Do Social Processes Deafen Us?

In the era of brain-science, it is becoming more and more epistemologically indefensible to make claims about something i.e. to propose something, without considering the basic knowledge-base assembled by the neuroscientific era.

The basic backbone of today's neuroscience is systems theory. As I've written elsewhere, systems theory is a general framework for understanding how individual components combine to generate a specific phenonemon.

As I've also written, quarks lead to protons, to atoms, to molecules. Molecules - such as H20 - are made up of two hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom. Oxygen is a complex and unstable atom. Hydrogen, conversely, is the most plentiful atom in the universe. These atoms are systems - and the molecule H20 is an even larger system.

When we see a wave, such as this



We are seeing an emergent property that requires multiple other emergent properties to emerge. It is a phenomenon in it itself, but within it lies the atomic and sub-atomic energies operating within a massive field of relations that includes atmospheric pressure, temperature, and wind, and more generally, the presence of the moon to induce a tugging force on the Earth, causing waves to form.

The biggest mistake - the most massive error Humans make - is talking - or making propositions about the world - which aren't first framed in terms of how the social-processes effect our thinking.

We begin philosophizing without defining the feelings which constrain the flow of our awareness - feelings, which ultimately confirm a dynamical reality.

Some Ancients Knew The Ancient Patterns

This is probably the truest symbol ever created. Everything that is exists along a spectrum of conditions. Polarized opposites mutually imply one another - complement one another - with every property possessing some intrinsic relationship to its opposite.

Yet, in a certain sense, this symbol also occludes an important singularity - or directionality - which is perhaps metaphorically indicated by the asymmetrical placing of our heart: on the left - towards the body - and yet wired directly to the vagus, which streams up to the insula and the anterior cingulate in the right hemisphere in particular - where the feelings of living and being with other's is continuously scanned by mirror neurons.

The Yin Yang is true, yet it lacks the specificity provided by a different book.

The Book of Genesis

וַיַּצְמַח יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים, מִן-הָאֲדָמָה, כָּל-עֵץ נֶחְמָד לְמַרְאֶה, וְטוֹב לְמַאֲכָל--וְעֵץ הַחַיִּים, בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן, וְעֵץ, הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע.

9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Read from right to left. This ancient script, the Jewish rabbis say, followed the directionality of the rising of the sun. History. The beginning of the day is right - and it flows leftward, towards differentiation of state (brightness) until it reaches its zenith, downwards towards its nadir at the depth of the night.

Individuals are supposed to be differentiated - hence our modern age. But differentiation must be understood within the context of history i.e. evolution of life, mind, and Humanity. As with the rising of the sun, its setting seems to lessen the presence of the light which weaves all things into dynamical rhythms with one another. The setting stimulates nihilism, relativism, anomie, confusion of identity (transgender), and the complete imbalance of the feelings - hedonism, over-eating, hoarding of material wealth, promiscuity, homosexuality.

It reminds me of Chris Hedges 2009 book, Empire of Illusion. The book is an on the nose critique of the illusions the media and culture feed people; the promotion of behaviors which in fact undercut stability - since stability entails the cultivation of certain moral feelings - the world we live within is a literal description of Huxleys Brave New World.

We live in a world of opposites. Trump says A - the opposite of B - and the people get B. There is a perverse positive relationship within his mind - and the mind of fascists in general - with being evil - mean-spirited, hurtful, traumatizing and objectifying towards all other beings. Is it not obvious to any decent psychologist that psychodynamics of this behavior is simple? It's a simple polarization. If the dynamism of your organism has a teleodynamism - a preferred movement (were a dynamical being!!) - and if that movement is being good and kind to other people - then doing the opposite entails a constraint upon processes i.e. a certain class of mirror neurons - which generally attune to the feeling dimensions implied by the behavior of other bodies. If an inner-representation of their state isn't stimulated within yourself, it's because a series of dynamical constraints have "interpreted away" the presence of continuity between individual human bodies, and have presented a vacuous illusion that relates to the world as if it were a literal dualistic separation of self-mind from the world 'out-there'.

Internally speaking, dynamically dissonant behavior is represented within our experience as negative feelings. Depression, shame, anxiety, and guilt, are emergent properties of dynamical relations - or configrations - between one body and other body's.

So again: if love is the cornerstone of the Human brain-minds proclivity - than the culture itself - with its 'embedded' institutional forces i.e. a city - channels psyho-social affective dynamics into a profound unnatural condition - a condition ridden with unconscious shame that, when it does mark itself within a persons experience, is reflexively dissociated within the familiar landscape of an autonomically regulated mind.

