Whats this? Two posts in as many days? Madness!

[lorimt]

I'm curious. How much do you feel beholden to biology? Not, oh wow, biology has done some great stuff, but rather things like instinct or such impulses. I tend to think of myself as fairly independant of such things, nurture and personal goals taking a much stronger role in most decisions I make. Anyone else? Any particulars where you do or don't obey some sort of natural or biological demand? What sorts of things? I'm especially interested in personal choices or ideas rather than observations about humans in general.

(It just occured to me, and I realize I have no idea how typical my approach to such things actually is.)

EDIT:
In rereading, I can see I danced around what on earth I was talking about. Things like bobbzman wrote about. For example, I know that I will do something different just because I'm scared, or unhappy or whatever, even when unrelated to mood. Stuff like that, if that makes sense. Not just emotional response, but things where I'm more rationalizing an action than rationally deciding to do something, or feeling an impulse to do something even when it seems like a bad idea. ::mutters:: I'm not really talking about emotion, I'm just not sure how to distinguish this case. Stuff like sithjawa are good examples too, and not ones that occured to me originally.

EDIT THE SECOND:
I'm still not coherent. I'll try again some other time when I've had time to think, and wave my hands about while talking at people.

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

As someone pointed out, our "rational reasons" for doing things eventually make reference to some axiomatic principles that aren't acquired rationally. These would be things like "if I'm hungry I should get food" and "that thing over there looks yummy" and "I have a bad feeling about this person". Whether or not those are biological, I can't really tell from the inside.

Someone mentioned free will, and I think that's the right thing to take into account here. We "tend to think of [ourselves] as fairly independant of such things, nurture and personal goals taking a much stronger role in most decisions [we] make" - but then how does one separate nurture and personal goals from biology? I have a goal to get some food right now - but that's for biological reasons. I have a goal of getting a tenured spot and being in a good academic community - but that comes from things like wanting companionship, intellectual conversation, and security, all of which seem like human instincts to want. Remember, all my actions are physical motions of my body caused by chemical and physical interactions in my brain and other places. So everything I do is determined through some combination of biology and external inputs. But some of those processes going on in the brain really are my goals and desires, and if those processes play a significant role in my action, then I call the action "free", even though it's just as biologically determined as anything else. "Nurture" just means that some of these processes and internal states are reshaped by external forces, so the proximate cause of the action is still biological, even if the initial cause is social or otherwise external.