I generally start by asking someone whether they think humans are mammals. That one seems to be acceptable for most people. Then you just take the slider and move it along to see when the cognitive dissonance starts.
but if you slide away in the other direction, away from mammals, even if they agree humans are mammals, they will often say that humans are not animals.
@@rockmusicvideoreviewer896 if you are specifying "mammals" then the word "Animals" shouldnt even come into the conversation. eg: fish, amphibians, mammals, etc. If someone attempts to use your argument, its easy to just explain that that argument is blatantly inaccurate. Strawmanning would be the logical fallacy.
@@rockmusicvideoreviewer896 Using the common sense that God gave you , then you know we are not animals . My wife , son and i and our friends at our wonderful Fundamental Baptist Church are value producing humans created by God in his image , we are not filthy apes . Our ancestors are Adam and Eve , not some slimy creature that ' supposedly ' crawled out of the ocean a billion years ago . Jesus is the truth and he is alive today . Darwin was a lying Jagoff , and he and his pseudo science lies are dead . Jagoff is Pittsburgh slang meaning stupid jerk .
I've put it like this to others: The ONLY significant difference between them and us is language - which also allows for the story we tell OURSELVES about "what it all means"...
What's interesting to realize. Dolphins don't think of themselves as dolphins. It's just a word we use. They think something completely different. Canada geese don't give a fuck about arbitrary lines on a map that mean nothing to them. I'm not being contrarian to your post. I just think it's a humorous realization. I have an elderly neighbor that feeds the crows every morning. It annoys her that they show up earlier each day. (they view the day as the sun rising, they don't give a damn about what "time" it is) It's just humans that judge time via a mechanical device. (we don't even do it, we just accept it now) Edit: If clocks didn't exist, we wouldn't know crap about seconds, minutes or hours. Hell, we made that up too. Time can be measured. The measurements mean so little and only to us. (insofar as we describe time)
Just because you don’t understand a language doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Koko was able to learn sign language because the concept of communication was already there, and she understood it. I will admit that languages differ in complexity, but that is due to what needs to be communicated.
The similarities are remarkable. Furthermore, as Yuval Noah Harari points out to great effect in his book Sapiens, Humans are not the only sapiens to have lived on this Earth, though it's easy for us to forget that humans once shared this planet with Neanderthals, and many others species of Sapiens which engaged in even more human like behavior, such as creating jewelry/art.
Absolutely fascinating, Seth. Dian Fossie ("Gorillas in the Mist") and Jane Goodall have also reached these same conclusions regarding you Human's closest Primate progenitors. Excellent guest!
DATA: Ha, ha, ha! I get it. Ha. ha, ha! I get it. LAFORGE: You get what? DATA: When you said to Commander Riker 'The clown can stay...' Ha, ha, ha. '...but the Ferengi in the gorilla suit has to go.' Ha, ha, ha. LAFORGE: What are you talking about? DATA: During the Farpoint mission. We were on the bridge and you told the joke. That was the punch line. Ha, ha, ha! LAFORGE: Farpoint? Data, that was seven years ago. DATA: I know. I just got it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Very funny! Ha, ha, ha... Star Trek: "Generations" Context: Commander Data had just recently had his "emotion chip" upgrade installed. You Human's remind us of Ferengi in gorilla suits. (With just enough Klingon, The Borg, and "The Dominion" in you to be an extremely dangerous species.) P.S.: All of you Humans will eventually begin to see, that out of all your species artistic inspirations in the Science Fiction genre, truly: 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' was the most accurate and prescient interpretation. Guaranteed.
Like Mr. Hitchens informed us,we’re simply highly evolved mammals. But religious folks believe otherwise.If we truly were created in God’s image,we’d be invisible.
The average human is also capable of far less than we tend to give them credit for. One guy hundreds of years ago does something special after a long, convoluted life path which made them grow as a person and somehow random, unrelated people get the credit for it. 🙄 That is like judging the intelligence of a dog 🐕 by the top 0.000001% of them.
Humans have a tendency to go with extremes. There exist people that refuse to believe our ancestral path, there exist people who justify their actions based upon that ancestral path. Humans a a very fucked up species. So much potential, squandered constantly. I'm absolutely guilty too, as are we all. Not even in the manners I spoke of. If we all could just get a long and work towards goals for the species as a whole. It's shocking to even try to imagine what we could accomplish. Even if it was a localized hobby to do in off-time. What a town of 10,000 people could do could make the pyramids look fairly bland by comparison. In a disturbingly short amount of time. It's amazing to imagine. Like I said, I'm guilty too, I probably wouldn't take part in this hypothetical as socializing for socialization purposes weirds me out. Imaging what could be though is amazing.
Not super-distant relatives. I'm pretty sure you could train any of the great apes to use a lavatory - my guess is it would take about as long as potty training a human child. The problem comes in with the fact that the great apes have significantly stronger muscles than us, they don't necessarily know their own strength, their impulse control is not as finely tuned as ours but their desire to get their own way probably is. So, to put it another way, the great apes are dangerous. Fascinating, amazing and dangerous. Smaller monkeys present a wider range of challenges, I'm less sure that you could house-train them, while the strength is less of an issue they can bite and monkey bites are dangerous. (Interesting fact: human bites are dangerous, our oral cavities have a similar germiness to other monkeys. So if you bite hard enough, the person that is being bitten has a good chance of ending up with a nasty infection if they don't get treatment.) Because smaller monkeys are less similar to us than the great apes, looking after them well and ensuring their welfare is arguably more difficult.
