Idea No. 1801: Emotions as Ways of Relating

Idea Description

Emotions could be viewed as special ways of relating or as relational methods, or skills, with a particular body/mind configuration. As such, emotions’ primary function is adding powerful but highly customized relational capabilities, enabling emotional organisms to relate to individual elements beyond generic or instinctive categories. They act as our interface with our complex environment and are analogous to countries’ domestic and foreign policies or positions vis-a-vis other issues and countries, including necessary preparation for peace or war. With these capabilities, we can relate in a unique manner to each of thousands of different elements and change these orientations quickly as needed. These capacities are particularly necessary for mammals with complex social systems. Emotions are not part of, nor do they oppose cognition, which only participates in their design and management, as it does in most other human activities. 

Emotions are a manner of relating which people experience. People literally feel how they perceive and relate, sense these special relationships, and experience their position vis-a-vis elements! This is why people are angry or in love, and don’t just have angry thoughts or a perception of love. 

Emotions express our drives and values and are neither rational nor irrational thoughts or judgments. Objectivity and rationality do not operate without or despite emotions, but within a personal or collective universe shaped by them. As in Einstein’s theory, it shows our space to be permanently “curved” by emotions, and our need to navigate within it.

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Nature of EmotionSam Hadar
Idea No. 3101: The Drive for Sameness, Difference, Continuity and Change (SDCC)

Idea Description

It seems that one of life’s and man’s prime drives is the urge to perpetuate and continue through time specific patterns and principles while permitting and/or requiring others to change. As part of the same drive, or in a parallel manner, life and man are driven to expand and spread through space certain sameness and homogeneity while allowing or requiring particular differences and/or diversity. Both could be seen as highly regulated intentional motivations for a distinctive blend of similarity and differences over space and time.   

Namely, the hypothesis is that life in general, and man as an extension of it, are highly driven by a very basic preference for a particular combination of continuity and change across time and sameness and difference across space. 

Various forms of life might interpret this drive differently and have very diverse manifestations of it. Nevertheless, many of our human drives, urges, motivations and inclinations might rise out of this basic drive and thus it can explain and connect many seemingly unrelated historical and current tendencies, actions and phenomena, in evolution and human history. For example, it can connect and explain previously disconnected activities and propensities that are taken for granted, as the perpetuation of life itself, sexuality, human love and socialization, education, political attempts for expansion and perpetuity, communication, as well as mummification, the building of pyramids, Hitler’s horrifying wish for a Reich of a thousand years and Mau’s blue dress code throughout China.

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Basic Drives of LifeSam HadarThe Drive for Sameness, Continuity and Change (SDCC)
Idea No. 2521: The Decline of the Genetic Drive and its Replacement by Values

Idea Description

The hypothesis is that people are less and less driven by genetic proliferation and preservation as commonly assumed and are increasingly motivated by less obvious but more general drive for the proliferation and continuity of leading values. 

 Thus, people simply want to continue, perpetuate and preserve, as well as spread and multiply whatever becomes important or significant for them, whether these are genes, lives, ideas, monuments, personal fame, life style, nations, ideologies, ethnicities, institutions, environment or art. 

Accordingly, genetic preservation and multiplication is viewed as only one specific case/part of a wider and more diversified drive to pursue certain sameness and continuity across space and time which we explore under another topic of conversation. Moreover, as part of this broader drive, the propensity for genetic proliferation and perpetuation seems to be diminishing in importance for humans and is being increasingly replaced by other values and aims, a process which only accelerates and emphasizes the human transformation to “general perpetuation”. 

Similar to the genetic code, a memory of an emperor, an empire, a religion, an idea, or an institution could all be viewed as intangible constellations, as patterns, or as codes that we all try to duplicate over space and time. Accordingly, we can say that people increasingly supplement or replace their preservation and proliferation of the genetic code with various other architectural, intellectual, visual, organizational, social, spiritual, or political codes.

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Basic Drives Vs. ValuesSam Hadargenetics, emotions, The Decline of the Genetic Drive and its Replacement by Values