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Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 81
RESPONDENT: The postulation of a creator as separate from its creation gets us into unsurmountable epistemological problems, while the postulation of blind (‘random’) evolutionary ‘forces’ is even not worth a thought. PETER: A few years ago I happened to be browsing through the Amazon library and came across a book written by someone who did give some thought to the ‘blind (random) evolutionary forces’ that you so haughtily dismiss as ‘even not worth a thought’. The author was a primatologist who had not only spent a good deal of time studying the behaviour of our closest genetic cousins, the chimpanzees, but had been shocked by the similarities between their instinctual behaviour and the instinctual behaviour of humans – he was evidently one of the few primatologists able to take a clear-eyed look at the full range of instinctual behaviour as opposed to those who earn kudos by focussing on nurture whilst seemingly turning a blind eye to fear and aggression. What particularly struck me at the time was that the book was not an intellectual thesis in that it
offered many down to earth examples of these same instinctual passions in operation in human animals Perhaps upon reflection you might consider that the fact that you regard such matters as ‘even not worth a thought’ may well be the very reason why you are at loggerheads with the content of what is written on the Actual Freedom Trust website.
PETER: (...) Perhaps upon reflection you might consider that the fact that you regard such matters as ‘even not worth a thought’ may well be the very reason why you are at loggerheads with the content of what is written on the Actual Freedom Trust website. RESPONDENT: First of all, it is not a fact that I regard such matters as ‘even no worth a thought’. What you talk about is something completely different from what I don’t consider as ‘even not worth a thought’. I consider ‘even not worth a thought’ the idea that some ‘blind’ (in the sense of ‘random’ or ‘mechanical’) forces are the cause for life in general and human life in particular. PETER: I do realize that you have done some thinking about the nature of these forces yet what you have concluded along with countless others who have come to the same conclusion, is that these ‘forces’ must in some way be other-than-physical forces – the notion of noumenon and phenomena. Here is the statement I commented on in context and where you define this non-physical noumenon in spiritual terms, whilst disingenuously blurring the distinction between spirit and matter, whereas elsewhere you have attempted to explain it in pseudo-scientific terms –
What I was pointing to was the fact that some people are beginning to do some down-to-earth thinking about the nature of these ‘evolutionary ‘forces’’ as opposed to the traditional notion that they must have an underlying non-physical (spiritual or metaphysical) nature, as you succinctly stated in another of your posts –
RESPONDENT: Obviously, instinctual behaviour is not ‘blind’ (in the sense of ‘random’ or ‘mechanical’) but fulfils ‘purpose’. As soon as there is a purpose guiding behaviour it is not ‘random’ anymore. PETER: If this is so obvious to you, may I ask what ‘purpose guiding behaviour’ do you see in the phenomena of the instinctual passions (to use your terminology)? And further, is this purpose not also the purpose of the ‘factor X, noumenon’, (given that your latest thinking apparently proposes that noumenon and phenomena are one and the same as in inseparable)? RESPONDENT: You might condone the fact that apes rape but if you think about their behaviour without sentimental attachment you will have to notice that it is, indeed, the best they can do to assure their long-term survival. In this sense, and this sense only, their behaviour is ‘intelligent’. PETER: Firstly, nowhere have I ever mentioned, let alone implied, that I condone the fact that apes rape – what I have said is that I found it very interesting indeed that our closest genetic cousins exhibit remarkably similar instinctual behaviour and emotions as is evident in the human animal. It is also clear that apes lack the intelligence to be able to do something about their passions and their behaviour whereas we, as intelligent humans, should be able to do far better than what we have been trying to do for thousands upon thousands of years – that which obviously ain’t working. RESPONDENT: That humans are instinctually driven beings I can verify myself every day by watching the news for 5 minutes. PETER: I didn’t need to watch the news in order to know that I was an instinctually driven being – a little self-awareness revealed this to be so. RESPONDENT: The particular problem of the human beings is that they are not apes anymore but have the ability to reflect about their behaviour. PETER: Indeed. Don’t you find it curious that human beings spend so much of their time and energy reflecting upon the behaviour (and feelings and passions) of others and yet spend so little time reflecting about their own behaviour, their own feelings and their own passions? RESPONDENT: Human beings have the ability to reflect and take appropriate action based on their reflections and not be guided by passionate instincts. While an ape cannot self-regulate its behaviour, a human being can. We would never talk about animals, only about humans beings, being ‘responsible’ for a rape or having committed a crime. PETER: I don’t know where you live but self-regulation doesn’t work around here – the town where I live has armed police, a courthouse and a host of lawyers fully occupied in dealing with the on-going failures of self-regulation. Be that as it may, I personally found self-regulation necessitated the constant presence of an ‘I’, a socially conditioned guardian, a constant moderator, an inner policemen, a voice of conscience in my head continuously judging myself as to whether my feelings and my behaviour was justified or unjustified, right or wrong, fair or unfair, good or bad and so on. In short I found that the constant stress of the need for continual self-regulation, or should I say self-flagellation, is a bummer, hence my search for freedom from this conditioned ‘self’-imposed neurosis. RESPONDENT: Besides, the existence or non-existence of passionate instincts and their effects on animal and human behaviour is completely irrelevant for the postulation of a noumenon. PETER: I for one was not musing about the existence or non-existence of the passionate instincts, I was simply pointing out the fact that some primatologists are starting to dare to publicize the readily observable fact that human malice and sorrow are the direct result of the animal instinctual passions, a fact that makes any and all postulations of noumenon/phenomena completely irrelevant. RESPONDENT: So, in fact, I have no problem at all with the facts that are written on the Actual Freedom Trust website. I have only a problem with your conclusions what these facts mean regards the ‘ultimate questions’. PETER: I do realize that some people spend a good deal of time wondering about such questions as ‘why are we here’, ‘where did we come from’ and ‘where are we going’ … but I have always been far more concerned with the down-to-earth questions such as why can’t we, as intelligent human beings, live together in peace and harmony, or more to the point, why can’t I live with people in peace and harmony. The parallel question was how could I not only become free of the feelings of bondage that the continuous need for ‘I’ as conscience inevitably results in but also the very instinctual passions that necessitate having a conscience in the first place. If these prosaic questions are of interest to you, then you might possibly find that the conclusions I came to, together with the practical steps I have already taken towards actualizing the answers – reported both in my journal and on the Actualism part of the Actual Freedom Trust website – to be of use to you in your own search for freedom.
