The Human Animal

This society, this world, this form of being in which we live, is shaped, fundamentally, by the economic architecture of capitalism.

Everything about ourselves is eminently understandable if we only observed the language of our phenomenology. But, alas, this phrase probably only means something to people who have taken up 'mindfulness' - or a general attitude of "non-judgemental curiosity about the flow of your phenomenal experience.

The world reified in language, the language of our culture, of our academies, is brutishly unself-aware, simplistically assuming within a lattice-work of complex constructions, designing life towards an arbitrary aesthetic, as if life didn't indicate one by its flows, its forms, and the access we all have to this internal dynamism from within our own human experience.

Brain Changes

People who are self-aware are self aware because they have practiced self-awareness. They have followed the direction, worked earnestly, and by doing so, restructured the teleodynamic flow of their internal experience. Mindfulness does not erase the past, but it nevertheless does the job by providing the observant consciousness the means to influence the flow of experiences. This happens through an intensely nuanced combination of rational inquiry (science) and a meditative focus on body and breath. These two approaches address the two general forms of constraint on the flow of human perception: top-down "predictions" of experiential causation i.e. what the meanings in the actions of Others means for your self-experience. And bottom-up release of metabolic energy repeatedly trapped by the "top-down" assumptions, by extending the out-breath and so inducing the sinoatrial node to relax flexion n diaphragmatic musculature.

A confused, paranoid, and prideful society

We truly do live in an ignorant naive world. Still, this impression can seem so wanton when there is still a presumption of "being on the right track". There are only two concepts that are useful to our thinking about our flow of experience, and this extends from a scientific analysis of the structure of communicative-processes. I speak certainly about this because it is IN YOU! Everyone can know from their own first person experience how they experience certain interactions, what causes this feeling, how I respond to this feeling, and so on and so forth. Our society has bred confused, paranoid and fearful people who are nevertheless to shame-phobic to acknowledge what is occurring within them.

Think of pride. Think of those times when someone says something slightly derogatory, and you respond in a way, with a sort of zest, that could only properly be described as "prideful". The point with this example is that the human brain, as paradoxical as it sounds, is intrinsically 2nd person oriented i.e. self-conscious. We act in certain ways to bring about a feeling of self. These types of actions occur most frequently under some degree of duress, at work, or any social place, where performing the scripts and demonstrating certain social capacities brings about, as we all want, exactly the types of experiences that make us feel good about "ourselves".

This is so monstrously reflexive that the only people who truly understand the magnitude of the problem are those with a curiosity in their own experiences. Psychodynamical processes, related to pride, and in particular, how pride enters phenomenology right after a subtle registering of shame, is ultimately why we have never yet established a truly stable, egalitarian society. It's not due to a lack of understanding, as systems sciences in all fields - biology, psychology, sociology, business - is pointing in a good direction. However, even systems-scientists haven't properly conceptualized the needs human beings actually have: to feel good, which requires being positively known by Others to actually experience those states.

Being known, by the way, is not a neutral action, but a veritable creation event, which "spurs" the neurological hardware of the brain to generate neural-connections that "correspond" to the form of expression - really, the spiritual presence of the Other - and so bring about a process, banally spoken about as ontogenesis, when indeed, it is a creation event, fundamentally dependent on the presence of the enlivening Other to bring the brain to species-typical proportions.

We do not know ourselves. Capitalism, and its intrinsic angst-ridden restless spirit, is responsible for the delusions we impose on ourselves.



Who here has ever encountered this? You say something to someone else about something they said you disagree with. Your explanation is complex - too complex for them to understand, because unlike you, they have not been training their brain since childhood, and so, do not conceptualize as easily. Their mind-brain is "constrained" towards only one acceptable action: Dissociation. First, implicit in the communicative-representation (the language your speaking) is a question about capacity; remember, all human experience is intrinsically 2nd-person oriented. When I experience myself struggling to understand something someone who disagrees with me is trying to explain, it is actually being unconsciously redescribed as a capacity issue: "I'm stupid if I can't understand" - and to not know something, to be ignorant, is to feel "less than" the person challenging your knowledge. A capacity redescription therefore can be described as an adaptive-mechanism that avoids a conscious experience of shame. Mind you, shame is the causative force in the subsequent "focus on the deficiency in the Other". We all know this. Psychoanalysts call it "projection". In the situation described in this diagram, projection is seen as an active process with two unconscious referents: the referents, mind you, are neurobiologically inscribed echoes of past experiences. They guide our prospective minds by "avoiding actions" or ways of being that may elicit negative feelings, and so jeopardize your ability to reach Michael Tomasellos 'species attractor: shared-intentionality.

