Quotes and Research for book

" Ibelieve for all our precociousness as a power-wielding species, we are infants when it comes to understanding ourselves as beings in the world." p. 2 Lissa D'Amour, 



From the preface...

"I encourage my readers to question the dominant misunderstandings and prejudices against secrecy that prevail in anthropology and the social sciences: that secrecy is generally a sham or hoax, rather than a valid means of establishing trust and interdependence in times of social and political instability, and that secrecy is a cursory social practice rather than providing the impetus for creating utopian cultural reality."

"An alternative approach is to view secrecy as one of the desperate tools of the human imagination for managing highly complicated—if not at times seemingly impossible—social relations. I must admit to my concern at being seen as an apologist for secrecy in taking such an approach."



"War Leaders are exactly like tribal shamans who cure group despair by exorcising bad spirits through healing sacrifices. Leaders can be disobeyed whenever they do not interpret and carry out the group-fantasy of the internal fearful alter. They must make real the growing paranoia of the nation, saying “Let me help you by naming your persecutors…evil is out there, in the real world. And you thought it was all in your head!"



- some leading theories of memory formation speculate that the hippocampus uses spatial setting as a triggering mechanism for the organization of memories. Pg. 112




"Childhood in much of India begins with the young child being regularly masturbated by the mother, “high caste or low caste, the girl ‘to make her sleep well,’ the boy ‘to make him manly…”‘ This practice has been said to be widespread by many reliable observers, including Catherine Mayo – whose extensive investigations in India in the 1920s led to the first child marriage laws(90) – a physician,(91) an ethnologist,(92) a religious scholar (93) and a sociologist.(94) As is the case with virtually all non-Western cultures, the child sleeps in the family bed for several years and regularly observes sexual intercourse between the parents. The extent to which Indian parents go beyond this and overtly have sex with the child cannot be determined. Rampal, the sociologist who recently did interviews modeled on the Kinsey studies about contemporary Indian sexual practices, concludes that “there is a lot of incest…It is hidden along with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out, like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family… To arrive at even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the hornet’s nest.. no one will ever confess to such a deed, therefore, any attempt to collect statistics may prove to be futile at present.”"

"Because they have only recently moved beyond what I have termed the infanticidal mode of chiidrearing, whereby as much as half of the children born were killed by their parents,(89) the use of children for the emotional needs of adults is far more accepted, an attitude that fosters widespread incestuous acts along with other child abuse." - on why incest and child abuse is likely to be higher in non-western countries.



- "it can be said that symbolic structures are present in three schematic forms, each corresponding to one of three formulas: like produces like; like acts on like; opposite acts on opposite. They differ only in the ordering of elements. In the first case, we think primarily of the absence of a state; in the second, we are dealing first with the presence of a state; in the third, we are dealing with the presence opposite to that which is desired." Pg. 89 mauss

- it seems as if Fuchs underemphasizes the significant role others can play in helping people with mental illness, primarily by not seeking to fix the person's feelings, but to explore the possible causes - that is, by compassionately empathizing with the feeling state they're in. Pg. 262

"the basic problem of neurobiological research into consciousness consists, when all is said and done, in the reification of consciousness itself. It then no longer appears as an activity of living organisms, no long as a relationship between subject and world which transcends the boundaries of the body." 46

- quote Luke 7:28...pure masculinistic cosmology.

"In the Bella Coola region secret society members in one village could even intervene in another village's affairs to punish ritual transgressions." pg. 41

"Given such mutual participation in secret society rituals on a regional scale, it is not surprising that the masks and other ritual paraphernalia (rattles, staffs, feasting dishes) exhibit artistic similarities generally known as the Northwest Coast art style with regional substyles." pg. 41

- It took about 12 years to enter the third level of the cannibal (hamatsa) society. pg. 43

"Members of secret societies were reported to experience powerful feelings of superiority over non-members." pg. 43

- Hayden reports the views of Drucker who stated that the purpose of secret societies in the pacific northwest was to dominate society by means of violence and 'black magic'. pg. 43

- Hayden believes that the dynamics seen in tribal secret societies likely apply to the chavin horizon, the chaco canyon culture, and the Hopewell Interaction Sphere as well as other prehistoric manifestations. pg. 44












"What if that abominable horror, that long river of blood and tears, had been programmed, in the middle of the cartouche, in that appalling self-replicating automatic machine? And what if, on the contrary, I was lucid, and it was this that was our nightmare? And it was this that was our illusion of history? And what if we - hallelujah - had the freedom to fix the rudder anew, to change course on the rose of the legend, what if we could rewrite the program, another time in a completely different direction, renaissance?" pg. 31 Roem












"Just as the period at the end of this sentence turns out to be a teeming world of interacting particles when seen under sufficient magnification, my Now, under close examination, is a wonderfully complex, and meaningful phenomenon. Before physics can contribute anything to our understanding of it, neuroscience, which deals with cells and electrical currents at the classical rather than the quantum level, will have to weigh in." - Hans Christian von Baeyer, QBism: The Future of Quantum Physics; pg. 216-217, Harvard, 2016



"By that time, between 6000 and 4000 BCE, all the basic ingredients of structural inequality were already in place: numerous defensive structures that invoke competition for scarce resources and a need for effective leadership; secular public buildings that may be associated with governmental functions; house shrines and temples that speak to the importance of ritual power; signs of hereditary rank, exemplified by lavish child burials; and evidence of craft exchange between elite families in different settlements. Political, military, and economic development differentiated the population, and prominent position, control over economic exchange, and personal wealth went hand in hand." - pg. 40