Ernest Becker’s book “The Birth and Death of Meaning” asks the question, “where does meaning come from?” The short answer is: meaning comes from culture - our lives feel most meaningful when we believe we are participating successfully in the cultural hero-system, and we measure the success of our performance through social affirmation. Culture prescribes the roles, how well we execute the roles creates feelings of meaning and self-worth, and we assess the success of our execution by way of positive social regard. Of course, culture is artificial and meaning is therefore entirely fictional, but that’s not the short answer. Here’s the long answer. Where does our self-concept come from? To discover any sort of meaning, self-worth, or self-value, one must first develop a self. Where does this self-awareness come from? Becker starts with our evolutionary history, arguing that group activities like hunting required keen perception and cooperation. If you’re my hunting partner, I need to predict your behaviour and you need to predict mine (notice this requires a concept of “I” and “you”). Back at home camp, anticipating behaviour was aided by the development of a symbolic social hierarchy - roles were assigned and social status became relevant. To reduce anxiety and be successful in the group, you needed to know what part you played and what was expected of that part. This, Becker argues, is where the self-concept was born. To predict your behaviour I must first recognize my own agency and then recognize you too have this agency - I need a self-concept, which I then use to anticipate your behaviour by projecting myself into your situation aided by my knowledge of your social roles and the expectations of those roles (we know this today as “theory of mind”). These social roles, rules, and customs are what culture is - the symbolic schema we created to predict behaviour, which then transforms into the symbolic schema that we derive meaning and self-worth from.
Symbolic vs. physical existence We have our bodies, our physical selves, but we don’t identify with them as much as we do our inner selves, our symbolic selves. Consider the banker who loses billions of dollars of client money and falls into a deep depression. He has a physical body, but the most important part of him (by his own apparent evaluation) extends to numbers in a bank account… what they symbolize about him. The overgrown weeds on your front lawn aren’t just weeds, they say something about you as a person, as do your unruly children or your messy car. Humans don’t live in a world of pure sensation, we live in a world of symbols, and we derive our sense of self and self-worth from this symbolic world. Our self-esteem grows from how well we believe we are inhabiting the roles and statuses of this fictional construction. To wonder whether you are valuable and whether your life is meaningful is to wonder where you fit into the cultural schema, how well you’re meeting the expectations, and whether others think your performance has been successful - as social creatures, we measure everything against the yardstick of positive social regard. The upshot of this is that our consciousness of self is a social construction. Symbolic self-representation is built from the outside in, which means our identities are, in essence, social products. We can’t divorce meaning from culture or ourselves from our symbolic worldviews any more than we can grow wings and fly. This makes man an interesting animal indeed, the only species that “vitally depends on a symbolic constitution of his worth. Once this has been achieved the rest of the person’s entire life becomes animated by the artificial symbolism of self-worth; almost all his time is devoted to the protection, maintenance, and aggrandizement of the symbolic edifice of his self-esteem.”
Culture as a codified hero-system When Becker says that man’s urge is to heroism, he’s not referring to the gladiators or warriors of old - he’s referring to man’s desire to be admired, to feel important. Culture is the vehicle - the codified hero-system - the means to become someone of importance (a “hero”). We earn our heroism, our self-esteem, by impressing our friends, by getting good grades, or by dressing well. As we reach adulthood, we earn it by performing well in the roles society offers: doctor, lawyer, professor, scientist - successful businessman, loving mother, stable father, dutiful friend, etc. We pride ourselves on being funny, artistic, generous, studious, ambitious, pious, or wise. By being good at these roles, by inhabiting these prescribed identities, we derive our vital sense of self-worth. “Almost all of one’s inner life, when he is not absorbed in some active task, is a traffic in images of self-worth.” We nourish ourselves with a constant inner newsreel of self-esteem images and evaluations. We think fondly about the bonus we earned, the book we published, the praise we received, the prestigious college our children attend. We strive for heroic self-identity. We are all culture-heroes, trying to stand out. You could say that while the initial role of culture was to help early humans predict behaviour (and provide physical security), equally important was the role of culture in making enduring self-esteem possible. The cultural hero-system is how we convince ourselves that we are an object of primary value, and it provides the prescription for meaningful action.
Consequences of living in a contrived world “First we discover who society says we are: then we build our identity on performance in that part. If we uphold our part in the performance, we are rewarded with social affirmation of our identity. It is hardly an exaggeration, then, to say that we are created in the performance.” The social environment is the only way we derive and validate our identities. The question may be “Who am I?” but the real question is “How are others supposed to feel about me?” And the scaffolding for everything is the codified cultural hero-system. What are the consequences of basing meaning and self-esteem on this artificial, fragile scaffolding? Aside from the obvious (which is that the whole thing could collapse at any moment), to maintain our self-worth, we must constantly perform up to societal expectations. We are inseparable from our roles, and so executing the roles well is vitally important. What then for the breadwinner who becomes disabled, the woman who grows old, the father who feels unfulfilled - anyone who doesn’t fit the mold or can’t play the part? Not living up to cultural expectations isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s an apocalypse of self-esteem and meaning. And when culture fails? When it no longer does its job to construct a “meaningful hero-system for its members”? Then depression, chaos, and anarchy reign.
