Lens 001 - Anthropological products are a function of pain and pleasure

One thing that helps bring peace to one's world is to understand that there is meaning behind one's actions, and that there is a rational explanation for everything that occurs in the world. Seemingly you may have been living your life just letting your actions stand for themselves, beckoning no explanations. However others often seek to inquire on the meaning of their behaviours and events in the world, most frequently in times of suffering or tragedy. It beckons us to be able to explain things, and I would encourage you to think of something you don't really understand, and then think about something you could comfortably deliver a lecture about. One does feel more "easy", right?

This "easiness" I will refer to as viscocity. This viscocity is a feeling invented by your brain to encourage behaviour that benefits survival. The most viscous action in the proposed case of choosing what to think about above would not be either of them, and instead, to simply not think about anything at all, or abstain from providing an answer.

When it comes to knowledge, and the origins of curiosity, I often look at it from an emergent trend towards survival. The evolution of the neocortex is a development which generally makes it easy for us to understand why things happen, and to relate cause and effect. Consider the advancement from tribal living to small communities with farmland in the not so early days of humanity. One could argue that the reason why we started to farm flora would be because it was beneficial for individual survival to understand what makes a plant grow so that you can make more of it to feed yourself and your family better than traditional hunter-gatherers. So my rationale here is that understanding your behaviours as a human being will be beneficial to your survival because you are capable of making conscious, and rational deductions, and applying that as a framework for decision-making in order to test and improve upon them. Such that if you are able to make more strategically successful decisions than other human beings, then you are more likely to be better-off in the long-term.

I believe that not a lot of people favour this form of thinking and intuition simply because it fulfils one human need and not many others. There are other activities more pleasurable in modern day. It is fulfilling of that which will increase your chances of survival into the future, however, it does not typically (for example) advance you towards finding a mate.

Regardless of such, the aim of this lens is to be able to understand the intent, and explain all of your conscious and unconscious behaviours. In effect, this will also allow you to provide a proposed explanation to everything that you see in the world that is a product of humanity. With this lens, you should feel more at-ease with the actions of yourself and the others around you. You should be able to feel level-headed about every social interaction that you enter, and should never feel nervous when interacting with someone since you are now able to better understand the reasons behind their behaviour. These are the most profound effects I got after discovering this axiom.

Let's begin with pain...

As I'm sure you are aware, humans are mortal, and hence we have needs. If we consider only those traditional needs which are absolutely necessary for survival, we have:

One need which we can often live without, however in ancient times was generally necessary, is:

I'd like to encourage you to think about each of these. Consider how you feel when you don't have enough of one of these. This feeling is pain.

I don't know enough about pain from a physiological standpoint, however, I can assume that it has its own neurotransmitter and affects the brain in a particular way. It makes you feel uncomfortable, and either avoidant of the stimulus which is painful, or seek to consume some resource, or perform some action to soothe the pain.

Now this concept of pain might be able to explain the majority of human behaviours. But there are some that cannot be understood through this, for example, the desire to fornicate.

The missing piece is now pleasure...

As human beings, we are compelled to do various things, often with the anticipation that they will provide us with pleasure. This pleasure is an emergent attribute of humans which has evolved in order to benefit our survival. This is why we find it pleasurable to eat a good meal, read or listen to stories, or to procreate. Given it is a separate chemical and neural pathway that causes this pleasurable feeling in your body, we must distinguish this from pain.

NOTE: As a side-note, I originally had the hypothesis that pleasure was merely a means to mask or soothe pain, but after learning about the mesolimbic pathway, I came to a conclusion that they have separate roles. For example, one would not have sex simply to mask the pain of not having a safe and convenient place to live. I certainly would not enjoy a shag in the pouring rain, that's for sure!

Additionally, consider an ancient and primitive human being. If you were to give him a house in the middle of the woods, all the food/drinks he could ever want, all the comforts he would ever need, and introduce a female. His first instinct would be to breed, would it not? Or would he simply be still and do nothing as all of his needs have been fulfilled? I would put money on the former in most cases.

My hypothesis here is that every anthropological artefact can be explained by these two concepts and feelings. That is, the reason they were created, or the behaviours performed, can be derived from either, or both of these concepts.

By "artefact" I mean anything that is a product of a human being. This could be a table, a shovel, a house, language, art, thoughts, everything.