"Meaning in the natural score takes the place of harmony in the musical score, which works as a conjunction or, more precisely put, a bridge in order to unify two natural factors with each other. " pg. 189 von Uuxkull




pg. 34, Cradle of Humanity; fossil evidence from lake Turkana indicates that the childhood period was extended in homo erectus, so that, at 12 years of age, specimens were already 5 feet 3 inches tall. This evidence coincides with changes in hip shape (for running) and shoulder shape (for throwing spears) as well as the appearance of more complex tools (Acheulean). Dan Liebermans has shiown that improved tools would have allowed homo erectus to slice meat and pound root vegetables and nuts which would have saved 40% energy in chewing. This reduction in chewing corresponds to the smaller jaw size observed in homo erectus fossils.



pg. 177-182 details how indigenous tribes have evolved a level of communication with local alpha predators. Safina describes the Ojibwe reverence towards the wolf - Ma'iingan - regarding it as sacred. Similarly, the Amur tigers of siberia are shown respect by the Udeghe and Nanai hunters, who leave a piece of meat for them after they kill. The San people of the Kalahari desert don't hunt lions, and when they interact with them, speak respectfully but firmly.

This intuitive level of awareness is imagined to be inexplicable, but from an embodied, ecological perspective, it is precisely the affective orientation and the attitude taken towards the above creatures which seems to function as a sort of 'syntax' - communicating and indicating, given the conditions of the situation at hand, that the humans, which are known to be a certain way by the above predators, 'honor' their capacities as alpha-predators.










"The alt-right have described their movement as reaction against establishment US conservatism, saying that there is a 'deep continuity' between the Buckleyite movement and the neocons. spencer has also said, 'The left is the right and the alt-right is the new left' and that 'were the ones thinking the impossible. Were the ones thinking the unthinkable.' On radix journal they draw on the idea of the "Fourth Political Theory", withe reference to the Russian theorist Aleksandr Dugin and the French new rights Alain de Benoist, an entirely new political ideology that integrates and supersedes liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism." pg. 66



"many nonscientists feel troubled when science demystifies nature, identifies the laws that rule it, and thus takes away from their feelings of wonder and awe about the world. In the words of the poet John Keats, the scientist is the sort of killjoy who would "clip an angels wings" and "unweave a rainbow". That sentiment was surely one reason why Darwin's theory met resistance, but an experiment like this shows us that we can have it both ways. Science can explain general principles of innovability even if it cannot predict any individual innovation. Understanding innovability can leave the magic of innovation intact. And that, by itself, is reason for wonder and awe." - Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest, pg. 135, Current, 2016

"If regulation matters because it avoids wastes, then it should be everywhere. And indeed it is. Think of a metabolism with its hundreds of reactions - lactase catalyzing only one of them - as a sophisticated inter-connected network of pipelines. Into this network flows nutrients, out of it flow biomass molecules. Each pipe has a dedicated pump, an enzyme that propels materials through it. A cell can regulate each pump according to its needs. It new nutrients turn up in a patch of soil - a fallen apples, a rotting carcass - the soil bacteria turn up the pumps through which these molecules flow. Once the nutrients are gobbled up, these shut these pumps down. And if more of some nutrients and less of others become available, cells can fine-tune the pumps to the right speed." - Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest, pg. 141, Current, 2016

Physics/Biology

Evidently, if the living organisms are not to succumb to the constraints of the physical world, their component parts and organs must be precisely yet flexibly correlated with each other. Without such correlation, physical processes would soon break down the organization of the living state, bringing it closer to the inert state of thermal and chemical equilibrium in which life as we know it is impossible.  Near-equilibrium systems are largely inert, incapable of sustaining processes such as metabolism and reproduction, essential to the living state. An organims is in thermal and chemical equilibrium only when it is dead. As long as it is living, it is in a state of dynamic equilibrium in which it stores energy and information and has them available to drive and direct its vital function. - Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, pg. 44-45, Inner Traditions

"We begin with the ecosystem as a level of organization, which we believe supercedes the importance of the organism for both the earliest stages of origin, and certain aspects of long term organization of the biosphere and constraints on evolutionary dynamics within it. We then consider the problem of how to classify kinds of biological order. A typological classification of metabolism reflecting their energetics and synthetic chemistry (as opposed to a cladistic classification reflecting historical paths of descent) captures constraints from reactivity and network structure in both organisms and ecosystems, and we believe reflects laws of composition that were central before the advent of genetics and the historical contingencies to which genetic systems are subject.

We observe that the universal features of biochemistry at the ecosystem level are contemporaneous with, or antedate, the oldest mineral fossils on earth. Whereas the rock record effectively vanishes acrosses the horizon to the Hadean eon, the profusion of life expressing the universals of metabolism provides a signature from antiquity that is the strongest it has ever been." - The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: the emergence of the 4th geosphere; Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz, pg. 38, 2016, Cambridge Press.

"Our argument will be that affordances for less costly and more reliable error correction determine to a considerable extent the organization of life today, and there is good reason both empirically and theoretically to believe they also dictated some stages in its emergence" - The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: the emergence of the 4th geosphere; Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz, pg. 22, 2016, Cambridge Press.

