quest


I am a woman born 1949 and my quest is to find a mindmate
to grow old together as a mutually devoted couple
in a relationship based upon the
egalitarian rational commitment paradigm
bonded by intrinsic commitment
as each other's safe haven and secure basis.

The purpose of this blog is to enable the right man
to recognize us as reciprocal mindmates and
to encourage him to contact me:
marulaki@hotmail.com


The entries directly concerning,
who could be my mindmate,
are mainly at the beginning.
If this is your predominant interest,
I suggest to read this blog in the same order
as it was written, following the numbers.

I am German, therefore my English is sometimes faulty.

Maybe you have stumbled upon this blog not as a potential match.
Please wait a short moment before zapping.

Do you know anybody, who could be my mindmate?
Your neighbour, brother, uncle, cousin, colleague, friend?
If so, please tell him to look at this blog.
While you have no reason to do this for me,
a stranger, maybe you can make someone happy, for whom you care.

Do you have your own webpage or blog,
which someone like my mindmate to be found probably reads?
If so, please mention my quest and add a link to this blog.


Monday, June 30, 2014

717. The Difference Between Animals And Humans

717.   The Difference Between Animals And Humans

Some people deny, that there is any decisive difference between animals and humans.   To me such a claim seems to be made by those in need of an excuse for allowing themselves the behavior of animals in disregard for the consequences. 

The most significant difference is the human ability of memorize sufficient knowledge and experience, which enables only humans for the long term anticipation of the consequences of their behavior.   Thus they are capable to recognize the harmful effects of instinctive behavior to an extent, which can lead to the conscious decision against such behavior.  

Under natural conditions, at some times animals find plenty of food, at others none.    Their instinct to eat as much as possible to store body fat is an evolutionary advantage for survival.   Until 10 000 years ago, and sometimes even much later, this was also the case for humans.
Today the reasoning ability enables humans to not always give in to the impulse to eat, because they want to avoid the anticipated consequence of obesity.    More precisely, the reasoning supplies the knowledge, but the balance between the power of instinctivity and the counter power of rationality and willpower determine the behavior.   Therefore some people are more than others able to keep their weight between healthy limits.  
Overfed pets just get fatter and fatter. 

It is the same concerning the survival of the species.    Animals do not hesitate to copulate, when they are driven by instincts, because they are unable to know, that at some time later, they will be severely punished with the atrocity of giving birth and the burden of raising the offspring.    
Only humans are capable to recognize early enough, that the survival of the species and procreation is a form of self-harming for the individual person.   The cognitive ability of a considerable number of humans to consciously reject procreation is a very unique trait of humans. 

The critical cognitive distance from instincts and the resulting freedom of decision is therefore what makes humans unique.   This ability to prevent self-harming comes along with the ability to also know, when the own behaviors cause harm and suffering to others.

 
When a cat catches a bird and drops it somewhere seriously wounded, the cat lacks any ability to recognize the suffering of the bird.  The same holds true too, when animals seriously hurt each other during struggles for the alpha position.   Animals cannot know, when the side effect of their instinctive behavior is strong suffering.
Humans can know this. Therefore it cannot be morally justified, that many humans use and consider their cognitive qualities only as a tool serving a more successful application of their instincts.   This aggravates the suffering of others instead of avoiding and preventing it.  People, who consciously follow their instinct, are knowingly cruel.  

This means that the cognitive ability to recognize the consequences of the own behavior brings along the moral obligation to avoid harm and suffering of others as much as of oneself.

 
Unfortunately, many people live by double standards.   When they benefit from using their rational brain, they do it.   But when others are concerned, they allow themselves willingly to be ruthlessly determined by instinctive drives. 

The same hunter, who during the day shoots animals feeling entitled to do so due to being a human, nevertheless claims in the evening his right to follow his animal nature by copulating like an alley dog with a prostitute, not perceiving the woman as an abused and degraded human being but only as an object.   Shooting at humans of another country or ethnic group driven by the ingroup-outgroup instinct, he also has allowed himself to be controlled by an animal instinct, even though his reason could recognize this as absurd, as animal but as certainly not human.

Who feels superior to animals due to being human should also be congruent in not giving in to his own animal urges.    Excusing and condoning animal behavior by misrepresenting it as the human nature is not only absurd, but also the consequences are fatal, usually for all parties involved.

Friday, June 20, 2014

716: Alley Dogs: The Regression To An Earlier Period Of Evolution

716:  Alley Dogs: The Regression To An Earlier Period Of Evolution


Definition: 
I call persons, who copulate without neither getting emotionally attached nor wishing this to happen, as alley dogs.
Copulation like alley dogs is a regression to behaviors prevalent before the specific cognitive qualities of the human brain had evolved.
  

Evolution is not a master plan. As long as a species survives, this only indicates, that in the past the evolutionary net sum of instinctive and in the case of humans also innate cognitive tendencies has resulted in a sufficient amount of procreation.  

