Can Philosophy offer me an escape from evo psych?

[Anonymous No.11158602]

If one accepts the premises of evolution, natural and sexual selection, game theory, genetics, and cognitive psychology, the conclusions of evo psych seem to logically follow.
How do I escape from this cruel world where I'm a gene replicating machine that's meant to spread the selfish gene? It seems like the highest ideal is to be a sleazy pick up artist or Genghis Khan, to become the biggest ape on top of a mountain of skulls. Is this really what I should aspire to be? Are people like Issac Newton considered to be the greatest failures in life because they did not spread their genes?

[Anonymous No.11158607]

>>11158602
P(A,B,C,D,E,F) imply P(G)
Fucking kill yourself for this post.
Unironically, this also solves your problem.

[Anonymous No.11158621]

hahaahahahah the absolute STATE of moderns, jesus christ

if you don't feel drawn to a higher principle IN SPITE OF precisely everything you're talking about then you're dead in the water. have fun huffing the kool aid nigger bitch

[Anonymous No.11158645]

>>11158621
Help me out, give me some book recs. Please.

[Anonymous No.11158653]

>>11158607
>>11158621
not OP but so many people on /lit/ are such unlikable smug faggot

[Anonymous No.11158663]

>>11158645
a little Shestov, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Evola, Kazantzakis (www.angel.net/~nic/askitiki.html) will do ya a lot of good

[Anonymous No.11158669]

>>11158602
Unironically the book of Genesis. Just keep your gf away from snakes, but she has to give birth to your children so she gets what she deserves and you just get to work in the field as ‘punishment.’

[Anonymous No.11158706]

>Are people like Issac Newton considered to be the greatest failures in life because they did not spread their genes?
Spread your ideas, your memes like he did you goddamn retarded cultist. Do you need books to know there is culture in life too? Who am I kidding, of course you do.
>>11158645
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y8_RRaZW5X3xwztjZ4p0XeRplqebYwpmuNNpaN_TkgM/mobilebasic?pli=1
>>11158607
and /thread

[Anonymous No.11158717]

>>11158602
>Isaac Newton is a failure
>ensured that his populations genes would be spread even further
You gotta think on a larger scale

[Anonymous No.11158725]

>>11158621
>if you don't feel drawn to a higher principle IN SPITE OF precisely everything you're talking about

I desperately want to believe in love and empathy and altruism but literally all empirical evidence points to those things being fictions and that I and everyone else who aspires to them are subhuman waste in this universe-wide game of endless war and domination

What am I supposed to do?

[Anonymous No.11158731]

>>11158602
like honestly, who or what even registers "failure" or "success" if we're all the slaves of impersonal mechanism? jesus christ

[Anonymous No.11158747]

>>11158725
>being this far gone

the more love is reduced, the more its phenomenology and thematisation in human experience becomes absolutely inexplicable. love (religious love, properly understood) is precisely the reaction against the universe being a "game of endless war and domination", what else would it be?

[Anonymous No.11158755]

>>11158725
All empirical evidence supports everything on the earth dying one day. Does this mean it's all pointless? You're a fucking human, act like it and start not caring about how short your existence is. Do something with your life.

[Anonymous No.11158757]

>>11158717
All the other reasonably intelligent Cambridge professors are slaying poon because they get to talk about how Newton called them stupid once. Average intelligence of species increases. Idiocracy is averted.

[Anonymous No.11158782]

>>11158747
Do you mind expanding on this, with some sources as well(not saying lol sources), but I would like to learn more.

[Anonymous No.11158799]

>>11158725
>I desperately want to believe in love and empathy and altruism but literally all empirical evidence points to those things being fiction
empirical evidence is fiction too, you 'let

[Anonymous No.11158803]

>>11158799
explain

[Anonymous No.11158817]

>>11158803
the external world is only accessible to you as experiences in your mind, same as love, empathy and altruism. they're all equally real/fictitious

[Anonymous No.11158835]

>It seems like the highest ideal is to be a sleazy pick up artist or Genghis Khan, to become the biggest ape on top of a mountain of skulls.
You describe reasons to be nihilistic. It doesn't follow that that winning this "cruel game" is an ideal at all. For example, there's no reason to believe that being on top of that food chain will give happyness.
(And in fact, reaching whatever goals is one of the worst strikes you can suffer. That's why you want to set an ever so unreachable goal where you enjoy the process towards it.)
(And btw. nothing is inherently sleazy - that's but a trained perspective.)

