I'm Back! (Sort of)

Some of my travels while I've been away, trying to connect to the whole.

Hi all! In my last (re)programming note, I mentioned that I was headed off for a bit of holiday touring during the end of summer. I had a great time, mostly hiking and biking through the amazing natural landscapes of Ireland and Wales, but it's time to tie myself to the writing desk once again. In that last post, I also said that I'd been encouraged to expand on something from my 100th philosophy thought experiment, and I've finally managed to do that. Over at the Sacred Naturalism blog on Patheos, I published a piece proposing a replacement for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a set of evolutionary hierarchies of needs — one for each and every level of biology according to E.O. Wilson’s model of consilience. Since all of life is related and deeply interdependent, no individual can hope to have all of their needs met until all of life does. The piece went through a long review process with two evolutionary psychology professors that I deeply respect, and as a result I'm quite happy with the final product. Below, you'll see the intro to the article and a link where you can read the full piece, That's followed by a few choice quotes to give you a summary if you're short on time. But if you do get through it all, I'd love to hear what you think in the comments below.

So that's all for now. It's great to be back! I'll post again soon once I've cobbled together the lessons I learned from blogging about 100 philosophy thought experiments. Hopefully I'll be able to capture just how much that changed my outlook on life. Stay tuned for that!

---------------------------------------------------------------
Replacing Maslow With An Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs

However ugly the parts appear, the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand / Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history ... for contemplation or in fact ... / Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is / Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.
--Excerpt from The Answer, a poem by Robinson Jeffers, 1936.

In 2018, the world will celebrate the 75th anniversary of Abraham Maslow’s classic paper published in Psychological Review that proposed a hierarchical approach to human motivation. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — that pyramid constructed on a base of physiological needs, and proceeding upwards through safety and security, love and belonging, and self-esteem, before topping out with self-actualization — is well known to millions who have had any exposure to the field of psychology. Fulfill these needs, and you will be a fulfilled person. Philosophers would say you were flourishing, imbued with eudaimonia, and a shining example of well-being. From a modern evolutionary perspective, however, this is no longer enough.....

< click here to continue reading >

---------------------------------------------------------------

"Ever since Darwin’s revolutionary idea came along, science has rather rapidly filled in the details of our interrelatedness. Yet much of philosophy, law, politics, and psychology are still focused on the realm of the individual, arguing even over how best to support any flourishing there. That, however, is an impoverished view."

"It’s only when our absolute highest priorities are concerned with the evolution of life in general that we can find ways for all of life to flourish together and ensure its long-term survival."

"It is incumbent upon us, for individual and collective reasons, to not only understand Maslow and other psychologists’ hierarchies of human needs, but we must also expand these hierarchies and adapt them to portray a wider and fully evolutionary view as well. As Darwin himself said, there is grandeur in this view of life."