Surely there is a redeeming final arch to this story… Prepare to be disappointed because this is where Becker falls back on his trusty crutch, religion. He offers (albeit half-heartedly) that a religious worldview may be less prone to collapse - that if we traffic in the shadowy virtues of some invisible after-world, perhaps our self-esteem will be more immune to disintegration. My take-away from this prescription is that living in an illusion of your own creation is more stable than living in an illusion created by others. You’re better able to control your own fantasy than the cultural fiction you were born into. I don’t doubt the logic of this, but it’s still a cosmic cop-out. Culture is arbitrary, contrived… fabricated. And if meaning is derived from our participation in the cultural hero-system, then meaning is fictional too. That doesn’t make meaning or culture superfluous - indeed, they are deadly serious - but it does make them artificial. Your sense of inner worth and importance, your self-esteem and self-assuredness, rests entirely on make-believe.
I submit that the entire Adam & Eve story, about falling from the Grace of Gawd..... is nothing more than ancient humans trying to figure out & explain that inner chimp that resides in us....not all of us.... they created the Cain & Abel story to further demonstrate what human nature is all about. Some humans are Cain like...others Abel like. It's pretty simple to see this in my mind. And then there's every other type of personality that has evolved in-between.
Parts of the Adam and Eve story are adapted from different mesoptamia myths. The first three versus appear to be borrowing from the Enuma Elis. The intent of this story was to show why Marduk was inferior to the older gods. In order to do this the scribes needed to elevate the Sea Monster, Tiamat from the waters of the deep in Ancient Eridu traditions, a kind of nature sprite to a sentient shape shifting god. And thus Ea and An are unable to kill her and they run away. Marduk then comes forth and claims he will get rid of her but they must give him supremecy over the heavens and Earth which they concede. The other part of the story comes from the story of Nammu and Ea (Stories patterned after Ea or his sages are used a lot in the Bible. Ia was the Eblaite name of Ea which is seen a lot in the names of the early kings of Israel). To understand the nature of these stories we need to understand that the waters beneath the earth in Genesis nine and Tahom in Genesis 1 are not just random story additions but are indirect references to the two earliest known ‘gods’ of Eridu. To further understand Eridu was a sandy island built in a swamp that was protected by eriduan floods by the south bank of the Euphrates and the width and depth of the swamp with low threshold outlets to the gulf and lowest Euphrates. As a consequence Eridu survived when other early settlements collapsed. While irrigation agriculture already existed up stream in Samarah culture, the relatively secure location at Eridu allowed them to develop mud-based irrigation schemes and canals that eventually dominated Sumerian agriculture. So that there were several important aspects of life, the waters, Absu (Swamp) and the mud, which they used to grow barley (--> beer) and thus life. The earth is associated with fertility, with a water table just below the surface Eridu could grow super-subsistence crops. By 7300 years ago they began construction on the first temple. Within the Uruk period the sprite god of the temple was replaced by a sentient god Enki, the water bringer, a wisdom/trickery god. The mud/water god Nammu was his mother. She could make the other gods. When it was determined by the gods that they need helpers because the work was to hard for the gods, she, the creator, asked Enki. Enki instructed her how to make humans from wetted sediments. This trait was then learned by a lessor god who made humans with various imperfections. Enki however possessed the Mes, so that he could imbue each variant with special roles in life. The snake story in Genesis is a variation on Gilgameshes search for eternal life in Dilmun in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Enki (before 2300 BCE) = Ea (after 2300 BCE) = Ia (Ebla ~ 2000 BCE) = yah (S. Canaan, post LBAC, aleph Beth) These are not any stories, they evolved over time from distinct origins in S. Mesopotamia.
@@Darisiabgal7573 Thanks for the history lesson...most excellent indeed .. While I can agree that the Genesis myth was "inspired" by previous creation stories, Genesis primarily is about the human condition, which has not really changed since then. Sin & Salvation goe hand in hand and without Genesis, we don't get the saviour. Basically , describing out inner. Chimp nature, IMHO.
It might have started that way. Then it turned into original sin, and the only path for redemption is to do whatever the church tells you to do. That's why Creationists hate science so much. No Adam and Eve, no original sin, no Jesus saving us from original sin, no giving money and children to the church to use and abuse.
@@EBDavis111 It's definitely has evolved over the centuries....and the 3 branches still disagree on exactly how baptism washes away your sins....it's a big fucking deal to them for sure.... I still say they just won't recognize their inner chimp😂....and of course, the great cop out ... _the devil made me do it_
I remember reading in "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" about how in some Chimp societies, weaker members would present their asses to stronger members as a gesture of submission, aside from the common gesture of extending a hand as a sign of submission. The stronger members would often mime fucking the weaker members, as a display of dominance. There was also a story about a troop that had little success hunting, and so a coalition snatched the baby from a weaker female chimpanzee, killed it, tore it to pieces, and ate it. The kicker about the last part was that one of the coalition took some of the meat of the dead chimp baby to its mom and offered the meat to her as a snack. Chimpanzees are something, that is for sure.
