The Complex Human Being

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

“Know thyself” -Socrates*
but…

What is your best presentation (in one perspective or a combination) to portray the complexity of a human being?
In other words, how would you justify a human being is a complex entity?
I will present my views later.

For theists,
Assuming you are able to justify, you, a human being is highly complex and thus a hindrance to fully ‘know thyself,’ then, how do you justify that you can know God exists?

*Socrates stated “I know that I know nothing” or “I know one thing: that I know nothing” whichever is the case, he know little and that would include himself.

2

It’s futile to try and describe the relationship between you and your self because you are not a discrete entity surrounded by another self around you. There is a division happening in a consciousness that’s created by a perspective in perception. That perspective or point is a thought induced state of mind. In your mind, your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your mental self gives the impression that there is a separate self apart from the one that realizes there is a self there when thinking stops. But all you know is the ‘self’ that is in you, or rather in what your thoughts create as ‘self.’ There is no self there other than that one. Take away that self (created from the continued use of thought) then you would not know what you were left with.

3

A homosapian behaves in a manner very analogous to the USA government; Congressional (House & Senate), Executive, Judicial.

If that isn’t complex enough … :confused:

4

Noted the comments above and the respective complexities towards the external. I agree if we link the self and human being to more and more external variables, the whole issue will get more complex.
Since such an issue will stretch to infinity outward, it will not be too helpful in contrast to looking inward to the complexity within the self itself.

In this case, I am more interested in the complex human being in genomic and neural terms.
The human genome is very very complex and science has only begin to understand the topmost tip of its iceberg.

The individual human brain has approximately 100 billion (some % dying at all times) neurons and each neurons has up to 10,000 synapse.
Each neuron contain a DNA.

In addition, each synapse is not a direct physical link but rather the linkage is based on the transference of neurotransmitters and other chemical from one point to another.

It is the complexity of the permutations and combinations of the above variables that make the complex human individual(s) or rather make the individual complicated.

My point is, whatever behavior, attitude, decision making and inferences (political, social, philosophical, spiritual) we made in life, we cannot ignore the above complexity.

For the present, I am direct this question to theists, realist (philosophical) and others (will highlight when they come in mind).
Do you have any idea of the complexity in your mind, brain and body that support your theistic and philosophical stance?

5

Let’s start with the words from St Augustine:

“I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself, so that we have to ask, what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp? Surely that cannot be external to itself, it must be within the mind. How than can it fail to grasp it? This question moves me to great astonishment. Amazement grips me. People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested.”

How are St Augustine’s comments relevant to the question posed? … “How complex is the Human Being?”

His opening words … “I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am”

St Augustine was a genius … an intellectual giant in the landscape of Western history … yet … he failed to understand the ‘totality’ of himself. He couldn’t find the boundary where his personal ‘being’ stopped … he assumed it had to be somewhere within his biological self … his brain.

From St Augustine’s enigma, we might suppose that individual ‘being’ stretches into infinity … eternity?

Let’s fast forward about 1,500 years … to the time of Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin. The notions of ‘collective unconscious, ‘synchronicity’ ‘noosphere’ and ‘Omega Point’ were introduced by Jung and Teilhard de Chardin.

Seems to me the above ‘notions’ suggest the human mind has an individual and personal conduit to somewhere … way out there. This expression … ‘way out there’ … infers a long distance in space and perhaps time … yet the truth is our reality is more likely enveloped by what is referred to as ‘way out there’… who knows eh!

While poking around I came across the ‘Global Consciousness Project’ … a significant and contemporary investigation of the capabilities of the individual and collective human mind. In an article written by Roger Nelson I found the question “Is there a sense in which mind is present in the world beyond the brain?”

Seems to me Rogers is posing the same question St Augustine posed 1,600 years ago … “Surely that cannot be external to itself, it must be within the mind. How than can it fail to grasp it?” … Hmmm!

6

I think so too…

The atavistic patterns and mannerisms exhibited from epigenetic memories by beings who have never met their predecessors, codes that survived through the ages - minute expressions and such and what got them selected and why, if there is a why, is an absorbing complexity about the human in the context you speak here.