RESPONDENT: Obviously, instinctual behaviour is not ‘blind’ (in the sense of ‘random’ or ‘mechanical’) but fulfils ‘purpose’. As soon as there is a purpose guiding behaviour it is not ‘random’ anymore. PETER: If this is so obvious to you, may I ask what ‘purpose guiding behaviour’ do you see in the phenomena of the instinctual passions (to use your terminology)? RESPONDENT: Survival. A defence mechanism against the threat of extinction. I am well aware that the instinctual passions are ‘blind’ in the sense that their logic is not the result of a conscious thinking effort to what may be the best course of action in a given situation. In this sense their logic can cause conflicts with ‘your’ logic, that is, with your conscious thinking effort to what may be the best course of action in a given situation. If your instinctual passions hinder you in certain situations a ‘retraining’ is necessary. For example, a goal keeper has to train himself to jump before the approaching ball ALTHOUGH the approaching ball threatens his well being, which – instinctively – makes him want to avoid the approaching ball. PETER: Whilst retraining is useful in enhancing or negating instinctive reactions as can be seen by apparent success of cognitive therapy, what we are talking of here is the instinctual passions most particularly those of fear, aggression nurture and desire. Whilst instinctual reactions are often necessary for survival – stepping out of the way of an oncoming car even before thinking kicks in for example – self-awareness reveals the instinctual passions to be senseless in that they are concerned with ‘my’ survival and not this body’s survival – hence they are not only ‘blind’, they are both senseless and debilitating. * PETER: And further, is this purpose not also the purpose of the ‘factor X, noumenon’, (given that your latest thinking apparently proposes that noumenon and phenomena are one and the same as in inseparable)? RESPONDENT: We cannot ascribe ‘purpose’ to the unknown factor X (noumenon), as long as it is unobservable; as soon as noumenon becomes observable it is not noumenon anymore but phenomenon; we can discover purpose, intelligence, meaning all over the place in the phenomenal world (‘nature’). PETER: It sounds to me as a layman that this ‘factor X’ is totally useless as it has no purpose at all and not only that, when it does become observable it ceases to exist! I can only conclude that your treasured ‘factor X’ (which presumably has something to do with your answer to your ‘ultimate questions’) has by its very metaphysical, non-purposeful, nature blindsided itself from being able to do anything at all about bringing an end to the phenomena of human malice and human sorrow. * RESPONDENT: You might condone the fact that apes rape but if you think about their behaviour without sentimental attachment you will have to notice that it is, indeed, the best they can do to assure their long-term survival. In this sense, and this sense only, their behaviour is ‘intelligent’. PETER: Firstly, nowhere have I ever mentioned, let alone implied, that I condone the fact that apes rape – what I have said is that I found it very interesting indeed that our closest genetic cousins exhibit remarkably similar instinctual behaviour and emotions as is evident in the human animal. RESPONDENT: Ok. It is indeed interesting. And now? PETER: What you now do with your interest is up to you of course. I was simply reporting that I found something very interesting indeed in the phenomenal world – down-to-earth evidence as to the fact that, despite the eons-old beliefs of the spiritualists to the contrary, or mendacious denials that it is so, human malice and sorrow has its roots solely in the animal instinctual passions. * RESPONDENT: That humans are instinctually driven beings I can verify myself every day by watching the news for 5 minutes. PETER: I didn’t need to watch the news in order to know that I was an instinctually driven being – a little self-awareness revealed this to be so. RESPONDENT: Self – awareness only teaches you that you are an instinctually driven being but not that ‘humans’ are instinctually driven beings. PETER: When I got off my spiritual high-horse and stopped feeling superior to other human beings, I became aware that I too suffered from the same general malaise, and the same inclination to indulge in escapist fantasies, as did all other feeling beings – the difference only being a matter of degree and not one of substance. RESPONDENT: If you want to verify that ‘humans’ (and not only you) are instinctually driven beings you might want to watch the news for 5 minutes every day. Or do you seriously think self – awareness is sufficient to make generalisations about ‘humans’? PETER: When I became an actualist I went out and purchased a TV along with a satellite service so as to be able to study the human condition in action irregardless of nationality, race, religion, gender, culture and so on. When studying the human condition it is important to not be so myopic as to miss the fact that ‘I’ am humanity and humanity is ‘me’. * RESPONDENT: The particular problem of the human beings is that they are not apes anymore but have the ability to reflect about their behaviour. PETER: Indeed. Don’t you find it curious that human beings spend so much of their time and energy reflecting upon the behaviour (and feelings and passions) of others and yet spend so little time reflecting about their own behaviour, their own feelings and their own passions? RESPONDENT: ‘Self – awareness’ is a conscious effort, and takes a lot of energy which not many people are able or willing to raise. And, yes, I find it curious. PETER: Yep. As I discovered, ‘I’ have an innate resistance to being put under the microscope as it were – in fact ‘I’ will concoct all sorts of diversions and make up all sorts of excuses rather than roll my sleeves up and knuckle down to doing what obviously needs to be done if ever I am to become free of the human condition. One needs no further proof than to become aware of one’s own feelings to experientially understand the tenacious hold that the instinctual survival passions have over we human flesh-and-blood bodies. * RESPONDENT: Human beings have the ability to reflect and take appropriate action based on their reflections and not be guided by passionate instincts. While an ape cannot self – regulate its behaviour, a human being can. We would never talk about animals, only about humans beings, being ‘responsible’ for a rape or having committed a crime. PETER: I don’t know where you live but self-regulation doesn’t work around here – the town where I live has armed police, a courthouse and a host of lawyers fully occupied in dealing with the on-going failures of self-regulation. RESPONDENT: Self-regulation is not easy, it must be trained. When you were a child and craved for ice-cream and coke you got punished with belly – ache until you were able to self-regulate your behavior and to resist the temptation to indiscriminately put sweets into your mouth. What you call the ongoing failure of self-regulation is the fact that newborns have not learned yet to self-regulate while the one’s that have developed the ability to self-regulate (which takes time and effort) are usually old people who soon die. One’s