the most upsetting thought-seed that keeps germinating in my mind, that I can't seem to shake or remove, is the idea that almost ALL of human behavior (outside of pure subsistence) is about playing games of social control. That it's so typical that most people don't even see it.
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this isn't necessarily malignant in all cases (though a whole lot of cases are), just that everyone is a control freak. the baseline attitude of "just let it be" is almost entirely absent in our society.
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what about seeking pleasure for its own sake? what are these ends for which others are the means?
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it's a reasonable question and while I can find some instances of people deriving pleasure through social interactions related to dominance/control ames (actually a lot of examples of this) I definitely can't write all of it off that way. pleasure-seeking is a thing too I guess
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though the first lemma of that should be "what counts as pleasure in your society, and in your individual psyche, and why?" a lot of stuff is probably lizard-brain level biological programming. how much is just the fruits of social control games planted long ago though?
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That's true: "self-justifying" behavior varies from person to person. I agree that status games (which are very related to but subtly distinct from control) are baked deeply into the human brain. Status seems deeply tied to mating success, and thus is selected for...
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one of the example questions that bubbled up while I was thinking about this is "why do people enjoy sports spectatorship?" there's no lizard-brain hedonic explanation for that. if you'll forgive my amateur neuroscience, it seems like that's a whole lot of neocortex shit.
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Mirror neurons?
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say more please
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Aside from the tribal stuff involved in sports, watching professional athletes do a thing gives some of the same mental activity as actually doing the thing, via the so-called mirror neurons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_coding_theory …
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