The Human Mind In A Diagram

Albeit, a crappy looking diagram.

Also, around the circle, imagine the word "Shared Intentionality", which serves as the organizing scheme used by natural selection to promote group selection.




This is what Human beings are. All of us - you, me, your mother and father - are organized in just these sorts of ways.

Hopefully our political, judicial and educational systems will recognize the necessity of understanding human nature with reference to the way we our unconsciously programmed to avoid negative experiences of self, AND, pursue positive experiences of self. As the diagram shows, this happens UNCONSCIOUSLY, for the most part, through the procedures described as dissociation and idealization. Idealization, it should be added, is strengthened by negative experiences (up until a certain threshold).

Although these processes CAN be made conscious, in the sense that we can pay more attention to the way we our physically affected by our interactions with others, for the most part the human mind is designed to dissociate behaviors or actions perceived in others (indirectly) or self (directly) that generate negative experiences of self. Keep in mind that the shame----pride continuum is a phenomenological description; in social psychological terms it can be called "submission" (low status) or "domination" (high status).

Some evolutionary psychologists mistakenly assume that humans merely pursue "offensive" behaviors such as acting in ways that make others think highly of them. However, it is obvious that these thinkers do not have a sophisticated enough analysis of their own phenomenology. In reality, humans beings are EMBODIED, which means we are constantly interacting (for most people, unconsciously) with our affective experiences. If we merely pay attention to how we respond (how our attention becomes oriented) to these experiences, we will realize that the self is both 'denying' something (dissociation) about the experience they are having, as well as "finding" something that will make them feel better about themselves (idealization). That this process happens almost instantaneously makes it difficult to perceive, which is why it has taken humankind so long to discover this self-regulation process.

In my opinion, my own experience of trauma, which turned my daily experience to one of relentless self-objectification (about 14 years worth of it) both steered me to the appropriate literature (psychoanalysis; traumatology; evolutionary psychology) but more importantly, made my mind so much more aware of itself than it otherwise would be had I developed the normal way.

You can either agree with this, or deny it. As a far as I am concerned, this is the way humans evolved - not as individual organisms - but paradoxically, as creatures who selfishly need other people to 'recognize' them as worthy of esteem. In evolutionary language, this is "group selection". In order to make this group selection comprehensible, the evolutionary psychologist Michael Tomasello has posited "shared intentionality" as the homeostatic state that individual human actors are genetically programmed to drift towards.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Starting at the start always depend on your current position from the start point, the length of distance travelled and of course the relative speed of motion of the object in question is relative.


Nice read, I enjoyed it.

Cheers!

originally posted by: Astrocyte
The Human Mind In A Diagram

I think that you unproved assumption will fail under sufficient critical examination.
When you refer to Mind as 'human', I infer that you mean that you think that each brain in a can is busy manufacturing 'thoughts/memories/imagination', ego.
Such theories of 'materialism/physicalism' have been obsolete for a long time.
Ten people, all unique Conscious Perspectives (Souls), rather than making their own thought, all perceive 'thought' from ten unique Perspectives.
To the limited Perspective, they appear to be 'different thoughts', 'self' generated, but the Heads and the Tails are merely two mutually arising opposite Perspectives of the same Coin.
It is arrogance, vanity, to come up with some simplistic diagram of the mind, and claim universality!
More mental masturbation.
As a philosopher, I know all about 'mental masturbation'! *__-

'Thought/imagination' = ego. Vanity.
'Believing' anything that you think (or feel; feelings are thoughts) is insanity!

As Truth is ALL inclusive, I will grant you that your diagram is 'true'.!
The only problem is declaring one's 'truth' to be the only Universal 'Truth'.
So, yes, that is true, but it is ALSO True (fill in every other Perspective in the Universe!), also!
Then we have the whole Truth!

Every Perspective is unique every moment!

"For every Perspective, there is an equal and opposite Perspective!" - The First Law of Soul Dynamics

"The complete Universe (Reality/Truth/God/'Self!'/Tao/Brahman... or any feature herein...) can be completely defined/described as the synchronous sum-total of all Perspectives!" - Book of Fudd
ALL INCLUSIVE!!!

"The acceptance and understanding of other Perspectives furthers our acquaintance with Reality!"

"Be empty of what you know
Your clever mind just whips up
A dust storm of pride.
Allow yourself to be fooled and
peace clowns its way into your heart.

If your head would shatter in wonder
at what Reality really is,
reason’s tyranny would end and
every hair on your head would
become an oracle" - Rumi