ability to self-regulate is not transferable. What you learned must be relearned by any other human being to achieve the same kind of mastery in self-regulation. I am currently living in Switzerland and curiously nobody here throws litter out of train windows ALTHOUGH it is not explicitly forbidden and threatened with expensive sanctions like in the USA where it says on the train windows littering is prohibited and punished with a fine of 1000 USD. It obviously shows that the majority of the Swiss people has learned something which the majority of the US population has not. PETER: I was referring to the failure of self-regulation in what are referred to as law-abiding societies in that they still need armed police, courthouses, lawyers and prisons in order to maintain law and order … not preventing littering. * PETER: Be that as it may, I personally found self-regulation necessitated the constant presence of an ‘I’, a socially conditioned guardian, a constant moderator, an inner policemen, a voice of conscience in my head continuously judging myself as to whether my feelings and my behaviour was justified or unjustified, right or wrong, fair or unfair, good or bad and so on. RESPONDENT: Why that? You can train your behaviour until no conscious effort is necessary. No conscious ‘I’ or police officer has to be present in order to greet your neighbours and not throw stones on them. PETER: Are you speaking personally of your own experience? Are you saying in effect that your feelings are always effortlessly felicitous, that you are effortlessly carefree, that you are effortlessly magnanimous towards your fellow human beings, that you effortlessly delight in being here on this planet, and so on? If so, it certainly wasn’t the case with me when I came across actualism – in fact I was fed up with the whole wearying business of being an ‘I’ who needed to be in control. But then again there are a lot of people who obviously don’t feel this way and there are many people who spend their lives busily strengthening their egos and feeding their souls in order that they don’t ever have to allow themselves to feel, let alone acknowledge, how stressful the whole business of being ‘me’ really is at core. * PETER: In short I found that the constant stress of the need for continual self-regulation, or should I say self-flagellation, is a bummer, hence my search for freedom from this conditioned ‘self’-imposed neurosis. RESPONDENT: It is only stress if you got addicted or continuously expose yourself to new and uncertain situations where you have no means to assess their potential danger to your well-being. PETER: For whatever reason I never adopted the play-it-safe attitude because I increasingly found that joie de vivre comes from the fact that every moment is new and every situation is uncertain and the only thing that stands in the way of this as an ongoing experience is ‘I’ as ego and, more significantly, ‘me’ as soul. What actualism is specifically designed to do is dis-empower the entity who thinks and feels ‘he’ or ‘she’ is in control to the point where ‘he’ or ‘she’ voluntarily lets go of the controls – so as to allow a sensual joie de vivre to happen, all of its own accord. * RESPONDENT: Besides, the existence or non-existence of passionate instincts and their effects on animal and human behavior is completely irrelevant for the postulation of a noumenon. PETER: I for one was not musing about the existence or non-existence of the passionate instincts, I was simply pointing out the fact that some primatologists are starting to dare to publicize the readily observable fact that human malice and sorrow are the direct result of the animal instinctual passions, RESPONDENT: Yes, I see that as well. PETER: … a fact that makes any and all postulations of noumenon/phenomena completely irrelevant. RESPONDENT: I don’t see why that would be the case. PETER: Perhaps I can put it this way – when one takes on board the fact that human malice and sorrow are the direct result of the animal instinctual passions – and only the animal instinctual passions – then any musings or postulations about a ‘noumenon’ incarnating the instinctual passions, about an underlying metaphysical reality, a greater reality, a lesser reality, an intelligent design or an intelligent designer and so on become not only irrelevant but are clearly seen as puerility writ large. * RESPONDENT: So, in fact, I have no problem at all with the facts that are written on the Actual Freedom Trust website. I have only a problem with your conclusions what these facts mean regards the ‘ultimate questions’. PETER: I do realize that some people spend a good deal of time wondering about such questions as ‘why are we here’, ‘where did we come from’ and ‘where are we going’ … but I have always been far more concerned with the down-to-earth questions such as why can’t we, as intelligent human beings, live together in peace and harmony, or more to the point, why can’t I live with people in peace and harmony.? RESPONDENT: Yes, yes, I ask that myself. PETER: Are you saying ‘yes, yes’ to the first set of questions or the latter two questions? The reason I ask is that in the hundreds of posts you have sent to this mailing list I can’t recall you expressing any interest in the latter questions – ‘why can’t we, as intelligent human beings, live together in peace and harmony, or more to the point, why can’t I live with people in peace and harmony? * PETER: The parallel question was how could I not only become free of the feelings of bondage that the continuous need for ‘I’ as conscience inevitably results in but also the very instinctual passions that necessitate having a conscience in the first place. RESPONDENT: Although I don’t see yet how it can be possible to get rid of them in their entirety I see it as desirable to reduce their effects on my behaviour. PETER: My experience is that behaviour is something that is relatively easy to control – it’s what goes on under the surface so to speak (or unconsciously, as some people are wont to say) where the real source of human malice and sorrow and the subsequent angst and denial really takes place. * PETER: If these prosaic questions are of interest to you, then you might possibly find that the conclusions I came to, together with the practical steps I have already taken towards actualizing the answers – reported both in my journal and on the Actualism part of the Actual Freedom Trust website – to be of use to you in your own search for freedom. RESPONDENT: Yes, thanks. PETER: It’s a pleasure. The other writing that may also help you is the I do understand that this is tough stuff to come to grips with solely because it is so new and is so radically opposite to what humans believe to be the truth about the existence of we intelligent animals on this particular planet. And yet it is not impossible to grasp because, despite these difficulties, there are people on this mailing list who appear to have done so and who report having success in becoming more happy in doing whatever they do in their daily life and in becoming less antagonistic towards their fellow human beings – all based on a preliminary understanding gleaned solely from the written words of actualists and given credence by their own hands-on experiences and successes.
