Reflexive Cognition versus Reflective Cognition, page 1

If any two topics of mind deserved to be made apparent, it is this: we respond to reality either in a habitual, automatic, and entirely subjective mode termed "reflexive" (i.e. like a knee reflex) or we take a relaxed, focused, and conscious perspective called "reflective".

These two states are essentially divided by one another through the property of reason, which links causes to effects and allows for the formation of a whole that is larger than its parts. With reflective consciousness, all these 'signs', in effect, scaffold the movement of attention so that the mind regularly renews its interest to link itself appropriately to the environmental "now" of its present situation. Using consciousness permits logical analysis of relations, articulation of relevant particulars and the parameters they may imply, to the goal of helping us achieve a coherent and cohesive picture of a particular reality, such that understanding the true sign (i.e. or the moment of efficacious awareness) will result in an optimal canalization of biodynamical energy, which is also, simultaneously, the 'path of least resistance', a line which moves inexorably towards its other end.

Thinking isn't actually anything 'you' are doing, so much as the way that the outside world and it's icon-index structure has been in a non-stop dynamical interaction with the human brain, such that the human brain is built to respond to the world in ways indicated by the iconicity of the external object. This is why the concept of a 'sign', at it's most logical level, is neither inside the interpreter (i.e. Human) nor in the object, but in the fact that the object and the interpreter have coevolved together, such that our perceptual systems and cognitive systems respond to the existential facticity of outside things, and through the form of outside things, very much in the Platonic sense of ideas, the sign comes into being between the Human and the object.

Ignoring the ontological implications for now, another important distinction to be made is between intrapsychic and interpersonal signs, which occur at the bodily level as non-concept 'percepts' i.e. "affects", and also in images and dreams, and linguistic and other symbolic signs, which are linear, digital, and about organizing the relations of things in a coherent cause-effect manner through the organization of symbols.

Right now, mainstream semiotics thinks of signs mostly in the external mode, not realizing that feeling-relations themselves constitute signs of coherent and incoherent dynamics, registering the hits and misses of interpersonal feeling-dynamics, which imply a symmetry dynamic (now known to be contiguous with a general symmetry principle in nature herself) so that an absent of trust, or anything which undermines a persons needs as a self i.e. to be positively known, generates a phenomenology that regularly registers negative affects - or 'signs', which, being signatures of past historical processes, necessarily refer to real life events, and so, to real meaning-structures which currently, if these affects still occur, hamstring the functioning of the brain-mind, insomuch as coherency - or symmetry making - entails a distribution of energy (which is also information) between the right hemispheres - so that what was once felt, is known and named - or brought within symbolic awareness. The right 'feeling brain' - which records the interpersonal signs and their intrapsychic consequences (also signs) - needs consciousness to order itself so that energy can be distributed, and the brain-mind set aright.

Now imagine, conversely, a society which sets as its general belief that "feeling is good", so that feeling and feeling alone be treated as the guide for acting. Such a mind has essentially forsaken a principle of brain-growth that is essentially tantamount to throwing away the diagram to a map and just guessing at what certain symbols mean.

Since mental events - or signs - which effect the flow of energy, a process we call "meaning', is going on all the time in every person's mind-brain, so what is to happen to a mind-brain that ignores history and so pays no mind to the future?

Nature provides countless metaphors for what mindless action produces. Take the Gray Birch. It lives only 30-50 years on average (bout 250 years less than other birch species) and reaches its adult hate very quickly, as it concentrates its entire existence into "growing quickly".

Growing quickly, or moving quickly, however, is not a stable strategy for trees, and so what tends to kill these trees is the fact that air pockets build up between cells, allowing plenty of space for fungi to pour in and hollow out the tree from within. Being a pioneer species as well, this species is usually all by itself, and so open to the destructive influence of the wind.

The end typically comes following a storm, with rainstorms (a 5 year event, usually) being the event which usually destroys the trees, as the weight of the ice and the hollowed interior break against the force of the wind.

Now take this above picture semiotically, or, said differently, as a metaphorical argument made by nature which has dynamically entrained consequences for human perception, in that it clearly indicates a specific interpretation.

Growing quickly is comparable to selfishness, which is equivalent to any amoral, antinomian, or nihilistic philosophy which privileges the self over the facts of its relatedness to others. Basic semiotic truths - basic realities - in not being heeded, produce opposite qualities, convictions, and states, as the properties of consciousness are as much emergent and as consistently constrained by its environment of others as the chemistry of a specific molecule is shaped by the electrodynamic conditions of its immediate surroundings.

Air pockets that grow between the cells, as the tree lurches upwards towards the light, are comparable to the dissociative gaps that form between peoples self-states when they accept simplistic and non-critical perspectives on themselves, their environmental background, and their reasons for acting. This gap - or break - just as in the air pockets that form in trees, serves as an opening for infestation - or mental illness. Sadistic and masochistic percepts - signs themselves - grow, and begin to hollow out the inside of a persons internal compass. Things are jumbled because true knowledge is constrained by the conscious fetishization of falsehoods - signs with powerful dynamical force compel obedience, and so the hallowing out of the self moves, as systematically and naturally as the infestation of these trees, until, one day, something happens.

Something - some "downpour", may stress and exhaust the system, until one day the trigger point occurs: like the tree being frozen over by rain and wind, some external event may trigger a meaning-reaction so big, and so powerful, that like the wind and rain, simply breaks the tree in half, which cracks like a statue, and when it falls, shatters into thousands upon thousands of pieces.

Is this not nature arguing her argument in the language of the trees?