"Ultimately, however, all strategies that survive in the long term must do so under competitive pressure. Strategies that deviate in core metabolism from the paths of least resistance, even by small degrees, take on fitne4ss costs either in energy demand, overcoming of side-reactions, maintenance of enzyme specificity, or other basic physiological functions. Because core metabolism carries such high-flux as the source of all biomass, even small-costs per reaction are amplified when they occur in the core-network." - The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: the emergence of the 4th geosphere; Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz, pg. 201, 2016, Cambridge Press.

"Perhaps the Yanomami, through centuries of trial and error, had learned something about how compounds from both food and medicinal plants provide specific signals, triggering effects on both our brain and our gut."- Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut connection, Harper-wave, pg. 201, 2016

"On these grounds, cancer is the unscheduled reactivation of an embryonic mechanism in a normally differentiated cell" - Corrado Spadafora, from "The Paradigm Shifters" - Suzan Mazur. pg. 141 2015

"Molecular composition influences the appearance of field solutions which define particular morphologies so that organisms become entities which are defined by both fields and particles, or more accurately, some combination of the two since they are not separable". Brian Goodwin, The Intuitive Way of Knowing: A Tribute to Brian Goodwin, pg. 57, Floris Books 2013

"In summary, genes do play an important role in development and evolution. But there is no genetic program: genes do not have agency or cause phenotypes. Instead, they select and stabilize developmental processes based on morphogenetic fields, and contribute to adaptation through learning"  - Johannes Jaeger and Nick Monk, The Intuitive Way of Knowing: A Tribute to Brian Goodwin, pg. 169, Floris Books 2013

"What is it that constitutes a whole or an individual? It is a domain of coherent, autonomous activity. The coherence or organisms entails a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-time domains, each correlated with one another and with the whole, and yet independent of the whole. In other words, the quantum coherent state, being factorisable, maximizes both global cohesion and local freedom. Its that which underlies the sensitivity of living systems to weak signals, and their ability to intercommunicate and respond with great rapidity. Within the coherence volumes and coherence times of energy storage, there is no space-like or time-like separation, and that is why organic space-time can be non-local.

The organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-times, this pure coherent state being an attractor, or end state towards which the system tends to return on being perturbed" - Mae-Wan-Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organism, pg. 286, World Scientific, 2008



Developmental Psychology - Psychoanalysis - Cognitive Science 

 "I would suggest that the baby has the all important first task of learning the non-verbal basis of social interaction upon which language will later be built. And this primary task takes several years" - Daniel Stern, Diary of a Baby, pg. 52, Basic Books 1990


"Instead of using sensing to get enough information inside, past the visual bottleneck, so as to allow the reasoning system to "throw away the world" and solve the problem wholly internally, they use the sensor as an open conduit allowing environmental magnitudes to exert a constant influence on behavior". Sensing is thus depicted as the opening of a channel, with successful whole system behavior emerging when activity in this channel is kept within a certain range." Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: prediction, action and the embodied mind. pg. 247-248, Oxford Press, 2016

Sociology - Philosophy - Politics/Economics

"Everything turns upon how we understand the social promotion of autonomy" - The I in We; Axel Honneth,pg. 46, 2014, Polity

"The natures that neoliberalism has produced operate within the epochal nature of historical capitalism, and perhaps even a sort of civilizational nature of humankind since the Neolithic revolution. " - Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, Verso, pg. 164, 2015

"At once humbled and ennobled by our discoveries, we are gradually coming to see ourselves as part of a vast and continuing process; as though awakening from a dream, we are beginning to realize that our nobility consists in serving, like intelligent atoms, the work proceeding in the Universe. We have discovered that there is a whole, of which we are the elements.We have found the world in our own souls." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, pg. 7, image press, 1959

"The people who make it their business to study or order human society (politicians, political economists etc) do so in practice as though Social Man were virgin wax into any shape they choose. They do not seem to have noticed that the living substance they are manipulating is, by reason of its very formation, characterized by certain narrowly defined lines of growth; and that these, although they are sufficiently supple to permit the architects of the New Earth to make use of them, are also strong enough to disrupt any arrangement that does not respect them. -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, pg. 237, image press, 1959






Research


 Post-mortem count of locus coeruleus neurons in 3 American veterans with PTSD.

 http://getit.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/getit?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fsummon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Postmortem+Locus+Coeruleus+Neuron+Count+in+Three+American+Veterans+With+Probable+or+Possible+War-Related+PTSD&rft.jtitle=The+Journal+of+Neuropsychiatry+and+Clinical+Neurosciences&rft.au=H+Stefan+Bracha&rft.au=Edgar+Garcia-Rill&rft.au=Robert+E+Mrak&rft.au=Robert+Skinner&rft.date=2005-10-01&rft.pub=American+Psychiatric+Publishing%2C+Inc&rft.issn=0895-0172&rft.eissn=1545-7222&rft.volume=17&rft.issue=4&rft.spage=503&rft.externalDocID=953689681

The 3 men studied with probable (extraordinarily probable! So much so as to be treated as an almost inevitable fact of warfare) war-related PTSD

1) A white Man, dead at age 68; an alcoholic; suffered from major depression and chronic schizophrenia; he had a spouse up until his death. He had 15,177 neurons in his right locus coeruleus, and 14, 252 in his pendunculopontine nucleus (PPN). 35 years of mental illness.

