Re: all humans share same parents 200kya
by doogles on November 28th, 2018, 4:55 pm
wolfhnd, one of your paragraphs caught my attention in your recent post -- "Reducing the concept from the species to the individual you get the idea that you are who you are because of your parents, which is obviously true, but you also inherit you parents culture. If you were raised by wolves you would get the wolves culture and because of that culture your brain would actual develop differently. None of which is particularly insightful accept at the psychological level level where Freud gets too little credit. We are who we are because our culture tells us who we are. Again as it applies to the original post most cultures tell us we are who we are because of who our ancestors were. Which isn't exactly true displaying a kind of genetic determinism that is built into our instincts.".
I self-published a book in 2009 called Animals, Brains, and Cultures in which I have addressed everything you mentioned in this paragraph. It is available at Amazon. While working in close association with animals for over 40 years, I constantly noted similarities between all species in behavioural traits, biochemistry and physiology from reptiles upwards. I relied heavily on my own primary observations but checked as many other references as well during those decades. It was virtually 40 years in the writing. There would be more than 200 references cited.
When I was about half way into it, it occurred to me that I had virtually come up with the same principles as Freud, and was tempted to use his 'id, ego and superego', calling the book something like "Freud re-visited", but realised that my view departed from Freud's in that I rely heavily on sensory-imaging as part of the 'ego' and 'superego'. Freud was a 'visual imagery' denier; he regarded day-dreaming as an early sign of mental illness. I finished up with a four-part component of behaviour -- the 'primitive' which embraces our instinctual drives and which accounts for more than 80% of our behaviours, 'sensory-imaging' -- which is the accumulated information we obtain from our own environment via our primary sensory inputs, 'rationalising' -- which is the internal ability we have to build sensory images in our brains on other sensory images (psychologists tend to use the word 'representation' rather than 'images'), and fourthly 'self-image' which is somewhat of a composite of the first three. The latter is very real if you consider the number of suicides related to damage to self-images.
Anyhow it's there with its hundreds of references if you are interested in a theory that synthesises the ideas of hundreds of thinkers and scientists over the millennia.
It finished up as a universal (across species) theory of motivation and behaviour, and incorporates all things you mentioned in that paragraph.