RESPONDENT to Richard: Ok, here it is:
How are these ‘modern scientific empirical discoveries of neuro-biology and genetics’ not theories/interpretations derived from empirical experiments. We have the neuro-biologist’s brain’s initial interpretation of data collected by his senses [empirical discoveries] AND we have the neuro-biologist’s brain‘s reinterpretations of his brain‘s initial interpretations of data collected by his senses [empirical discoveries] which you quote above (1) that the brain is programmable in the same way a computer is programmable and (2) that the human brain is also programmed, via a genetic code, with a set of instinctual or base operating functions, ... PETER: Given that you are having trouble determining fact from theory and have commented on something I have written concerning the empirical discoveries of neurobiologists and the like about the brain functions, I would refer you to a post you wrote to this mailing list which seems to confirm experientially, in your own experience, that what Mr. LeDoux discovered in the laboratory can be experientially confirmed by the simple act of being attentive to your own instinctual reactions, the near instantaneous feelings that result and the thinking that happens a split second after the feeling has taken hold –
As a suggestion, rather than continue to attempt to dismiss and/or disparage all that is written on the Actual Freedom Trust website by means of intellectual sophistry, the simple down-to-earth every-moment act of being attentive to your feelings, when and as they are happening, (as you reported above) might well reveal that a good deal more of what you glibly dismiss as ‘superstition of facts’ may well turn out to not only make good sense but could well even set you free from the human condition one day … if you so wish, that is.
RESPONDENT No 95: I fail to see how a subjective observation could deliver a definitive answer to the question though. Watching your kids and animals may be explainable by your theory but it could be explained by other theories too. Self observation cannot yield much in the way of internal physiological data. I cannot yet see the factors that make your theory necessarily true. PETER to No 95: My suggestion is that, provided you are old enough to have experienced puberty,
you too have sufficient life experience to be able to make up your own mind on this issue based on your own experience of how ‘you’ yourself
tick and your own observations of other animals, be they non-sentient or sentient, rather than having a subjective opinion one way or the other
based solely on what others believe to be true or false. RESPONDENT No 95: Quite right. RESPONDENT: Facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory. PETER: You can trot all the theories you want about the truths of theories but I live in a world of fact, a world inexorably based on the surety of cause and effect. If the roof of any building I design or build leaks, the fact is that the occupants and/or their possessions will enviably get wet when it rains. If I design or build a building on ground that is susceptible to movement, as all ground is to varying extent, then the foundations of the building needs to be strong enough not to break in order that the building does not crack or the foundations and building need to be designed and constructed in such a way that any movement that does occur, occurs in a way that does not damage the building or impact on its functionality. None of these facts are ‘susceptible of diverse explanations’, none of this requires a guarantee of ‘the truth of … theory’ – these are facts or givens that are known by any adult hands-on building practitioner, regardless of their age, gender or culture, no matter where the building is located on the planet. Now the topic of this conversation is whether the deep-seated emotions of fear and aggression, nurture and desire are instinctual, as in biologically inherited, or whether they are the result of imperfect nurturing/environment. Your contribution to this discussion is presumably that one can never know which is fact given that –
This in effect means you are, exactly as the previous correspondence has done, sidelining yourself in any discussion about the means to bringing an end to the deep-seated emotions of fear and aggression, nurture and desire that are the root cause of human misery. The other thing that is worth noting is that whilst you are busy telling me that it is impossible for me to know – by my own observation and my own experience and verified by the observations and experiences of others – that something is a fact, you are busy challenging someone else on the list to disprove that what you say is not fact. Vis –
Nothing like telling someone one thing and then telling another something entirely contradictory, hey. RESPONDENT: Or put it differently: Such hypotheses as ‘genetic coding’ of instincts are really not inspired by the result of experience to nearly the same extent as they are by certain ‘preconceived ideas’. PETER: Indeed they are not – personal experience and global-wide experience is most often ignored or in many cases even denied in favour of ‘preconceived ideas’, as the following illustrates –
I’ll try and stop whistling ‘Give me that old time religion’ long enough to relate to you another personal on-the-ground observation I made that demonstrated that the instinctual passions are universal to all human beings on the planet and have existed for as long as human beings have existed – in other words, that fear, aggression, nurture and desire are biological inherited. As a somewhat callow young man aged 20, I went to Europe for the first time and was particularly struck by the fact that literally every square metre of Europe had been soaked in human blood at some stage in history, be it in pre-historic times, the stone age, the iron age, the bronze age, medieval times or modern times, given that World War Two had only ended less than a quarter of a century prior to my visit. Wherever I went I found monuments to some battle or other and remnants of defensive walls and embattlements from all cultures and all epochs and visited field upon field, village upon village, and city upon city where hundreds, thousands and sometimes millions of human beings had either deliberately killed and maimed their fellow human beings or had been deliberately killed and maimed by their fellow human beings. I was also struck by the fact that these same disputes, skirmishes, battles and wars are still being waged all over the planet, either overtly or covertly, and will keep on doing so for no other reason that it is human nature for human beings to keep doing so. Faced by the utter futility of ever being able to do anything about the situation, I, like countless others before and since, learned to turn a blind eye to what I had seen with my own eyes and in doing so desensitised myself from feeling such feelings as sorrow, grief, despair and hopelessness when confronted with the extent of human beings’ perpetual animosity towards other human beings. RESPONDENT: Richard claims to report ‘direct experiences’ and not expounding ‘theory’ or ‘hypotheses’. I don’t have to say anything anymore about the validity of these ‘reports’. PETER: And yet immediately after this declaration ‘I don’t have to say anything anymore about the validity of these ‘reports’, you were busy telling someone else on the list –
Nothing like telling someone one thing and then telling another something entirely contradictory, hey. RESPONDENT: But one thing is for sure: Unless you are Richard, all you do is turning his ‘reports’ into preconceived ideas, which, because you lack his ‘direct experiences’, you subsequently use as interpretative filters for your experiences and observations to make them fit to them. PETER: That’s a crock argument if ever I have heard one. I have just related to you the observations I made and the conclusions I drew from these observations about human nature that I had in Europe as a young man in my twenties – some 15 years before I fell under the influence of Eastern religious dogma and some 30 years before I had ever met Richard. For all I know, you may well have made similar observations as I did as a youth – given that I have met only a few people who have not been interested in peace on earth at some stage in their lifetimes – and it is clear that you also have subsequently settled on an explanation for the underlying cause for all the mayhem and carnage that human beings have and continue to inflict upon each other –
If that is the conclusion you have come to, then fair enough, but you are wasting your time trying to convince me that human beings are meant to forever wage war against an imaginary Evil satanic force, be it imaginary, mythical, symbolic, psychic, psychological, spirit-ual, formless or whatever. RESPONDENT: We are not at all talking about a ‘fact’ when we talk about ‘genetically encoded instincts’ and we also don’t talk about a report of a ‘direct experience’; what we discuss here is a so-called scientific theory and weigh its evidence; it goes without saying that such a theory can necessarily never be more than hypothetical. PETER: Rephrasing your crock argument using ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ and repeating makes it no less of a crock. Perhaps I can summarize what your current proposition is to this mailing list is – on the one hand that the deep-seated emotions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire are not in fact instinctual passions because ‘facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations’ and on the other that ‘ …‘Satan’ (literally ‘adversary’) is, in fact, the energy of the instincts’. Is that not the gist of it? And in the meantime the suggestion that twigged you to write this post to me remains unaddressed by you –
At least my previous correspondent responded to my suggestion before grasping for an intellectual get-out. I find it very odd indeed when I reflect back to the start of the mailing list and recall what a good opportunity it offered for people from all over the world to have a free-ranging down-to-earth discussion about bringing an to human malice and sorrow to nowadays finding myself having discussions with people who refuse to discuss the issue of personally actualizing peace on earth because they are so convinced that it is a fact that nothing at all can be known for a fact about any issues concerning peace on earth and that any experiences relating to the issue of peace on earth can be summarily dismissed as being relative/subjective.