כה וַיִּהְיוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם עֲרוּמִּים, הָאָדָם וְאִשְׁתּוֹ; וְלֹא, יִתְבֹּשָׁשׁוּ.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Whatever the book of genesis is, it has correctly identified the most important factor - or whats called a control-parameter in systems theory.

If emergence is the normal process in nature, the Garden of Eden and the world of the Neolithic era are separated by the presence of a feeling that is deeply a part of the way we interpret and experience reality. Shame is a disease. Believing its presence and letting it motivate you - in turn - is a diseased way of relating. Not recognizing the causal processes - of shame (detection of social threat) - an occluded presence - to anger (self-defense) a conscious experienced affect in the conscious mind with it's own internal regulatory "familiarity for the self", is a repeating dynamic, implicit in the songs on the radio - Drake, Bruno Mar's, Miley Cyrus - the vomit-worthy meaninglessness which literally believes the bull$hit it preaches - assuming, in it's deafening lack of awareness, the ultimate ontological entanglements that their voices put them in contact with.

The way we connect to one another - the fear we feel, because, as Robin Williams character discovers at the end of What Dreams May Come, what strikes me as one of the most beautiful scenes in cinematic history:





There is no equivalence between good and evil. Good is truth - the way, and flow of the Human brain-mind.

Comment on the movie:

This final act - his decision to stay in hell with his wife, and with her, lose all memory of his self and being - is the truest expression of love their is: a manifestation of the truth of the equivalence between self and other.

In another scene, he aptly recognizes how his inability to metabolize his children's death WITH his wife - left her alone and feeling "unknown". People who are connected need one another to stabilize their internal reality. Abandonment i.e. preoccupation with your own pain (usually disavowed, or dissociated) leaves the other alone, and unable to equilibrate themselves.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I liked this movie. His devotion to his wife was the ultimate expression of selfless love.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Greet
Inquire
Encouraging response
Relate a similar experience
Graciously accept their feedback.
Encourage a follow up interaction
Offer salutations
Make note of your inquiries
Maintain beliefs relative to the encouraging feedback you provided
Remember this to reference on later interactions.
Build profile for interactee

I find if you get good at inquiring and remembering to inquire with on going activities, or concerns of the individual you can form relationships very quickly. In fact this formula has always served me well.

All right, well I think that humans themselves create cultural organisms through emergence. As a human, you might belong to different cultural organisms, for example, a Christian, a Democrat, a Republican, a member of a family, the citizen of a country or resident of a state, or especially a practitioner of a certain philosophy.

Each cultural organism has its own "laws" which are followed subconsciously by a member of that organism, and the member is brainwashed over time through tricks of the tongue to believe the beliefs of his or her organization.

Sometimes we are tricked into believing things that go against science / aren't factual / aren't healthy for us / are deceptions. That happens a lot when one approaches a cultural organism for the first time or is fully engulfed in its loving embrace, kind of like a symbiotic relationship where truth is traded for power.

Culture is a body of knowledge concerning survival in a hostile world, inherited and passed on from generation to generation.

Maria Colavito, in her biocultural studies, described a hypothetical shock that the reported blowup of the hypothetical Mediterranean island Thera brought to the world some time before the first millennium B.C. She proposed that this terrorized the survivors and disrupted the earth-trusting mind-set of our species, leading to the Phoenician alphabet and a long parade of harsh patriarchal cultures and religions.
Perhaps through trauma our species suffered a setback, breeding an intellect based on distrust, fear, and the attempt to predict and control a hostile natural world in the interest of protecting against it, which ultimately produced culture as we know it today.
Culture has been our principal environment of mind for many millennia, and through the dynamic of culture and biology, humanity fell into a vicious cycle long ago, a trap from which only the prefrontal-heart dynamic can deliver us. Nature has continually offered us this escape, but, time and time again, circumstances breeding fear in us have turned her down.

Chomsky, Wolfe and me

In 2005, I published a paper in the journal Current Anthropology, arguing that Pirahã – an Amazonian language unrelated to any living language – lacked several kinds of words and grammatical constructions that many researchers would have expected to find in all languages. I made it clear that this absence was not due to any inherent cognitive limitation on the part of its speakers, but due to cultural values, one in particular that I termed the ‘immediacy of experience principle’.
Language is ancient and emerges from general human intelligence, the need to build communities and cultures.

The Piraha

The thing I find so interesting about the book and Everett’s views and findings are that he claims that the Piraha are by far and away the happiest people he has ever met. Their perception of space and time is directly influenced by their language, by the way they interpret the space around them into symbols, and because of this they are often thinking only in the immediate present, they do not worry about the future or dwell on the far past, they are contented in the here and now.