Primal instinct

[eventhorizon]

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Usually that perception is shaped in your very early childhood and persists, but it can be manipulated throughout your whole life either by traumata or by constantly fostered foxnews fears.

For some the issue is Fox News, for others it is other news orgs. But we are not here to discuss that. Politics is a verboten subject. So please keep those thoughts to yourself.

"Fox News" serves as an example for a media business whose recipients range is largely based on sensationalism and provoking outrage and fears. You can use any similar media with a similar business model but usually you take the most obvious, widest known example to emphasize a point. The "Sun" for UK residents e.g.

My point is scientific, not "political". In psychology the effects of such media consumption on anxiety and fears are as well researched as the effects of fears and anxiety on gathering "safety" things. So please keep the paternalism to yourself, if I may say so.

Sorry if my example hurt your feelings, though.

[JRinFL]

There are basic predispositions hardwired into our brains. To deny that is to deny reality. Of course, modern humans spend considerable effort in denying reality, one might even consider it to be one of the defining characteristics of modern life.

[JRinFL]

...
Usually that perception is shaped in your very early childhood and persists, but it can be manipulated throughout your whole life either by traumata or by constantly fostered foxnews fears.

For some the issue is Fox News, for others it is other news orgs. But we are not here to discuss that. Politics is a verboten subject. So please keep those thoughts to yourself.

"Fox News" serves as an example for a media business whose recipients range is largely based on sensationalism and provoking outrage and fears. You can use any similar media with a similar business model but usually you take the most obvious, widest known example to emphasize a point. The "Sun" for UK residents e.g.

My point is scientific, not "political". In psychology the effects of such media consumption on anxiety and fears are as well researched as the effects of fears and anxiety on gathering "safety" things. So please keep the paternalism to yourself, if I may say so.

Sorry if my example hurt your feelings, though.

You are looking to provoke, please stop it. All "news" media suffers from the same sins no matter the political bent of each outlet.

[eventhorizon]

...
Usually that perception is shaped in your very early childhood and persists, but it can be manipulated throughout your whole life either by traumata or by constantly fostered foxnews fears.

For some the issue is Fox News, for others it is other news orgs. But we are not here to discuss that. Politics is a verboten subject. So please keep those thoughts to yourself.

"Fox News" serves as an example for a media business whose recipients range is largely based on sensationalism and provoking outrage and fears. You can use any similar media with a similar business model but usually you take the most obvious, widest known example to emphasize a point. The "Sun" for UK residents e.g.

My point is scientific, not "political". In psychology the effects of such media consumption on anxiety and fears are as well researched as the effects of fears and anxiety on gathering "safety" things. So please keep the paternalism to yourself, if I may say so.

Sorry if my example hurt your feelings, though.

You are looking to provoke, please stop it. All "news" media suffers from the same sins no matter the political bent of each outlet.

If science provokes you, it's not science's fault...

And surely not "all news media" is the same or "suffers from the same sins", but that's neither the topic nor my point. My point is how anxiety and fears affect perception and consumerism and how the industry makes use of these effects.

Actually you are getting political here, don't you? Maybe you should stop.

[Christian Noble]

The foundation of man’s ‘first skills’ are cutting tools, fire and cordage. From these three things everything else can be built and as such why we have civilization....

That's really interesting. Knife to separate, divide. Cordage to bind together. Fire to cook, or destroy, to see, and to keep warm. All three, fundamental, basic ways to modify the environment.

For the record, I'm also interested in fasteners (screws, glue, rivets) and in fire (from electricity to flashlights to a bonfire). What does that say? And where is the forum for people interested in fastening and in fire?

Lots of forums for Bushcraft, which one could argue is the convergence of primitive skills, the mountain man and classic camping era, and modern outdoor living skills. Many keeping those ‘fires lit’

[James Y]

I don’t know about primal instinct. If it were, I would think that many more males in our society would be carrying knives than actually do.

