Collective instinct of the human animal

[Yellow]

This is something I used to address dismissively. Coincidences abound. Whenever something awful happens, there are always a cluster of "empathic" people who just knew something was wrong. A particularly vivid dream, the right song on the radio, an impending sense of doom that strikes seemingly out of nowhere.

Of course, we individually have these feelings all the time. But since nothing happens afterward, it passes by unremarked. Forgotten. Unless something happens to happen. Then it was a true foreboding.

Right? It's ridiculous.

But we all accept that some animals know when there's an earthquake coming. Or a big storm. We accept this as a kind of animal mysticism.

But what if we do have a sensitivity of some kind? Like a static in the air?

I've been in two situations where I could have sworn that there was a kind of static. Where I knew that something serious was happening, and so did everyone else.others felt the same. Too many others.

Spoiler

It was a beautiful day, and all but 2 of us on the teaching staff planned to take our students outside for lessons for 6th and 7th periods. I was the math teacher, and I had even planned an "applied math" lesson that amounted to throwing balls around. When it came time to go out, I just didn't want to. There was a like a static in the air, and I didn't want to do it. I didn't see other groups out my classroom windows either. Between periods, we found out that a local man had been on campus with a loaded shot gun with the expressed intent to kill the "scumbag kids" who had murdered his cats while he was in jail. (in all probability, they did). None of us went out. None of us saw him. After being so excited, we all we just changed our minds at the last minute.

Another situation was more recent, as I was living at the landfall point of a hurricane. Floridians under-react to hurricanes. They buy water and whatnots because the power might go out, but no one expects anything real. In my 7 years down there, nothing earned more than a "pssh". Monday morning, it was a tropical storm that might be a 1, and we were buzzing about it. By end of the work day, work was going to close Tuesday at noon, with Wednesday, the day of the storm, off. We had only closed early once and it was a high cat 2 supposedly a few hours away. This was a 1. Tuesday afternoon, the county sheriff was telling the newspapers and channels to tell us all that this one "felt different". We already knew. Something felt different. There was this static in the air. There weren't any jokes. We were all making plans. In 24 hours, it went from a 1 to a 5. Hurricanes just don't do that. No one would have predicted it.

What I'm asking is, do you think we are capable of animal-like collective instincts?

 

[The Grey Man]

Yes. Only a fraction of the information that the senses take in is processed by the brain and, of the processed information, only a fraction is disclosed to the conscious mind. We do a great deal of our thinking unconsciously, and the consequences of such thoughts may be private feelings or instinctive actions rather than crystal-clear verbal communication. A vague sense of doom might be the result of some hitherto unconscious thought process barging into the conscious mind like a stammering messenger.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

I'm gonna be predictable and boring and say no.

or I would break it down as: either it is physically possible to sense something, or it is not. An impending earthquake might be possible to sense based on intuition about various processes around us just like a mathematical model can predict it based on various inputs form the physical world. Whereas knowing whether there's gonna be a maniac showing up with a shotgun somewhere, that seems to be a different category.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Intuition is a sense that must be trained, and it's growth is usually along a narrow path. For example firefighters fighting a fire in a building, one of them has sense that something is wrong, tells everyone to escape the building and moments later the building collapses. In their years of fighting fires their subconscious noticed irregularities with this fire and made a decision to retreat. I would be more interested if you could show me examples of people that "predicted" a catastrophe and actually stopped it, granted I'm sure these stories are less likely to get picked up by the news.

The title of the thread made me think this would be anthropological. Such as us having inborn fear of snakes and spiders. How long ago did we form these? How long did our social species evolve together before branching out. We all share the same emotions and many gestures. Can this all be attributed to simply how the brain develops? Mental disorders are way too prevalent for I and many others to just be a defect. I have the night owl gene and BPD, this is theorized due to humans having night watchers, what came first, the predisposition to sleep late or the need for protection at night? Even then how much time would lets say a lineage of day walkers need to stay up to develop a predisposition to being up at night?

 

[Rolling Cattle]

Of course, we individually have these feelings all the time. But since nothing happens afterward, it passes by unremarked. Forgotten. Unless something happens to happen. Then it was a true foreboding.

What you said about confirmation bias was my initial thought to your question. I sometimes force myself to take notice when I have strong unexplainable predictions, and counted how many of them come true. The feelings were often just false alarms. But if one hits, it certainly feels more significant.

