Most Important Knowledge?

When it comes to the human being, what matters is meaning, and how it is we make it. But unfortunately, too few people are curious as to what constitutes good knowledge, and in being uninterested in learning, they more or less exist as if there were nothing important or essential to be known about the way and manner human beings know.

Meta-Knowledge is Essential to Human Brain Functioning

Humans today are more or less monstrously dumb. One should - if one wants to gain some sort of significant epistemological footing on the problem - chalk it up to the concept of trauma; but what is trauma if you've never been trained to understand the idea in a biological way?

Neuroscientists, anthropologists and archeologists have highlighted two parts of the modern human brain that is considered to mostly differentiate us from other hominid species like Neanderthals and the common ancestor (or phenotype) we share with them, Homo Heidelbergensis. The anthropologist Stephen Mithen has developed the very plausible theory that with Homo Heidelbergensis, Homo Erectus transitioned from a mostly mimetic mode of relating and conveying meaning towards a singing mode of communication that used phonemes (sounds) to convey meaning.

This is problably exactly what happened, and furthermore, it is precisely that "glu" that exists and conceals the unity of self and other, and which facilitates are ability to communicate through language.

So what makes the human brain different?



Let's assume that the singing apes were gental and genial with one another - which is what the whole concept of singing is meant to convey; still, the neandetherals lived in the north, and had evolved an occipital cortex that grew larger to help neanderthals forage at latitutudes where the sun goes down at an earlier time, and so gives less time for foraging. Robin Dunbars time-budget rationale does a good job explaing why the Neanderthals brain looks the way it does, but it says nothing about what the Neanderthals mind was like.

In Homo Sapiens, it is primarily the parietal and frontal cortex that has evolved beyond the Neanderthals, primarily at the corners (frontodorsal) and even lower down, into the orbitalfrontal cortex. These regions of the brain process episodic memory - such as the ability to think in images; but more than anything else, the mid-line structures in human beings have reached a state of symmetry such that full-blown images have formed, so that human beings are simultaneously aware of themselves as they act, as well as the external situation they are operating within.

Many people - or the vast majority of people - don't notice this, and certainly don't have anything like a systematic awareness of it. Yet, in fact, these are precisely those strings which naive and ignorant "magicians" are pulling at when they play around with "archetypes"

Yet, in fact, these are things existing in some platonic "ideal realm", but are the very semiotic correlates - the representative ideas - which are continous with the dynamics which underlie your present functioning. The body self-organizes from below, from within, with its own structural history of connections with the external world; in living and being, it is normal in normal contexts for human beings to correctly self-organize - because they are a fractal dynamic - to recoginze the necessity of correctly knowing themselves. Correct knowing is profoundly rare in this world around us, and tends to come to those who are properly 'separated' from the commercial and capitalistic motive-creators that turn humans into very different - and subuptimally functuoning - beings.

The human brain is a correlation device dedicated to representing those external object-relations which hold meaning - good, bad, or neutral - for the organisms existential functionality. The brain is itself emergent, subjective to "chemical" dynamics that ultimately achieve their goodness or badness in terms of the quality of the existential relations it has with its environment. For humans, other humans have become the "environment", and the qualia in questions are the moods, feelings, and intentional states of others - as instinctively represented by the subconscious midbrain structures of the brain, where mirror neurons synchronize to the signs in other bodies which signfiy the intentions of others.

Immoral Behavior Poisons Reason

“In 1967 Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and desirability of Peace was published in America by a certain “John Doe” (someone even suggested it was Galbraith). It was clearly a pamphlet against war, or at least a pessimistic lament on its inevitability. But since, in order to wage war, we need an enemy to fight, the inevitability of war is linked to the inevitability of identifying and creating an enemy. In the pamphlet it is thus suggested with extreme seriousness that the reconversion of the whole of American society to a state of peace would be disastrous, since only war provides the basis for the harmonious development of human societies. Its organized wastage provides a valve that regulates the effective running of society. It resolves the problem of supplies. It is a driving force. What enables a community to recognize itself as a “nation”; a government cannot even establish its own sphere of legitimacy without the contrasting presence of war; only war ensures the equilibrium between classes and makes it possible to locate and exploit antisocial elements. Peace produces instability and delinquency among young people; war channels all disruptive forces in the best possible way, giving them a “status”. The army is the last hope for outcasts and misfits; the system of war alone, with its power over life and death, induces people to pay a blood price for institutions far less central to social organization than war, such as the motor car. From the ecological point of view, war provides a release valve for surplus lives; and though, until the nineteenth century, only the most courageous members of society (soldiers) were killed in war while worthless members survived, current technology has made it possible to overcome this problem with the bombardment of urban centers. Bombardment limits the population boom better than ritual infanticide, monasticism, sexual mutilation, extensive use of capital punishment…War makes it possible, at last, to develop a truly “humanistic” art in which conflicted situations predominate.” – Umberto Eco, Inventing the Enemy; pg. 18, Mariner, 2011

The above description is not one Eco shares, but he repeats it because it is a popular view among people connected to the bastions of power.

Such people have somethig deeply, deeply wrong with their reasoning processes, which is more or less indicated by the following diagram:



Major trauma affects mid-brain functioning and the development of forebrain structures to regulate the semiotic experience of the environment. Major trauma puts the logic of the brainstem - the periaquaductal gray and the amygdala - into gear, so that the 'worse possible situation' is always expected, making the mind with a past of extreme emotional experience unaware that its feeling-relations to the world are stereotyped by experineces that have, in effect, traumatized your consciousness of reality so that you are still, despite being "out of the originating context",

...expecting responses and behaviors that derive from that past context.

This is what a flashback is; and also what PTSD does to the brain: it keeps the person "in the past", and out of the present, so that its reasoning processes are always affectively linked to contexts that were extreme, absurd, and - what lies beyond the awareness of the traumatized mind - not necessitating any of the claims that the traumatized mind makes about reality.

To be objective, one needs to recognize that selves that have avoided early-life trauma are normal, healthy, life-affirming selves.

If you can accept this logical fact, you are, in effect, accepting into your mind and being a truth that is more significant than all other truths: evil, pain, suffering, are not essential features of human reality; but are emergent properties of human beings in a social with other human beings, in a natural world that follows laws we are imperfectly aware of, but with knowledge, will come to make ourselves more healthily related.

dp

That's all well and fine and all... But... It seems to me you dance around the meat of the topic... You talk about metaknowledge and its necessity. But say nothing of how to cultivate such knowledge.