Neuroplasticity and Reading, page 1

With the brain now 'officially' recognized as plastic, it is even more sad that so many people exist without caring one iota about how much potential they have for growth.

The world of "limitations" has imposed itself hardcore on people. People think homosexuality exists independent of the biology of social and emotional development. They think transgenderism is "caused" by the "genes" within us, not knowing that they have been conditioned by a media and culture which speaks glibly and ignorantly about how biological processes actually work. The propagandists, in other words, have been wildly successful. People identify in rigid ways; and even attempt to invent imaginary categories which they seem to think is relevant to their sense of identity i.e. "pansexual".

But I don't want to get sidetracked from my love for reading - the purpose of this thread - it is important to recognize what identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender does to the human mind.

Since reality actually is ruled by symmetry, and that the things we visually perceive as 'complementary', for instance, male and female, really does have everything to do with how we think about 'self and other', which is the fundamental "ontological root" of human experience. The entire brain is controlled not just by 'symmetry', but by a multimodal meaning system which transfers meanings from one domain to another, without problem - for instance, the 'visual' brain perception of symmetry in a tree, and the forebrain conceptual recognition of the metaphysical meaning of 'balance', and how this sense of balance, which is quantitative and mathematical, is an even deeper and more profound elucidation of symmetry.

In other words, when we identify with an asymmetrical position such as "reality does not have patterns about a fundamental complementarity, which is reflected by male and female", we put ourselves in dissociation with other facts which implicitly reference the opposite of this idea. for instance, if the brain is plastic, and every single modality can grow or diminish as a function of use, than that means sexual feeling states are also a function of 'use', and hence, what we are exposed to, what we semiotically 'take in', is what drives the formation of feeling states. This applies to the person who looks at gay porn as much as the person who reads all day. The former person will come to identify with being gay because he is surrounded by a culturual milieu that has trained him to interpret such feeling states as a fundamental expression of who they are.

Identity states like these more or less cripple self-development, so that neuroplasticity is simply 'not interesting', primarily because it puts them too closely in touch with a powerful semiotic fact: that the conscious mind can 'change itself' if it manages to achieve a high enough vantage point.

Now, I want to say that I am absolutely in defense of gay rights on the grounds that it is a victimless behavior which only can be seen as wrong from an 'esoteric' seeming metaphysical position. I am speaking mostly as a psychologist and physcist - because symmetry is the ordering principle, we need to recognize that symmetry at a cognitive level has to do with "acts of ackowledgement".

When the sun is yellow and I say its yellow, that's a correlation. The homosexual person or the transgender person, because of how they identify, are constrained from recognizing symmetries that pertain to certain metaphysical issues. Even the idea of symmetry itself, which is metaphysically the 'concept' used by most physicists, a few cognitive scientists and a growing number of developmental psychologists to explain a phenomena, cannot be noticed, and it cannot be noticed because certainly held strong beliefs - which are values in themselves - constrain the formation of perceptions and cognitions.

The brain is always trying to regulate itself - and from the minds perspective, to "feel insane" is to be intensely dysregulated, so the brain controls the loss of psychological control by forming an ego that holds rigidly to its "truths", even though such truths are the metabolic consequences of the experiences they have had - and can be transformed if the light of consciousness is placed on self-experience.

Reading

I have written much more about identity and symmetry and sexuality than I wanted to - but perhaps it makes sense.

To read the way I read seems like a rare thing. Non-fiction - the world of physics, geophysics, astrophysics, mathematics, biology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, genetics, biophysics, paleontology, archeology, anthropology, developmental psychology, cognitive, psychoanalysis, and history - which is so great, so much to learn and so much to integrate!

If people understood the way knowledge has exponential consequences for self-ordering processes, they would definitely read more. But such an idea is what forms in a mind that has seen itself transform from a primitive state to a sophisticated state. It is a "differentiation and integration" process - what happens to dynamical systems like us, "strange loops" which are existentially transformed by the knowledge which it takes in.

Reading, learning, and growing, has helped me realize that socrates was a truly great mind - a mind who recognized the paradox that true learning leads to a recognition of the complexity of reality, and the partiality of knowledge: I am always learning more and more, and one wonders whether the learning process will ever end.

Conversely, the lazy mystic claims to know everything by devaluing everything besides its "own bliss".