I think the A.I. called Blue Dot predicted the coronavirus outbreak before it became official. If A.I. could determine something amiss, why can't humans unknowingly have premonitions from the data our brains collect? Maybe with practice and enough experience, our brains could synthesize patterns and make reliable conclusions.

 

[Black Rose]

With Si you just know. No words just base emotions. Emotions have been around billions of years. All brain functions including emotions helped move the organism where it needs to be. They detect danger and find food. They are not thinking in words, they are not thinking at all. They just know.

Spoiler: emotion diagram

Here is my diagram of basic emotion.
Think of it as an insect.

Ni does not think in words either. It is thinkings in archetypes. Meaning it looks at the rotation of a field of the true nature or face of archetypes. You put women's face up and all women face would be in her face. The female archetype would be the rotation of all-female faces together. Not all archetypes are the same. As long are there are abstract faces to be rotating in an archetype is possible. Example, duck, fridge, zoo, dreams, mother.

Multidimensional rotation is when the mind folds up the archetypes when Si is the only attachment of a given intersect of Architypte.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

@Animekitty I think your diagram is missing something, and it's a bit difficult to follow. Where does it start and end? Is there not a stimulus internal or external that elicits an emotion? Everyone has intuition, whether they investigate and add to it seems to be a conscious endeavor.

Please watch this video. I think it gives insight into what exactly this thread is trying to accomplish.

 

[Rook]

Very possible. Body language in group changes. Subcon picks up change, instinctual reaction leads to group cohesion, escalation.

Not at all clued up on human pheromones, might or might not be a valid inclusion here.

Depends on group, core beliefs etc.... angry mob of religion not the same as an angry mob of science.

Tribal poor not same as sophsticate gathering..... many factors. But yes, the common human is a group animal and thus these things take hold, I work with tribal labour every day, very social humans, one event, like a snake in the potato fields or a reprimand from the boss spreads out very fast in the group, and the reaction is very uniform withy the exception of more reserved or indifferent individuals.

Snakes not merely a physical danger to them, supernatural fears also included.

I'm thinking about witch trails here, or the people in Malawi murdered for fear of them being vampires....

many flavours of humans, many variables, but yes, the group id very real.

In terms of precog: depends. Can't really say, but fear can spread fast among us (current drama over 20 00 dead from a virus as example). Don't know as to OP, tbh...

 

[ZenRaiden]

Well mathematically it is very simple. You either think something is good or bad. 50/50 chance. There are days when you feel bad or bad about something and there are days when you think Ok about something. Everything is 50/50 if we think in black and white.

Bad things happen quite often and people feel negative and bad quite often.

 

[Daddy]

I've heard this described as a form of intuition, where the things that are familiar are no longer familiar and something seems off. It could be that the details or patterns or probabilities of the world around you have changed or shifted significantly, like things are off-kilter. Or maybe you just feel different and it has more to do with you. This probably has an instinctive response where our unconscious mind redirects our attention to it, sometimes in dreams or just in our thoughts, causing us to hesitate and reflect on what it means.

Either way, in my opinion it's a sign that something is amiss or different, but what exactly is harder to figure out. I don't think anyone would truly know exactly, without investigating first. I call bullshit on that. But it probably does require a sensitivity to notice the many little signs that other people aren't even aware of, even if you don't know what exactly they mean right away.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if this has more to do with Jung's Synchronicity. People see a sign that something is off, then they see the later result and attribute what happened to the sign they saw. Cause they don't have to be directly connected and there can be many potential results for the signs that people see. Actually, I believe people that are strong in intuition not only pay attention to the signs, but also to their many potentials. Being sensory focused diminishes those potentials by its nature.

 

[Yellow]

An impending earthquake might be possible to sense based on intuition about various processes around us just like a mathematical model can predict it based on various inputs form the physical world. Whereas knowing whether there's gonna be a maniac showing up with a shotgun somewhere, that seems to be a different category.

I think I agree. Predominant "feelings" about a building natural disaster like a wildfire, hurricane, or earthquake probably should be held in a category apart from phenomena like a shooter or a plane crash. There's a reasonable argument for un/under-registered sensory input for huge physical phenomena resulting in an instinctual sense of danger. You'd have to risk magical thinking to explain the latter group.

It could be that the details or patterns or probabilities of the world around you have changed or shifted significantly, like things are off-kilter. ... But it probably does require a sensitivity to notice the many little signs that other people aren't even aware of, even if you don't know what exactly they mean right away.

Only a fraction of the information that the senses take in is processed by the brain and, of the processed information, only a fraction is disclosed to the conscious mind.