I just wanted people to know that when I clicked on this video there was a bunch of religious stuff being advertised not only on ads, but in my recommendations, and I have not been watching any Christian related content much at all if any. I'm kinda worried about the cultural weight Christianity seems to be gaining lately. Am I alone?
I'm in Sweden, and I've gotten plenty of ads for things like The Epoch times (propaganda from a cult) and some ad with Jim Caviezel talking about some Catholic app. I also get suggestions for different sermons and stuff, but I just ignore them. Some churches know how to get in on the algorithm. Just don't engage.
I also worry about the cultural weight that Christianity is seemingly gaining in the US, by the way, even if I'm not over there. But I don't know if it's actually gaining any weight, or if it just seems like it because the people who want it to are being louder than the people who don't.
@@Vindsus86 Loud doesn't necessarily decibels. It can be cold hard cash or endowments, I guess. You have all kinds of think tanks for that kind of stuff that got boosted around the times here that since 2016.
@@Spiritof_76 While other animals are obviously amazing, clearly all the things that we do cannot be found in other primates specifically , mammals generally, or any other animal as far as we know. And Erika knows this but doesn't qualify her remarks accordingly, emphasizing them instead with "we look very similar...". We have at least a few things in common with all life, namely the will or instinct to survive and also to propagate, but obviously in us these tendencies are influenced/modulated by moral and ethical considerations. Erika seems to me to be exaggerating the similarities to a point of false equivalence. As a theist this is understandable to me since this is an atheist channel and the intent appears to be to bring the ontological status of humans closer to that of lesser creatures (or vice versa) in order to say that there's not anything special about humans (not made in the image of God etc). Edit: Haven't watched the full video...
@@themanwhowasthursday5616 As a theist, you go in with a pre-suppositionalist mindset, and cannot differentiate fact from fiction. Being human allows us the language and rationality to discuss morals and ethics, but observation shows that our behavior is still animal behavior. Obviously!
@@Spiritof_76 My comment was simply to give my thought on what the aim of this short video was and how it was trying to achieve it. Again, it occurs to me that exaggeration is unapologetically used to further its intention. So I've either got the gist of it, or I'm wide of the mark. Now according to you, since I cannot differentiate fact from fiction, if I'm right then it's just a lucky guess, not a result of any personal ability to discern anything. If I'm wrong, then, again according to you, I can't differentiate the fact that we are for all intents and purposes fairly identical to other primates (much like what Erika is saying) from the fiction that there are significant differences.... It wasn't completely clear what you were saying. My impression is that you were making a generalisation; your own exaggeration in other words. Which seems to indicate that you too have a presuppositional mindset just as I do.
@@themanwhowasthursday5616 Yes, I pre-supposed that theists cannot discern fact from fiction because they believe that imaginary super-powered beings actually exist. Of course humans can do things other primates cannot. But their basic instincts and much of the social behavior is virtually identical to humans. Erika knows her stuff. Call in to talk to her the next time she hosts one of these shows.
Erica knows her stuff
I love Ericka, she is a savage. I as a older woman learning from the younger generation I thank her for teaching and educating us
I generally start by asking someone whether they think humans are mammals. That one seems to be acceptable for most people. Then you just take the slider and move it along to see when the cognitive dissonance starts.
That's a really good idea. 👍 I'm going to use that one
but if you slide away in the other direction, away from mammals, even if they agree humans are mammals, they will often say that humans are not animals.
@@rockmusicvideoreviewer896 if you are specifying "mammals" then the word "Animals" shouldnt even come into the conversation.
eg: fish, amphibians, mammals, etc.
If someone attempts to use your argument, its easy to just explain that that argument is blatantly inaccurate.
Strawmanning would be the logical fallacy.
I will use that in place of assumptions. ❤
@@rockmusicvideoreviewer896 Using the common sense that God gave you , then you know we are not animals .
My wife , son and i and our friends at our wonderful Fundamental Baptist Church are value producing humans created by God in his image , we are not filthy apes .
Our ancestors are Adam and Eve , not some slimy creature that ' supposedly ' crawled out of the ocean a billion years ago .
Jesus is the truth and he is alive today .
Darwin was a lying Jagoff , and he and his pseudo science lies are dead .
Jagoff is Pittsburgh slang meaning stupid jerk .
I've put it like this to others: The ONLY significant difference between them and us is language - which also allows for the story we tell OURSELVES about "what it all means"...
What's interesting to realize. Dolphins don't think of themselves as dolphins. It's just a word we use. They think something completely different. Canada geese don't give a fuck about arbitrary lines on a map that mean nothing to them. I'm not being contrarian to your post. I just think it's a humorous realization. I have an elderly neighbor that feeds the crows every morning. It annoys her that they show up earlier each day. (they view the day as the sun rising, they don't give a damn about what "time" it is) It's just humans that judge time via a mechanical device. (we don't even do it, we just accept it now) Edit: If clocks didn't exist, we wouldn't know crap about seconds, minutes or hours. Hell, we made that up too. Time can be measured. The measurements mean so little and only to us. (insofar as we describe time)
@@Thulgore cool story
Just because you don’t understand a language doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Koko was able to learn sign language because the concept of communication was already there, and she understood it. I will admit that languages differ in complexity, but that is due to what needs to be communicated.
