The Mind is Like Chemistry

The mind is EXACTLY like chemistry.

When two atoms interact, there is an exchange of electrons. Other times, protons are moving, or some other tiny particle is disturbing the behavior of an atom.

Only atoms are basic elements, and even then, they come in many different forms.

Not so the mind. The mind is a transforming semiotic process, so that negative and positive experiences of self-with-other come to slowly sculpt the feeling-body of the brain-minds semiotic evolution.

Each experience is an emergent property of a physical interaction between your brain and another salient object. Olfactroy (smell), tactile and thermoregualtory experiences of snuggling up with mommy, for example, are early forming meanings that occupy the center of the baby's perception. Mommy has a special smell (this has been experimentally confirmed; infants can discern their mothers breast milk over another woman); mommy holds me close and makes me feel warm. See the progression? Hungry -> Milk; Cold -> Held; this 'bad' to 'good' dynamic is the core self-other material for later life processes in thought - yet the western world has inherited fantasies about a disembodied mind that is "totally in control" of what it feels and desires. Nonsense.

Tactile perception, or teh feeling of being touched by the mother, stimulates neural growth between the the forebrain and the parietal cortex, where touch is felt. These early relations between the forebrain and other parts of the brain stimulate brain growth: feeling touched, massaged, and handled delicately and lovingly by an Other spurs those neurons to grow in the best ways possible.

This is all before a word is utterred. This is before visual perception or auditory perception become the central portals of semiotic significance. But would it be surprising to learn that developmental neuroscientists have established patterns in the above 3 domains (touch, smell and thermoregulation) that correspond to attachment categories at 18 months of age? Self and other interactions form around the feeling of need. If the infant is cold (thermoregulation) and there is no response from the environment, you can put a -1 in the brain. If this experience continues to occur - a pretty unconscionable thing - the brain will be severely hampered simply because the body needs another body for normal brain growth to happen - this is the 2nd law of thermodynamics in action.

Same thing with touch; infants need to be touched for the simple reason that adult humans are motivated to delicately massage the infants body. This holding of an infant is in itself a special sort of touch. But here, I'd like to note, that either situation can be done "too much". If the infant is hot and the mother continues holding the infant, she will dysregulate him. If the infant doesn't want to be held, and the adult insists on holding them, the brain will register the situation, context, and response of the other, and associate it with the anxious response of the body.

Therefore, so much has happened before you can even utter a word that determines what you feel and what situations bring out certain feelings in you. Notice: these are context effects. They do not represent themselves as anything other than the feelings we feel, meaning feeling is fundamentally a register of self and other - as well as basic hoemostatic parameters that the conscious mind is supposed to register and respond to - i.e. it is the 'other' of the knowledge of its existence.

All in all, the mind evolves as a fractal of the social-situations it has lived through. Since this 'all-encompassing' meaning means we are determined in everything we do by some fact that affected us before hand, the solution is not the pipe-dream fantasy of 'transcending physical reality', but rather, to learn how things actually work, and seek to adapt yourself to the world around you.

It's simple: want to feel good? Listen to the Other.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Well, the brain is Chemistry. Everything is, unless its a vacuum.

a reply to: Astrocyte

But what really is going to cook your noodle is when you get to the part that, subconsciously, we are all connected. These quantum entanglements also change how we think, how we feel, how we interact.

We don't live in a vacuum... we are all part of a lot of things.

a reply to: Astrocyte

You have too many chemicals in your brain.
Thus, you have confused the Mind/Soul
with the physical brain.

But all is not lost!
YOU are the most current Winner
of the Napolean 14 Award!

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