Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

and certainly understand cheating and lying!

What about the reptilian brain’s flight or fight response — does this lead to any values? It is interesting that in a discussion people often just seem to attack without thinking or otherwise immediately back off. I think the key message here is that it helps us greatly to discern where we are just reacting to the world through our primary, instinctual selves, and when we are applying some kind of more advanced discernment. Remember in the last chapter that same cut-off point was observed — the point where we stop just re-acting and start to apply some rationality and to be full agents of our actions.

Where is power in all this? We could say that there is a value called ‘authority’ that served us well in our remote past — when the worst we were able to do to our rivals for power would be to bash their head with a rock or kill them with a spear! But now we have powerful people with arsenals of nuclear weapons that could destroy the whole world. Power no longer serves us too well — if indeed it ever did. It’s only rationality that can be used to counter the hierarchies of power — and this is one of our toughest challenges.

Of course, some might say that we have the instincts we have because value is built into the universe, or because God has arranged things this way, or even that God has arranged evolution such that we ended up with the instincts and values that we have. There seems to be numerous possible alternatives. But, as with the discussions of emergence and a kind of

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