Newfie wrote:I think you are both way off base but am too tired to make a long complicated post. Maybe later. For now I simply think you give far too much credit to our reasoning, we are still 99.4% (roughly) running on pure animal instinct. That we appear to be operating otherwise is mass delusion.
My 2¢
And something like that percentage of our DNA is also identical to that of a chimpanzee, but we are not chimpanzees. Intellectual thought is not mass delusion. It is the basis of free will. Free will is not I want this right now or that right now, it is the freedom to form a world view out of which decisions are made, and to hold that against what would otherwise, animalistically or from a competing world view, oppose our decisions. Free will is the ability to choose what might appear not to be in our own best interests because we choose what we feel is right over that. It is up to deliberation, mostly intellectual, but sometimes as a nod to our base nature, to decide what we feel is right.
And this is not to deny that we are formed of the primitive or the hard-wired. If we had to go about every day without the influence of the primitive then we would spend every moment, literally, trying to figure out which way was up. As it stands we don't tire our consciousnesses with that problem, thanks to "pure animal instinct."