7 
A human being is a complex entity. 

A person is a possible combination of electrical networks in the cerebral cortex. Every moment can elicit a certain combination, in part by the input from the senses, but also from the imagination that reconstructs the input into a probable combination, thus eliciting the combination that allows a human being a short hand access to memories in dealing with the world. That said, the actions of the imagination are ill understood and certain triggers often fail because the input is never guaranteed. We create routines in fact to reduce the chances of failing to trigger the right responses. We thus rely less on memory. The problem is that again, a routine is never exact because the contents of our minds are not the same, even if our routines are.

Another source of complexity, at a higher level, is what may determine a person's actions. Under one hand there is character, but character develops within a society. Character might be a quality that is strengthened by society as it assumes a simple whole in its dealings with the individual. Or it might be that society simply reacts to what is a simple whole. A third possibility is that society itself is not a whole, thus the individual is presented with a variety of social environments that may require different characters. Thus rather than a simple whole, and individual might be saturated by different characters or masks that he or she wears, never guaranteed one as his or her "true" character.

 More complexity arises also from the incompleteness of every moment for an individual. Lower animals may have very few choices they have to make because they are highly instinctual. Our condition is such that very few actions are [i]entirely[/i] instinctual. Because of this further complexity is added.
8

Well said, I agree with the above.

What I am driving at is, all human expressions, i.e. physical and mental are a resultant from complex sets of variables which are not easy to understand or trace. We may be able to understand some sets of complexes but it is often not easy to understand most of them. Most often many would missed the root variables and thus made crude inferences.

One good example is the various psychological ‘complexes,’ e.g. inferiority complex, superiority complex, Oedipus complex, etc.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_(psychology

Personally, I am very interested in what is termed ‘the theistic complex,’ i.e. this is the set of complex human variables that impel humans to believe in a god.

Since believing in God is a resultant belief, there must be a complex set of human variable that is permuted and combined to manifest an impulse that impel humans to believe in god.

Theists should not insist they believe in god because the book or my father/parents/society said so. Rather they should made an attempt to understand the significant root and various human variables that combine to cause them to be theistic.

9

As should Atheists who know not why they believe what they believe other than "they said that they a sciency thing and saw the light". People can be so complex as to believe that other people far away who say “WE know the REAL truth because of science and they said so” are actually altruistically honest while no one else on the planet can possibly be.

Seems like the same “Believers”/“Sheeple” psychosis/disease.

Perhaps they should look for the Atheist-gene to remove it from the gene pool also.

10

No issue with me on this.
IMO, EVERY human being should make an attempt to understand the various complex set of variables that generate and influence their behaviors in every aspect of life.

I raise the OP because I regularly encounter theists who are ignorant of their own human nature, deliberately avoid to know more of it and throw everything to their faith in God to take care of whatever they encountered in life.

11

Interesting because I find the exact same thing concerning atheists who put the life and faith in the hands of political advocates using the name of science for worshipful credence, blind to any and all objections.

Perhaps the REAL issue of human complexity and psychosis doesn’t really have anything to do with being theist or anti-theist / atheist?

12

No issue for me, it up to you to discuss it.

The issue of human complexity and psychosis are faced by both theists and non-theists. It is just the contexts that need to be qualified and any conclusions to be soundly justified.

13

Well, I’m not ever getting any “sound justification” out of you, merely accusations backed up by bias, most specifically about theists.

So “qualify” the contexts with something other than “you theists need to…”.

Yeah, people are complex. And what you seem to be completely ignorant of is that SOCIETY is far more complex because of it. But to listen to an atheist one would be encouraged to think that social concerns such as religion, are merely simple minded reliques of their inferior primate ancestors. The religions were dealing with the complexity of homosapian before homosapian could even count, much less write.

And that is an expression of how complex homosapian really is. Homosapian includes both the most enlightened and the most moronic as well as the vast range between them incomprehensible to him.

If you think that you can classify groups of people by their misunderstandings of reality, their “beliefs”, you are not on top of that range.

14

You are damn good, the moment you try to get a bit serious its …yuck.

15

Hello Prismatic
The theistic complex sounds like another idea through which complexity is actually reduced. Even if it is called “complex” the end result is an explanation for the imperative to believe. I disagree. I believe that there is no imperative and that explains often the theist defensive stand.
I agree that there are complex circumstances that make belief more likely but not just in God, but a broad range of things. Let’s just say that theism is just one possible expression of the “true believer”. I see this when a person who believed with passion in God, after losing her faith, becomes a passionate atheist. Neither position commands certainty but the individual desires such certainty in this and other matters.

16

I agree with the second part of the above.

