Happiness Is A Scam, Santosh Jha [bill gates books recommendations txt] 📗

imagine and extend our ‘self’ into the consciousness of others to visualize what others feel doing something. We tend to recognize whatever is benchmarked by ‘collective other’ action-behavior as ‘successful’ and then ape it. This seems wired in the newly evolved cortical layers of brain. As this cyclicality gets internalized in brain states as ‘memory’, we feel rewarded when we successfully ape the established benchmarks of mass majority behavior-action patterns; especially that of those people, whom society-culture labels as ‘successful’ and powerful. This is altogether different matter that when people ape, they mostly ape the ‘ritual’ of success, not the essence of it. This predominance of visual brain makes it easy to see the rituals but it is difficult to precisely visualize and imagine the essence of an action-behavior. People see a successful man always wearing white clothes and they all start wearing white clothes. Nobody cares why this successful man wears white and what this color preference signifies for his success. It happens because white clothe is visible and easy to be aped, whereas the essence or deep causalities of success is intangible, not visible and therefore cannot be easily aped. That is probably why human world has 99 percent rituals, only one percent essence of reality. This ritualism is innately embedded in perceptions as well as attitudes and mannerisms. So, we just need to keep this hypothesis as probability, as it may help us in understanding the ‘context’ of perceptional realities we accept. This shall help us in deciphering, what part of the Happiness Perception is ritualistic and what is true essence of the reality of Happiness. Just keep in mind that it is a favorite psychological standpoint that people feel happier among people, doing things in togetherness and turn sad and depressed when lonely. Psychologically speaking, humans have been labeled as social beings and their innate sense of wellness is entrenched in gregarious living. Gregariousness; sense of collective wellness and aping are huge contexts or filters for perception of Reality for average men and women.

Criticality of Sociability in Brain Evolution – As listed above, modern human brain evolution was triggered and energized by three factors, which we can sum up as ‘survival need’ to ‘match up’ with what mass majority of other humans do in the large collective grouping of family and society. Science tells us that ethnicity and racialism are wired behavioral traits in humans. This is simply an expression of the human brain, which feels safe and rewarded in ‘similarity’ and homogeneity. People with same skin color, appearances and habits in a localized milieu were trusted and enhanced survival potential. Anyone looking different was suspected and dispelled from local milieus. This instinct is still intact and this ethnicity-preference is expressed, often brutally, in racial feelings. We can hypothesize from these facts that our brain evolved to its contemporary form, primarily oriented towards creating neural suitability and adaptability to attain optimum survival and mating successes in collective milieus of family, society, tribe and ethnic homogeneity. Human brain is wired ‘disproportionately’ towards ‘societal needs’ and optimizing survival-mating prospects of individual within collective domains of society and cultures. This is over-encompassing, instinctive and engrained propensity in all mammalian brain. However, as human societal-cultural-political milieus are far more massive and complex, humans seem to have deeper and more intense ‘Social Needs’ than other animals. It can be safely hypothesized that in long journey of evolution of human brain in the last hundred thousand years of settled living, the innate and primeval ‘Survival Needs’ have got merged and assimilated in more current and relevant ‘Social Needs’. In other words, we can say, innate and core survival needs of individual, now get expressed in terms of social needs. In fact, as we shall detail later; the fulcrum of societal-cultural-political propriety and jurisprudence is this ‘authoritative alignment’ of individuality with collective sanity and system. We shall talk about more specific aspects of all these later. What we intend to do here is, install a probability of a hypothesis that modern human brain has evolved to hardwired aping, adaptability, assimilation and co-option with collective benchmarking of normal-appropriate-righteousness, to optimize survival-mating potentials in the external milieus. The simple, straight and uncomplicated statement of fact is – Our brain and its cosmos of perceptions is almost fixated to accept all aims-purposes-successes of ‘self’ or individuality, in terms of the ‘singular suitability’ of what is best and ideal for life-living in societal-cultural domain. In other words; brain accepts utility-worth-goodness primarily on the basis of singular ‘Context’ and this context is – Societal-Cultural. This hypothesis we need to keep in mind when we step further into more details of related aspects of how our brain works, how our consciousness is shaped and how we perceive and actualize reality.

Here, we need to sum up the progression of human brain evolution, listing out critical elements, which were primary causalities. As humans stepped down from trees, they needed to roam and gather-hunt food from a larger areas, which required better suitability of brain in creating ‘familiarity’ with territory, wider physical milieu, predators and prey. Probably, human brain required more neural connections and activities to enhance the capability of ‘recognizing’ as the essential tool of survival and success. This recognizable ‘memory’ was essentially visual memory as hunter-gatherer early humans required great ‘mapping’ memory of the landscape, full of uncertainties. It probably remains till date like that. Even in contemporary human world, a person whose memory is better than most, is considered a genius. Science now tells us that such people with strong and unflinching memory have troubles in some aspects of cognitive abilities and relationship domains. Still, most people feel ‘Happy’ to be genius of memory than genius of societal skills. We don’t go into it here.