"Veteran HB25 (probable WR-PTSD) was a combat WW-II, Pacific Theater veteran who was later stationed in Hiroshima and served during the Korean War and was 68 years old at the time of death. Chart information suggested at least one episode of severe depression treated 24 years prior to his death. Collateral information from the veteran’s wife strongly suggested that the veteran had a history of exaggerated startle response, combat–related nightmares, avoidance of war reminders, avoidance of crowds, restricted range of affect, difficulty concentrating, chronic dysphoria, suicidal thoughts, little to no interest in any social activities, and chronic irritability resulting in difficulties on the job and arrests for fighting. Episodes of rage/violence were also frequently directed towards his family. He had a past history of alcohol dependence; however, it was in remission for 15 years at the time of death. There was no history of panic attacks. Two years before his death, he was admitted to a VA nursing home following a left hemispheric cerebrovascular accident suffered during lung resection due to adenocarcinoma of the lung. No metastases to the brain were noted at autopsy. The presence of a large, old infarct involving most of the left cerebrum in the territory of the middle cerebral artery was confirmed by postmortem examination. There were also scattered old microscopic infarcts in the right cerebrum. He was taking no medication at the time of his death."

http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/jnp.17.4.503

This description correlates quite well with the very low (about 8 thousand less) neuronal count in this mans locus-coeruleus - an area that generates a molecule (norepinephrine) important to the regulation of a human beings feeling of coherency - and thus - a low amount would refer to a very low capacity  to regulate consciousness. With reference to the "energetic" norms of human-human (or Self-Other) engagements, a human brain-mind with this low a number would have difficulty existing within the human world in a normal way. Thus, the man spent much of his time dissociated, or afraid, likely "oscillating" along such a dual attractor.

2) A white man, dead at 68. Benzodiazopine addict. Alcoholic, and a diagnosis of "generalized anxiety disorder" since the 60's. Unipolar depression. He had 10,566 neurons in his right locus coeruleus and 8,099 neurons in his PPN. 29 years of mental illness.

Veteran HB12 (benzodiazepine abuse and probable WR-PTSD) was 68 years of age at the time of his death. He was a combat veteran and served for four years in WWII. This veteran had a diagnosis of benzodiazepine abuse at the time of his death and a history of alcohol dependence that had been in remission for 20 years. He had been hospitalized on several occasions for recurrent unipolar major depression and, as noted in his chart, for “possible panic attacks.” This veteran had a chart diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) dating to the 1960’s, which was identified as combat-related on his VA medical record. His anxiety disorder diagnosis was made more than a decade prior to the recognition and DSM formulation of PTSD. It is likely this four-year WWII combat veteran’s combat-related anxiety and other symptoms are misdiagnosed manifestations of WR-PTSD.



3) White male, 78 years at death. 11,322 neurons in his right locus coeruleus. 6,924 neurons in his PPN.

 Veteran HB23 (probable panic disorder and possible WR-PTSD) was 78 years old at the time of his death. History from this veteran’s wife indicated the frequent occurrence of typical spontaneous panic attacks in this veteran (which started in his teenage years preceding his military service). The panic attacks occurred at a frequency of roughly two per week or more and manifested by flushing, profuse sweating, shaking, dyspnea, sudden weakness, and feeling faint. There was a positive history of panic attacks in the veteran’s family. The veteran had a history of alcohol abuse that had been in remission for at least five years at the time of his death. He served as a cook in WWII; and while there was no chart documentation that he experienced severe trauma during the war, he manifested extreme avoidance of war reminders and intense distress when faced with war reminders. In addition, the veteran frequently exhibited insomnia and other symptoms of anxiety. Since this veteran met core PTSD symptoms from each of the three DSM-IV-TR symptom clusters, his postmortem consensus diagnoses were probable panic disorder and possible WR-PTSD.


Very Important!!!!   --> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25154707

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22021
 

A Moral Point of View

We have to change our views about what we are and how we live. The beginnings of such a view can be found in the works of Stuart Kauffman, Terrence Deacon, Robert Ulanowicz and Harold Morowitz. The most prominent idea coming from the works of these eminent thinkers is the feedback-based mechanism of autocatalytic sets. To briefly state this idea, an autocatalytic set is a system of relations that support one another's continuous activity. Imagine A, B and C, chemicals. When A relates with B, it produces C. C then happens to produce A, which links all 3 chemicals together in a mutual feedback. With this idea in mind, we can make the bare, basic statement about life: all living processes are circular. From the molecules inside of us, to the things we think and the way we think them: its happening in loops of mutual interaction between the organism (autocatalytic network) and the environment it exchanges energy with.

The problem for psychology is to recognize what is relevant as causal factors. Phenomenology suggests, as the philosopher Axel Honneth expresses in his body of work, that "being recognized" by the other is the core psychological need of Human beings. Indeed, from modern relational psychoanalysis, to the modern field of interpersonal neurobiology, more and more mental health researchers and practitioners are recognizing the interpersonal process as the means to galvanize change in the clients way of being. Psychodynamics, also, has been restored to its proper status as the main way of understanding the functional logic of human feeling and behaving. It has only returned to its primary status because what was implausible and intuitively unjustified in Freudian psychoanalysis was jettisoned, while alternative fields such as behaviorism, entertaining the even weirder notion that mental events didn't matter in explaining human functioning, was clearly not right in how it understood humans.