Some millions of years ago, when the ancestors of present day humans were still only animals, they copulated by instinct as all animals do.  Some months later it was followed by the birth of the youngster(s).   
At that moment, they had no conscious memory of the copulation and they were not aware, that the agony of birth was caused by the copulation.   
When they copulated, they were also unable to anticipate, that giving birth was the punishment for the female.   
Lacking the comprehension of this causality, they also had no way to avoid the agony of further procreation.

Then the unique evolution of the human cognition began.   One of the aspects thereof is the longterm memory and the ability to anticipate the future consequences of the own and of others' behavior.  This enabled the co-evolution of purely cognitive emotions, which derive from reasoning and not from bodily sensations.   Cognitive emotions are very distinct from sensations like fear in the situation of a real danger or pain after being physically wounded.  

Some of these cognitive emotions are: 
  1. Emotional attachment based upon invisible cognitive traits.  
    It is difficult to define love or to put such feeling into words.  But with certainty, whatever there is, it cannot be called love without cognition derived emotional attachment. Traits leading to emotional attachment can be honesty, reliability, empathy, but also intelligence and education, which make it rewarding to be together.

  2. Rational empathy and a theory of mind.  
    By this someone has knowledge about how another person is going to react,  This is more than the anticipation of visible behavior, but also the anticipation of the invisible cognitive emotions.  This includes also those situations, when the reaction of the other will be very distinct from the own reaction under identical circumstances. 

  3. Responsibility and consideration.   When being in advance aware of the consequences and impact of the own behavior upon others, responsibility is the cognitive ability to prevent hurting others by the avoidance of anticipated own cognitive emotions like guilt, shame, remorse.
     
  4. Awareness for invisible emotional reactions caused by invisible experiences.   
    This includes taking full account of feelings of selfworth and identity of the self and in others and how these are elicited and effected by interactions.   Examples are appreciation, depreciation, adulation, disdain, honor, equality, indignation, injustice, pride, entitlement and much more.
Sometimes such qualities are called emotional intelligence.  

By instinct only, alley dogs are male, while females attempt to exploit a man as a provider for the children, who get her full attachment, while he gets a subscription to the repeated use of her body.

When cognition modifies the raw instincts, emotional attachment to an intimate partner happens usually fast or immediately in women.  For men usually more repetitions are needed, before the subjective experience of the alley dog copulation is converted into the emotional attachment of making love.
 
Had there been a continued linear evolution of only a growing strength of rationality and cognitive emotions like the one in the list above over instincts, this would have enabled and motivated more and more people to avoid harming others.    As a logical side effect, this would have drastically reduced procreation and maybe the human species would already have been extinct.
Until safe family planning was available, a truly considerate and responsible man would have rather refrained from physical intimacy than ever risking to cause suffering for a woman, who was not fully wishing to have children.   

But the human species did not get extinct.  Some alley dogs continue to sire alley dogs and prevail in the gene pool.  I can see several reasons. 
  1. Some people, mostly men are just like animals, because they lack the human emotional restrictions which would prevent them from copulating like alley dogs.  Their behavior is not guided or determined by cognitive emotions.    They contribute more to the gene pool by having more offspring than the considerate men.  Genghis Khan is a good example.  He is reported to have raped thousands of women and his genes are supposed be present in millions of Asians.
    1.1.  They can be generally limited in their ability to feel cognitive emotions, as in the case of Alexithymia.   They are not aware, what pain they cause to people, who want to be loved, because they themselves do not know love and are unable to experience emotional attachment.

    1.2.  They know, what they do, but do not care, because they are not able to feel guilt, shame or remorse.   They are sociopaths.  
  2. The availability of safe birth control has made the consideration for preventing the threat of pregnancy as the most drastic consequence of alley dog copulation obsolete.  
    It needs less cognitive quality to be able to refrain from doing something as drastic as making a woman pregnant. 
    To refrain from abusing a woman as a toilet for body waste because of respect for her brain, to spare the woman the invisible suffering of indignation, devaluation, objectification and humiliation requires a much higher level of cognitive quality in a man.  Less men have it.
    Being free of the fear of pregnancy is great.   But unfortunately it came with the price of the disgust of being (or at my age having been) too frequently approached by alley dogs.
     
  3. The human brain including the ability for empathy has evolved for coping with the life in small groups or communities.   Now people are suddenly (seen in the evolutionary timeline) flooded by the media with very realistic representations of extreme atrocities.  This representations are so realistic, that the subconscious brain cannot distinguish between such pictures or movies and real life. 
    Nobody can react permanently with full empathy to this extreme amount of exposure. 
    Desensitization is an unavoidable consequence.  

    When a man grows up munching chips while indifferently watching a movie, in which a woman is raped, it is not really astonishing that he will consider hurting 'only' a woman's feeling as a trifle in comparison.    

    When a woman grows up sitting in the safety of her home in front of a TV, she also gets a very biased picture.  On TV women are presented as willingly and happily doing and wanting themselves, what really only benefits selfish men.  On TV, these women get rewarded, but never emotionally harmed.  The watching real woman is thus misguided to underestimate, what she gets herself into by making the mistake of complying or imitating behavior, which really is an expression of male instinctivity and male wishes.  When this woman unexpectedly gets very hurt, she learns to understand reality too late and the hard way.
  4. When one person hurts another, no matter if it is the alley dog the loving woman or any other situation, there are two different perspectives.  
    4.1.  The difference between hurting and not hurting behavior is a choice, and therefore people with cognitive emotional quality take themselves the responsibility for what they do to others.
    They never use the behavior of the victim as an excuse, even if the victim could have avoided exposing himself to be vulnerable.

