The Task Ahead

With modern neuroscience discovering the neural correlates of psychological trauma, and having made sense of these findings through the coherency of the theory of Darwinian evolution according to natural selection, human beings now have a clearer idea than ever before of how we work.

But even more important, in my opinion, is the significance of what the findings indicate: that development is entirely dependent on interpersonal interactions, meaning that culture at large is the primary control parameter behind whether or not a person suffers trauma, because a culture is more or less the teleodynamic attractor in the functioning of a very large group of people. Thought of in terms of dynamics, each brain-mind is converging towards the same 'singularity' - the same 'way of doing things' - which allows each individual to become 'compatible' with the people around them.

It is this power - well known to the elite - that structures the events of the world around us.

It is an effect of human psychological functioning in relation with other people - not a real entity in itself. Every self-mind can decide to change, and if enough change, a 'phase shift' can occur whereby the dominant culture shifts to a different attractor.

It's a cascade phenomenon as well. Just like the cascades that happen within our biochemistry, perception can 'cascade' so that we seem to move inexorably closer to an important insight. It happens in an interative way: perception, cognition, where the 'effect' of each situation is like this:



The abstract categories of 'self' and 'object' are the poles of the process; we are the self, and the object is the 'other'. We perceive the object, and immeditately upon interacting with it, we are affected, hence, "affected perception".

But the self cannot tolerate dormancy; immediately upon being affected in perception, it mounts a cognitive response - and so you have an 'affected cognition', or a 'cognized affection', the former phrase implying how cognition is motivated by affect, and the latter phrase implying how cognition 'has an affection' i.e. a goal, or purposiveness. A desire.

Each brainmind is involved in such a process. Every human being (as opposed to animals) can thus change, but of course, change is not arbitrary: it depends upon affordances - chance interactions - which means a certain objective reality can only modify cognition (self) if it firsts modifies perception (the "not-self" pole of experience). Perception can only be modified if fortune graces you with an influence that would help you change. Outside that, you remain "outside".

But luck is luck - nothing more. The system, upon being discovered, can be manipulated: humans can work to target the development of certain functions, such as "roots of empathy", where preschoolers are exposed to a baby, and, at such a young age, encouraged to develop their awareness of the significance of the cues exhibited by the infant body; it develops an empathy in preschoolers at a time when brain development is still very robust, and so, will "stick" in a deeper way than if they didn't have that sort of exposure.

There is also mindfulness, which can target any object of experience - inner or outer - but gains its effect through the simple suggestion that one should relate to oneself with a detached non-judgementalness. We are told that we can be 'a friend' to ourselves; that we can trust - and not feel that we should react with fear, anxiety or panic.

Here, the observing pole of awareness if being construed as a inherently 'good' side. We are told we can be this way, and so, we identify and embody it - we "are" what we believe we can be, which no doubt derives its oomph from the super-geometrical combination of two people, instead of a single person.

No single person has ever grown on his own, without making use of some real other - a conversation, or a book. It has never and could never happen without a real relationship prefiguring the now internalized dynamic that can be enacted within the self. God does not exist until the other is recognized as necessary; God without knowledge of the primacy of the real human other is pure idolatry - pure wishful, idealistic, unrealistic neediness.

Culture grows at the slow pace that it does because so many people are 'out of sync' with one another. The highl educated and self aware constitute a mere percentile of the population, whereas a much larger number exists in a state of existential confusion as to 'what the nature of things' is. The majority of naive ignoramuses, whereas a small portion, more knowledgeable, become structured according to the dualism psychological trauma induces when the brainstem 'cuts off' and organizes the mind around an attractor that entails a great deal of entropy - or dissociation of real psychological material - which produces as an effect feelings of irritability, agitation, and depresion - all of which spur a psychological nihilism - a sadomasochistic hatred of the other - both the other Humans around you, and the human self within you, which you equally hate.

This 'battle' between nature within the mind and society of the homo sapiens is a difficult thing to bear witness to, but it is, at root, a natural process. Blame is an ignorant thing to do, because it fails to take seriously, or even recognize, facts like neuroplasticity, which renders psychological events into real 'quantitative' phenomena - probabilistically determined by synaptic 'weightings' between different networks.

Therefore, moral action is inherently pragmatic. Whether or not the self is 'selfish' is irrelevant: how we function depends upon how were related to. That means, each individual should realize the importance and signficiance - if small and iterative - effect compassionate action has on other humans. It really can make a difference between one behavior and another, and so, help 're-right' the human species.

Talk of heaven or hell is irrelevant. When I die, the sleep of non-being seems gift enough (although I like living, and hope to live a long full life). The only reason you should have for being a good person is the hope of helping the human species recover from a traumatological condition that persists because of feedback effects between material society, social relationships, emotional regulation, and internal psychic narratives - or in short, a certain expression of an 'archetypal culture'.



There is also slight genetic causation, so that, if an irritable and aggressive father has kids, those kids have a higher probability of being irritable and aggressive. But this is a slight effect relative to the power of interpersonal interactions.

Of course, trauma, of the ritualized kind, committed against children, is a powerful counterforce to any environment input; you could say such a child has an 'arrow' between generations that is fairly robust, and with early life conditioning, endogenous functioning becomes more and more dissociated from environmental dependencies. Of course - there are still real life relationships that support the inner narrative that the self engages in to self-regulate. But this fact is obscured by other ideas/beliefs, usually those that exagerrate the signficance of the archetype relative to the real life relations which create it.