As I had mentioned elsewhere, humans are unfortunately embedded [unavoidable] in their DNA set up with an existential dilemma which can be a potential for ‘evil’ or ‘good’.
Therefore any theist or non-theist or any human can be evil if their inherent evil impulse is not modulated.

I am not sure what you meant by this.
The natural complexity of the theistic-complex can be reduced to the existential dilemma [ED] that is common in all humans.
However, the combinations and subtle processes that expand from the inherent ED to a person believing in a God and its related religion is due to a VERY complex set of neural wirings. It could be like trying to draw a flow-chart for a certain weather forecast.

I am trying to draw flow-charts of the various significant human complexes and finding patterns amongst them.

However, at present I am giving attention and finding solutions to what is critical to humanity, i.e. religious-based evils that we hear and are bombarded with its news every day.

17

Hello Prismatic
I believe that there may be neural states that make religiosity a probable outcome but i don’t believe that this is an explanation of Christianity but an explanation for belief in general. The neural disposition has to be in the presence of the cultural object. In fact it changes the reaction one has to the cultural object. But it is an error to think that there is a God gene or neurological state. The need caused by the particular state is as likely to be satisfied by religion as it is by Marxism.

18

There is no God gene but there is a neural ‘program’ that impel the majority to a belief in religion and others.
The deterministic sequence is as follows;

X1. At the basic level we have the existential dilemma [ED] - a sub-complex itself.
X2. Then we have the various methodologies that an individual resort to deal with the ED.

A. These varied methodologies [possible Positive or Negative] are, examples,

  1. Beliefs
  2. Religions
  3. Spirituality -positive & negative
  4. Ideologies - Marxism, Nazism, Fascism, & positive ideologies etc.
  5. Drugs - hallucinogens, pain killers, highs, lows, others
  6. Other human activities, sports, culture, business, politics, etc.
  7. Escapism - hermiticism, asceticism, etc.
  8. Other psychological methods
  9. Other psychosis
  10. Hedonism,
  11. Etc. etc.

B. Within 2. Religions, we have

  1. Theistic
  2. Non-theistic

C. Within 1. Theistic, we have

  1. Abrahamic - focus in lower brain
  2. Non-Abrahamic [main- focus in higher brain[/list]

D. Within 1. Abrahamic, we have
[list=1]1. Judaism
2. Christianity
3. Islam
4. Others, Bahai,[/list:o]

You will note the cultural element that determined how a believer end up with his belief is only significant in the present circumstances at level D. At present, a believer is a Christian or Muslim has more to do with birth and location. There are exception of conversion by choice but they are not very significant at present.

At level A to C, the neural consideration are critical. Being fundamental, the neural elements i.e. A to C are more critical than the cultural elements. Therefore we should give more attention to these critical neural elements. To do so, we have to understand the complexity of the human being.

To resolve the critical problems of humanity, we need to understand the sub-complex ED and why humans choose the respective methodologies to deal with the ED.
All the methodologies, e.g. drug, negative ideologies, religions, cultural elements that cause evils must be dealt with, prevented and minimized.

At present, my focus is on religious-based evils, an area which I has expertise and I leave the rest to the respective interested NGOs.

The hypothesis of religious-based evils is,
Within Theistic religion, we have

  1. Abrahamic - focus in lower brain = significant evils by SOME fundamentals on SOME evil laden verses.
  2. Non-Abrahamic [main ones] focus in higher brain = negligible evils and no evil laden verses.

The general solution is to trace the evils deterministically back to X1 - existential dilemma and trace forward on how the evils by SOME evil prone believers arose.
We will take remedial actions if that is possible.
However, the Abrahamic Religions core principles cannot be remedied, i.e. an infallible God’s words cannot be edited, changed nor revised by fallible humans, that would be blasphemous.
So the solution is to wean off the Abrahamic religions and find alternatives [single or a combination] amongst the various methodologies to deal with the inherent unavoidable root cause, X1-ED.
The best solution imo, is positive foolproof spirituality and other net positive methodologies in alignment with local conditions.

19

Some call it “follow the leader”.
… go ahead, try to get rid of it. See what you get instead.

20

As with Phyllo you have this impulsion to counter for countering sake and doing it blindly.

Note I have never ever said I want to get rid of it, note the point in red.

I am however very optimistic humanity can wean off and replace the Abrahamic religions in the future, it is just a matter of time when the critical mass is reached to find the relevant replacements.