Dissociation is generally about shame. When we feel shame, our body-brain-mind takes it as a poison. It is a constraint on experience - a constraint on what "you let yourself" know. In this example, the shame of not having knowledge, and so experiencing yourself vis-a-vis the Other as "less-than", cannot be consciously tolerated. It is, in fact, a little mini-injustice cast within the human cultural nexus. Whenever someone does something like this, the correlation between self and world, breaks down. Delusions swarm between minds, ultimately socially finessed scripted that regulate our affective experience, this being, ultimately, the judge in why we tend to act in unfair, arrogant, and abusive ways.

Think about it. Our conscious experience is INHERENTLY tinged with unconscious flows of affect that "speak knowledge" about what we fear, what we feel we need, and what we don't want to see. Still, we are quasi-machines, built by by action-based sensory precision feedback so that every "moment" between organism and world is attuned. But, much is "filled in". All our visual systems are imperfect constructions of the external world, subject to real-metabolic time-scales and biological processes that color our phenomenology.

Very true. Very much is filled in for us!

The purpose of covert propaganda is to discourage reflective thought and short-circuit logical thinking. Self-awareness is the key to fighting it. Every channel of communication is infiltrated by those attempting to manipulate us with black propaganda, and we are kept connected 24/7. By keeping the population constantly distracted, they prevent people from engaging in the self reflective practices necessary to develop the higher self awareness needed to recognize when black propaganda is short-circuiting them. As helpful as some technology can be, this is a dangerous side effect.

This means we can only be self-aware, in the truest sense, if we are able to interpose awareness between each cycle. Each response, each feeling, forms a meaning-system that inevitably forges itself into a story-like-structure. We seek coherency, symbolic coherency but there is nevertheless a tremendous break between ourselves and the world when we exist at odds with one another. The metaphysical flows that construct us - the tensions of diametrical opposites, organism-world



This diagram, although a tad-bit tangential, nevertheless speaks to the intrinsic metaphysical coupling that always exists between the organism and the lived world it exists within.

But this is nevertheless so "3rd person". The reality of a world, and external world, awaits an evolutionary medium. This medium, implicit in the very beginnings of the evolutionary process, is the emergence of primate apes who have begun to make-fire. The origin of the modern-self derives from this phase-transition in the life-process. The world, and its metaphysical wonders, only revealed itself, and thus is fundamentally dependent upon, the existential feelings of being enlivened by being known by another creature. Why else assume a 2nd-person phenomenological functionality, other than that "the Universe wanted to know itself". Indeed. It seems like the most logical explanation.

Yet, the world opens up, a world of forms, and forms that reproduce. Humans come in two sexes, and its only when they come together that the wonders of reproduction, meisosis, mitosis, and the splendors of the complex system dynamics, emerge as actualities.

Organism-World, a tense duality, creates being. Self-Other, a tense duality, creates consciousness within the physical world. Why do we resist the fundamental dualism - tension, and complementarity between opposites, when the world screams this is how it functions? Today, there is a delusion about sexual orientation, and a delusion about mental illness, that speaks about both without any reference at-all to the system-dynamics operating between minds that mutually act upon one anothers experience. For example, the statement, "I first knew I was gay", is a cliche, a stereotype, a "just-so" story that operates as a form of facilitating being known-by-the-Other. Our needs to "be known", is ultimately about mirror neurons in my being "attuning" to what is meaningful-to-me in the expressive behavior of the Other. My being therefore immediately identifies, at the time, with the story: and so it repeats itself, meme-like, because the "release" of the pent-up anxiety, depression, and the colossus sense of meaningless, associated with feelings - likely generated by intolerant and anxiety-inducing Others (who themselves, of course, have had intimations of such experiences; hence their powerful reactivity) - is now "made sense". When you communicate the verbal routine "I first knew I was gay", you in a sense obliterate any feeling that contradicts that claim. While Behavioral Economics continues to make a mockery of human beliefs in a capable and dependable memory, we still nevertheless foster a conversation in our culture that ignores neuroplasticity, dynamical-biological system-world ecology, and the general reality that mindfulness brings one in contact with their organic biological core, and so provides the relief from being constrained by feelings, to realizing that feeling is something the human mind can regulate consciously.