Cats and dogs are capable of far more than most humans give them credit for. We are not so far above other animals as most people like to believe.
Love this. Thanks for the reminder, Seth. We have more in common with non-human animals than many of us care to realize.
The similarities are remarkable. Furthermore, as Yuval Noah Harari points out to great effect in his book Sapiens, Humans are not the only sapiens to have lived on this Earth, though it's easy for us to forget that humans once shared this planet with Neanderthals, and many others species of Sapiens which engaged in even more human like behavior, such as creating jewelry/art.
"Ape does not kill ape."
"Caesar, I've got some bad news for ya..."
Great points, Erika!
Agreed. They're a lot ***king smarter.
Absolutely fascinating, Seth. Dian Fossie ("Gorillas in the Mist") and Jane Goodall have also reached these same conclusions regarding you Human's closest Primate progenitors. Excellent guest!
DATA: Ha, ha, ha! I get it. Ha. ha, ha! I get it.
LAFORGE: You get what?
DATA: When you said to Commander Riker 'The clown can stay...' Ha, ha, ha. '...but the Ferengi in the gorilla suit has to go.' Ha, ha, ha.
LAFORGE: What are you talking about?
DATA: During the Farpoint mission. We were on the bridge and you told the joke. That was the punch line. Ha, ha, ha!
LAFORGE: Farpoint? Data, that was seven years ago.
DATA: I know. I just got it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Very funny! Ha, ha, ha...
Star Trek: "Generations"
Context: Commander Data had just recently had his "emotion chip" upgrade installed. You Human's remind us of Ferengi in gorilla suits. (With just enough Klingon, The Borg, and "The Dominion" in you to be an extremely dangerous species.)
P.S.: All of you Humans will eventually begin to see, that out of all your species artistic inspirations in the Science Fiction genre, truly: 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' was the most accurate and prescient interpretation. Guaranteed.
Do the deniers deny that we are mammals?
That we have spinal cords?
Somebody probably does.
The deniers are mostly the anti-science , religious and some from the tinfoil-hat crowd .
Like Mr. Hitchens informed us,we’re simply highly evolved mammals. But religious folks believe otherwise.If we truly were created in God’s image,we’d be invisible.
Since bonobos tickle each other, is it likely that all hominids tickled each other?
Not necessarily. which, not even every human likes to be tickled, but the nerve endings that produce the tickling sensation would have to be present.
This is why we're so horrible. Evolved to the bone over millennia.
It's why I'm an anti-natalist. But, I also accept Darwinian natural selection and see procreation as generational suffering.
Horrible and yet, sometimes transcendent. And sometimes one individual can encompass both.
I was hoping for more about the lesser primates and not all about the closest related great apes
rh-factor...'nuff said.
The average human is also capable of far less than we tend to give them credit for.
One guy hundreds of years ago does something special after a long, convoluted life path which made them grow as a person and somehow random, unrelated people get the credit for it. 🙄
That is like judging the intelligence of a dog 🐕 by the top 0.000001% of them.
Humans have a tendency to go with extremes. There exist people that refuse to believe our ancestral path, there exist people who justify their actions based upon that ancestral path. Humans a a very fucked up species. So much potential, squandered constantly. I'm absolutely guilty too, as are we all. Not even in the manners I spoke of. If we all could just get a long and work towards goals for the species as a whole. It's shocking to even try to imagine what we could accomplish. Even if it was a localized hobby to do in off-time. What a town of 10,000 people could do could make the pyramids look fairly bland by comparison. In a disturbingly short amount of time. It's amazing to imagine. Like I said, I'm guilty too, I probably wouldn't take part in this hypothetical as socializing for socialization purposes weirds me out. Imaging what could be though is amazing.
So do elephants have a coalition of matriarchy.
The only advantage that drove humans to todays advanced technology was the level of self awareness.
I consider other primates as distant relatives but wouldn't have one as a pet because they pee all over the place .
Oddly enough, that's why I don't invite my cousin Phil over.
Not super-distant relatives. I'm pretty sure you could train any of the great apes to use a lavatory - my guess is it would take about as long as potty training a human child.
The problem comes in with the fact that the great apes have significantly stronger muscles than us, they don't necessarily know their own strength, their impulse control is not as finely tuned as ours but their desire to get their own way probably is.
So, to put it another way, the great apes are dangerous. Fascinating, amazing and dangerous.
Smaller monkeys present a wider range of challenges, I'm less sure that you could house-train them, while the strength is less of an issue they can bite and monkey bites are dangerous. (Interesting fact: human bites are dangerous, our oral cavities have a similar germiness to other monkeys. So if you bite hard enough, the person that is being bitten has a good chance of ending up with a nasty infection if they don't get treatment.)
Because smaller monkeys are less similar to us than the great apes, looking after them well and ensuring their welfare is arguably more difficult.