I think this may show that just because you're male doesn't mean you're automatically a hunter, maybe there are just a lot more gatherers in society now. It could even show an evolution in our species where we no longer feel the need to hunt because food is so readily available. I think to get a better answer to a question like this you need to ask it of other cultures that don't live in abundance, people who still live off the land and can't stroll down to Walmart for their meat. This change started so long ago when the idea of buying instead of hunting/gathering started.



I would even say it's actually a result of our higher intelligence vs other animals, because hunting costs both calories and can involve risk, two things that mammals are wired to conserve and avoid. In the wild if a lion can bully his way in and steal a cheetah's kill instead of spending energy to hunt for themselves they'll do it every time. Humans are doing the same but we're intelligent enough to cooperate/trade for our goods. We've evolved to the point of being able (aka, being so successful) that we don't need tools like knives (our version of claws and fangs) to survive on a daily basis.

Of course, the problem is that at any given time we are only a step or two away from being in the right situation where food is no longer handed to us and we have to fend for ourselves. For the most part humans have found almost every conceivable way of cheating natural selection but it catches up to those who stray too far outside of our culture.

Makes total sense.

Regarding people in other cultures with less affluence, who rely on tools like knives for their living or their very survival on a daily basis, it’s interesting to note that many or most of them use knives and steels that most forumites would consider total garbage. Yet they use what they have with great skill and effectiveness to get the job done, day in and day out.

Jim

[aicolainen]

we’re living in a hyper novel environment that’s really messing with instincts evolved under completely different circumstances.
It’s hard to say exactly which impulses trigger what behavior in this setting.

A long time ago I read somewhere that wolves are hardwired through evolution to hunt even when their stomach is full from a recent kill. Not because they enjoy killing (as they’re often wrongfully attributed), but because statistically only one in about ten hunts pays off, so they must start planning the next meal right away to survive. In a hyper novel environment with an abundance of domesticated sheep on pasture that will quickly turn into a pretty irrational slaughter.

I’m not an expert on what we’re wired to, but that program has certainly has turned into a lot of irrational behavior under our current circumstances.

Certainly I feel there is a part of my program that have me itching to go out and hunt and gather my own food, however irrational that is in a cost / benefit analysis.
Take any person, however urban, to the woods and give the person an axe, and you’ll almost always see the primal need to chop down and create come to life.

I’m very aware of my excess accumulation of knives and other consumer goods, and try to keep it at bay. It’s no doubt irrational.
That said I’m also very aware about the hyper novelty of our situation, and don’t feel that the specific act of owning and carrying knives is irrational. In a sense it provides a connection to my genes, a primal instinct if you will, but I don’t think of it as such.
Owning and using knives, guns and other manual tools has a lot of advantages over surrendering completely to modern conveniences, and forces (or at least enables) you to think more deliberately about how situations can be approached and improved through your own effort, a process that is very rewarding to the mind. And unfortunately a section of the mind that’s regularly numbed down i modern humans.

[Bolster]

I’m very aware of my excess accumulation of knives and other consumer goods, and try to keep it at bay. It’s no doubt irrational.
That said I’m also very aware about the hyper novelty of our situation, and don’t feel that the specific act of owning and carrying knives is irrational. In a sense it provides a connection to my genes, a primal instinct if you will, but I don’t think of it as such.
Owning and using knives, guns and other manual tools has a lot of advantages over surrendering completely to modern conveniences, and forces (or at least enables) you to think more deliberately about how situations can be approached and improved through your own effort, a process that is very rewarding to the mind. And unfortunately a section of the mind that’s regularly numbed down i modern humans.

Very interesting thoughts, here. Makes sense to me. If humans have anything like "instinct," maybe the interest in knives is a bubbling-up of primal urges. I have lots of cutting tools: table saw, bandsaw, metal bandsaw, jigsaw, circular saw, sawzall, hackzall, chisels, drills, biscuit jointer, router table, on and on, but the cutting tool I buy way too many multiples of, is inevitably knives.

