How Do We Know What We Like?
How do we know that we like what we like?
Where does the subjective begin to take shape?
The Dana Foundation produces a newsletter that is sent out to the scientific community, and recently they covered these questions.
The essential brain is not well understood by the multitude of people who actually possess one of their own. And, one could argue that the essential subjective brain remains a mystery.
Is the topic related to biology or is it more related to physics? A recent discovery that was announced in the New York Times shows that an isolated cell from a fruit fly is not different from an isolated from a human. Of course the difference is that for each one cell that the fruit fly has, the human has some 4,000,000 cells.
What is interesting here is that in evolutionary psychology the process of becoming a brain or a fruit cell under goes similar processes. Paul Bloom recently released a book, How Pleasure Works.
I wanted to bring this book to greater awareness because I think that Mr. Bloom emphasizes an aspect of humanity that is frequently overlooked, “our essentialism underlies our passions, our appetites and our desires.”
Who we are in essence is difficult to ignore, despite the fact that it is probably impossible to isolate with today's physics, or today's biology. The idea that what we like is colored by our history is not profound, by any means. One would venture to guess that a six-year-old might well have answered the question that way, which is essentially the basis of the article.
What we like comes from being who we are. The multitude of "fruit fly" cells converge into a cluster that becomes "who we are." And at a very early age we are differentiating ourselves from others. I am not a chair. I am not a table, I am not You. I am me.
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