This here is basically all you need to know for this lens. If you feel a little confused, I recommend scrolling down to the examples below.

Beyond this, we can look to see what it implies. Consider the question of "Do I have free will?". At any point in time, are you able to perform actions freely? Can you simply choose not to eat and starve yourself to death? The answer to this given the current lens is that the attribute of freedom is finite. It is not possible to have total freedom as you are bound by the human condition. Hence, if immortality is a material concept, then one who is immortal would have infinite freedom, as there would be nothing in the human condition to hold them back.

One thing I am yet to answer is how an immortal being would behave. As we have shown, all human behaviours are driven from pain or pleasure, so if you have neither of those, no human needs, then what will you do? What are you? Hence I believe this question is rhetorical, that is until we are able to observe an immortal entity.

Examples

Applying this lens has helped me to better connect with people by understanding their needs, pains, and opportunities or threats to pleasure in the current environment.

You are a human being, and chances are the person you are talking to is also a human being. So you both at least have one thing in common, the ability to feel. By opening your eyes and being able to observe and label feelings, you can start to rationalise their origins. This is a multi-layer approach to emotional connection:

Example 1 - A table-cloth

Consider a table-cloth, one that would be large and thick enough to protect the surface of a wooden table from a family of hungry Italians.

It's not often that you would go to a Nonna's house for a feed and find a bare wooden table.

One could argue that the behaviour of lining the table with a cloth is a means to prevent pain. I'm sure your Nonna would have had to clean the table countless times prior to owning a table cloth. This is an act that would drain your energy as a human being, and in a means to protect it, you make use of technology.

This draining of energy is the pain, and the use of a table-cloth is an artefact of this human condition.

Example 2 - "Free will"

Consider those who often capture themselves on social media doing things that you would certainly not ever attempt, all in the name of "Remember, you have free will". These characters have a clear pain they are trying to soothe which is that of vacuous feeling of community or social approval. Hence I wish not to linger on this as I believe it would be trivial to elaborate.

Instead, consider these characters if they were to be isolated alone in the same conditions as our Neanderthal friend we introduced above, but instead, in the absence of another being. To be clear, this is the situation:

Would one carve their skin and draw blood in the name of "remembering that they have free will"?

One might argue that they will commit the act at some point. However, I believe there would be a different rationale to the activity, such that after some time, the pain of isolation becomes so debilitating that it seems favourable to replace that emotional pain with something that is physically painful, a distraction to a problem you can't solve.

To play devil's advocate, let's assume that the hypothesis test for free will was in fact the reason. One could assume that this desire to break this hypothesis stems from the pain of not knowing whether or not 'free will' actually exists. This indecision is something your limbic and reptilian brain do not like, and hence, it is painful.

A similar narrative would apply to one who would deliberately starve himself to death (and succeed). It is still an act derived from pain.

Example 3 - The honest kid

Pleasure doesn't need to have a logical or rational basis, it can be purely irrational, dependent on the arrangement of chemicals and neurons in the brain.

Consider a child roughly 10 years of age. They have a sibling who is roughly the same age. This child breaks an expensive vase while chasing the other around the house, and both of them are about to be scolded by their parents.

The child has a few options:

  1. Own-up to the mistake
  2. Lie and blame the other sibling
  3. Stay silent

This is a classical prisoner's dilemma. But I don't want to showcase this as you can work it out for yourself.

In this hypothetical, we are not dealing with rational agents, nor is this particular one an ideal scenario.

Imagine if the child went to a school where their core value is "Honesty above everything else". Imagine if the child was exposed to materials at school which often showcased stories of characters owning-up to their mistakes and being honest. These would all be presented by a figure of authority.

Potentially this child would choose option 1, even with the threat of physical punishment. This could be for a number of reasons, here are my hypotheses:

  1. The pain of the guilt would far exceed the pain of the punishment delivered by the parent. The child is smart enough to realise that a lifetime of guilt is far more potent than a spanking.
  2. The child sees this as an opportunity for long-term community and connectedness towards their school and figure of authority as they would likely be able to brag about this situation when they attend school the next day.

So even if the artefact does not deliver instant pleasure or relief from pain, it may have been derived from the human ability of heuristical clairvoyancy to favour survival. After all, this is one of the roles of the neocortex.