[bochen787]

What are the adaptation advantages of internal human conflict?

In politics if something happened it always happened for a reason. I think the
Same can be said about ‘nature’ and evolution.

This may be vastly oversimplified examples, but why do humans (in general)
Experience:

1) Love & Lust

Love and Lust are two entirely different things and can never be reconciled.
Love is selfless and wishing the best for the other person. Love is ‘higher’ more abstract, ideal, ‘spiritual’, and it involves a higher consciousness and awareness of self and
Others. Love is willingly placing the other person above and before yourself and feeling happy for doing so even at great expense of your own self interest and well-being.

Lust is primordial and primitive. It is DIRECTX10, it bypasses all our software programming (ie morals, ethics, religions, promises, social contract) and goes straight to the point. (reproduction) It is hardwired into our brain and nervous system and is a irrefutable fact of humanity.

The amazing thing is, even though love and lust are entirely different worlds, both this realms of existence are very compelling. And here is where confusion and conflict jumps in. If all humans cared about was love there would be no conflict. Same for if all we cared for was lust. But as a human most can be swayed one way or another and its hard sticking to one side of the fence.

Love can be associated with generosity, empathy, kindness, peace. Lust can be associated with avarice, apathy, hatred, violence.

Love is like the feeling you get when you help or donate to those less fortunate than you, or those in desperate need.

Lust is like the feeling you get when you are starving or on the verge of dying from thirst and eat a 16” delicious pizza or drink a quart of Gatorade.

Both actions are desirable and ‘emotional’ in their respective domains. Both they contradict each other. Why this contradiction??

If the meaning and purpose of subjective human life is to just “experience”, to have
‘emotions’ and to get raw input of stimulus, then there is really no good or bad.
Love and lust are all a part of this ‘experience’ of life, and are equally worthy of meaning and purpose. But why the inner conflict then?


The point is though; each human is fully capable of experiencing and enjoying BOTH of these conflicting and contradicting aspects of life. Why did we evolve this way?
What is the adaptation advantage of this inner turmoil?

What benefit does a criminal gain from growing a ‘conscious’? Or a sinner believing in God and transforming his life?

My question really is:
Why do we do ‘bad’ and then think bad of ourselves and want to do ‘good’ but really deep down still want to do ‘bad’? What is the purpose of this confusion and conflict?

[bochen787]

Even the quest for 'sustainability' itself is unsustainable.
Sustainability, although more noble, is still the urge for perpetuation
And proliferation of human life! It is a more calculation version, on that will
More likely stand the test of time against non-sustainable methods of living.
But sustainability actually does what unsustainable societies tried to do but could not.

See, we can’t run from who we are.
We still want to ‘exist’, and sustainable societies are just the more cunning and
Clever.

Maybe LOVE, even true genuine love, is the more cunning & clever workaround
Of the flaws of lust?! They seem to accomplish the same purpose, more LIFE!

In the caveman times, when there were no language, no speech, no writing and basically
Not even short range communication, each individual can be thought of as an disconnected ‘node’. Therefore it made sense that lust, violence, every man for himself was actually the more efficient method of survival for the species as a whole.
Today we have instant global communication and globalization; so perhaps, love instead of lust, collaboration instead of competition, peace instead of war will actually be the more efficient model of more life!

So I think life itself is the conflict, as long as there is life there will be problems, because
Life itself as a fluke of existence and the source of ALL PROBLEMS.

We can blame no one and nothing but each our selves. If we didn’t exist, neither would the problems of the universe.

[threadbear]

Lust is related to the maintenance of the physical body, procreation. We need bodies to house souls that are able to look beyond the physical and ask spiritual questions, as you asked. Suffering related to having to maintain a body helps the spirit to evolve.

[uNkNowN ElEmEnt]

Base animal lust is provoked by the stimulus of a desireable mate, or seeing the characteristics that would make a desireable mate in another person. Its totally instinctive, although different cultures have different criteria in what is desireable that is not biologicaly but culturally determined. Ie: some like thin women, some fat or with big butts, some like men with long necks and long... etc.

Love is a construct that was made either in the Renaisance or around the Victorian era. People married for other reasons before that, "love" was not a consideration and is largely an invention of the human mind within the last 500 years or so. If people in these times found "love" or some such emotion in their marriages it was a by-product probably brought on by gratitude of having a faithful or desireable or admirable spouce well after the fact of the marriage taking place.

I think that is why we find so much confusion in "love" until we know ourselves enough to decide what is important to us, we won't be able to find what we are looking for in another person. So now, thanks to the invention of "love", we think we are supposed to find it, keep it and this really is putting the cart before the horse.

That is also why friends make the best marriages. They know each other and can find enough things in common, and there are things that keep them engaged and interested in each other long enough to come to apprecate each other or find deeper emotions.

This is hardly an adaptation advantage. If anything our culture, though more understanding of our emotional and biological makeup, is even further off the track. We should be living in an age of enlightenment where we understand what goes into finding the right spouse and having satisfying relationships. Instead most of us run around acting more cave man like than ever... which I am not knocking necessarily... the chase is fun too.

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('bochen787', 'W')hat are the adaptation advantages of internal human conflict?