RESPONDENT No 95: I fail to see how a subjective observation could deliver a definitive answer to the question though. Watching your kids and animals may be explainable by your theory but it could be explained by other theories too. Self observation cannot yield much in the way of internal physiological data. I cannot yet see the factors that make your theory necessarily true. PETER to No 95: My suggestion is that, provided you are old enough to have experienced puberty,
you too have sufficient life experience to be able to make up your own mind on this issue based on your own experience of how ‘you’ yourself
tick and your own observations of other animals, be they non-sentient or sentient, rather than having a subjective opinion one way or the other
based solely on what others believe to be true or false. RESPONDENT No 95: Quite right. RESPONDENT: Facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory. PETER: You can trot all the theories you want about the truths of theories but I live in a world of fact, a world inexorably based on the surety of cause and effect. If the roof of any building I design or build leaks, the fact is that the occupants and/or their possessions will enviably get wet when it rains. If I design or build a building on ground that is susceptible to movement, as all ground is to varying extent, then the foundations of the building needs to be strong enough not to break in order that the building does not crack or the foundations and building need to be designed and constructed in such a way that any movement that does occur, occurs in a way that does not damage the building or impact on its functionality. None of these facts are ‘susceptible of diverse explanations’, none of this requires a guarantee of ‘the truth of … theory’ – these are facts or givens that are known by any adult hands-on building practitioner, regardless of their age, gender or culture, no matter where the building is located on the planet. RESPONDENT: Just let’s take this sentence of yours: ‘If the roof of any building I design or build leaks, the fact is that the occupants and/or their possessions will enviably get wet when it rains.’ That is nothing but a hypothetical situation. PETER: No, it is not a hypothetical situation at all. I quite deliberately chose an example of a fact that I knew to be a fact by personal experience. I was a builder for some thirty years and over that period of time, a few buildings I built did have leaking roofs that resulted in the occupants and/or their possessions getting wet. RESPONDENT: You define two conditions: Condition 1: The roof must leaking. Condition 2: It must rain. And based on these two conditions you construct the outcome: The occupants will inevitably get wet. That is not a factual statement; that is a logical conclusion, like 1 plus 1, ‘inevitably’, equals 2. PETER: Out of interest I typed ‘one plus one equals two logical statement’ into Google and came up with a logic statement that one plus one does not inevitably equal two –
Be that as it may, the fact is that the occupants and/or their possessions did get wet when it rained if the roof leaked, which is why I learnt to be very careful when designing and/or building buildings so as not to repeat the same mistakes. RESPONDENT: A fact is something else. For example: I am sitting on the PC and writing a reply to you while my wife is in the kitchen cooking tea. PETER: And by your logic, if it were raining and the roof was leaking, any water that started dripping from the ceiling onto floor would not be a fact, but would be logical conclusion. Have you ever noticed that logicians have to resort to torturous semantic arguments in order to prove their logic to be right, whereas a fact, such as – you were sitting on the PC writing this reply to me while your wife was in the kitchen cooking tea – is simply a fact in its own right as it were? * PETER: Now the topic of this conversation is whether the deep-seated emotions of fear and aggression, nurture and desire are instinctual, as in biologically inherited, or whether they are the result of imperfect nurturing/ environment. Your contribution to this discussion is presumably that one can never know which is fact given that –
RESPONDENT: Fact is that people get angry. It is not fact that there are ‘instincts’ and ‘genes’. These are ‘hypotheses’ you use to explain why people get angry. Statements like ‘genetically encoded’, ‘biologically inherited’, ‘result of imperfect nurturing’ – all that are nothing but hypothetical statements; these are EXPLAINATIONS of the fact that people get angry. PETER: In the world I live in, the reason why something happens is known as cause and effect – there is water on the floor and the cause can easily be verified as being the fact that the roof is leaking. In exactly the same way, when I got in touch with my feelings and noticed how often I was annoyed, frustrated, peeved, angry and so on, I wanted to know the cause – was it always someone else’s fault, was it at root the result of imperfect nurturing/ environment/ circumstance or was it at root a biological heritage that I shared with all other human beings on the planet? For me it was an essential part of discovering how and why ‘I’ tick as I do. * PETER: Now the topic of this conversation is whether the deep-seated emotions of fear and aggression, nurture and desire are instinctual, as in biologically inherited, or whether they are the result of imperfect nurturing/environment. Your contribution to this discussion is presumably that one can never know which is fact given that –
This in effect means you are, exactly as the previous correspondence has done, sidelining yourself in any discussion about the means to bringing an end to the deep-seated emotions of fear and aggression, nurture and desire that are the root cause of human misery. RESPONDENT: What is it with you that for you a statement like ‘facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations’ means sidelining myself in any discussion about the means to bringing an end to deep-seated emotions? Ok, let me ask you: Facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations, or are they not? PETER: No, facts are not always susceptible of diverse explanations – that is a purely philosophical statement. The fact that you sat at your PC and typed out this response to me is not ‘susceptible of diverse explanation’ nor was the fact that your wife was in the kitchen making tea at the time you made the observation … exactly as the fact that I am now sitting at my PC typing out this response to you and the fact that you are now reading these words is not ‘susceptible to diverse explanations’. Given your current philosophical view that a fact, for example the fact that ‘people get angry’, is always susceptible of diverse explanations, it would make no sense at all for you to enter into a discussion about the reasons why people get angry because you would always have in mind that the fact that people get angry is refutable, as in ‘always susceptible to diverse explanations’, would it not? * PETER: The other thing that is worth noting is that whilst you are busy telling me that it is impossible for me to know – by my own observation and my own experience and verified by the observations and experiences of others – that something is a fact, you are busy challenging someone else on the list to disprove that what you say is not fact. Vis –
RESPONDENT: Please don’t put words into my mouth. PETER: I am not putting words in your mouth, I am quoting your own words that you yourself typed out, presumably whilst sitting at your PC. RESPONDENT: I am not at all busy telling you that it is impossible for you to know that something is a fact. PETER: I am wont to occasionally to paraphrase what someone says in down-to-earth unambiguous terms in order to call a spade a spade as it were. It is a habit that I also apply to my own thinking whenever I find myself vacillating over something that I already know to be obvious in order to confuse, avoid or deny the issue at hand. This is in fact what you wrote –