A position I will advance in this book is consistent with the predictive processing account advocated by Andy Clark (2016), yet tries to see all this apparent "prediction" in terms of Andreas Weber's (2016) focus upon life being synonymous with evolving feeling. Other work in quantum biology (McFadden and Al-Khalil, 2014) gives credence to the notion of life tending to keep itself 'attuned' to whats needed for its survival at greater and greater levels of complexity. The "centripetality" (Ulanowicz, 2008) of this internal tendency implies to me that there is "something" in the core, or center, that is not sufficiently or adequately contained by physicalist interpretations (2015), yet nevertheless organizes and biases the phase space to maintain itself at "criticality' (Kauffman, 2008, 2016) that is, to attune to what is present in the "adjacent" possible, and select a forward action into the "unknown".

A further notion amenable to my theory building has been Gordon Burghardts (2006) work on animal play and his notion of 'surplus resource theory' in relation to the concept of the 'relaxed field'. To summarize, an animal tends to "test its limits" when it has a surplus of metabolic energy within its organic system. This appears in higher organisms as play and curiosity, but Burghardt has shown how a "primary process" version exists in the earliest vertebrates. Burghardt does not see play as fundamentally related to the nervous system as much as an expression of a "biological surplus" that the nervous system then gives expression to in its curious exploration of life within the adjacent possible.

So what does being recognized have to do with autocatalytic loops? As mentioned, I believe there is something in the "core" of autocatalytic systems that might not be explicable by math or probability theory alone. This tendency emerges and expresses itself more clearly and certainly when the conditions of life are "plentiful" - when the physics of its internal causation permits self-extension into the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is what is immediately within the organisms cognitive-grasp; but it gets there not through any act of "thinking", but of feeling its way forward. Exploration and play must always be couched in terms of "making meaningful" its immediate life-situation. The umwelt of the organism transitions smoothly into the adjacent possible when it exist in the "relaxed field". The relaxed field, indeed, is where the spiritedness of the organism "overcomes" the biomechanical repetition emphasized by the predictive processing account.

If it hasn't become apparent yet, the "core" of the autocatalytic system is the Self of human experience. The center of a galaxy, the center of a whirlpool, and the center of an autocatalytic loop intimate this structure, albeit, is refers to itself as an absence (Deacon, 2011). Yet, on the inside, as a human, does the self really feel like an absence? The notion of the core being an absence does not sit well with work in developmental psychology (Siegel, 2012, Schore, 2003; 2003) and traumatology (Van Der Kolk, 2014, Bromberg, 2006, 2011) which describes the Self that evolves in insecure environments as a deflated, dissociated, and fearful Self which often experiences itself as an "unreality". Richard Chefetz, (2015) a leading thinker on the subject of dissociation and trauma, describes the traumatized person as someone who "fears being real" as result of having felt, so strongly, the sting of "unreality". What does this mean for philosophy? If "feeling real" is interrupted in trauma, and the traumatized person, in his malaise, retreats from the world of relationships with Others as his stunned mind experiences the shock of his own depersonalization, this then entails that being with Others is what creates the feeling of "being real".

If we remember the concepts of autocatalytic loops, relaxed fields and "predictive processing", we can see that complex beings like ourselves repeat the very same processes, yet do so at multiple levels of activity. Emergence is, as understood by Kauffman, Ulanowicz, Deacon and Morowitz, the organization of complex phenotypic traits in terms of whats "behaviorally meaningful" to the organism. Thus, it is the umwelt, the "life-world" of the organism, that indicates the functional logic of its self-coherency. For humans like us, what matters, then, is not genes (As Dawkins and many cognitive-behaviorists still think) but meaning-images, forms of experience, and what those experiences say about our relatedness-to-other-humans. Some postmodern theorists (Rancier) have thought and some still think that there is no 'fundamental morality' by which we can organize our relations to one another. However, cognitive scientists like George Lakoff (1999) and Mark Johnson (2015) and psychoanalysts like Jessica Benjamin (1988;1998) and Donnel Stern (1997, 2015) have referred to the body to make sense of how humans make-meaning. The embodied cognitive science approach (Columbetti, 2014) has also stressed the body as the "background" from which cognitions emerge. The work of Allan Schore and Bruce Perry has stressed the importance of early-life relational experiences (and by implication, the life-world of the people they grow around) and with Jaak Panskepp and Darcia Narvaez, want to increase public awareness of the metaphysical and social significance of early-life relational interventions (2012) for people who are vulnerable. I also have the same interests. The work of developmental psychologists (Tronick, Beebe, Stern, Fonagy, Fogel) have revealed the immense potential for social and psychological change in the Human species. We just have to get our self-understanding in check, so that we recognize that what were most affected by - and thus, the reason we live - is for One-Another. I hope that my work can contribute to Axel Honneths conclusion in his "The Struggle for Recognition", that humans can come to understand one another with reference to knowledge about how the environment - early developmental contexts on critical phases of development - open and close our life-worlds, make living-with-others easier, or harder, and so, makes life worth-living, or full-of-suffering. That we are "cultures" made up of the meaning-images of our relations - and that we are all perched towards mental and neuroplastic growth, with potentials that are more or less the same (Doidge, 2015, Vincent, 2014) from conception, but become different because of our being "canalized" by different developmental settings - can become the "background knowledge" for a future society. Such knowledge is inherently moral - inherently about how we actually affect one another.