Very possible. Body language in group changes. Subcon picks up change, instinctual reaction leads to group cohesion, escalation.

Emotions have been around billions of years. All brain functions including emotions helped move the organism where it needs to be.

I think y'all agree. At least for physical phenomena? And it makes sense. People who are more sensitive to physical input could become nervous or tense, and then people sensitive to those people would feel spooked too. So they're all processing real information, but may be unable to pinpoint where the information is coming from. Seeing so many people acting different would rattle some of the remaining folks.
Resulting in this:

fear can spread fast among us (current drama over 20 00 dead from a virus as example).

But then these are good points too.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if this has more to do with Jung's Synchronicity. People see a sign that something is off, then they see the later result and attribute what happened to the sign they saw.

Bad things happen quite often and people feel negative and bad quite often.

How could we tease out what's really instinct/sensory "knowledge", and what's random chance inappropriately attributed to our instinct/sensory "knowledge"?

 

[Daddy]

How could we tease out what's really instinct/sensory "knowledge", and what's random chance inappropriately attributed to our instinct/sensory "knowledge"?

Great question! I'm really not sure. If the butterfly effect is real, then even a small variable at some point in time could change the outcome of things later on. Maybe for humans to make sense of things, we have to attribute things to our senses, even if on some philosophical level, the attribution isn't really that simple.

I guess if you want an answer, maybe it's enough to generalize patterns. So if a particular sense is linked to a certain outcome most of the time, then that sense could be attributed to that outcome. But I think it's also not a very rational thing to do because it's not a direct causal link. It's more like some kind of cognitive analytics; it can be useful and meaningful to do so, but it's retrospectively irrational.

 

[ZenRaiden]

How could we tease out what's really instinct/sensory "knowledge", and what's random chance inappropriately attributed to our instinct/sensory "knowledge"?

Even optimistic people very rarely get cough off guard when bad things happen. Human brains are naturally geared towards bad things happening. We are naturally biased towards bad stuff. People tend to rehears bad feelings more often than good feelings. Even minor bad thing that happens tend to bother people more often than 10 good things. 10 good things happen and you forget them or do not even notice them. One bad thing happens and your brain narrows down to that one problem. It is simply because bad things used to cost us our lives and good things very rarely happen.

 

[BurnedOut]

This is something I used to address dismissively. Coincidences abound. Whenever something awful happens, there are always a cluster of "empathic" people who just knew something was wrong. A particularly vivid dream, the right song on the radio, an impending sense of doom that strikes seemingly out of nowhere.

Of course, we individually have these feelings all the time. But since nothing happens afterward, it passes by unremarked. Forgotten. Unless something happens to happen. Then it was a true foreboding.

Right? It's ridiculous.

But we all accept that some animals know when there's an earthquake coming. Or a big storm. We accept this as a kind of animal mysticism.

But what if we do have a sensitivity of some kind? Like a static in the air?

I've been in two situations where I could have sworn that there was a kind of static. Where I knew that something serious was happening, and so did everyone else.others felt the same. Too many others.

Spoiler

It was a beautiful day, and all but 2 of us on the teaching staff planned to take our students outside for lessons for 6th and 7th periods. I was the math teacher, and I had even planned an "applied math" lesson that amounted to throwing balls around. When it came time to go out, I just didn't want to. There was a like a static in the air, and I didn't want to do it. I didn't see other groups out my classroom windows either. Between periods, we found out that a local man had been on campus with a loaded shot gun with the expressed intent to kill the "scumbag kids" who had murdered his cats while he was in jail. (in all probability, they did). None of us went out. None of us saw him. After being so excited, we all we just changed our minds at the last minute.

Another situation was more recent, as I was living at the landfall point of a hurricane. Floridians under-react to hurricanes. They buy water and whatnots because the power might go out, but no one expects anything real. In my 7 years down there, nothing earned more than a "pssh". Monday morning, it was a tropical storm that might be a 1, and we were buzzing about it. By end of the work day, work was going to close Tuesday at noon, with Wednesday, the day of the storm, off. We had only closed early once and it was a high cat 2 supposedly a few hours away. This was a 1. Tuesday afternoon, the county sheriff was telling the newspapers and channels to tell us all that this one "felt different". We already knew. Something felt different. There was this static in the air. There weren't any jokes. We were all making plans. In 24 hours, it went from a 1 to a 5. Hurricanes just don't do that. No one would have predicted it.

What I'm asking is, do you think we are capable of animal-like collective instincts?

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