RESPONDENT: You simply and continuously confuse facts with hypotheses [= explanations of facts]. PETER: I could revert to a bit of t’is ‘tisn’t if you like – no, it’s you make a hypothetical distinction between facts and explanation of facts. As an example – . the explanation as to what your wife was doing in the kitchen was that she was making tea, i.e. it was a fact that she was making tea, not a hypothesis, nor a theory, let alone a ‘truth of a theory’. RESPONDENT: Just to make sure that we agree on that: 1. There are facts, or are there not? [I assume for a moment that you agree there are facts.] PETER: Why do you have to ‘assume’ that I agree that there are such things as facts – don’t you read what I write? RESPONDENT: There are facts, or are there not? [I assume for a moment that you agree there are facts.] Example for a fact: ‘People are getting angry.’ PETER: If you are telling me that there are such things as irrefutable facts – i.e. facts without your stock caveat ‘facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations’ – then I agree with you completely, totally and unequivocally. RESPONDENT: 2. The explanation of a fact is not a fact but a theory, or is it not? PETER: No, the explanation of a fact is an explanation of a fact – as in your wife was in the kitchen cooking tea – and the explanation of a fact does not turn a fact into a theory. RESPONDENT: [The explanation of a fact is not a fact but a theory, or is it not?] Example for a theory: ‘Instincts are genetically encoded.’ PETER: Okay, let’ go back to a fact that you acknowledge to be a fact – people are getting angry. Provided one acknowledges cause and effect, then the obvious next question is – what is the cause of people getting angry ... or to be more specific the question that occurred in my case because it is the only anger I can do something about, why do I get angry? There is nothing theoretical about giving an explanation of a fact nor about seeking an explanation for a fact – my wife is in the kitchen, why is she in the kitchen; there is water on the floor, why is there water on the floor; my computer has a fault, why doesn’t it work properly; people are getting angry, why are people getting angry? * PETER: The other thing that is worth noting is that whilst you are busy telling me that it is impossible for me to know – by my own observation and my own experience and verified by the observations and experiences of others – that something is a fact, you are busy challenging someone else on the list to disprove that what you say is not fact. Vis –
Nothing like telling someone one thing and then telling another something entirely contradictory, hey. RESPONDENT: Your accusation is unjustified because I am not telling you one thing and then telling No 37 something else. PETER: In that case I must have misunderstood – I took your question to be a rhetorical question in that you were claiming some things were facts and asking him to refute them, a position that contrasts with what you were telling me at the time – that there are no such things as incontrovertible facts. * RESPONDENT: Or put it differently: Such hypotheses as ‘genetic coding’ of instincts are really not inspired by the result of experience to nearly the same extent as they are by certain ‘preconceived ideas’. PETER: Indeed they are not – personal experience and global-wide experience is most often ignored or in many cases even denied in favour of ‘preconceived ideas’, as the following illustrates –
I’ll try and stop whistling ‘Give me that old time religion’ long enough to relate to you another personal on-the-ground observation I made that demonstrated that the instinctual passions are universal to all human beings on the planet and have existed for as long as human beings have existed – in other words, that fear, aggression, nurture and desire are biological inherited. RESPONDENT: Sentence 1: ‘Instinctual passions are universal to all human beings.’ Sentence 2: ‘Instinctual passions have existed for as long as human beings have existed.’ You did some observations, you had some experiences, you read a little bit and then you came up with these generalisations and logical conclusions in sentence 1 and 2; but these are not facts. PETER: I can’t help but notice that you inserted this comment before the observations that I made and made no comment at all about the observations I made which makes me wonder whether you take any notice at all of any observations or any experiences that anyone may have with regard to the source of human beings’ perpetual animosity towards other human beings, let alone the means to bringing an end to it. It also makes me wonder whether you ever watch the news on television at night-time or wether you have ever become aware of your own feelings whilst watching the news. * PETER: As a somewhat callow young man aged 20, I went to Europe for the first time and was particularly struck by the fact that literally every square metre of Europe had been soaked in human blood at some stage in history, be it in pre-historic times, the stone age, the iron age, the bronze age, medieval times or modern times, given that World War Two had only ended less than a quarter of a century prior to my visit. Wherever I went I found monuments to some battle or other and remnants of defensive walls and embattlements from all cultures and all epochs and visited field upon field, village upon village, and city upon city where hundreds, thousands and sometimes millions of human beings had either deliberately killed and maimed their fellow human beings or had been deliberately killed and maimed by their fellow human beings. I was also struck by the fact that these same disputes, skirmishes, battles and wars are still being waged all over the planet, either overtly or covertly, and will keep on doing so for no other reason that it is human nature for human beings to keep doing so. Faced by the utter futility of ever being able to do anything about the situation, I, like countless others before and since, learned to turn a blind eye to what I had seen with my own eyes and in doing so desensitised myself from feeling such feelings as sorrow, grief, despair and hopelessness when confronted with the extent of human beings’ perpetual animosity towards other human beings. RESPONDENT: … … … * RESPONDENT: Richard claims to report ‘direct experiences’ and not expounding ‘theory’ or ‘hypotheses’. I don’t have to say anything anymore about the validity of these ‘reports’. PETER: And yet immediately after this declaration ‘I don’t have to say anything anymore about the validity of these ‘reports’, you were busy telling someone else on the list –
Nothing like telling someone one thing and then telling another something entirely contradictory, hey. RESPONDENT: Why would I be not allowed to explain to somebody else that Richard, in my humble or not so humble opinion, mistook the psychic for the spiritual after saying that I have nothing to say about the validity of his reports of ‘direct experiences’? Your accusation is unjustified. You keep on constructing conflicts and contradictions where there are none. PETER: To say that you don’t have to say anything anymore about the validity of the observations and experience that someone has with regard to the source of human beings’ perpetual animosity towards other human beings and the means to bringing an end to it to one person and then, only hours later, make categorical statements to another person on this mailing list about the validity of that person’s observations and experience seems a contradiction to me, but then again I’m a layman, not a philosopher. * RESPONDENT: But one thing is for sure: Unless you are Richard, all you do is turning his ‘reports’ into preconceived ideas, which, because you lack his ‘direct experiences’, you subsequently use as interpretative filters for your experiences and observations to make them fit to them. PETER: That’s a crock argument if ever I have heard one. RESPONDENT: Why would that be a crock argument? For me it is a logical conclusion. PETER: That’s odd, I thought it was a put-down of the ‘you are only a mere follower and as such can’t think for yourself’ category, in other words, a crock argument. * PETER: I have just related to you the observations I made and the conclusions I drew from these observations about human nature that I had in Europe as a young man in my twenties – some 15 years before I fell under the influence of Eastern religious dogma and some 30 years before I had ever met Richard. For all I know, you may well have made similar observations as I did as a youth – given that I have met only a few people who have not been interested in peace on earth at some stage in their lifetimes – and it is clear that you also have subsequently settled on an explanation for the underlying cause for all the mayhem and carnage that human beings have and continue to inflict upon each other – [Respondent]: ‘the ‘Power of Imagination’, symbolically depicted as a dragon or monster and also identified with ‘Satan’ (literally ‘adversary’) is, in fact, the energy of the instincts.’ [endquote]. If that is the conclusion you have come to, then fair enough, but you are wasting your time trying to convince me that human beings are meant to forever wage war against an imaginary Evil satanic force, be it imaginary, mythical, symbolic, psychic, psychological, spirit-ual, formless or whatever. RESPONDENT: I am not trying to convince you that human beings are meant to forever wage war against an imaginary Evil satanic force etc. All I am saying is that the dangers of the psychic domain was well known to the different religious tradition and that they all kept on warning people to not falling for the ‘Power of Imagination’. PETER: No, that is not at all what you said. What you said was –
When someone says that something ‘is in fact the energy of the instincts’, I take the word ‘energy’ to mean the activating source that produces the effect. Why do you insist on playing your cards so close to your chest, why not lay them on the table – is this not the conclusion you have come to as to why people get angry? * RESPONDENT: We are not at all talking about a ‘fact’ when we talk about ‘genetically encoded instincts’ and we also don’t talk about a report of a ‘direct experience’; what we discuss here is a so-called scientific theory and weigh its evidence; it goes without saying that such a theory can necessarily never be more than hypothetical. PETER: Rephrasing your crock argument using ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ and repeating makes it no less of a crock. RESPONDENT: Ok, let me ask you some questions: When I talk about genetically coded instincts, am I talking about (a) a fact or (b) a direct experience or c) a so-called scientific theory? PETER: As far as I am aware, the only thing you have said with regard to instincts is what you said above –
Given that this is your statement, you must know on what basis you made it. As a matter of interest, would you mind letting us know whether or not it is fact, direct experience, so-called scientific theory or something else? RESPONDENT: When you talk about genetically coded instincts, are you talking about (a) a fact or (b) a direct experience or c) a so-called scientific theory? PETER: You might not have noticed but over the past weeks I have made clear in several posts the personal observations I have made, together with some of the documented observations of others, some of the now-unethical behavioural studies of human propensity for anger along with some of the archaeological evidence of perpetual human violence together with primatological observations of violence in similar animals that I have read of, along with reports of the direct experience of my own deep-seated feelings and passions operating as ‘me’. But most tellingly of all, anyone who can recall having had a pure consciousness experience – an experience of being temporarily free from the human condition, and from this vantage point can very clearly see how the human condition operates – knows by their own direct experience that human beings are still slaves to their primitive animal past in that they still instinctually regard being alive as a grim and desperate battle for survival – a battle largely fought against their fellow human beings – and that this archaic instinctual imperative is the root cause of human beings perpetual animosity towards other human beings. RESPONDENT: When No 95 talks about genetically coded instincts, is No 95 talking about (a) a fact or (b) a direct experience or c) a so-called scientific theory? PETER: No 95 has been quite adamant that he has no certainty, no personal experience, no theories nor any conviction about the source of the deep-seated human emotions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, rather he made clear what his motive was in writing to me about the subject in his last comment to me –
* PETER: Perhaps I can summarize what your current proposition is to this mailing list is – on the one hand that the deep-seated emotions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire are not in fact instinctual passions because ‘facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations’ and on the other that ‘ … ‘Satan’ (literally ‘adversary’) is, in fact, the energy of the instincts’. Is that not the gist of it? RESPONDENT: No, it is not. However you like to call it, ‘instinctual passions’ or the ‘Power of Imagination’ it is just a name for the phenomenon that people become angry. These words are not explanations; they are the name of the phenomenon. The Ancients called the phenomenon ‘Satan’; you call it ‘instinctual passions’. The fact that people get angry is in no way effected by the names we give to the phenomenon. PETER: Has it ever occurred to you that homilies such as ‘the word is not the thing so it doesn’t matter what name we give to a thing’ is nothing but a platitude and a ploy – a platitude in that it is oft trotted out without any thought as to sensibility and consequence of what is being said and a ploy in that it makes nonsense of the commonplace convention of using different words to describe different things and as such ends the possibility of being able to have a sensible conversation with anybody about anything. Meanwhile back in the real world, you yourself have acknowledged that anger is a fact, and whether or not the energy of that anger is called ‘Satan’ or is in fact a biological imperative that has its roots in instinctual animal behaviour does indeed matter in that it affects people’s attitude and approach to dealing with the fact that people do get angry from time to time. Those who believe passions such as anger and sorrow are synonymous with the ‘Power of Imagination’, aka ‘Satan’, are prone to seek repentance, forgiveness and solace in religious belief whereas those not so inclined may well be open to what is being said on the Actual Freedom Trust website site and may even be capable of taking what is said at face value. * PETER: And in the meantime the suggestion that twigged you to write this post to me remains unaddressed by you –
At least my previous correspondent responded to my suggestion succinctly before grasping for an intellectual get-out. RESPONDENT: It was not my intention to address your piece of writing. PETER: Obviously not. RESPONDENT: Besides, you can be as mature and grown up as you possibly can imagine and you can have so many experiences of how you ‘tick’, somebody else ticks, animals behave etc. PETER: And yet you yourself make definitive explanations about how other people tick ‘… ‘Satan’ (literally ‘adversary’) is, in fact, the energy of the instincts’ and the ‘Power of Imagination’ it is just a name for the phenomenon that people become angry’. May I ask what is the source for your explanation of the fact that people get angry, given that it is apparently not based on empirical research?
