The Cartesian mind is no longer plausible to a growing number of today's scientists. Because of this, may philosophers, biologists and physicists are
rethinking the nature of our existence, since it isn't - in fact - what our culture implicitly assumes: that emotion and reason are "different" things
deriving from two different ontological substances - matter and mind.
Antonio Damasio's 1994 book
Descartes Error really got the ball rolling, even though other biologists, philosophers and physicists - people
like Fransisco Varela (biology, philosophy), Humberto Maturana (biology/philosophy), Evan Thompson (biology, philosophy), Terrence Deacon (biophysics,
psychology, linguistics), Stuart Kauffman (biophysics, philosophy), Brian Goodwin (biophysics, philosophy) Mae Wan Ho (biophysics, philosophy), Ervin
Lazslo (complexity sciences, philosophy), Harold Morowitz (biophysics, philosophy), George Lakoff (biology, philosophy, linguistics), Mark Johnson
(philosophy) Walter Freeman (neuroscience), Gerald Edelman (Biology, philosophy, neuroscience) Ilya Prigogine (biophysics, philosophy) and a few
others (I either don't know of or am too lazy to keep citing) have helped pain a picture of Human reality that is radically unitary.
When I hear people like Bill Maher speak, I can enjoy him for a good 40 minutes, or, at other times, I can find every word he utters to be fueled and
motivated from a place of unreflective stupidity.. Maher expresses two common strands in current American culture: an appreciation for science, and a
libertarian philosophy of "let everyone do what they want so "long as they don't hurt other people". The first value, of course, is what allows me to
like Bill Maher in the first place. He evidently subscribes to a world view in which reason is afforded value. Reason, for him, as for me, is about
knowing "objective reality".
The problem is, Bill Maher - like many other people - do not realize that reason is
about regulating emotions. Furthermore, it is
categorically
impossible to speak - to be motivated to assert something - without whatever was said having a
contingent relationship to
everything you have ever said over your lifetime. We simply do not notice this because we are constantly embedded in a "relational caccoon" from
which our thinking and narrating self begins from. The psychoanalyst Joseph Palombo captures this idea with his term "mindsharing":
“Mindsharing is the process through which we are at one with other peoples thoughts, feelings, and experiences. This process includes our capacity
for empathy for other people and their ability for attunement to our mental states. As we will see, through mindsharing we provide others with
psychological functions they require to maintain their self-cohesion, even as we, being interconnected to others, require them to provide similar
functions for us. I call this process “providing complementary functions”, a process through which we search for others to complement our sense of
self.
The fact that we need others is not simply a reflection of our imperfections; our need is related to the social imperative to have others “be with
us”. Others enhance our existence by their companionship, their presence, and the nurturance they provide us (Stern, 1983) – Joseph Palombo, The
Neuropsychodynamic Treatment of Self-Deficits: Searching for Complementarity; pg. 14-15, Routledge, 2017
Palombo speaks about the mind in terms of a complex-adaptive system, which is what more and more practicing psychoanalysts and therapists are
beginning to do. Indeed - the more you come to
relate to your self with this knowledge, the more you begin to realize you function just like a
non-linear dynamical system, but the question is, how to think about it?
Since we live in a world of relational experiences that are bad and good, we are literally "split" within ourselves - because of a lack of education
of this issue - to become organized by
how negative objects affect us, and
how positive objects affect us. Our brain thus records (1)
the sorts of objects which hurt us (a certain person, adults, males, etc) and the (2) "instrumental behavior", or adaptation, that the mental system
should take.
What is the focus in the first situation versus the second situation? Objects which affect us our initially located in the external world, although
with development they begin to take on an "inner" correlate in a linked chain of associations with the external object. The response, however - or how
your mind becomes organized to respond in response to external objects that have induced past sufferring - has much more of a "verb(al)" quality, both
in the sense of it being an
feeling relation which contains knowledge of the world and its inevitable tendency to produce verbal speech a
second later.
It is truly amazing to me that some minds "don't know what they feel" - or can't "name it to tame it". Naming is necessary: the left hemispheres
regulation of the right entails the use of words - symbols, to configure its inner tension in terms of its actual development i.e.temporal, structure
i.e. I feel this way because so-and-so did this to me, because they themselves felt a certain way because someone did this to him, ad nauseum.
We don't realize it, but we are making reality coherent - at a physical level - as the very atoms which create our thinking - when we temporally
integrate the inchoate realities of our feeling, into the sequential understanding of its actual historical causality - how it shaped the feeling
which confuses you.
A coherent representation which confirms and affirms values intrinsic in material processes i.e. in the natural symmetry processes which build up
structure - like Human bodies - structures the dynamism of the brain-mind to become more resonantly consonant with the existences of other Humans.
Such an orientation is felt - and begins to be felt by Other humans who are resistant, because the consciousness on the inside has 'worked through'
all those dynamics which block a sense of correlation - or compassion - for other people.
This is what we name this process. Compassion is the effort of the Human being to 'put itself back together' after thousands of years of chronic
dissociation from its existential condition. Dissociation yields a world of 'good' (idealized) and evil (feared, dissociated) - and thus the
self-other dichotomy that has played such a huge role in fomenting conflicts in human history and deepening traumas which today motivate the minds of
today's living.
The bottom line of this post is this: what you
are presently feeling refers to what a present event "informs" you of about your past history.
Every feeling is a regurgitation of the past - and its expectations for the future. Indeed, past and future is unconscious structurin
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11-2-2017 by Astrocyte because: (no reason given)