Grab Instantly Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, And The Origins Of The Human Mind Put Together By Ajit Varki Available As EPub

do really adore this book, but can't buy the Denial as a "Rubicon", as the crossroad, the barrier along the evolutionary path.

Intellectually grasping our own impermanence and denying it as a recipe to enlightenment, to higher level of existence
Trying to grasp the meaning of reality has led us toward an enormous abyss and from the edge of that abyss, we peer anxiously through our telescopes and microscopes into the fog of the unknowable.

I'd rather think about this barrier as of first perception moments of surrounding realm, and as a result of these shocking moments the generated hypercuriosity that drives us among the.


Despite of the fact, I see things differently, I recommend this book! It will fascinate you, it will force you to use your deepest imagination.
What you'll also learn that the valor to deny important things is placing us among the craziest gamblers of the Universe.


A weird book, I like weird. This is a Bower Bird of a book, It mixes Darwin with the Dalai Lama, and the Old Testament with Oscar Wilde, It creates or really extends the theory of evolution and explores why denial exists,

We are all going to die, We are all pointless specks of dust on a very minor planet in a very minor solar system.
So why do we think that we are important, significant and relevant to the pathway of the universe

Denial, dear friends.
Denial. This book probes why "reality denial" has emerged in humans, While there are some wonky steps in this argument in terms of philosophy, and correlation is often confused with causality, it is a potent kick in the face for humans in denial.


We don't actually matter, So from this truth, how will you live your life

Hell yes, Confronting. Fascinating. “At bottom, no one believes in his own death,in the unconscious, everyone is convinced of his own mortality.
” Freud

This book proposes an intriguing scientific theory to explain why only we, homosapiens, of all the other ape descended species, and other highly intelligent bird and mammal species, for that matter, were the only ones over millions of years of evolution to develop such extensive intelligence and intersubjective awareness.
Ajit Varki proposes that we were able to break through an evolutionary wall presented by the paralyzing consciousness of mortality that is coincidant with advanced development of ToM.
Theory of Mind, or, more loosely, awareness of self and others According to the theory, other species were not able to break through this barrier.
As they approached fuller selfawareness, this type of intelligence became a disadvantage, They freaked out! “Im not gonna fight for a mate or for dominance, or food, I could hurt myself, or die!! Err, Ill just stay in this cave here and not spread my seed at all.
” Im hamming, but Ajit fleshes out this theory in more detailed, and science based ways, He thinks that homosapiens overcame the barrier by somehow evolving a way to psychologically repress the constant dangers.
Thus, the title. Its all very speculative, but still interesting to consider, If the premise gains more traction, it could turn the field of evolutionary biology on its head.
It offers possible answers to questions about our strange and paradoxical relation to death, Also, the theory has many implications for how we think about mental health, anxiety, depression, and developmental psychology.


Here are a few more characterizations of this paradox,

Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death

“the everpresent fear of death in the normal biological functioning of our instinct of self preservation, as well as our utter obliviousness to this fear in our conscious life.
”

Katie Roiphe on Freuds detached selfanalyzing of his own dying as he approached and experienced it.


“Even Freud, by implication, with his graceful, bravura passages of accepting death, does not on another level believe in it.
The heroic clarity he respects, then, is not entirely possible: It is a goal, an ideal, a place to move towards.
” Comprehensive evaluation and conjecture designed to provoke much thought, This book has a novel idea, If novelty was everything, I would have given this book five without hesitation, Nevertheless, the book has some problems that earned it two in my opinion that I will discuss later.

The book discusses the origins of behaviorally modern humans in contrast to anatomically modern humans.
It notes and tries to solve two problems in human origins:
, Hominids seem to exist for more than ayears before the appearance of behaviorally modern humans aroundyears ago in Africa before their dispersal in the whole world.
The answer here is that a block existed that did not allow other hominids to evolve full human cognitive capability for this long time.
What is this blocking wall It is awareness of mortality, A psychological block!!
. In most species when we have a feature that appears in a single species only while its precursors exist in several other species, usually some disadvantages accompany this feature which blocks its utilization by other species.
For example, the giraffe's long neck makes it vulnerable when the giraffe is drinking, It is clear that humans have an unusual cognitive capabilities intelligence but what can the disadvantage of intelligence be The answer here is that once a member of a species develops a full theory of mind ToM, she becomes aware of its own mortality by noticing the mortality of others.
This in turn reduces her/his overall fitness due to the onset of some form of existential depression and makes it impossible for this trend to have root in the genetic makeup of the species.