Moreover, as later, settled and organized life-living emerged and it created family, society, cultures and tribal ethnicities, regional identities, etc.; human brain probably required more ‘information processing’ function, as compared to earlier suitability of primarily having a ‘recognizing’ skill. This information process had to be there as social and cultural living required complex behavioral adaptabilities in collective living. The hierarchical societal system, power-authority inequalities, appropriateness of behavior-action in collective spaces, as against individual liberty, et al required far more brain processing neural plexuses. The society and collective living evolved in its complexities and naturally twin challenges were faced by human brain – first to process available and incoming information from growingly complex collective living spaces to optimize an individual’s successes in survival and mating. Second; complex life-living also created new technologies and tools, which required new and complex skills to handle and excel in. These skills required human brain to process information better to create a synchronous action-behavior by manipulating and managing better motor skills and neural symmetry.

The cortical region of new brain states emerged and got consolidated to adapt to these new challenges and that is why we can hypothesize that human brain’s perception of reality and survival intelligence evolved largely ‘contextual’ to normality and righteousness in collective space and less in exclusively individual domain. This created a cyclicality in the long years to follow when human societies and cultures, life-living and human system became hugely complex. The individual perception catered to collective normality and collective benchmarking of reality growingly got embedded in human brain plexuses.

Many scientists believe that the seed of emergence of human subjective consciousness, what we know as definitive sense of ‘I’ or self; happened as a person required to install a deep sense of ‘Others’, as extension of his or her ‘Individuality’. Animals do not have consciousness like humans as their sense of ‘Other’ is not as marked as that in humans as humans have society, cultures, polity and religion. How this ‘other’ milieu shapes up an individual’s perception and disposition; is a deep domain, which must be understood in details. We do not have the space to elaborate it here but every aware person must invest efforts to acquire knowledge about this aspect of his or her consciousness. This aspect is a key hypothesis, which shall lend us leads to our further investigation into human mind and perception of realities.

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Nature’s Intelligence and Perception

We all are so used to accepting ourselves as a definitive protagonist; someone, who is in control of his or her life and executor of all decisions of behavior and action in every moment of living. When we know in detail about how our brains evolved and how nature and evolution engrained and embedded its innate intelligence of ‘suitable’ action-behavior, we can see and realize how this view is scammed. Science is more or less unanimous in declaring that we humans have no Free Will and what we all do and act as, are shaped up by chemical mechanisms and processes in brain and body. We, our sense of ‘I’, only ‘owns’ what brain states decide for us. Average person does not understand and accept this ‘dualism’ of self – the subconscious Self, which is ‘owned’ by the conscious Self but very rarely in ‘control’ of it. This chemical mechanisms and processes are the script of nature and evolution, installed in brain states as Innate Intelligence, which largely shape up and functionalize what we do and how we behave.

The same hypothesis also explains how and why what we feel and how we perceive reality is not an independent and free willed option but an expression of wired intelligence of nature; embedded in our body-brain system, through a complex plexus of chemicals. As ‘we’ and our body-mind are not the same reality; similarly we and our feelings-perceptions are not same realities. We detail the functionality of brain to understand it better. This shall unravel the ‘scam’ which we all live out and seldom realize, we are in.

Human brain is a bizarre marvel of nature and evolution. If early humanity could understand how life-living and almost every reality in the living world is so conflicted and dualistic; they unfortunately could not know that it had its roots and genesis in the way human mind evolved and came to be what it is today and how it works. Contemporary humanity understands it as modern science has deciphered many aspects of brain, its structural marvel and functional complexities. We can clearly see and understand, why life-living is innately conflicted and why this leads to we humans getting into a scammed perception of most realities; especially life-living and personal realities. We are talking about this in detail here to get to the bottom of this conflict as well as the scam trajectory, in the long history of evolution of human brain.

There has been loads of researches in brain functioning and also many path-breaking headways have been made in understanding how human brain works out realities for us, how brain arrives at a specific decision and above all; how consciousness – the subjective sense and feel of ‘I’ or Self ‘owns’ what the brain states decide. However, there is no finality as so much of brain mechanisms and processes are still to be known and what is available for understanding may also be very partial. We have also discussed how human dependence on analogies and symbols, especially of languages we know and speak, restrict the holism of our understanding of complicated ideas like consciousness, cognition and causalities of realities. That is why; it is my humble and sincere request that we must never accept any aspect of information; we are talking here, as more than hypothesis. What we are talking about and what we arrive at; may at best be accepted as probability. It is up to you to inquire more and deeper into what we have talked here and internalize yourself, what you arrive at after personal assessment.

We are essentially trying to work around a hypothesis to understand the realities of perceptions and feelings, we own and live out, which may help us to better understand how and what part of our populist and dominant perceptions are ‘scammed’. We are dealing with Happiness but it also involves our inquiries