Knives are crude cutting tools, in comparison to the other precise, bench-mounted, cast-iron, high HP cutting tools I own. One of my other cutting tools rather easily adjusts to cutting off precisely .001". But I keep buying knives. So an explanation like Aicolainen's makes sense! Maybe there is just something primal about, and attachment to, humankind's early vital cutting tool.

[James Y]

My late dad, who was blue collar all his life, always had a pocketknife on him. TBH, he used his knives more extensively than I do. He’d carry one pocketknife until it was completely used up (which usually took only a few years), toss the remnants into an old toolbox (for some reason he never threw them away) and would buy another.

But he was not knife-obsessed. He never attached any importance to his knives other than as tools to help get the job done. Once when I was young, my dad noticed about five pocketknives I had sitting on a stack of books in my room and asked, “What the heck you need so many pocketknives for?” He hadn’t known about the other dozen or so that I had in my drawer.

Jim

[Kevinim82]

This thread is very enjoying to read. Thank you all that are contributing to it.

Now I shall rant peaceably…

I am in much agreement to the desire to go outside and create, to be in nature, to experience and encounter it; and to use simple and complex tools while doing so.

I think a lot of wonderful things about human physiology get down played when we think of survival situations. *my favorite survival organ is the liver! Humans can go very long times without eating… only our consumerist teaching and behaviors would tell people otherwise. And on the other end of our built in survival organs: exposure (extreme temperature change) in the wild will kill anyone in the matter of minute/hours!

If we think primal; know the average man lived only until his 30’s prior to things like vaccines and modern sanitation (and many many more awesome things.) *my own plug: prior to the vaccines for polio/mmr… and about 6 or 7 other childhood vaccines… many many children died in infancy and early childhood.

In my own understanding of the human brain our autonomic response/functions are all bundled at the stem of our brain. Things like heart function and breathing, and many more autonomic functions (I am way oversimplifying).

When I think primal brain, I think emotional responses, one primal response that can be broken down most simply is fight or flight. And another set of emotional responses that can be broken down; mad, sad, glad, or scared. In my studies of what one would call “human instinct” I think the these emotional responses are as instinct as a human brain goes. Emotional response=tied into the hormonal responses of our body.

We are humans! We have executive function. We plan/learn! Our frontal lobes are big, and communicate well with the sensing parts of our brains. Executive function makes us uniquely human.

I would dismiss the idea that if left in the woods with an axe, everyone would do a pattern of very similar things. … … there is an anthropological term/theory (I forgot the name of said term) of primitive cultures from around the world… they share similar experience/developmental … to be broadly relativistic about the “primative cultures” is very dismissive of the uniqueness of those said cultures, and also dismissive of the amazing ness of being human.

And for my favorite part of this topic. Knives! Knives are wonderfully complex and wonderfully simple tools. I am so happy to be able to use tools. A knife to me is like playing chess with two queens. (Not to be confused with safe queens!) a knife gives me another way to solve a problem, and I can solve said problem sharply (pun intended!)

I think Shaun Houston “BBB” said it most rightly that a person only needs about 5 knives in their life… after 5 we are all just carrying around pocket jewelry, and at this point we have been sucked into a consumerist/dopamine response to buy buy buy (nothing hunter/gathering about this.) Business people are in the business of making you think you need excess of their products and they use the dopamine response to prey on that reward center in our brains that can never be full or satisfied.

Keep living life, and be very cautious of the business people who would tell you, you need a PM2 in every color G-10 in the spectrum of visible light.

On a more brain note. Business that operates and use electronic media in all forms; seek to give us just a little dopamine response (and this type of reward structure) it can never be full or satisfied.

[Manixguy@1994]

I must say this thread has been a very enjoyable read . I’m glad I took the time to read it , a lot of information that I thought I would ever read in a Spyderco Forum . Regards to all MG2