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coberst 03-6-2007 04:01 PM

Violence in the shadows
 
Violence in the shadows

There are various forms of violence; science categorizes them by the human unconscious motivation.

Playful violence is not motivated by hate or the urge to destroy but in the pursuit of displaying skill. However, there is often unconscious aggression and destructiveness hidden behind the explicit logic of the game.

Reactive violence is that which is employed in defense of life, freedom or dignity. It is rooted in fear, which can be imagined or real, it can be conscious or unconscious. This form of violence is in the service of life and not destruction. It implies certain proportionality between means and end.

Often the perceived threat is a result of outside manipulation by political or religious leaders. Reactive violence is often that which is vigorously defended as being necessary. We do not want to be facing the possibility that our violence is without reason. We always want to be confident that we are independent thinkers capable of distinguishing truth from fiction. We vehemently deny any hint of having been manipulated into violence by our leaders.

Frustration is often the cause for reactive violence. Also this form of violence can be induced as a result of envy and jealousy.

Revengeful violence induced by revenge is reaction to something already having happened. The strength of the revenge motive is in “inverse proportion to the strength and productiveness of a group or of an individual.” The impotent individual has but one recourse for reestablishing his lost self-esteem, “an eye for an eye”. The person who lives productively is not driven to such extremes; s/he can easily forget such insults because living productively provides immunity against the emotion of revenge.

“Psychoanalytic material demonstrates that the mature, productive person is less motivated by the desire for revenge than the neurotic person who has difficulties in living independently and fully, and who is often prone to stake his whole existence on the wish for revenge.”


A shattering of faith is a motive for revengeful violence, which often occurs in the life of a child. The infant and developing child starts life often with a strong sense of faith in the mother’s warmth and care. This can express it self with any and all relatives, but this faith is often shattered at an early age. This faith in life can be harmed by what we might think of as small things such as the death of a friend or pet. We might consider such matters to be the common disillusionments of life but, to the child, what matters is the sharpness and severity of the particular disappointment.

Quotes from “The Heart of Man”—Erich Fromm

Cristian989 03-6-2007 11:39 PM

Re: Violence in the shadows
 
The unconcious is a theory. "Science" is wayy too broad of a term to be throwing around like that.

I dunno.

Kilroy_x 03-7-2007 12:04 AM

Re: Violence in the shadows
 
Random nominal categories ahoy! Actually that's very reasonable, just unfalsifiable. Sort of like 99% of psychology. Well, you have to know where you've come from to know where you're going, I guess.

coberst 03-7-2007 03:40 AM

Re: Violence in the shadows
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Cristian989 (Post 1304262)
The unconcious is a theory. "Science" is wayy too broad of a term to be throwing around like that.

I dunno.


We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”.

P.S If we take a big bite out of reality we will, I think, find that it is multilayered like the onion. There are many domains of knowledge available to us for penetrating those layers of reality. Cognitive science is one that I find to be very interesting.

Cristian989 03-7-2007 01:26 PM

Re: Violence in the shadows
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by coberst (Post 1305707)
This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science.

I'm glad you have a personal opinion about this, but this sounds way too generalized. I would like to see some examples atleast.

Quote:

Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.
Empirical evidence? I love how you just throw those terms around. How about some studies that have come to this conclusion. NO, not what someone interpreterted the research as, but what the findings are actually were.

Even if they are supposedly "empirical" findings, they are not perfect because studies have flaws, etc, and I take it that if you read enough about any emperical finding, you would find that there is usually contraditions that are found in other research in other fields of psychology that have a different point of view that is also supported empirically.

Quote:

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
Again, please gimme an example of a study (which I take it would probably have to me a meta-analysis since you said "findings").


Quote:

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”
That's not good enough to support your point.

Quote:

There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.
Different synapses? Do do realize that a synapse is not actually "connected", but instead it's a gap between (usually) the dentrites and the terminal button. Neurotransmitters are released which travel across the gap to receptors who continue the signal (ie. action potential). P.S. that's not cognitive, that's neuroscience.

Quote:

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.
What about abstract thoughts? Those don't exist, yet we still have a category for "freedom" and for "hatred". By the way, that's one way to look at it, but a social psychologist/cognitive even would argue that humans have "schemas" and that these schemas can be easily altered using priming.

Again, that'ts just one way different areas of psychology have their own way to explain behavior. And just like cognitive, other areas also have emperical evidence to back them up.

coberst 03-7-2007 03:21 PM

Re: Violence in the shadows
 
Cristian

The book "Philosoph in the Flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson has a very substantial bibliography with numerious studies which can provide the party who is interested in seeing data.


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