In my recent posts I have been developing the idea that individual human beings might be more accurately seen as individual expressions of social preferences, attitudes and beliefs than as separate autonomous individuals. We live our lives making choices, deciding between this and that, creating our lives. We become mothers, fathers, doctors, lawyers, and carpenters. [...]
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Society and the True Self, Part 3: Waking Up in the Matrix
Posted by Jeff Carreira on March 15, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/03/15/society-and-the-true-self-part-3-waking-up-in-the-matrix/
Society and the True Self, Part 2: The Socially Conditioned Self
In my last post I described how other peoples’ outside opinions about us get incorporated into our own internal experience of ourselves. Now I want to show how the opinions about us that become part of our experience of who we are do not only come from people we interact with. Society as a whole [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on March 10, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/03/10/collective-development-and-the-true-self-part-2-the-socially-conditioned-self/
Society and the True Self, Part 1: How the ‘me’ became the ‘I’
Human existence is punctuated by distinctions – self/other, me/you, in/out, here/there, us/them, up/down – and the list goes on and on. These distinctions are what we use to locate ourselves in reality. For those of us inspired by the possibility of individual and collective transformation there is one distinction that we have to pay very [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on March 1, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/03/01/society-and-the-true-self-part-1-how-the-me-became-the-i/
A World of Sentences, Part 4: Living in a Background of Affirmed Commitment
I have been developing a thought about language and reality and suggesting that it might be better to think about the sentences that we use as commitments to reality rather than descriptions of it. Of course there is danger to take this thought too far. There are layers and levels of reality and some lend [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on February 23, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/02/23/a-world-of-sentences-part-4-living-in-a-background-of-affirmed-commitment/
A World of Sentences, Part 3: The Transformative Power of Language
In my last two posts I have suggested that it may not be valid to think of language as a description of reality. So if our language does not describe reality, what does it do? There are many ways to look at the value and function of language, but there is one that I find [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on February 16, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/02/16/a-world-of-sentences-part-3-the-transformative-power-of-language/
A World of Sentences, Part 2: Language and the Reality of Reality
When we begin to suspect how much language might be influencing our perception of reality our fundamental conception of what is real and true starts to unravel. Have we been wrong to assume that language is an accurate reflection of reality? Is there even a ‘reality’ out there to be reflected back to us in [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on February 9, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/02/09/a-world-of-sentences-part-2-language-and-the-reality-of-reality/
A World Made of Sentences, Part I: Sentences and the Perception or Reality
My last series of posts showed how our sense of self can be seen to be composed from an unending string of conclusions about who we are. In discovering this something interesting becomes apparent. We realize that our self-concept is built in language. Our sense of who we are is contained in sentences – statements that [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on February 2, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/02/02/a-world-made-of-sentences-part-i-sentences-and-the-perception-or-reality/
Self, Truth, Reality and Language – Part 4: A Model for Human Transformation
This will be the final post in this series and it brings the ideas we have been working with together into a model for how human transformation happens. Human beings change in many ways. We become smarter, we become stronger, we become more assertive, we become more reflective, we become, we become, we become… There [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on January 26, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/01/26/self-truth-reality-and-language-part-4-a-model-for-human-transformation/
Self, Reality, Truth and Language – Part III: Psychological Development vs. Spiritual Transformation
Over my last couple of posts I have been writing some thoughts about our sense of self. One way to think about our sense of self is to see that it is formed by a self-border – a line that separates our psyche into the ‘me’ and the ‘not me.’ On the outside of the [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on January 19, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/01/19/self-reality-truth-and-language-part-iii-psychological-development-vs-spiritual-transformation/
Self, Reality, Truth and Language – Part II: Sentences In Your Head
We are all trapped in a self-image – a set of ideas that we identify with as who we are. If you want to discover radical freedom then you have to look closely at what choices you are making that are causing you to have the identity that you are experiencing right now. It has [...]
Posted by Jeff Carreira on January 12, 2012
http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2012/01/12/self-reality-truth-and-language-part-ii-sentences-in-your-head/
