When I say pleasure I am talking about the primative sense. Meaning. We are 'designed' to do what we enjoy doing. Our brains are 'designed' to reward some behavior, or can be tricked into rewarding some things based on chemistry.
by designed I mean through evolution.
We seek pleasure, that is the most basic of our instincts. It surpassed even our desire to reproduce, as it dictates our discovery of reproduction.
Unlike more primative animals, we aren't born with as strong an instinctual side. Since we come from a long line of animals that have gotten smarter and smarter with time, and a group of already highly social animals all the way down to pre-man and pre-ape mammals, we have a deminished sense of instinct. This has some really great reasons, since a society can use group thinking to overcome a task, and the defeating of instincts can mean the continuation of the genetic line in ways that other animals couldn't recover from.
An example might be the choice to become nomadic, which takes instinctual animals genetic changes to produce but can be spawned in 1 lifetime for social animals.
Also the choice to NOT reproduce due to negative situations. Such as a bad winter and little food for children or pregnant females.
We are one of the few animals that needs to be taught about sex. We can discover masturbation on our own, but not know what use to make of it. But we find it through our search for pleasure.
We avoid painful things, and are attracted to pleasureable things.
We might not even have an instinctual aversion to death. We fear death on a mental level, but we fear pain on an instictual level.
When I say we are born selfish, I mean we are born to seek pleasure.
We eat what tastes good, and we do what feels good.
But I agree with most of what you said.
by designed I mean through evolution.
We seek pleasure, that is the most basic of our instincts. It surpassed even our desire to reproduce, as it dictates our discovery of reproduction.
Unlike more primative animals, we aren't born with as strong an instinctual side. Since we come from a long line of animals that have gotten smarter and smarter with time, and a group of already highly social animals all the way down to pre-man and pre-ape mammals, we have a deminished sense of instinct. This has some really great reasons, since a society can use group thinking to overcome a task, and the defeating of instincts can mean the continuation of the genetic line in ways that other animals couldn't recover from.
An example might be the choice to become nomadic, which takes instinctual animals genetic changes to produce but can be spawned in 1 lifetime for social animals.
Also the choice to NOT reproduce due to negative situations. Such as a bad winter and little food for children or pregnant females.
We are one of the few animals that needs to be taught about sex. We can discover masturbation on our own, but not know what use to make of it. But we find it through our search for pleasure.
We avoid painful things, and are attracted to pleasureable things.
We might not even have an instinctual aversion to death. We fear death on a mental level, but we fear pain on an instictual level.
When I say we are born selfish, I mean we are born to seek pleasure.
We eat what tastes good, and we do what feels good.
But I agree with most of what you said.