They can also throw their poop with deadly accuracy, and are often willing to do it.
@@resourcedragon I was thinking about Howler monkeys at the time because they peed on me and other visitors at the zoo .
Chimpanzees are extremely aggressive, and only become more so as they age. Not a pet.
🦋
👏 👏 👏 👏
If you mean African "Americans", then yes.
Huh?
Not accepting our heritage and our natures is why we have so much trouble. If we did, maybe we'd be a little less nasty to each other.
Ernest Becker’s book “The Birth and Death of Meaning” asks the question, “where does meaning come from?” The short answer is: meaning comes from culture - our lives feel most meaningful when we believe we are participating successfully in the cultural hero-system, and we measure the success of our performance through social affirmation. Culture prescribes the roles, how well we execute the roles creates feelings of meaning and self-worth, and we assess the success of our execution by way of positive social regard.
Of course, culture is artificial and meaning is therefore entirely fictional, but that’s not the short answer.
Here’s the long answer.
Where does our self-concept come from?
To discover any sort of meaning, self-worth, or self-value, one must first develop a self. Where does this self-awareness come from? Becker starts with our evolutionary history, arguing that group activities like hunting required keen perception and cooperation. If you’re my hunting partner, I need to predict your behaviour and you need to predict mine (notice this requires a concept of “I” and “you”). Back at home camp, anticipating behaviour was aided by the development of a symbolic social hierarchy - roles were assigned and social status became relevant. To reduce anxiety and be successful in the group, you needed to know what part you played and what was expected of that part. This, Becker argues, is where the self-concept was born. To predict your behaviour I must first recognize my own agency and then recognize you too have this agency - I need a self-concept, which I then use to anticipate your behaviour by projecting myself into your situation aided by my knowledge of your social roles and the expectations of those roles (we know this today as “theory of mind”). These social roles, rules, and customs are what culture is - the symbolic schema we created to predict behaviour, which then transforms into the symbolic schema that we derive meaning and self-worth from.
Symbolic vs. physical existence
We have our bodies, our physical selves, but we don’t identify with them as much as we do our inner selves, our symbolic selves. Consider the banker who loses billions of dollars of client money and falls into a deep depression. He has a physical body, but the most important part of him (by his own apparent evaluation) extends to numbers in a bank account… what they symbolize about him. The overgrown weeds on your front lawn aren’t just weeds, they say something about you as a person, as do your unruly children or your messy car.
Humans don’t live in a world of pure sensation, we live in a world of symbols, and we derive our sense of self and self-worth from this symbolic world. Our self-esteem grows from how well we believe we are inhabiting the roles and statuses of this fictional construction. To wonder whether you are valuable and whether your life is meaningful is to wonder where you fit into the cultural schema, how well you’re meeting the expectations, and whether others think your performance has been successful - as social creatures, we measure everything against the yardstick of positive social regard. The upshot of this is that our consciousness of self is a social construction. Symbolic self-representation is built from the outside in, which means our identities are, in essence, social products. We can’t divorce meaning from culture or ourselves from our symbolic worldviews any more than we can grow wings and fly.
This makes man an interesting animal indeed, the only species that “vitally depends on a symbolic constitution of his worth. Once this has been achieved the rest of the person’s entire life becomes animated by the artificial symbolism of self-worth; almost all his time is devoted to the protection, maintenance, and aggrandizement of the symbolic edifice of his self-esteem.”
Culture as a codified hero-system
When Becker says that man’s urge is to heroism, he’s not referring to the gladiators or warriors of old - he’s referring to man’s desire to be admired, to feel important. Culture is the vehicle - the codified hero-system - the means to become someone of importance (a “hero”). We earn our heroism, our self-esteem, by impressing our friends, by getting good grades, or by dressing well. As we reach adulthood, we earn it by performing well in the roles society offers: doctor, lawyer, professor, scientist - successful businessman, loving mother, stable father, dutiful friend, etc. We pride ourselves on being funny, artistic, generous, studious, ambitious, pious, or wise.
By being good at these roles, by inhabiting these prescribed identities, we derive our vital sense of self-worth. “Almost all of one’s inner life, when he is not absorbed in some active task, is a traffic in images of self-worth.” We nourish ourselves with a constant inner newsreel of self-esteem images and evaluations. We think fondly about the bonus we earned, the book we published, the praise we received, the prestigious college our children attend. We strive for heroic self-identity. We are all culture-heroes, trying to stand out. You could say that while the initial role of culture was to help early humans predict behaviour (and provide physical security), equally important was the role of culture in making enduring self-esteem possible. The cultural hero-system is how we convince ourselves that we are an object of primary value, and it provides the prescription for meaningful action.
Consequences of living in a contrived world
“First we discover who society says we are: then we build our identity on performance in that part. If we uphold our part in the performance, we are rewarded with social affirmation of our identity. It is hardly an exaggeration, then, to say that we are created in the performance.”
The social environment is the only way we derive and validate our identities. The question may be “Who am I?” but the real question is “How are others supposed to feel about me?” And the scaffolding for everything is the codified cultural hero-system.