RESPONDENT: All your empirical research will never ever turn the explanation of a fact into a fact. PETER: But then again a clear eyed, non-philosophical observation meant that you were able to explain to me that the reason your wife was in the kitchen was that she cooking tea. If you want to ascertain the difference between fact on one hand and theory, belief and hypothesis on the other, then down-to-earth observations such as these are the very place to start. A word of warning though, if you make such clear-eyed down-to-earth observations your prime business in life, you will be on the slippery slope to the ending of ‘me’. * PETER: I find it very odd indeed when I reflect back to the start of the mailing list and recall what a good opportunity it offered for people from all over the world to have a free-ranging down-to-earth discussion about bringing an to human malice and sorrow to nowadays finding myself having discussions with people who refuse to discuss the issue of personally actualizing peace on earth because they are so convinced that it is a fact that nothing at all can be known for a fact about any issues concerning peace on earth and that any experiences relating to the issue of peace on earth can be summarily dismissed as being relative/ subjective. RESPONDENT: Yes, that is indeed odd but it is totally off topic and irrelevant to my statement that ‘Facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations’ etc. PETER: You might have missed the sign on the door before you chose to subscribe to this mailing list –
Given that what is on offer here is a *non-spiritual* and down-to-earth freedom from the human condition of malice and sorrow your explanation that the fact that people get angry is synonymous with ‘The Power of Imagination’, aka ‘Satan’, is so far off topic I’m inclined to start singing ‘Give me that olde time religion, give me that olde, time religion, it’s good enough for me’ and wander off and make myself a cup of coffee.
PETER: As a somewhat callow young man aged 20, I went to Europe for the first time and was particularly struck by the fact that literally every square metre of Europe had been soaked in human blood at some stage in history, be it in pre-historic times, the stone age, the iron age, the bronze age, medieval times or modern times, given that World War Two had only ended less than a quarter of a century prior to my visit. Wherever I went I found monuments to some battle or other and remnants of defensive walls and embattlements from all cultures and all epochs and visited field upon field, village upon village, and city upon city where hundreds, thousands and sometimes millions of human beings had either deliberately killed and maimed their fellow human beings or had been deliberately killed and maimed by their fellow human beings. I was also struck by the fact that these same disputes, skirmishes, battles and wars are still being waged all over the planet, either overtly or covertly, and will keep on doing so for no other reason that it is human nature for human beings to keep doing so. Faced by the utter futility of ever being able to do anything about the situation, I, like countless others before and since, learned to turn a blind eye to what I had seen with my own eyes and in doing so desensitised myself from feeling such feelings as sorrow, grief, despair and hopelessness when confronted with the extent of human beings’ perpetual animosity towards other human beings. RESPONDENT: I don’t know what I am supposed to comment here. It is fact that people are killing people. PETER: I have always taken that as a given, an undeniable irrefutable fact that I first became aware of as a ten year old when I first saw photos of piles of corpses from what has become known as the holocaust on my parents black and white TV. RESPONDENT: Question: Why do they do kill each other? Answer: Because they are subject to the passions. PETER: I have since come to know that such killings as the holocaust – an estimated 4,200,000
to 5,800,000 human beings killed – are in fact but the tip of a very big iceberg indeed in that an estimated 160,000,000 human beings were killed
by other human beings in wars alone in the last century and perhaps even more tellingly an estimated 174,000,000 human beings died at the hands of
their own autocratic governments in the last century alone RESPONDENT: Question: Why are they subject to the passions? In the answer to this question you come up with all these theories (evolution, biological heritage, social conditioning), which, eventually, lead you into an explanatory dead-end street: It is all due to blind nature! PETER: The explanation that the passion for killing, for example, is a biological inheritance passed down through the genes that we human animals share with all other animals was traditionally a dead-end street but this no longer the case nowadays. Prior to the discovery that an actual freedom from the instinctual passions of malice and of sorrow is possible, the spiritualists had the meaning-of-life market cornered in that they proposed that life on earth was fundamentally miserable because the ‘true’ meaning of life was to found ‘elsewhere’, i.e. somewhere other than in the physical world. Materialists were then left with the counter-proposition that there is no such thing as a meaning of life that needs to be sought and found in order to find fulfilment – a position which leaves them espousing various coping mechanisms and ideologies aimed at ‘making the best of reality’. The recent discovery of actualism means there is now a third alternative to the usual either/or alternative of spiritualism vs. materialism and one no longer needs to deny or ignore the fact that human beings are instinctually driven beings – nowadays one has the option of taking a clear-eyed look at this fact and get on with the business of becoming free from the instinctual passions themselves. As always, the ball is in your court to do with this change in circumstance what you want.
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