Grace Period, by Will Baker is not about any disaster, incident, or event in particular. The described observations, such as brief fluctuations in the universe itself, bizarre behaviours in animals, a man concerned for his blood pressure, and busy signals on every phone line, are all too messy, too broad, and too inconstant within the story to point to a specific event. While some readers who’ve been impacted by a significant event and had their life turned unexpectedly might pull pieces of this work and relate them to their own experiences, this story doesn’t need an event or conclusive ending for readers to unearth its deeper meaning. This grace period is an extended metaphor for the beauty and insignificance of human life.
This work shows that humans, at their core, are primitive and simple. They take in their environment, but never go as far as to deduce and understand the situations they are in. Because of this, humans find themselves - all of a sudden - lost in the uncanny valley, and the ancient flight or fight response takes off. This is good. This keeps species alive. But when under such pressure that the response is activated, all prior learning and training for disaster leaves. Humans are flawed.
…show more content…
But a human life can burn out and fade, while the world continues to turn. No universe is pulsing to combat a dying soul, because in the end, one life is unimportant. The contributions of that life maybe appreciated, but will not matter in a few quick years. Humankind live in a grace
In the year 1625, Francis Bacon, a famous essayist and poet wrote about the influences of fear on everyday life. He stated, “Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other” (Essays Dedication of Death). Clearly, external surroundings affect perceptions of fear as well as human nature in general. Although C.S. Lewis published the novel, Out of the Silent Planet, over three centuries after Bacon wrote his theory on fear, Lewis similarly portrayed external surrounding to manipulate perceptions of fear. From the first chapter of the novel, Lewis revealed fear to be a weakness that leads to ignorance. It was this ignorance that apparently fueled the cycle of corruption and immorality on “The Silent Planet.” Using the character Ransom to reveal the effect of memory and morality on fear, C.S. Lewis demonstrates that fear is a quality of the “bent” race (humans), and only by eliminating fear in our lives can the human race become hnau.
...’s obedience level is affected by the location and surroundings of the experiment; they also hold a mutual understanding on the question of ethics. Yet, there is a larger question. Could these points indicate that humans are not fully in control of their actions?
The Grace That Keeps This World, by Tom Bailey, is an enthralling novel about the Hazen family who have lived in Lost Lake their whole lives. In this novel Kevin Hazen, a young man of 19, is searching for where he belongs in the world and in his own family. He wants more for his life than the life of survival that his parents have lived their whole lives. The story of the Hazen family is centered around the first day of deer season. For the Hazens, this hunt is more than just a sport. They use the meat of every deer they shoot to help them survive through the winter.
In his lecture, primatologist Robert Sapolsky explains the uniqueness of humans as well as our similarities to other primates. In doing so, he broke it down into six points of interest: aggression, theory of mind, the golden rule, empathy, pleasure in anticipation and gratification postponement, and lastly, culture. Professor Sapolsky approaches each point with interesting fact-based examples thus allowing me to gain insight on humans and other primates. Sapolsky’s knowledge of primates along with his scientific background allows him to make a clear argument that one cannot simply ignore.
Man is the product of heredity and environment and that he acts as his machine responds to outside stimuli and nothing else, seem amply proven by the evolution and history of man. Every process of nature and life is a continuous sequence of cause and effect (156).
Blumberg, Mark Samuel. Basic Instinct: The Genesis of Behavior. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2005. Print.
The biological perspective examines how brain processes and other bodily functions regulate behaviour. It emphasizes that the brain and nervous system are central to understanding behaviour, thought, and emotion. It is believed that thoughts and emotions have a physical basis in the brain. Electrical impulses zoom throughout the brain’s cells, releasing chemical substances that enable us to think, feel, and behave. René Descartes (1596–1650) wrote an influential book (De Homine [On Man]) in which he tried to explain how the behaviour of animals, and to some extent the behaviour of humans, could be like t...