    4.2.  Under the impact of desensitization, people have a more selfish perspective based upon the entitlement to do, what they want.   Whoever gets hurt or harmed is attributed as either defective or too stupid to protect himself.  Therefore they feel justified to take no responsibility.   The victim of an alley dog is blamed for not being also an alley dog.  In the case that the suffering reactions of the victim annoy the alley dog, the victim is even blamed for diminishing the alley dog's benefits.

    This desensitization has contributed to a present social norm in many western societies, which defines alley dog copulation as allegedly healthy behavior.   Those, who get hurt, are supposed to use those remedies, which contribute to the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.
It is sad.  All the amazing progress only leads to the material standard of life getting more and more comfortable.  But when it comes to the avoidance of non-physical suffering, there is no progress, but a regress to times before the evolution of the cognition.   

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

715. Love Cannot Be Defined, But A Loving Relationship Can

715.  Love Cannot Be Defined, But A Loving Relationship Can

Love is an emotion, which is felt and cannot be clearly defined.   It is easier to define, what is not love, than what is.  
The mere urge to copulate with a body is certainly not love but only a virulent expression of the procreation instinct.    Whatever form of attraction there may be, nothing can be called love with justification, unless there is the recognition and appreciation of the cognitive qualities and personality of the partner. 

The relationship of a couple can be defined as loving by behaviors, by which the quality of the bond between the partners is directly or indirectly expressed.
  
The criteria of a loving relationship:
  1. Emotional attachment and emotional intimacy
  2. Physical intimacy
  3. Some amount of intellectual intimacy, depending upon the amount of intelligence and education
  4. Exclusivity, each being special to the other in a way, which nobody else is
  5. No need or inclination to wish or to search for someone else
When all the above criteria for a loving relationship are present, and when the couple has also explicitly agreed to stay together indefinitely, then they have accepted to be a loving couple.  Obviously both experience sufficiently, whatever love means for them personally.

But when two persons share physical intimacy repeatedly with each other during a considerable time, even for years, and they do not consider themselves as a couple in a loving relationship, there can be very different arrangements.  

In the case, that it is really only physical intimacy and nothing else, then this is just a variety of reciprocal abuse and taking advantage of each other, while they prefer the practical advantage of avoiding the recurrent hunt and search for someone different.

But there is also the concept of friends with benefits (FWB), where the word friend really means true friendship, and is not just confounded as synonymous with mere acquaintance.   

A true friend is someone, with whom there are ties of emotional and intellectual intimacy in some form.    This is the essence of friendship.  When physical intimacy is added to the true friendship, then this combination contains all esential ingredients for a loving relationship.   

When the couple nevertheless explicitly puts emphasis upon the distinction of being FWB, but not being a loving couple, this means more often than not, that their are some serious personal problems.
  1. It can be a sign of selfishness and greed, when someone wants all the benefits of being in a loving relationship while also wanting all the advantages of being single.   It is an attempt to get all needs met while not having any obligations to also meet the other's needs.  
  2. There can be fear and apprehension.  
    Someone may fear commitment and obligations.  
    Someone may fear failure and getting the more hurt, the more he allows involvement.   
    Someone may be torn apart between the fear of a repetition of a very hurtful past experience and the wish to have a better relationship. Someone may fear to fail, would accepting love lead to the next step of further closeness by living together. 
    Someone may succeed to maintain the denial of such fears by insisting on the denial of any emotional involvement.  
  3. There can be unrealistic hopes and expectations.   The real quality of the present relationship is not appreciated as sufficient in comparison with imaginary ideals.  The relationship is considered as a temporary arrangement until either the ideal and perfect partner is found or until someone experiences that overwhelming sudden sensation, as which love is presented in fictional novels or movies. 


This FWB concept seems weird.

It cannot be explained by evolutionary biology.    By instinct, men want to sire as many offspring as possible with as many different sets of genes.   By instinct, women want commitment and attachment as the best way of provision for their offspring.   

While FWB does not cater for the needs of the instinct driven, it nevertheless also does not serve the specific needs of those with a very low instinctivity, the brainiacs, eggheads and intellectuals. Their needs for intellectual and emotional intimacy, for the companionship of shared extensive cultural and cognitive activities are best fulfilled in a close loving relationship.
 
Maybe FWB suits predominantly the needs of the people in the middle of the instinctivity bell curve, who are the most disturbed by their internal struggle between the contradictory forces of instincts versus rationality and self-control.  

As long as both persons implied want either love or FWB, they can get, what they want.   But sadly enough, often there is a disparity, probably when people differ very much in their level of instinctivity.  While one partner experiences all the criteria as given and thus himself as being in a loving relationship, the other is afflicted with some of the problems listed above and keeps on enforcing a distance by insisting to be only FWB.