socialize and learn these kinds of rules. Great apes and a number of other animals have these kinds of social instincts, and will learn about the social group they are born into. The new inhibitions and enhancements didn’t replace the base urges, they simply modified their expression - filtered them if you will, in ways which made our survival possible. Somewhere along the way we picked up language, art, technology, etc, etc - and Bam!, we became modern humans. Ok, so I simplify a little.
Meanwhile, though, we’re walking around with layers of ancient urges and slightly less ancient instincts and inhibitions. Most of our behavior is still directly attributable to these old automatic systems, however much we think we are rational actors. In fact, what we have evolved is a brain capable of comprehending and analyzing itself and its urges - not one independent of them.
So the idea is this - that a great many of our behaviors result from inhibitory action of more recently evolved parts of our brain on older, more primative parts. For instance - a human male sees a human female of sexual maturity, and those deep instincts kick in - but the urge to drop trou and mate on the spot is inhibited by a chain of further instincts. Perhaps the female is a relative. If not, our place in the social heirarchy might dictate an inhibition, or perhaps that more recent developement, the awareness of general social mores - will head off an imminent copulation. The last link in the chain is a conscious awareness and analysis of the urge and a logical decision regarding it. Each instinct is a bit more complicated than the last, and they occur in turn along the path between the urge and actually doing something.
So what does this have to do with light finding the shortest time path? Well, we have a number of possible actions upon recieving a stimulus, and perhaps we simply take the first action that makes it through the complicated web of inhibitions first. Most things happen automatically, because there are not enough inhibitions along the way to prevent us from just doing what our bodies have evolved to do.
In other words, we act on instinct unless there are enough inhibitions and counter-insticts to slow the action down long enough for us to actually think about it and make a decision. Perhaps another way to put it - the notion to do something encounters resistance and gets bumped up the chain of command until finally you, the Big Boss, has to make an executive decision. If the urge encounters no flack from subordinates, you just do it.
Further, we might say that the difference between say a sex offender and a normal person may not be the absence of the urge to fuck the attractive young female, but the failure of a complex system of instinctive and learned inhibitions against fucking whatever you want. Normal brains have sexual urges when provided the right stimuli, but in properly wired and socialized brains, they are quickly overridden when not appropriate. We can see the effect easily enough in the sexual behavior of people under the influence of alcohol - a drug impairing conscious judgement, which is the last link in a chain of sexual inhibitions.
I am sure this theory has many holes a real scientist could stick her finger in, but as no one reads this blog, I guess I’ll never know where I went wrong. I don’t claim that any of this is accurate, but it is an interesting series of ideas.
Oh, and here’s another theory, since I am blathering on anyway, concerning racism: From our ancient origins as a social species, we have many instincts concerning how we treat others in our social group. Sex roles, dominance roles, etc. In order for this to work, we need a mechanism to tell us who is part of our group and who isn’t - an ability to identify otherness. After all, our entire species does not form a single tribe, and anyone not a part of our tribe will be competing for resources. Most animals, when confronted with another animal competing in the same ecological niche, is generally not friendly (this is why cats and dogs do not get a long, perhaps). Humans, possibly around the time they actually became humans, grew into an apex niche with little or no competition except that from other humans, and the antipathy for any competition had only one target.
So how do you know who to be friendly with, who to share with, who to trust? Well, since we are the same species, we can’t simply be born with an urge to fight anything having two legs, two arms and walking upright - we need to learn who our group is. In infancy, the smells and faces fill in the blanks. Close relatives will look very similar, and probably smell similar, and we’ll see their faces a and smell their smeels constantly as a child. Extended families will also be seen during infancy, and during childhood a human will play with its peer group and come to characterize the group by the features it sees during that time. It is possible that people will have a deep instinctive reaction to those whose features vary significantly from those they were exposed to as children (perhaps also during puberty as sexual attractions are formed).
Again, these will be pretty deep instincts, inhibited by little more than our social conditioning. Racism may be a deep part of our biology which we fight in the shallow water of rational thought. It does suggest a method for heading it off, though - socialize children well with as much cultural/physical diversity as possible, to program the deeper instincts with a more inclusive tribal identity.
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