The Social Beings Collective Fixation

Why do some thoughts fixate in our awareness while others don't?

The answer: we are social beings. What bothers you could come to bother me; and the way you come to regulate the thing that bothers you can also become the same thing needed to help regulate me.

This happens because humans traffic in self-states. Interaction is assimilation. There is a great deal of cross-over between one self and another self.

But self-states are states of perception and experience. These states are strung around a larger necklace: the narrative.

The brain various systems self-organize around self-states, because the first experiences a human has are self-states: these early-life experience, indeed, are the archetypal 'fractals' of the later life period. What happens here becomes "fleshed out" by later life narratives, be they simple (i.e. "machismo" persona) or more complex, as in the logic of the philosophical gnostic for why they believe and do as they do.

Pragmaticism is the Highest Science

There is nothing sensible or logical about fetishizing and romanticing suffering. Most people get this. But imagine: imagine if someone got it into their mind that humanity "needed" to live a false story, otherwise "existence would end". If this were a belief, then I would question the premise on which it is placed: that there is some essential dichotomy between the experience of 'transcendence' and the experience of being a mere 'human'.

As an avid reader into the fields of developmental psychology, developmental neuroscience, developmental psychoanalysis, and of traumatology, this "either-or" way of being is strongly associated with the insecure attachment pattern, appearing either in ambilvant or avoidant forms.

Why do humans believe that time is irrelevant to meaning-making? If your early life went wrong - a period where NON-CONSCIOUS parts of your AFFECTIVE BEING, your PROCEDURAL LEARNING and IMPLICIT RELATIONAL KNOWING become programmed by the self-other interactions you have with your environments.

The interaction with the other - the percept that arises - this is the "seme". How the other looked at you, the feeling they had and the level of insight they showed into yuor experience, becomes the 'grist' for the baby's experience. The neonate has no capacity - not having the neural machinery required - to inhibit and regulate psychoaffective experience, which is why the first year of life the attachment bond with the mother is so strong: it needs the mother regulate it's affective states.

At around 12 months, infantile narcisissm grows a bit too big for the social environment to tolerate, so the dopaminergic systems become entrained to the noradrenergic systems in certain social situations: creating the necessary impasse - the experience of shame - so that certain things are understood as wrong.

The environment - the other - serves as the primary regulator of your experience. Yet - YET - the other MUST BE PRESENT TO YOUR EXISTENCE, and not preoccupied as so many traumatized people are - with their OWN EMOTIONS. The nascent infant self will experience the preoccupations of a mother - or the preoccupations of a father - or any sort of famly system discord, and come to semiotically represent these events - these symmetry dynamics - in the infants affective experience.

What is the point to be appreciated here? That semiotic experiences of gestation and birth are real - that meaning is continuous - and that a persons adult life narrative dialectically refers back to essential self-other dynamics implicit in the way your mother and father related, the way that affected their fucntioning with you, and so on.

Time - the thing so hated by some minds - is actually implicitly the very process - its origin - which bemuses the traumatized persons mind. Time - the past - has left episodes and very great episodes of "error", which potentiated and strengthened the reflexive brains organization around 'threat' - around others.

The self which formed in this context, in this world, is one deeply addicted to material things, overly world-weary and negative about the future, and all the time makes statements of speculation as if they were truths.

To not know the objective dynamics of how a mental state acts as a 'short-hand abstraction' of a self-other interaction deprives every mind of an objective standard for truth. A social fixation - a worry of the minds of other minds - can become your worry. And indeed, does it ever end - can it ever end, unless someone from 'outside this system' of fixation offers a different viewpoint?

Actually, collectivism causes social herpes more often than it does anything good. Why do you think "social media" is such a disaster and big cities are steaming pits of misery?

I generally prefer to be left alone in peace.
Don't really pay much attention to most of the other monkeys.
I socialize a little here and there.

originally posted by: skunkape23
I generally prefer to be left alone in peace.
Don't really pay much attention to most of the other monkeys.
I socialize a little here and there.

Same here. The older I get the more solitary I become.

Solitude is very addictive.