Some people feel our human experience is diminished if we understand how it works cognitively, particularly in the case of love & art.
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I understand it feels that way to them but think they fail to appreciate that understanding ourselves can also be powerfully moving to many.
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Thinking purely on a psychological level. The fact that there are truths to be discovered & this matters in its own right is separate.
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Its a mistake to think that ppl who like human nature to be ineffable don't value truth or ppl who like to work it out are unmoved by it.
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It's a simple truth that people are moved & satisfied by different things.The most Vulcan-like among us are still excited & awed by humanity
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Sometimes people think coz I like evolutionary psychology, I want to 'reduce' everything to biology, make it smaller & less impressive. No.
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Aside from the fact that I think it's the best evidenced approach to psychology that we have & gets us closest to understanding ourselves...
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...it's also deeply satisfying in that it doesn't limit us to humans who exist now but links us to all life & millions of yrs of history.
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Many people like to look forward in terms of where we are going - progress of reason & science and/or transhumanism - I'm a historian.
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I've always been more interested in where we came from & why we are how we are tho I recognise that thinking of the future is more important
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To play devil's advocate a bit, there is some good reason to worry about us learning too much about how we work cognitively imo. 1/?
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Learning enough about how our brains work may lead to an ability to adjust our preferences and that can be scary imo bc they're arbitrary.
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That cld certainly be a reasonable objection but I'm thinking much more basically, psychologically right now abt what satisfies & moves ppl
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But that doesn't mean abandon science, just that meaning comes from our relationships and unfashionable things like morality and how to be
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And for some people, meaning comes from science too. People can be very passionate about understanding our world and our nature.
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Yes but passion for knowledge not same as motivation for meaningful human good - nazi doctor's human experiments?
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People can find good and bad things meaningful, yes. These can be related to a passion for knowledge or not.
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You also have to define what you mean by "good," "bad," "meaningful," etc. before you can talk about them and definitions entail premises.
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