This essay was depressing, but also impressive. There are two characters, and as I mentioned, one is the sympathetic one and the other is the empathetic one. In the essay, It Will Look Like a Sunset by Kelly Sundberg, she takes the disturbing moments of her life, gets a handle on them, and puts them together to create a sense of literature with language and style. She was married, and it was once a love story, like most. But, she then explains why she stayed and endured years of emotional and physical abuse from her husband, Caleb. The first paragraph of the essay starts off beautifully. It says, “I was twenty-six, having spent most of my twenties delaying adulthood, and he was twenty-four and enjoyed reputation as a partier. The pregnancy was a surprise, and we married months later.” (Sundberg, 208) And following that later on, “We didn’t want a church wedding, but our families insisted. Faith was what made marriage sacred. Faith was what kept people together.” (Sundberg, 209) The author creates a connection between her life, faith, and marriage. Expressing that having confidence in her marriage and having trust kept them together. Her pregnancy was a surprise and that also kept them together. Faith is the connection between God and herself. Sundberg mentioned that her and her husband were together two years before he started to abuse her. With him first pushing her against the wall, then two years later, he hit her. Following a year later, he hit her again. Her argument was that her husband wanted to change, so he attended therapy and anger management. Nonetheless, that did not help
The purpose of this academic piece is to critically discuss The Darwinist implication of the evolutionary psychological conception of human nature. Charles Darwin’s “natural selection” will be the main factor discussed as the theory of evolution was developed by him. Evolutionary psychology is the approach on human nature on the basis that human behavior is derived from biological factors and there are psychologists who claim that human behavior is not something one is born with but rather it is learned. According to Downes, S. M. (2010 fall edition) “Evolutionary psychology is one of the many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior”. This goes further to implicate that evolutionary psychology is virtually based on the claims of the human being a machine that can be programmed to do certain things and because it can be programmed it has systems in the body that allow such to happen for instance the nervous system which is the connection of the spinal cord and the brain and assists in voluntary and involuntary motor movements.
...and dominance standing among members of an equivalent species. Moreover it's been instructed that within the evolution of animate thing prokaryotes to cellular eukaryotes, primal secretion signal between people might have evolved to paracrine and endocrine signal among individual organisms. Some authors assume that approach-avoidance reactions in animals, evoked by chemical cues, type the biological process basis for the expertise of emotions in humans.
Thinking back on the history of mankind, there is a well known pattern of barbarian and aggressive behavior inherent in human beings. The desire to conquer and control their environment has been proven to be existent in human nature. Although mankind’s conscience manages to keep these instincts in check, they can become unleashed if provoked. Often when faced with adversity, humans tend to regress and lose their sense of rationality giving rise to an emergence of their “id” personality. According to Adam Roberts analysis of the unconscious mind, “the id works outside the realms of logic or reasonableness, it just wants, and it doesn’t care how or why” (Roberts 56). Therefore, the “id” makes up the subconscious of an individual’s consciousness where all primitive desires and urges derive from. It is not attainable to conscious thought, yet it affects all of a person’s actions.
"Instinct." Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
How do we explain, predict and control human behavior? This question remains a central underlying theme within psychology as a whole. Few specific branches of psychology have attempted to integrate multiple perspectives within their fields of research. Evolutionary psychology appears to be unique in this endeavor, and as the following researchers point out, “Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioural sciences—a framework that not only incorporates the evolutionary sciences on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all of the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires” (Tooby & Cosmides, 2005)
Even though most innate human behaviors can never truly be prophesied with any real form of accuracy, there are ways to assess the potential for a person to respond to certain situations with a given behavior. For instance, one of the best predictors of imminent behavior is a person’s past behavior or actions (Vecchi, 2009). Although individuals can (and do) change over time, the likelihood of a person’s organic behavioral pattern changing is generally quite limited, particularly if they haven’t been taught new ways to cope with stressful situations. “Given this
Imagine a place of complete control of every action during any given day. This unattainable goal goes under the rug; however, this elusive place is attainable only in one 's mind. The dictating factor of all human actions lies within the emotion which derives from the inner depths of the sea. The sea monster which swims through the human body, leeching on to our brains and controlling them. Through the sea monster antagonizing fear into human`s consciousness, this brief attack dictates everyday actions. Fear, expressed from human responses to stressful stimulus activates the flight or fight response inside our brain. This triggers without our conscious awareness as this occurs as an automatic response. A human response in which requires no