[Anonymous No.11158877]

>>11158782
it's the entire foundation of Shestov's philosophy, it doesn't matter what = x the whole human sphere of concerns is reduced to, whether you call it Substance or Matter or the epiphenomenal farts of a biological substrate, the more you insist on the reduction, the more prove the irreducibility. and of course consciousness is in the brain, or that love emerged out of evolutionary processes, the truly philosophically mature question is how it is that these things can emerge out of an unconscious medium/process in the first place, and what that says about it. and this is one of hegel's great insights: you can say "spirit is a bone" ("spirit is ACKSHUALLY some determinate material =x, heh"), but then all you've succeeded in doing is displacing the properties of mind onto substance, so instead of consciousness being some ectoplasmic essence (no one fucking thinks this, stop thinking you've done anything by refuting new age dualisms), instead consciousness is matter. well. okay? so? what have you really said about it? then we have to assume consciousness is self-knowing matter, and that raises more questions than you've answered. I think even peasant farmers in Babylon knew that a head injury fucks with people's minds.

and even despite that, what do you owe objective, universal truths? they're blind. they're dead. natural laws are descriptive, they don't refer to some substantial in-itself, they just describe patterns of causality, what do you owe a brick fuckin' wall by discounting the reality of love and beauty as you know it and feel it? one tear is worth a thousand pages of analytical scribblings. and as such this is what religious love is, to love in spite of its just being a biological drive adequate to the human mode. see that's the problem with you faggot reductionists, you think love is just an articulated amoeba drive when it's the primitive desires of simple organisms that is just love, latent. my point is you've fetishized disenchantment, as you accuse the religious of hypostasizing their feelings. stop doing that. the only true love is precisely the love that would arise in a meaningless, contingent universe. love's intrinsic validity is groundless

[Anonymous No.11158912]

>>11158877
The religious distinction between mind-body-and soul is actually very helpful to trying to understand consciousness in a coherent way. Especially when applied to pointless cloning intuition pumps. That is to say - you could construct a materially identical clone with the same mind - perhaps even switch 50% of the molecules between you and the clone and you would still be one but not both identical minds. This would be the soul.

[Anonymous No.11158930]

>>11158912
But it's important to remember a distinction does not entail a dualism. Aquinas' soul is not Descartes' mental substance. The understanding of the soul as the "meaning" embodied by the "letters" of embodiment is fruitful to think about. I'm gonna go with Desmond on this: the soul is not a structure, it is a structuration.

[Anonymous No.11158935]

Holy shit, evolutionary psychology has so many problems, I despise people who take it this seriously without realizing the vast implications and ignorance it takes to pretend it's proven.

[Anonymous No.11158977]

>>11158930
Yes. And the soul also has a dimension in continuity the same way as Theseus’s ship while the mind is changeable do to injury or whatnot.
>>11158912
But how do I know it’s Tuesday when I wake up in the morning and I just didn’t sleep until Wednesday? Oh, because I looked at my phone and that’s what the people at AT&T said.

[Anonymous No.11158990]

>>11158977
>Yes. And the soul also has a dimension in continuity the same way as Theseus’s ship while the mind is changeable do to injury or whatnot.

right, which is why the old Phineas gage-tier arguments against the existence of a soul are really toothless. mental faculties are not the soul. there is still a consciousness there, always will be, until death, and it will be that self-centered consciousness it's always been

[Anonymous No.11159002]

>>11158977
You get out of the hospital on Wednesday. - but everyone’s phones just keeps saying it’s tuesday. What the flying fuck? Can somebody bring me a calendar?

[Anonymous No.11159009]

>>11158602
Natural selection does not have normative force.

>>11158935
>w-we have like no idea how evolution could shape the mind!
>you can't base psychological theories on things that actually happened!

[Anonymous No.11159030]

>>11158602
Biologism is retarded, OP
We are soul within bodies, this sensible world will always change and no matter what you do here it will eventually disappear and be recycled, so what matters is your soul and the post-death
Read the greeks

[Anonymous No.11159040]

>>11158725
>I desperately want to believe in love and empathy and altruism
All of these things exist. Both as living social/historical/cultural organisms (in varying forms) and in human biology (in other animals too, just differently). It's just that these things don't map quite well to biology because of the gulf between them as their own organism, and one's biology (the latter is much more nuanced and gradient-like). Don't pretend social organisms have no power, they are the basis of human society (uncivilisational band or tribe). Evo psych is pretty dodgy (its status as 'science', that is), as are many branches of psychology. They lend towards being like social sciences: overly driven by trends,'cool ideas', and academic insularity. And like social sciences they tend to be more related to the everyday machinations, and are thus more politicised and ideological than any apparent 'hard science' would ever find acceptable. That doesn't mean it's useless, though.