There is much potential for growth in us, because the world, and reality, in fact, is very different from what contemporary and historical human cultures have believed, and what contemporary researchers in psychology and biology still believe. Social processes, being inherently tinged with the force of pridefulness and phobias, can keep ourselves from recognizing what is, by having already entrained us, "recreated ourselves", in the shadow of the Other (Benjamin). If we really are beings structured by the very psychological-mental force of being "recognized by the Other", why is it so hard to see? If it enlivens us, and helps us be what our biological potential has become stabilized at (implying a punctuated equilibrium version of biological evolution), then why am I inclined to believe that everyone who doesn't share my conviction is wrong? Logically speaking, if the "Self" we experience is identical to the Self implicit in the "for-me-ness" of biological life (Merleau-Ponty) then it shouldn't be surprising that the nature of human awareness is as subtly structured by "for-me-ness" as the functionality of an amobea. Because life-begins before linguistic awareness allows us to record our own personal self-understanding, the pre-verbal, implicit-relational knowledge of affect and interpersonal presence already biases just how we begin to formulate the self-understanding so central to adult-functioning. The self-concept exists like a "kernel" around the life-essence of the roving Self. The kernel is not an illusion, at least not in its capacity to generate life, meaning and a sense of Reality (to self); but in the fixed way it characterizes the Self as a person, made up of certain essential characteristics, the self our society speaks about and reifies in its songs and stories, is indeed illusory.

The Moral of this story, of the human story, is, and has been from the very emergence of our species,  our essential self-other equivalence (Tomasello). How we got there, the direction of the human organism to give preferential-treatment to the developing brain, will need to acknowledge the radical self-other symmetry implied by the Human-need-to-be-known, where developing and playing with a Self-concept entails needing the Other in order to feel real to yourself. The energy of neurological transformation, and therefore, the emergence of humans, is about the ever-increasing sensitivity of an Organism to the implicit "sacredness" of Being-For-Oneself. In early life, the circles are spread apart, hardly communicating, merely "becoming aware" of one another when they approach physical proximity, but even then, there is no cognitive-knowledge of the Other (Donald, 2001). With humans, a background context of ecology (trees, fruits, other animals, ecosystems, energy cycles in nature) has allowed one species to emerge with the capacity to feel excited and enlivened by a type of knowing that make the Self of the organism into a concept to be shared. The concept, made and constructed by an autocatalytic loop of Action-Perception cycles within one organism, coinciding and reconciling its own expectations and affectivity with the Action-Perception cycles of another, stimulated the emergence of a mental-reality world of increased knowledge-of the life-world of another creature - the life of the Human Other. Self-consciousness then, is irreducibly predicated on the "glue" of a common existential need, and the fundamental pleasure of "being known" positively by the Other.

Thoughts about self

Gosh darn! It's hard trying to explain the self.

Since my thought is largely focused on an evolutionary reconstruction of human brain evolution, I have been thinking, once again, with how it happens.

I'm reading Dan Zahavi's Self and Other, and I just finished a section where he analyzed Husserl's understanding of the way the self experiences the other. Beyond this conversation, my mind was being brought to my own interests; I have been saying lately that human awareness is a function of the others intentional state, but Dan Zahavi's critical standard of analysis has got me rethinking this idea into something more phenomenologically reasonable.

To say that all experience is essentially me trying to match the other, is wrong: clearly there is a simple actor - me - who is giving expression to his very personal needs; as I'm currently doing right now.

Yet I still feel that there is more to say about how it is others affect us, and how the energy we feel after being affected does something to us that cannot happen by ourselves.

To anticipate a probable objection: yes, we can feel quite good on our own, as I myself quite often do. But where do such imaginative possibilities come from? We assume, of course, that they are "ours", because when I am by myself, it is just me and my desire for self-expression. And what I feel in the flow, again, is assumed to be a natural property of being human.

This impression is understandable, but ignores something essential: what we do within ourselves when we are away from others most likely derives from pre-existing relations. As someone who has experienced trauma, studies trauma, and has read numerous accounts of the effects of early-life relational neglect on infant, child and adult mental functioning, there is very good reason to believe that these private capabilities are first made real by actual interactions with others before they are able to be recreated in an imaginative mind.

So, on one hand, a fully lived human life achieves well-being by being human; that is, by living a narrative self, enlivened by it's openness to the actions of others, and by its own meaning-making and curious wonderment about the world, the human being fulfills its indwelling biological potential. Because the potential unfolding of humanness depends on the presence and interaction with others, complete humanness requires relaxing into the I-Thou field of human relating. Gazes must look upon you with a disposition of care for affects to arise within. For the early infant (0-3 months), the touches and caresses of the mother already set a flow of back and forth contingent interactions, in which the mother's tender touch responds to the baby's affective expressions; the baby learning at an extraordinarily early stage something that will be integrated within other modalities, when touches are a bother, its expressivity learns a control; all modalities seem to process a basic "vitality form" (Stern) that is set around a rhythm of mutual recognition of the Other; but what is being recognized, other than a self?

So few ask the question: is metaphysics not poking its head into biology? If recognition stimulates the other, and all human thought and relationality occurs in what Burghardt (2005) calls a "relaxed field", why not accept the metaphysical existence of a self? How else does the brain grow, given what phenomenology shows (Zahavi, 2014), comparative psychology shows (Tomasello 2014; Tomasello 2016) developmental psychology shows (Behen, Chugani, 2015) and traumatology shows (Ogden 2006; Lanius 2014; Van Dr Kolk 2015)? It shows that brain volume goes down in negative valenced relational contexts; and goes up in positively valenced relational contexts. Tomasello shows that apes do not possess the motivational qualities to think like humans do; they don't think, in fact, because the other is experienced as a competitor first, so the self and it's own needs are primary. The apes world is not relaxed enough - there is not enough love, or too much trauma. Perhaps these two notions are inversely related.

