1037: What is real regarding homo sapiens?.....

 What is real regarding homo sapiens? Behavior. Everything the organism does is behavior, that is interacting with its environment, and to understand the organism we only have to ask the question: What causes the behavior?
   
You might respond: that is a matter for psychology to explain. I disagree, because calling something "psychology" is behavior too. A thinking organism behaved, did something. In this case labeled some activity, gave it a name to organize his knowledge and activities.
   
One activity he calls psychology, another philosophy and then he started quarreling about whether this or that should be labeled "psychology" or "philosophy".
   
But it all comes down to the fact that one of the primary activities of the brain is to organize information, label it, categorize it, evaluate it, etcetera. We have spent a whole project on this theme: "A World Full of Patterns".
   
So, we have to ask: why does the organism do, what it does? The answer is survival and procreation. And here the questioning ends, because when you ask: why would an organism do that and not something else, we only can answer,
   
that because of our self awareness we simply learned that organisms do so and why they do so is because that is how the system apparently works. If you continue that line of question you'll finally end up with the meaningless question: Then....where did the universe come from.
    
Those lobes in our skull and in particular those frontal lobes, they are the storytellers. They come up wit all kinds of explanations, justifications, theories and so on to interpret what we do.
   
But it is always afterwards. What we do and why we do things is primarily driven by emotions, or maybe even by hormones. Fear, need for security, need for food, need for social interaction and so on. It is very basic in my opinion.
    
Through the  ages tons of songs are about love. That never changed. Libraries full of books from all times are about the same themes: love, hate, envy, relations, excitement, fantasy. Hasn't changed in thousands of years. The products of our frontal lobes have changes. We call it cultural development.
    
However, homo sapiens stayed the same and he explained his existence and actions with all kinds of fantasies and imagination or saw himself as part of nature and simply made out of the matter all things were made of.
   
Let's draw a somewhat simplistic picture of old societies of 4000 years ago or even later.What we see is, that homo sapiens is a social animal and that you need means to keep all the noses pointing in the same direction.
   
That is the perfect condition for cooperative behavior in the group. The best way to do this is to create a knowledge system, which derives its knowledge from outside the individual in the group.
    
So, you need a source and special people that are in contact with this source. A "recent" example is for instance Moses who climbed a mountain to get in touch with the outside source and he came back with a set of commandments.
    
You only have to make the crowd BELIEVE that what is offered here is KNOWLEDGE and you are set and done to control the crowd. You can't question this "knowledge". That upsets the crowd and you'll be punished and called a heretic.
   
Yet, history shows us, that there always have been people, who didn't accept this narrative, who said belief is not knowledge. If you know something, you can't doubt its factuality. You can test it. Beliefs are based on air. You can't test them.
   
The point of view that I, as a human being, am not willing to accept things as factual and real unless I can perceive it with my senses, test the observation and verify or falsify it, and what I should accept as something that influences my actions, dates back to more than 1000 years BC.
   
In general societies were controlled by belief systems, religions,  which made materialist thinkers unwanted guests. And the first of such unwanted guests on this planet we know of lived in India around 2000 BCE already.
   
What we know about them is mainly from quotations in texts of their opponents. Nevertheless, Charvaka, also known as Lokāyata, is an ancient school of Indian materialism. Charvaka holds direct perception, empiricism,
 
and conditional inference as proper sources of knowledge, embraces philosophical skepticism and rejects ritualism and supernaturalism. It was a popular belief system in ancient India.
    
As the subtitle of this project says "the philosophy most people don't like", also in those days it already was the case. Almost all schools of Indian philosophy including Buddhism and Jainism
 
have condemned Lokayata as a very base philosophy and relegated it to an uncivilized and unethical status that deserved no merit or appreciation.
   
And not only that. Practically all written texts of Lokayata philosophers have been destroyed. What text we know of are quotations in writings of the opponents of this materialism.
   
Thank  again you for your attention...