So am I being a homophobe, then? Chances are, if you've had conversations with Others in which you or the Others you related with shared-forms-of-expression that brought about a phenomenological state of "coherency"; and if affects were felt, shared and enjoyed. Indeed, your brain had already anticipated you: its only reality, it imagines, is the one being currently offered to it. Interactions like these actually bind you to the archetypal Other. They live in you as "imagined interlocutors". We humans speak just as reflexively and automatically at times of dis-ease as the cow or horse who engages in repetitive self-soothing actions to "make coherent" its current affect reality.

All creatures look for meaning within their life-world. It's just we humans have not yet conventionalized amongst ourselves (perhaps buddhism getting the closest) a language of self-experience. We don't know it, because no one has made it meaningful to us. See the loopiness, the circularity? This is life, endlessly spiralling, upwards into the abstract and spiritual.

Everything I've written thus far is cutting edge science. The human mind, as well as the human genome, correlate quite well, and so what is thought by many prideful and egotistical scientists (i.e. Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker) about the "innate" organization of our being, is very wrong.



Retrotransposons are known as "jumping genes", because they actually cut themselves out of the genome, and fly to other parts of the genome, and then insert themselves. Dawkins, Francis Crick, and others, cynically - as they always are - described these genes as "parasites", but the 288 million dollar ENCODE project revealed just the opposite: these genes are very complex regulators of gene expressing proteins.

Are neurons, in other words, possess a degree of plasticity that corresponds quite nicely to the plasticity we (or some of us, at least) experience within our phenomenology.

Contexts Are Activating You

Our brains internalize Others, quite literally. Being "enlivened" in any interaction quite literally inserts the others phenomenology exactly like retrotransposons do to neurons at another codon. We are, in other words, embodying not merely the form of our interactions in our cells, but our cells incline, recreate us, based on the past, into creatures that pursue meaning in terms of past-meaning-structures.



Hiumans live as Mind. We express mind, and adopt the existential functions Others have learned when they enliven us with their expressivity.

PS. For those who were caught off guard by my comment relating to sexuality.

As I encoded, but failed to make clear in my writing, the world opens up VIA the other. The male-female metaphysical harmony and belief that humans should attune themselves to that harmony - a fairly common belief in early-religious systems - and so institute a "law" about marriage, is not, and will never, suffice.

That our feelings are motley constructions from other domains is beyond dispute: if were hot, we get cranky. If were depressed, we may incline to paranoid thoughts that have historically bothered us. These are contingent and relational realities, always built via a referentiality: for instance, if I'm afraid of not being able to fall asleep, that fear only makes sense with reference to an internalized value: sleep is good and necessary.

Indeed, I didn't get so self-aware without first encountering this phenomena, again, and again, and again, until it became apparent to me that my tension and need not to be this i.e. not to sleep, was simply a function of an already domain general anxiety. Developmentally, I was anxious before I had things to anxious about.

This sleep example applies equally to any feeling we have. I was once desperately afraid of Schizophrenia. Again, consider the referentiality: I am afraid BECAUSE I value my sanity. There's always a personal value (whether learned via experience, or imposed by the cultural surround) that precedes my feeling relationship to the thing itself.

I'm attempting, if you can't yet tell, to describe how it is homosexual feelings form and develop. The background conditions are generally invariable: coddling mother, negative masculine presence that frequently brings into question your capacity as a particular examplar i.e. a "man".

