Human Sexuality

(more of my photographs of bronzes of Tamil Nadu)

Among human beings, the most significant and consequential deviation from the evolutionary command encoded in our DNA is that it has moved away enormously from the purpose of sexual activity. Inventing and re-inventing sexuality, man has lost the fundamental reason for it: procreation, ensuring continuance of life, the survival of the species. Sex has become the ultimate in recreational activity. All other acitivities: sports, art, music, scholarship, competitiveness to excel in various fields, etc. etc., all derive from this shift of sexual organs to the brain, because man/woman believes that his/her achievement will make him/her attractive to the Other, and therefore will enable and also enhance sexual experience.

In the other living creatures that we know, plants and animals, which do not have the benefit of imagination, it is DNA which prompts their reproductive systems to activity; while, among human beings, sexuality has not only left the most complex mark, but is in a continuous process of enhancement and acceleration. Therefore, our human inventions of romance, yearning, voyeurism, variation of activity, variety of partners, scorching jealousy, and vendetta.

For a simple example, take the case of an amoeba: in the body of water, small, large, dirty or clean, in which it lives, that limbless, organless, brainless, life, the DNA in its single cell contains the message of survival. When the content of the water body is stable, the reproductive system is automatically stabilised. But if the water is drawn away, the automatic system of survival will go into action, and it will begin to divide and reproduce with acceleration.

Compare this to mankind: homo sapiens … I can go on and on, but would like someone who reads this and has an opinion, to engage me on the subject.

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I had tweeted:
Human beings are the only creatures whose sexual desire, fulfillment, violence, reside in the brain and not in the sexual organs.

@DeirdreS wrote: that would surprise me very much. We're all mammals; if it's true for humans, it's true for others as well.

My answer:
All mammals are not the same. Only human beings are conscious of their existence and aware that they were born, that they are, and that they will die. No other living creature has this consciousness. They exist purely according to the commands of genetics.

@DeirdreS wrote: Recent research with primates, monkeys show they have a sense of what others are thinking/feeling, just like us.


My answer:
Empathy alone is not the same as self-awareness.  It is instinctive and born out of the most basic sense of survival. Among the living, both plant and animal, there are varied degrees of evolution. But the difference between man and others is unbridgeable.  On a scale, for instance, of 1 to 100, if man was at 100, the other forms of higher evolution would not exceed 8-10. Some animals, some insects, and what we would call the highest forms of mammals, just to take a small instance, can sense and learn more than some others.

B.F. Skinner, who developed "Skinner's box" or more elaborately, what is called in psychiatry "behaviorism", claimed that human beings could train less evolved creatures to perform new behaviors for food and survival. But that does not make them more evolved: they still are not conscious of their existence, that they were once born and that they will also die. They do not know their names, their identity. They cannot confer, create religion or concepts, form associations in protest against their greatest adversary, their worst annihilator.

The point is that we are the only creatures conscious of our being and therefore capable of premeditation and execution.
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@looksurly wrote: Do we really know what goes on the brain of other creatures? E.g., whales http://fwd4.me/V7Y

my response: Only human beings are conscious of their existence and aware that they were born, that they are, and that they will die. No other living creature has this consciousness. They exist purely according to the commands of genetics. If you still doubt, I'm willing to provide explanations and evidence.

@looksurly wrote: What I doubt is that you (or anyone) can prove that another animal is not conscious. We barely understand this in humans.

my response: I respect your doubt; now, for me the question is: are you comfortable with your presumed  belief that in all creatures and, perhaps, even in matter, reside varying degrees of consciousness. If so, I would not want to argue and try to convert you to scientifically incontrovertible evidence that I am willing to provide to you, including designing and suggesting models of experimentation in laboratory to prove that among all living creatures, only humans are fully conscious.

As I said earlier, on a scale of 1 to 100, human beings being at 100, the other consciousnesses would not exceed 8-10, and that is not sufficient to transpose and juxtapose our own feelings of pleasure, grief or whatever onto them, as not only are they oblivious of those feelings, but function almost entirely out of genetics. 

So, either I leave you to your belief or proceed to prove my point. I may mention, in passing here, that I did set up an experiment at Rochester Psychiatric Institute sometime in the 1970s, when, at an open house, as a chief speaker, I was asked this very question, apart from several others, and I succeeded in making my point, because the opposite could not be proved by the scientists who had taken me on.