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Mind Made for Mating

Jason Silva

A Mind Made for Mating by Jason Silva, inspired by Geoffrey Miller and his book The Mating Mind.

The human brain is essentially a sexual ornament, a “courtship device," so that its extraordinary capacities for art, language, and poetry are but human versions of the peacock feather, used to capture and manage the attention of potential mates. With the advent of culture, we still employ these extraordinary capacities, these “technologies of rhetoric” to ‘capture the attention’ of others. Except it's no longer to spread our genes but to spread our MEMES, a new replicator, born from the primordial soup human culture, one that leaps and spreads. All of this is still perfectly natural; we’ve just swapped sperm for the currency of digital information. But as Dawkins said, biological life has been an information technology all along: “If you want to understand life, do not think of throbbing gels or oozing liquids, think about information technology.”

Comments

well...he definitely drank something...

Submitted by gushtunkinflupped on Wed, 01/09/2013 - 01:19.

"The human brain is essentially a sexual ornament, a “courtship device," so that its extraordinary capacities for art, language, and poetry are but human versions of the peacock feather, used to capture and manage the attention of potential mates."

 This is an incredibly misleading statement that only serves to marginalize the inherent qualities of this multidimensional journey we call life and the value of being in the experienced moment...regardless of how much deluded people like Dawkins aim to dilute our entire existence by summing it up as merely mechanistic gene-spreading. This branch of merely-ism is ridiculous and discussed/debunked in some of simon powells works.

 

Next time i see my niece painting i will explain, much to her dismay, how her beautiful expression of the human imagination (whatever the hell that is!) and creative ability are only archaic relics used to try and attract potential mates :-P ...she'd probably smack me with some knowledge just like kids tend to do when us adult left-brain folks come in with our disconnected takes on reality

suggested reading

Submitted by jansummerhays on Wed, 01/09/2013 - 17:56.

For a thorough discussion of some of the more salient ideas brought forward in this video, see Richard Doyle's amazing book "Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere".

http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Pharmacy-Evolution-Mediations-Biomedical/d...

Hi Drew,  I've seen you

Submitted by Jeffrey Fish on Wed, 01/09/2013 - 21:25.

Hi Drew,

 I've seen you post a few times about the Bushmen and their mastery of the internal human energies.  I'd love to know more about this topic.  Could you recommend a couple good sources on the Bushmen to get me started?

 Much appreciated,

Jeff 

Awesome!  Thanks.  Slowly

Submitted by Jeffrey Fish on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 20:14.
Awesome!  Thanks.  Slowly making my way through some of that stuff.  Especially enjoyed the Bradford Keeney podcast.

Vertiginous

Submitted by Bluebeard on Thu, 01/10/2013 - 01:16.
Jason, You remind me of my old friend, Hunter, who used to smoke weed and spurt like this. You have a gimmick here that works, this ending in a flash, on that last syllable. Thank god you avoided that this time and tried another aesthetic strategy (very refreshing obviously). It seems yr presentation is the organic outgrowth of our last slide. What do I make of it otherwise? It's a fascinating art piece, a bouncing mind-manifesto for rapid mating opportunities. I thinks this helps. James Dean

Vision Quest

Submitted by Bluebeard on Thu, 01/10/2013 - 01:27.
o

agree, very eloquent. in any

Submitted by mountain wind on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 10:28.
agree, very eloquent. in any case mating is not EVERYONE's life purpose, although I can see that it is an integral part of the organism that I am. It is one of the very important drives in our life. The whole of life is definitely much broader and why this balant reductionalism actually even deserves mercy is in question. 

its a super video but its

Submitted by mountain wind on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 10:23.
its a super video but its really narrow to classify our brain as designed to be something so specific in the range of human experiences as be responsible for mating. It's a refreshing viewpoint but its a theory based on interpretation of other theories, the result being increasingly abstract. actually today i got stoned with a friend and we talked about how a lynx is a feline and a fox is a dog (i know, cannine). A horse is more like a dog than a snake, crocodile or lizard. Camels are weird horses but again so are donkeys though giraffes are weirder and zebras a different colors and some lizards change colors and deep underwater don't even go there, not to mention the Jurassic era animals. Would be nice if they explained it this interestingly in school! Like WOW! Welcome to life! Here's what we know. I conscious society. It's possible. There is a lot of meaning.

yeah..

Submitted by gushtunkinflupped on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 12:52.
I mean the video is well made. But provocativeness/eloquence and good video making skills don't make up for an extremely narrow/reductionist approach to explaining all and everything under one little category...Its a fun idea to play with, but nothing more once you dig deep enough into it. Life and our existence is way to multi-faceted to reduce to something like that

Daniel Pinchbeck and Jason Silva Approach Singularity

Submitted by CULTiE on Mon, 05/20/2013 - 12:31.
Daniel Pinchbeck and Jason Silva Approach Singularity 

www.Cultie.com

Twitter- @CultieMagazine

Facebook

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