By accepting and tolerating homosexuality, we may indeed be following a necessary step in an already played-out evolutionary dialectic. As said, the "metaphysics" of the world COMES after the discovery of the Other. The Other - that is, the care and play and copious meaning making behind our neurological growth - is how we see the world, can conceptualize external reality, to begin with.

So, does it make sense to punish the Other when the Other inclines towards homosexuality? Especially when early-life family dynamics and the endless strain of the capitalistic rat-race, constrains his or her experience to a very narrow self-knowing?

It surprises me, to be completely honest, how willingly people seem to be to throw away, to turn away, and not consider with awe, the processes that generate our being. A human consciousness cannot emerge - as a scientific fact - without a sperm and an egg, as both possess properties that genetically complement the functioning of the Other.

Homosexuality is a function of a world that has hurt and abused the Other. The weak and vulnerable, become tense, anxious, and depressed, lose connection with the world, and yet feel the robust exuberance of a sex drive: the urge to keep it going, to keep the spiral flowing upwards. So what do they do? They want to be straight, they tell themselves, their fine, but they're not, as their secret fears and secret internalizations of the coddling mother and the intolerant father do battle within his affective being.

When looking at a photo of a naked woman, theres a need to feel attraction. The need, though, echoes the hurt, anxiety, and disapproval, that the father has instituted in you. You move from his perspective towards the object, and in doing, depress your affective relation. Too much thinking, too little being "taken up", as emotions usually work, by the affective-presence of the Other.

To fix feelings is not easy, but is actualizable. A scientific consensus is emerging that the human mind does indeed possess remarkable cognitive prowess - being able to affect its body state, allows it to release the muscular tension that saps the energy of embodied pleasure. We can track and follow the exact neurological routes, such as the vagus--heart-gut connection. So much experience "comes" from here, and it is from here, from what we feel hear, that people can be made to believe that they are "this way" i.e. gay, straight, etc. That we are precisely "open" to anything is a function of the emergent-mind that exists above us. But the needs - the need to be sexually profligate (bi-sexuality), the sex addiction of our society rightfully worries psychologists who work in this field, as sex, as a n intensely pleasurable feeling, can be used to regulate your life-stresses, and as such, can become a behavioral addiction. This is the type of sex-addiction that needs "something new", more and more, and what, ultimately, does such behavior, when considered with reference to a more self-regulated and self-relaxed mode of being, signify?

A human is able to do what no other creature can do: see the world, its patterns, its forms, and the way it reproduces being, again and again. But again, this happens through the Other. Thus, the Other > World, because the latter is dynamically ancillary, in that without another human being to enliven your brain to adult proportions, the world simply isn't as clear and meaningful.

So indeed. It is strange that we've punished homosexuals. Quite rightly have they gained rights to marry, and rights to start a family.

Nevertheless, the world still speaks its functionality. Are we gnostics? Are we going to pretend this is a "world of hell", even though it gives us birth, gives us minds for knowing, and gives us pleasures? So why the certainty that the typical conservative view of "male-female" is unimportant or insigificant? Does this indicate a more basic Human-World dissociation, whereby the human, lives in a fantasy world which is out-of-touch, or tune, with the realities of its existence?

Mind creates duality. When the mind emerges, the possibility of a "dissociation" of self-from world can happen. Initially, I believe, we were absolutely one, and so the "garden of eden" tale may indeed be an collective unconscious memory of our hunter-gatherer, predating the capitalism-pride-shame-competition-agriculture complex, which set us up as individual egos who defined themselves in terms of their otherness. Self-alienation started with capital. When the first man accumulated things, he broke himself from affective-harmony with Others, and so induced the creation of a new self-other dynamic, situated around power, pride and shame.

My honest to God view, one I don't think is reasonable to give up, is that, sometime after we quiet our spirits, our body's and minds will "reassociate" and, also, I believe, the dualistic-structure of the world and its complex dialectics will be honored, and so, without much compunction or diffculty (in a self-aware mindful world), sexuality will not take on the central-importance it has today. Capitalism - with its selling and marketing of people as if they were foodstuffs, creates and exaggerates this need.