Secrets of being

I'm so tired, yet I need to speak. My body is tired. I've had a headache for hours; and I've argued much with my mother today. I also didnt eat enough - last ate at 4:30, and so no wonder I'm feeling off.

Yet I feel a deep, deep wound resurfacing in me. I'm afraid of this wound, this familiar, familiar foe.

I don't want to anthropomorphize - and I don't think I'm doing so. Perhaps a rhetorical flourish.

But it needs to be spoken so. This feeling, this pain in me, is me. It's me at another time, me at another place. There is no communing with this inner foe without acknowledging him.

I say a foe, because that is what he has felt like to me. And yet, I regard him as a foe merely as a disruption that can arise and so disturb my experience of self.

The language seems needed, deeply feels needed. I have suffered and do suffer with this feeling of weakness, worthlessness, patheticness; all these words do so little to cover the phenomenology - the unique, vocal-based form of my mental disturbance.

It is always awkward and painful for me to talk about these thoughts, because they're "so weird". Our culture prohibits exploration of subjectivity, which is a shame in itself, since sharing of second-order perception promotes a deep inter-subjective knowledge of the others phenomenology.

We all share one consciousness. This reality is so deeply, hiddenly, and ingeniously true, yet it sits in the middle, beyond logic, beyond any external effort to know. Robert Frost spoke "the secret sits in the middle and knows". The heart knows what the mind can only build language around. Our thinking, like the world that makes us up, is a vast architecture upon and around this basic, simple truth: love.

This truth is not beyond science. So long as this power has physical effects, it falls within sciences observational credo. This love yearns to be known more deeply: we can build the scaffolding of how it is we become with the flow of this energy.

It is a knowing that weaves itself through life forms yet strangled from full expression by the limitations imposed by time, space, and the matter that evolves within it.

But it weaves: it weaves its little knowing through physical reality, coming upon things that suit its immediate knowing.

Now in us, this knowing is a knowing of the nature of the knowing. We know ourselves primarily through our vulnerabilities; we recognize the "emptiness" of being when the world squelches us. Perched at the edge of chaos, complexity theorists say. With Damasio, we see that the human is a dynamical system of 100 trillion cells and 86 billion neurons, which registers the state of its metabolic "knowing", and the mind, outward focused, knows but knows within the dynamism of its body's "knowing'.

This emphasis and repetitious use of 'knowing' is not purposeless, but to point to the nature of this dynamic flow: love is coming to know itself through a physical vehicle. The process of being: drama, comedy? Such was the view of the Greeks. Awe-inspiring: horrifying? The Egyptians and the Hebrews seemed to feel the divine this way. A celebration of life and being - for India. A calm, soothing flow of Qi for the orient.

All these different views touch on the flow of being and the ways it presents itself. The various human cultures are each mesmerized by being in a different way; different contexts; different experiences; different meanings. The flow is different, yet it is the same flow, with different aspects.

Yet awe might be the only cognitive power worthy of being in the company of love. The awe from the knowing: from the beautiful, healing flow of the knowing.

The suffering mind is simultaneously cursed and blessed: the paradox of being crushes upon him. And yet, great knowings can burst from this heart of such people. Its as if the diameter of being widens with knowing deep existential sorrow. The pain of despair - the despairing face; the hole felt within. And the hope for release, or even, a chance to live.

And then what? How many stories does one need to hear to be stricken by the cynical. But my life, and my being, and the life of every being: theres a knowing - a sacred knowing. Can we be content with a sense of trust of that which appears to be beyond our knowledge at this point?

Love is so true. Love is being. Love is true knowing. All is embedded. And somehow, with knowledge of how one is embedded, choice appears, knowledge begins to blossom, and all out of one beautiful insight: knowing emerged, in the evolutionary past. What we call "apes", led to what we call "hominids". And the knowing went further, deeper, with a full blown mind, a memory of its knowings, crafted around the needs of the moments, with others.

One cannot but help but wonder, how profound is this secret of being?

A love for Existence

I'm very high right now. I smoked a joint, mostly to my self; brother has a bad chest cold. And then I started sucking from the vaporizer. Till the bright green weed turned brown.

Now I'm in my room, paranoid, which is more to say, experiencing a heightened degree of attention. My awareness seems "pulled up" or lengthened. These changes in consciousness are fundamentally difficult to explain because of the nonverbal nature of it. Yet, I can say I feel sensations more at my temporal lobes, as well as along the ridge of my nose. Tingling.

The problem with such a state is that an anxiety can creep beneath awareness. The anxiety arises from the experience of idleness; I'm bored, and reflexively I feel this anxiety. A moment later I feel a strong pull towards a particular thought: I'm going to hear voices. Schizophrenia; a paranoid anxiety, relic from my past. It's such a repetitive, and by now, mostly feeble occurrence when I'm high.

I'm not disparaging it, just merely noting a habit in this mind of mine. Nature is kind enough to build the human spirit with a goodness, a lovingness, and a capacity to contain, calm, and soften the hardness of reflexivity. Yet, thoughts still emerge; and they emerge because the brain is reflexive. Past noumenous structures take on a "potentiated" state, so that if certain conditions are met (very stoned, very late, also haven't been sleeping well lately) a certain event has a high probability of happening.

