In a world that externally appears as one of rapid technological and social’ progress,’ has human nature actually internally changed?
Of what it is, and means, to be human?
Flight of ideas commenced out of longstanding concern about how psychological concepts and science make claims as to what it is to be human.
With the psychopathologisation of everyday life over the past century, philosophical matters of existence, meaning, human ethics and behaviour, are increasingly materially viewed solely in terms of science, psychology and mental health, and considered physically determined by biology and neuroscience.
Human life and nature is no more than the physical parts upon which it is constructed. And human psychology, nature, and life, materially reduced solely to such physical parts.
Where aspects of human nature, of character and values, now all too frequently receive a diagnosis alongside a recommended treatment.
Whereas in the past, mental illness was viewed as either a moral failing or revered as special insight; in the present, a moral failing is frequently diagnosed as mental illness, or personality disorder.
And any discontent or ‘unhappiness’ about existential questions as to why one materially exists in the first place, viewed solely in terms of psychology and mental health, with its material basis in human biology and the brain: A manifestation of depression, fear, irrationality, or wishful thinking. Rather than a basic genuine philosophical question about one’s existence and being.
Where in a modern technological materialistic world, only when a phenomena can be ‘seen,’ ‘touched’, or measured, is it predominantly accepted as ‘real’.
And any ‘reality’ that is reasoned and abstracted from the ‘unseen,’ or based on prior assumptions arising from perception and reason, is considered either to not materially physically exist; or not to exist in actuality. As a reasonable mental abstraction, based upon both realistic assumptions and logical inference to make ‘sense’ of the facts, including the abstract.
And given such abstracted knowledge concerns making ‘sense’ of non-physical ‘unseen’ experience rather than physical measurable observations, it is considered suspect, relativised, unintelligent, or frequently regarded as fantasy, delusion, or other form of psychological pathology.
Something to be dismissed as of no human importance, or material consequence. Requiring scientific explanation, technocratic solution, government policy, or therapeutic treatment.
But psychology, mental health, science, biology and neuroscience cannot answer questions as to why one’s complex material existence and the physical universe arose the first place.
Explanations and theories as to how, do not answer as to why the seemingly mathematically improbable material universe arose from nothing, causing life to emerge and subsequently evolve. That material existence arose based on an assumption of a pre-existing probability of zero; devoid of any prior mathematical or physical laws for existence to arise, an absolute nothing. And if such a priori laws existed, where did they arise?
As both empiricist science and reason of the rationalists have their own assumptions and bounds, and so limits to what each is capable of knowing.
Though this is not to dismiss the importance of both in seeking towards an increased knowledge and understanding of what is both true and real. To the extent that it is humanly possible. Either via empiricist science and/ or rationalist reason, or more reasonably where one can have faith in both.
Rather than then current modernist/ post-modernist ‘reality’ of ‘my truth,’ of unhinged relativised feelings, or ill-defined words bereft of true meaning.
Flight of Ideas seeks dispel the myths. Even by those who claim to be enlightened by reason, science, and modern progress.
For fear that error, fallacy, ignorance, speculation, folly, harm under the guise of care, intellectual arrogance, or disingenuous ill-intent, leads a flight into intolerance and madness.
Flight of Ideas
Some Fly, Others Fall.