Houellie,

Just read your post about voyeurism - and I agree.

We are voyeurs. We watch the telly and absorb stuff - then we buy stuff - and then we watch the telly again.

"Right now we are the luckiest people in the world."

...but then, the reindeer herdsman on the Siberian tundra might have the same opinion of his life....

You are a stirrer Houellebecq, but you too have said something profound and most probably correct.

"Thirdly, a lot of the truly creative people have had the assistance of mind altering drugs. This seems to be discouraged these days".

Imagine if you will the first cave man that accidentally ate hallucinogenic fungi while on a food foraging expedition. He hallucinates in his cave, realises that it is not real, but in fact a picture of something real. He has an epiphonic moment, and draws the image he is seeing on the wall of his cave with a stone, and voila, art is born. The very notion of depiction is born.

And the observation you make is correct Houelle, it is only tolerable to see reality from one perspective in our modern society. Arts and sciences have indeed suffered,(maybe even, been held back 100 years or more) in the absence of the acceptance of alternative or altered perspectives, or more accurately, points of reference for human thinking.

We are in effect a bunch of chemical reactions running around in our own receptacle.
The core concepts we accept and understand to be truth today, are as pagan as our most fundamental instinct, that being "fear of the unknown".

I dont think, I am that silly for thinking us time poor Houelle, but it is much more complex than that.
I think we are choice poor, independent thought poor, and basically corralled like sheep really.

Dear thinker 2,

I disagree. We are not sheep. We are wolves. Wolves are both predators and social animals. However, a predatory animal needs prey, and the pack must not grow too large. Due to our technology we have far outstripped our optimum pack size. We have domesticated our prey. However, our instincts are predatory although religious images cast us as sheep needing a shepherd. We try to live as sheep, but we are predators. Therefore we have wars with other large packs and prey on each other within our pack.

Though I acknowledge instinctual or primordial motivations, I dislike and disagree with the propensity, in many disciplines, to explain away human behaviour as ancient baggage. It's such a convenient rationale, with no empirical evidence to back it up; it's just so damned intuitive it must be right.. Wrong!
I think we are both more spontaneous than that and more individualised. However, both of these are demeaned within our passive-receptive, utterly missionary existence.

*It's such a convenient rationale, with no empirical evidence to back it up; it's just so damned intuitive it must be right.. Wrong!*

Not so Squeers. The Tabula Raza theory has been thrown out the
window for quite a while now. Perhaps you should read up on the
identical twin studies that have been undertaken, of identical
twins separated at birth, grown up in different environments.

You would be quite foolish to claim that genes don't influence
behaviour, for the empirical evidence shows that they do.

But there is also a mass of circumstantial evidence. I know a
few young blokes in this district, who are now in their 20s.
Their fathers took off years ago, having never known them. Not all,
but some of those guys walk, talk and act just like the fathers they
have never met. The " chip off the old block" is not just
about environment.

Even you should know that, observing your own children. They can
live in a similar environment, with much the same upbringing,
but turn out quite differently.

Genes matter, but live in denial if you will.

Yabby,
I don't think I said anything about tabula raza, did I?
The brain also has a remarkable ability (a definite flaw) to montage sense perception, experience, and even other people's posts!
And when you talk about genes you are merely changing dialect.
Has it not occurred to you that our intellectual efforts translate and rationalise rather than explain nature, behaviour etc?
I thought I could credit "Even you" with that much depth..