What are the consequences of basing meaning and self-esteem on this artificial, fragile scaffolding? Aside from the obvious (which is that the whole thing could collapse at any moment), to maintain our self-worth, we must constantly perform up to societal expectations. We are inseparable from our roles, and so executing the roles well is vitally important. What then for the breadwinner who becomes disabled, the woman who grows old, the father who feels unfulfilled - anyone who doesn’t fit the mold or can’t play the part? Not living up to cultural expectations isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s an apocalypse of self-esteem and meaning. And when culture fails? When it no longer does its job to construct a “meaningful hero-system for its members”? Then depression, chaos, and anarchy reign.
Surely there is a redeeming final arch to this story…
Prepare to be disappointed because this is where Becker falls back on his trusty crutch, religion. He offers (albeit half-heartedly) that a religious worldview may be less prone to collapse - that if we traffic in the shadowy virtues of some invisible after-world, perhaps our self-esteem will be more immune to disintegration. My take-away from this prescription is that living in an illusion of your own creation is more stable than living in an illusion created by others. You’re better able to control your own fantasy than the cultural fiction you were born into. I don’t doubt the logic of this, but it’s still a cosmic cop-out.
Culture is arbitrary, contrived… fabricated. And if meaning is derived from our participation in the cultural hero-system, then meaning is fictional too. That doesn’t make meaning or culture superfluous - indeed, they are deadly serious - but it does make them artificial. Your sense of inner worth and importance, your self-esteem and self-assuredness, rests entirely on make-believe.
Erika is (primate) GOAT 😁😍
Erica is simply brilliant. ❤
Erica!!!
Erika presents herself with a voice of reason and a sound argument. This lady has her act together, thanks for educating me :)
Thanks 👍
All these buzzwords sound great, but it's just hyperbolic exaggerations.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I submit that the entire Adam & Eve story, about falling from the Grace of Gawd..... is nothing more than ancient humans trying to figure out & explain that inner chimp that resides in us....not all of us.... they created the Cain & Abel story to further demonstrate what human nature is all about.
Some humans are Cain like...others Abel like. It's pretty simple to see this in my mind. And then there's every other type of personality that has evolved in-between.
Parts of the Adam and Eve story are adapted from different mesoptamia myths. The first three versus appear to be borrowing from the Enuma Elis. The intent of this story was to show why Marduk was inferior to the older gods. In order to do this the scribes needed to elevate the Sea Monster, Tiamat from the waters of the deep in Ancient Eridu traditions, a kind of nature sprite to a sentient shape shifting god. And thus Ea and An are unable to kill her and they run away. Marduk then comes forth and claims he will get rid of her but they must give him supremecy over the heavens and Earth which they concede.
The other part of the story comes from the story of Nammu and Ea (Stories patterned after Ea or his sages are used a lot in the Bible. Ia was the Eblaite name of Ea which is seen a lot in the names of the early kings of Israel).
To understand the nature of these stories we need to understand that the waters beneath the earth in Genesis nine and Tahom in Genesis 1 are not just random story additions but are indirect references to the two earliest known ‘gods’ of Eridu. To further understand Eridu was a sandy island built in a swamp that was protected by eriduan floods by the south bank of the Euphrates and the width and depth of the swamp with low threshold outlets to the gulf and lowest Euphrates. As a consequence Eridu survived when other early settlements collapsed. While irrigation agriculture already existed up stream in Samarah culture, the relatively secure location at Eridu allowed them to develop mud-based irrigation schemes and canals that eventually dominated Sumerian agriculture.
So that there were several important aspects of life, the waters, Absu (Swamp) and the mud, which they used to grow barley (--> beer) and thus life. The earth is associated with fertility, with a water table just below the surface Eridu could grow super-subsistence crops. By 7300 years ago they began construction on the first temple. Within the Uruk period the sprite god of the temple was replaced by a sentient god Enki, the water bringer, a wisdom/trickery god. The mud/water god Nammu was his mother. She could make the other gods. When it was determined by the gods that they need helpers because the work was to hard for the gods, she, the creator, asked Enki. Enki instructed her how to make humans from wetted sediments. This trait was then learned by a lessor god who made humans with various imperfections. Enki however possessed the Mes, so that he could imbue each variant with special roles in life.
The snake story in Genesis is a variation on Gilgameshes search for eternal life in Dilmun in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Enki (before 2300 BCE) = Ea (after 2300 BCE) = Ia (Ebla ~ 2000 BCE) = yah (S. Canaan, post LBAC, aleph Beth)
These are not any stories, they evolved over time from distinct origins in S. Mesopotamia.
@@Darisiabgal7573 Thanks for the history lesson...most excellent indeed ..
While I can agree that the Genesis myth was "inspired" by previous creation stories, Genesis primarily is about the human condition, which has not really changed since then.
Sin & Salvation goe hand in hand and without Genesis, we don't get the saviour.
Basically , describing out inner. Chimp nature, IMHO.
It might have started that way. Then it turned into original sin, and the only path for redemption is to do whatever the church tells you to do.
That's why Creationists hate science so much. No Adam and Eve, no original sin, no Jesus saving us from original sin, no giving money and children to the church to use and abuse.