We are creatures who are bigger than sex. Indeed, the feeling of compassion and awe, may be the leading edge of our being. When we attune to the world and recognize the nature of reality, we feel awe, and so we feel attracted to attune ourselves. But people cannot be threatened to do so. The patriarchal ethic of force and power is not permitted to be used!

Awe should only be the guide.

Excellent OP - I'll be back to read more. Thanks for posting it!
S/F

a reply to: Astrocyte

*furious applause* bravo good sir bravo. Sumptuous incredible, and quite easy to follow! The charts were a bit hard though.

a reply to: 5leepingWarrior

Here ya go, man....
save them to your computer and then upload into your account for future use.....

a reply to: Johnnyblastoff03

By keeping the population constantly distracted, they prevent people from engaging in the self reflective practices necessary to develop the higher self awareness needed to recognize when black propaganda is short-circuiting them. As helpful as some technology can be, this is a dangerous side effect.

Yep! And see, the flip-side of that is the thing we only skirt around for now.....
some states have legalized weed. Even D.C. - our freaking national capitol....has legalized weed.
This is remarkable for two reasons:

Weed is safe, and it encourages us to think....it encourages the development of self-awareness and depth of thought needed for self-actualization and to recognize the truth. That's why some fight it so hard.

It loosens the collar of control and exclusive input.

So - why are they fighting it?

Thanks to everyone for the stars and flags.

a reply to: 5leepingWarrior

Not sure which charts you had trouble with.

Heres a bit more explanation behind the charts. I'm very influenced by systems theory and in particular the views of Stuart Kauffman, Terrence Deacon, Harold Morowitz and Robert Ulanowicz. My "metaphysics" of the dynamics of biophysical processes - and so the consciousness it generates - is based on their very, very important work.

1st Chart: This describes a typical example of how interactions with others is biased by past affective experience. So, behind each individual are two circles, together forming the affects we feel when we interact with Others. They are two, because our mind is pulled by different levels of experience. Our body, being a dynamical process of continuous self-creation, communicates how its dynamical-processes are existing. What we feel is the 'essence' of this process. Were just so used to it that we never quite realize how amazing our every moment of existing is: trillions of cells are performing a statistically improbable wonder to maintain our continuous existence!

The second circle is how we've been affected. This is crucial, as it is through the presence of Others that we paradoxically reconstruct our being. Each human emanates a "story" in his behavior - both linguistic (symbolic/representative) as well as non-verbally, which, it must be stated, is the more ancient and infallible of informational processes. This is why I emphasize dissociation so much: our representational-thinking mind fails to properly symbolize what the language of affect - operating through a psychodynamical self-other equivalence - is saying. Consider how dangerous this is! If we don't properly understand ourselves and our relations and literal biological dependence on one another, we are essentially deluding ourselves into a mode of functioning that is ill-adapted to what enlivens our biological being. In fact, many people naively assume that Japanese - the oldest living people on earth - live so long because of "green tea". Such an assumption reflects a deep lack of self-understanding, as it is the dynamical inter-inclusion of Self and Other - that is, the interpersonal process - that brings energy into our body's and enlivenment into our being. So, the real cause of Japanese longevity is the healthy cultural attitude towards elders cultivated in Japan. The old, therefore, still "feel recognized" - and by being acknowledged as living being, life remains a relaxed and enlivened place for them and their bodies. If we only knew how nonnegotiable a moral-awareness was to maintaining a free, fair and democratic society! My lifes mission - because it is so pleasurable! - is to share such knowledge and help create a conversation about how communicative processes revolve around care and its absence. So much of this capitalistic world we live cultivates the latter, and only because a competitive mode-of-being "crowds out' care, because care can be easily associated with "weakness". And when you've experienced weakness - i.e. being insulted and negatively related to by Others - your brain, and your consciousness, has little tolerance for affects that imply 'care'. Unless another presence in your life fosters a healthy relationship to care, you'll be a person who repeatedly dissociates a wide-spectrum of feelings because you cannot tolerate it within the flow of your self-experience.

Putin, Trump, are severe examples of people who cannot tolerate 'weakness', and so do not foster any values that may imply a 'selfless care' for Others. Only trauma creates these states,