Disregarding all this, you are a human being and thus pretty adaptable. Being a gene replicating machine isn't an actual meaning or purpose, as meaning and purpose are products of the mind. You chose to think that you're actually just a gene replicating machine. If you remove your mind, that notion is ultimately just matter interacting meaninglessly like everything else. There is nothing innately teleological about it, it's just cause and effect running its course. Given that meaning is developed on personal belief and thinking, find something you like and can believe in. Your present path seems rather self-defeating and unhappy.

[Anonymous No.11159050]

>>11159030
>the sensible world will always change.

You’re either reading Parmenides or Heraclitus. Can’t remember which. Read Diogenes instead.

[Anonymous No.11159053]

>>11159040
>uncivilisational band or tribe
even an uncivilisational band or tribe*

[Anonymous No.11159056]

>>11158602
We may reject the contention that the ordering of institutions is always defective because the distribution of natural talents and the contingencies of social circumstance are unjust, and this injustice must inevitably carry over to human arrangements. Occasionally this reflection is offered as an excuse for ignoring injustice, as if the refusal to acquiesce in injustice is on a par with being unable to accept death. The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. Aristocratic and caste societies are unjust because they make these contingencies the ascriptive basis for belonging to more or less enclosed and privileged social classes. The basic structure of these societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in nature. But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these contingencies. The social system is not an unchangeable order beyond human control but a pattern of human action. In justice as fairness men agree to avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common benefit. The two principles are a fair way of meeting the arbitrariness of fortune; and while no doubt imperfect in other ways, the institutions which satisfy these principles are just

[Anonymous No.11159064]

>>11159050
Synthesize Parmenides And Heraclitus as part of the historical process! The universe always changes through time but is unchangable when you consider time as the fourth dimension of the universe as a whole.

[Anonymous No.11159083]

>>11159064
And thankfully Leibniz showed the Arrow paradox to not actually be a paradox because infinite series can have finite sums.

[Anonymous No.11159090]

This is fuck a fucking dumb "problem" to have. Accepting your premises, there is NOTHING to lead to the conclusion that
>I'm a gene replicating machine that's meant to spread the selfish gene? It seems like the highest ideal is to be a sleazy pick up artist or Genghis Khan, to become the biggest ape on top of a mountain of skulls.
Fucking dumb post.

[Anonymous No.11159100]

>>11159064
But we are always living the present
past and future are mind/memory constructs

[Anonymous No.11159296]

>>11159100
Yeah - that’s why the universe appears changeable - to us. But not to God, the unchanging. - good music inspired by Kierkegaard’s Christian discourses there.

[Anonymous No.11159341]

>>11158607
Those aren't conclusions of evolutionary psychology, they're axioms you fucking retard. The conclusion is a broadly Nietzschean notion of recognizing your will to power by killing your enemies and reproducing like a tumor. If you read anything besides faggy literature, you would know that.

Please kill yourself.

>>11158602
It mostly follows from the materialist worldview, but the materialist worldview is the brainchild of autism, so while I haven't seen much aside from Nietzschean sentimentalism ("AUTHOR YOUR OWN TRUTH, IN CAPITAL LETTERS!") that truly refutes it, there are obviously value systems which reject treating the universe as some elaborate masturbatory device.

[Anonymous No.11159362]

>>11158621
>if you don't feel drawn to a higher principle IN SPITE OF precisely everything you're talking about then you're dead in the water

t. Sentimentalist

>>11158877
>what do you owe objective, universal truths?

My sanity.

[Anonymous No.11159430]

>>11159362
recognition of universal truths =/= their worship

keep calling anyone who doesn't lie down and take scientism's cock in their ass a sentimentalist, tho bro

[Anonymous No.11159691]

>>11159430
>recognition of universal truths =/= their worship

Living contrary to truth is mere delusion. It isn't a mistake that Nietzsche is loved by members of the identitarian left - he offered the first step on the path towards realizing their delusions and fantasies of being one thing even while they were something quite different.