The story told in the book is something like this:
Several species in the history of earth could attain elementary self awareness as indicated by the mirror test i.
e. the ability of an individual to know itself in a mirror,
Self awareness can evolve to a higher form that Varki calls elementary ToM which makes the individual aware to some vague level of the individuality of other members of its species which allows elementary communication and some form of tool use etc.
This is assumed to be the level of most hominids before the advent of homosapiens, Low functioning autistic children give an analogy to this kind of elementary ToM,
The final step is the development of a "full" theory of mind which allows the agent to understand other minds and connect to them.
This enables the full range of human mental potential but it comes with a price, Only individuals who attain this level of ToM get a clear understanding of death and of the individual's own mortality by noticing the death of others.
This in turn leads to a form of depression that reduces the fitness of the individual.
This prevented other hominids and other kinds of intelligent species like birds and wales from ever attaining humanlevel mental development.

The special case of homosapiens is that some of its members could evolve this full ToM and in the

same time they evolved a form of mortality denial which developed later a a more general reality denial.
This allowed these individuals to have the benefits of the full ToM assumed to the full range of humanlike intelligence while not suffering from the aforementioned psychological block.

Varki was careful to indicate that his theory is not falsifiable but and I agree it is still useful to theorize this way for singletime events like the evolution of humans.

Nevertheless, there are some other problems in this proposal that makes it on the verge of becoming a justso story.
Even though Varki mentions many of these problems in his final chapter, they are just dismissed.

For example, Varki mentions that the concept of a full ToM is not clear and resolves this issue by saying that the elementary selfhood awareness up to full ToM lie in a continuum but in this case, why did not individuals develop on this continuum slowly enough to avoid the onset of depression There must be a break someplace in this continuum.
This leads me to think that the problem is not with the full ToM concept but with the intermediate vague ToM state which most hominids are assumed to live within.
The analogy with autistic children is not very useful because the kind of achievement of these hominids is not similar.
For example, autistic savants may be able to survive in the wild but we would expect then to see several different technological achievements that are not continued during early hominid days but what we see in the archaeological record is the opposite: Very simple tools that do not evolve for a long time.
This does not seem to me the achievement of a nation of ASD patients,
Another problem is that the book gives very little notice of other factors that derived the evolution of the human mind including tool use.
Even though many researchers subscribe to higher importance of social factors in the evolution of the human mind, it is very hard to completely dismiss tool use as having at least some effect.

Another deep problem I think is the assumption that attaining a full ToM would lead to appreciation of mortality and then to reduced fitness.
Both of these effects are not clear, Why would appreciating mortality lead to depression, This may be true for us modern humans but why is it the case that for earlier hominids with undoubtedly different environmental condition and who are raised in completely different cultures than ours Why cannot the individual just understand that her/his life is too short to spend without joy and people do not engage in sex for reproduction in most cases but to enjoy the moment.
Was not it possible for these early individual to even become more life affirming exactly because they know that this life is short! I do not think that they have the author's familiarity with the "life is suffering" saying.

All in all, I do think that this theory deserves being discussed but it is hardly the last word and I think Dr.
Varki would agree.
A friend recommended this book to me because he knows I love books on selfdeception, and this book is fantastic.
Its different from any of the other books Ive read on the topic, and I didnt expect to enjoy it as much as I did.
Unlike other books, Varki and Brower took a really indepth, narrow focus on one specific type of selfdeception, and thats the denial of death.
Rather than purely taking a psychological approach to the topic, they wrote from the angle of evolutionary biology.
Evolutionary biology is typically something I dont enjoy reading about, but this book made it so digestible and engaging that I binged this book in a couple of days.
They develop a theory of why we evolved for theory of mind and why we deny death while also bringing in many other theories and studies from throughout the years.
While this book didnt touch on a lot of the aspects of denial and selfdeception that Im curious about, the fact that it went so deep on this one topic was actually quite interesting.
It made me think a lot about how we evolved the way we did to deny our own mortality and how it was advantageous to our species.


Lastly, I want to note that the story of these two authors, how they met, and how this book came to fruition is so serendipitous.
Its honestly one of the craziest true stories Ive heard, and Im so glad these two authors met and that it led to this book.

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