Our Defensive Minds

We humans are a supremely defensive creature. And why is that? Simple: were animals. Our physiology, just like the physiology's of homologous creatures (all other mammals, invertebrates, and upwards, the closer we are - such as with primates - the more alike our nervous systems are) is built in a simple arithmetic: adapt to survive. As such, our body's react, react unconsciously, in inherently defensive ways, in damn near most moments of our earthly and imaginary mental activity.

When were awake and doing what we do in the morning, we don't quite appreciate the context that "scaffolds" or every experience. To do what we do at most moments, we needed to have certain types of experiences. Most people have these experiences because our physiology enacts (through our unreflected upon behavior) shifts in thinking, feeling and intention when we receive a certain kind of feedback. To put this idea in neurological terms, the right brain "frames" the activity we experience through the self-reflective left brain. When we articulate something, we notice our action of articulation - and the intent and meaning we ascribe to the act. What we don't notice is the CONTEXTUAL background - the experiences of the past - adjust and articulate certain aspects of reality, while dissociating what possesses a threatening affective/emotional feeling tone.

Take any communication we engage in. We understand "the self" we need to enact in order for this communication to go smoothly and comfortably. Each moment of these interactions, certain metacognitive "appraisal" systems make micro-adjustments to the perceived feeling aspects of every nuanced expression in the other.

We also have basic needs, existing separately, "constellating" thoughts, feelings and "self-object" experiences - those experiences which give us the implicit sense of "this is me, and I like it". How we speak, how we notice things, how, how, how. This basic narcissism is present in every healthy mind, and basically in any individual who experiences positive emotion/affect. "Affect", btw, means those bodily feelings that accompany emotional experience. The lightness in the stomach (a vagus/enteric system process) the freeness of the limbs and a simple and comfortable sense of warmth, these experiences are "rewards" to the dopamine system of our ventral striatum. This part of the brain "constructs" our experiences by providing an implicit qualia of intense pleasure. We unknowingly 'seek' this pleasure, in a way totally consistent with any other seeking/reward behavior observed in mammals, reptiles, and microbiota. I do not mean to reduce human beings to simple animals, but there is a basic and enormously strong logic to the simplistic necessity of evolutionary forces: you either adapt yourself neurochemically (via cell activity) to the outside perturbation, or you die. And it appears, very basically, that the evolution of biological organisms follows this basic principle. Overtime, this process moved into more complex neural patterns, creating creatures that could move themselves and feel as "one" in doing it (despite the coordinated activity of millions/trillions of cells), ultimately leading to homo - australopithecus - a sort of ape-man hybrid, bipedal but with a chimp brain, Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalus, and Homo Sapiens. Erectus discovered fire. Neaderthals had the intelligence for culture, language, and a rudimentary self-awareness.

Human evolution has been H-A-R-S-H

When a person laughs, why do they laugh? Laughing is all about "unexpectedness". Things which seem wildly incongruent, hit us as "funny". It's hard to really get deeply into the experience of laughter because it strikes us so quickly. But if we can say anything about the experience, we can see that two disparate things, coming together as "themselves", and yet in contrast to one another in an "absurd' way, come together to produce the experience of 'laughter'. For example, saying something too loudly in a spontaneous way induces laughter because of the temporal shift from one "way of being" to another way of being, with the other way of being 'impressing' on the former in a particular way, producing the effect of laughter.

These sorts of experiences, as well as compassion, sympathy, joy, or ecstasy, are socially emergent properties that express the truly spiritual qualities of human experience. In fact, between defensiveness and togetherness, could lie a deeper reality - an inverted picture - with two sides "meeting" temporally, first as the impersonal scaffolding of biological organization, leading structurally to "socially emergent" properties like love. The movement, temporally - from the beginning of the process to it's present manifestation, is from a QUANTITY of products (chemicals) interacting, to a QUALITY of relationships between organisms, from something simpler (insect) to more experiential (dog) to self-referential (humans). Evolution has moved, ONTOLOGICALLY, into "dimensions" that didn't exist (or werent manifest) 3 billion years ago.

a reply to: Astrocyte

That is true of many people. That is not true of people who recognize that the body is merely a vessel. It is possible to become one with something and yet realize it is better to not identify completely with it. The ignorant will see a Honda swerving back and forth and will say, "That car is being stupid!" The wiser will say, "That person is being stupid!" The wisest will think, "What is wrong with that one?"

Some become one with their vehicle. Some struggle with their vehicle. Others master their vehicle.

You are referring to the ones who become one with their vehicle and judge the vehicle instead of the driver.