@@EBDavis111 It's definitely has evolved over the centuries....and the 3 branches still disagree on exactly how baptism washes away your sins....it's a big fucking deal to them for sure.... I still say they just won't recognize their inner chimp😂....and of course, the great cop out ... _the devil made me do it_
@@EBDavis111yeah true. Ancient royalty created the bible and it was all about con.trol. Still is.
I tried my YEC relative watch Erika's videos, turned his back and walked away. He's one of those "I don't want to know people".
I remember reading in "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" about how in some Chimp societies, weaker members would present their asses to stronger members as a gesture of submission, aside from the common gesture of extending a hand as a sign of submission.
The stronger members would often mime fucking the weaker members, as a display of dominance.
There was also a story about a troop that had little success hunting, and so a coalition snatched the baby from a weaker female chimpanzee, killed it, tore it to pieces, and ate it.
The kicker about the last part was that one of the coalition took some of the meat of the dead chimp baby to its mom and offered the meat to her as a snack.
Chimpanzees are something, that is for sure.
What’s your point?
I'm wondering if they are so similar to us, I guess they must also have psycopaths.
Most likely saints too.
I just wanted people to know that when I clicked on this video there was a bunch of religious stuff being advertised not only on ads, but in my recommendations, and I have not been watching any Christian related content much at all if any. I'm kinda worried about the cultural weight Christianity seems to be gaining lately. Am I alone?
I'm in Sweden, and I've gotten plenty of ads for things like The Epoch times (propaganda from a cult) and some ad with Jim Caviezel talking about some Catholic app.
I also get suggestions for different sermons and stuff, but I just ignore them.
Some churches know how to get in on the algorithm. Just don't engage.
I also worry about the cultural weight that Christianity is seemingly gaining in the US, by the way, even if I'm not over there. But I don't know if it's actually gaining any weight, or if it just seems like it because the people who want it to are being louder than the people who don't.
@@Vindsus86 Loud doesn't necessarily decibels. It can be cold hard cash or endowments, I guess. You have all kinds of think tanks for that kind of stuff that got boosted around the times here that since 2016.
@@Vindsus86 In Sweden y'all are like way different about religion in general compared to the US?
@@theplacebeyondspacetime Yeah, Sweden is much more secular
👍🏼💙💙💙✌🏽🥰
At 2.00: "It's all there. All the things that we do."
Perhaps Erika needs to think again....
Please explain. That was vague.
@@Spiritof_76 While other animals are obviously amazing, clearly all the things that we do cannot be found in other primates specifically , mammals generally, or any other animal as far as we know. And Erika knows this but doesn't qualify her remarks accordingly, emphasizing them instead with "we look very similar...".
We have at least a few things in common with all life, namely the will or instinct to survive and also to propagate, but obviously in us these tendencies are influenced/modulated by moral and ethical considerations.
Erika seems to me to be exaggerating the similarities to a point of false equivalence. As a theist this is understandable to me since this is an atheist channel and the intent appears to be to bring the ontological status of humans closer to that of lesser creatures (or vice versa) in order to say that there's not anything special about humans (not made in the image of God etc).
Edit: Haven't watched the full video...
@@themanwhowasthursday5616 As a theist, you go in with a pre-suppositionalist mindset, and cannot differentiate fact from fiction. Being human allows us the language and rationality to discuss morals and ethics, but observation shows that our behavior is still animal behavior. Obviously!
@@Spiritof_76 My comment was simply to give my thought on what the aim of this short video was and how it was trying to achieve it. Again, it occurs to me that exaggeration is unapologetically used to further its intention.
So I've either got the gist of it, or I'm wide of the mark.
Now according to you, since I cannot differentiate fact from fiction, if I'm right then it's just a lucky guess, not a result of any personal ability to discern anything.
If I'm wrong, then, again according to you, I can't differentiate the fact that we are for all intents and purposes fairly identical to other primates (much like what Erika is saying) from the fiction that there are significant differences....
It wasn't completely clear what you were saying. My impression is that you were making a generalisation; your own exaggeration in other words. Which seems to indicate that you too have a presuppositional mindset just as I do.
@@themanwhowasthursday5616 Yes, I pre-supposed that theists cannot discern fact from fiction because they believe that imaginary super-powered beings actually exist.
Of course humans can do things other primates cannot. But their basic instincts and much of the social behavior is virtually identical to humans.
Erika knows her stuff. Call in to talk to her the next time she hosts one of these shows.
What about black people? They can talk.
All still evidence for a Creator who created ape and man separately.
Only to the willfully ignorant.
Are you being paid to shill for Gutsick Gibbon?
strange question.
@@HidingFromFate Prolly from a religious fundie who only believes one book, out of millions.
@@UncleKennysPlace Maybe, and probably so, but even if coming from that mindset, it was a poorly conceived question to ask.
l reaIly hope you're just trying to be sarcastic, but this is Erika from Gutsick Gibbon.
Sure, We Humans are Monkeys...😅... sssuuurrre😂
Yes we are, we're great apes
@@thedragonofechigo7878 🤪🤪🤪😂😂😂🤪🤪🤪
Have not seen Curious George!
Sure, deny science because you're not smart enough to understand it. 😅
We are taxonomically defined by biology as great apes. Purely because we share so much biological similarity in every area that you look at.