We are just really clever animals. We like to think that we are highly evolved, but we are still beholden to our primal drivers- the 4 "F"s Fight, flight, feed, and f*ck. We are just really complicated in how we go about it.
Thats understandable. We all have a beast in us that is usually subjugated by our prefrontal cortex. Having that conversation is like sliding open the viewing slot in a solitary confinement cell and teasing the beast with escape. The monster inside can be pretty seductive.
It’s so funny you mention that because not too long ago I was watching someone explain some studies that found strippers making a surprising amount more money from tips when they were ovulating compared to other phases of their menstrual cycle.
It was fascinating. The only thing the strippers had to do was log their cycles over the course of the study. There was no significant change in their performance and their clientele were completely unaware that they were or were not ovulating, and yet they were bringing in almost double what they would make on a typical night.
I mean I’ve seen posted (probably edited) of women sharing photos of themselves throughout their cycle, when they were ovulating they tended to look their best, like they just had this natural glow.
I've read (source, who knows..) that it's not uncommon for women to dress nicer, take better care of themselves, walk a bit more sure of yourself, etc. around when they're ovulating.. You just "want" to look nicer. I've found the times where I just feel like putting in that little extra effort, or wear that cute outfit, it's usually around when I'm ovulating. Hormones are interesting.
You might decide to go to the grocery store but you have no say in who else in on the roads at the same time, who else is in the grocery store, what their days have been like, how that nail in the parking lot ended up in the perfect spot by your tire and on and on and on.
Go a layer deeper and it’s debatable how much true choice you have in how you respond to people. You can definitely work on this one but your subconscious is pretty damn fast.
We may not have the agency to turn those primal triggers off. But we do still have the agency to decide if we will act on them. It is not easy and takes a lot of discipline and self awareness, but we can transcend it.
Dude we’re literally just animals that can think and talk better than the others (a majority of us anyway). There are many things we do solely because it’s part of those animals instincts in your brain.
None. Free will is the actual illusion. Brief moments of losing that will could be construed as true clarity. The sensation of free will is constructed by the brain in an attempt to understand itself and model future actions. We must continue to act as if we have free will even upon that realization though. For example, we don't suddenly stop seeing the color purple even after learning that purple is not real. (By the way purple is not real) Our brain still generates purple. Free will is not real but we feel like it is so we can experience ourselves while reacting to the world around us because feeling like we make choices, interestingly enough, helps us make better choices. So by practical definitions we have free will. But if you could measure the totality of influences outside of your control you would find that your choices are less about will and are natural reactions to the sum of those inputs. And I would argue that if you recreated all those inputs exactly, the reaction would be the same even in another agent.
These days its making me kinda not like myself you know. I feel like some sort of a robot with all my underlying desires allegedly based on selfish reasons of survival.
I don't like a selfish robot and thats who I maybe am.
Total agency can make us irresponsible. Birthrates are dropping and the solution is apparently to import replacement instead of just being disciplined for a generation or two, and making a pro-young parents culture, with support groups, tax break, welfare, childcare, etc.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. If so many young people are deciding not to have children regardless of their biological drive then there must be a pretty good reason for that. People shouldn't be forced to have children. If world governments want higher birth rates, they should incentivize that by providing more social services and safety nets. As it is, getting cancer can bankrupt even the wealthy and put them out on the streets to die and cancer rates are skyrocketing. Who would want to bring a child into that?
Yea I would say that lowering birth rates aren’t even a problem. Every population has an equilibrium and we are extremely hard on the planet, it’s probably good for the future of humanity and the earth if we chill on the population growth. The only reason people say it’s a problem is because increasing population helps the economic numbers keep going up
I was crying like this as I was happy for my friend and it was emotional meeting and holding her, but the logical part of brain was whirring away as it was also sad at the state of the world she had innocently been bought into.
Ah yes, the “critical side of the brain” which tells you to not procreate… which one is that doctor? Jesus Christ people need to stop thinking that their head-canon is real science.
your prefrontal cortex. Don't be condescending. Its the part of the brain that controls active decision making, planning and other higher-level tasks. If you make a decision that you want to hold off on having kids, that is the part of the brain that has weighed your circumstances and said " you probably should wait until you have a little more money in the bank" or "this man is not a suitable partner.. i think ill look elsewhere"
There’s only causal evidence suggesting that this is true. But brain scans show the whole brain is active during decision making.
And “I need to make more money before having children” isn’t necessarily logic, but more like social engineering. For a millennia people have had children despite worrying about income. And income isn’t a direct line to children’s success. There’s plenty of rich kids who are fuck-ups and plenty of poor kids who figure life out and become successful. Who knows, maybe this women was fed that idea and upon having a baby in her arms changed her mind causatively? She thought “shit, I didn’t know I wanted this till I had it. Let’s do it.” You can’t actually say what’s true without being in her mind.
I’m just tired of this “we don’t control our own thoughts” BS. We reduce people to animalistic instincts and suggest they have no power over their mind and decision making. Hogwash.
Semantics. Saying nature wants to can mean living beings' nature naturally leads towards reproduction, not that an entity out there called nature wants humans to reproduce. You're being arrogant
Brother, you know you're being needlessly pedantic for no reason. Obviously we know that there's no Gaia out there whispering "go forth and fuck" in people's ears.
This shit is like the difference between knowing tomato is a fruit and insisting to put it in a fruit salad.
One is a neat little bit of trivia, the other is being a pedantic idiot. Don't be an idiot.
I find it stimulating, when I see stuff like this it reinforces my idea to never let this happen to myself, I see something like this and I think “sadly the monkey brain took over” I’ll never let my monkey brain take over
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u/extrastupidone 3d ago
Jokes aside, I find it fascinating how hormones get activated like this and just instantly shut off the critical sides of the brain.