>keep calling anyone who doesn't lie down and take scientism's cock in their ass a sentimentalist, tho bro

Scientism in the sense of autistic engineers is just as dependent on sentiment, in that it dogmatically assumes that the values of scientific inquiry are themselves not open to investigation. This is where philosophy starts. You get a lot of biologists who just figure "Yeah, the point of life is for me to stick my cock in whatever I can impregnate," but you get just as many (if not more) who realize that there's more to life (or less, I suppose, if you adopt the position that life isn't worth living and hence fucking isn't worth the effort).

[Anonymous No.11159705]

>>11159691
>Living contrary to truth is mere delusion.

How does one live contrary to the """truths""" of the reductionism of the cognitive sciences? By not being a good little cog? Nigga please.

[Anonymous No.11159718]

>Sociobiology-lite for incels
>even once

[Anonymous No.11159785]

>>11158602

if you want an escape from evo psych, you have it. you see it already, you can tell from the way you've written the op. this is called vision. persistence in solidifying this vision internally and externally is called volition.

[Anonymous No.11159858]

>>11158602
just read the selfish gene for the first time??

Yeah, philosophy could give you some answers. Darwinism is just a way to see natural selection. And it was a way that served the british empire. They needed a good excuse to enslave and kill everywhere.

[Anonymous No.11159918]

>>11158621
>then you're dead in the water. have fun huffing the kool aid nigger bitch

what a great sales pitch for that "higher principle" which clearly you must be abiding very close to

[Anonymous No.11159926]

>>11159918
is the slogan in the OP any better?

[Anonymous No.11159927]

>>11159918
>implying zen masters can't have a sense of humor
>implying im bound to petty notions of "etiquette" and "morality"

i shiggy, i diggy, i shiggy diggy doooooooooooooooooooooooooo

[Anonymous No.11159928]

>>11159918
>your principles are wrong because they hurt my feelings
kys yourself my man

[Anonymous No.11159952]

>>11158602
>materialists actually think this
Woah.

[Anonymous No.11159962]

>>11158817
This.

[Anonymous No.11160282]

>>11159705
>reductionism of the cognitive sciences

Nigga what the fuck are you talking about

[Anonymous No.11160347]

>>11158602
Every genetic line is doomed to end, sooner or later. You’re already a genetic failure even if you live. Eventually life in the universe will cease to exist, including any strains related to you. If the measure of your success is the continued existence of your progeny you’re already doomed to fail.

[Anonymous No.11160455]

Why does every philosophag turn into a sniveling retard when bio is introduced? Mathfags laugh and make equations for biological systems. Chemists discover new pathways. Geologists uncover new fossils. Wannabe philosophers always have an aneurysm over the fact that humans are great apes and genes play a role in our life. They inevitably go full fedoras nuthin personnel or paranoid schizophrenics who believe everyone but them is in on a grand conspiracy to cover up the gnostic truth.

[Anonymous No.11160507]

>>11158602
Start with the German Idealists. Schopenhauer's refutation of materialism is irrefragable.

[Anonymous No.11160665]

>>11158602
>meant to spread the selfish gene

How does this follow at all? There's no teleological implications in it.

[Anonymous No.11160672]

>>11160665
get dawkings book. The selfish gene.

Bassically it reduces life meaning to pass genes.

[Anonymous No.11160686]

Read the sections in the Phenomenology of Spirit and physiognomy and phrenology and realize that it applies just as well to evo psych shit

[Anonymous No.11160698]

>>11160672
>what is Hume's guillotine

[Anonymous No.11160971]

It's actually really simple. Really so fucking simple.

Does acting like a pre-programmed biological fuck machine make you happy? No? Then don't bother with it.

>>b-but then I'll be failing my biological imperative! I'd be giving up the only sense of meaning in my life! People would call me a LOSER!

Ok, fine. So what? Really, **so what?** Just face those thoughts. Feel like a loser. Feel like a failure of a homo sapien. There's literally no reason you need to run away from them. You just do because you've never been taught you could.

The more you turn inwards and face yourself, the more you'll see just how much of human neuroses is just a creation of our mind as we try to fulfill arbitrary needs that don't fulfil us.

We have the power to create our own reality. And I don't even mean in the sense that "we can turn trees into houses" or whatever. I mean in the sense that we LITERALLY have the capacity to change the way we perceive existence simply through willing it. If that isn't magic, then I don't know what the fuck is.

[Anonymous No.11160977]

>>11158602
>>11160686

[Anonymous No.11160979]

>>11160977
fucking based