Traumas recorded by the human brain do not just go away. Whatever embodies or is embodied by these structures has an ostensive permanence about it. Yet - were told by neuroscience - that the molecular relationships which constitute this condition can be reshaped through a change in attention. What reshapes what?

I know. Or rather, I should say I know that there is a feeling within me, a power, that forces into my mind the belief that life is fundamentally meaningful. This gnosis is no doubt the sort of knowledge known by ancient mystics both east and west. It can take on many forms and be known in different ways. But it's a feeling of love and compassion, as well as the application of cognitive processes towards understanding. These processes which we embody and come to know strike a chord that feels so incredibly deep - deep enough - that one cannot possibly deny the highest probability in an awesome, beautiful truth at the core of reality.

Our minds are so conditioned by our relatedness to others. I'm reading Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallets "The Ancient Origins of Consciousness". I also read Todd Feinbergs "From Axons to Identity", so I have a sense of his erudition and range of interests. This book has revealed an even deeper level in his scholarship, in that he attempts to explain - or solve the hard problem of consciousness, as he and Mallet put it - by somehow combining 2 third person perspectives and his and Mallets own philosophical perspective. They make a strong assertion, based on no transformative evidence to shut down a counter-argument. They dissociate the plausibility of other viewpoints; they over-believe in what they think they know.

John Hands recent book "CosmoSapiens" has an admirable skepticism about it. Hands heartily demonstrates an even keeled analysis of what humans think they know. Cosmologically? We don't in fact know for certain how things happened. The tendency to make the strong assertion is more emotionally driven: they want to believe it. A species that evolved in the context - and by a context - of mostly stories, is always going to be vulnerable in imaging and thinking in ways ill-suited to reasonable scientific accuracy. In order to gain a deep sense of how to "weigh" things, you need to be mindful of all the possible affective material that may be displaced in this present state of propositional consciousness. My relatedness with the world is a function of my affects - or feeling. Feeling frames perspective; or how you evaluate the other. And feeling is a function of homeostasis processes in the body, and so can be put off kilter by unstable behavior...or thinking, or beliefs.

There is a so little self-analysis to the point that is required: we are RADICALLY social in our functioning. Feinberg describes the poplar difference between hierarchies: namely, non-nested and nested hierarchies. The former are physically separated while the latter are "nested" one within the other as a biological hierarchical dynamic. So, according to this way of describing the different types of hierarchies, human social processes 'entrain' individual human beings according to some central attractor. We can describe this attractor in different ways, largely, ironically, in terms of how we've come to reflexively evaluate the world. One way may focus on cognitive structures, but the emphasis is largely on ecological relationships that mediate the development of higher levels of consciousness; such as tool-use and the frontal lobes; fire and consciousness (Burton 2007; Wrangham 2009; Herculano-Houzel 2016) or even more distant things that seem to have no relationship to dynamical processes (and so is disembodied in its construction) as Joshua Greenes (Moral Tribes) belief that human beings developed compassion as a function of defining themselves as being different from others. 

Difference? For someone who has suffered a severe psychological trauma, I cannot tell you how incredibly unlikely that claim is. My healing comes not from difference; but a recognition of sameness. It's a transcendental awareness that re-cognizes, with a background feeling of awe, the fact that you and I are equally embodied in a context that threatens us left, right and center with suffering. And so what we do - and where we are locked - is a feedback loop that dissociates us from the relevant information: how we feel in our relatedness with others. My claim is that human thought is a function of the other, and so our thinking, fundamentally, is tinged with value, with feeling about. It needs to be recognized that consciousness did not just pop out of nowhere, but evolved. And affect has always been the barometer that organizes the overall state of the organism; however, the mind embedded in those effects is also negotiating meanings with the outside world. In developing languages, we created conditions in which the mind could become fundamentally desynchronized with affective knowing, so that language could eventually evolve in such a way as to support defensive dissociative processes (such as not wanting to know that one aggresses because of a history of being aggressed against; not owning and recognizing the feelings that you once felt as a victim; the dissociation of victimhood, weakness, and most of all, an inhererent vulnerability that comes with being a fragile biological system, built to know pain to promote its survival.)


The positive neuroplastic effects of positive relationships has now established beyond a doubt that "healthy" human relationships promote neurogenesis. But what, persay, is "healthy"? Developmental researchers like Allan Schore, Alan Fogel, Dan Siegel, Ed Tronick, Beatrice Beebe, T Berry Brazelton, and Peter Fonagy emphasize the dyamics of affective processes that organize and motivate changes in attentional state. Traumatologists have also seemed to recognize the necessity of adopting an interpersonal focus, simply because they have success when they actually care verses when they don't. When their affective concern is felt, and most of all, displayed for the eyes of the other, the other is provided a metaphorical experience of "being held". I know this feeling and I was later able to note it after 2 or so years in therapy with a truly gifted psychotherapist. Her way of being with me, looking at me, talking with me, didn't just show a care. It was a genuine, sincere, non-exaggerated care. It was affectively felt, and so organized spontaneously in its manifestation, which then entrained my being, What I felt afterward - the burst of energy - how else is one to interpret this? My psychological functioning, or in Feinbergs lingo - the highest level in a multilevel system that constrains lower levels - is buttressed, ballooned with energy. And to no loss to the psychotherapist treating me. In fact, she gets a burst in feeling kindness, and I feel a transformation in my self-state.

My state of mind at any one moment of relation is also a state of self. Only a dissociated daze is valueless. When we think about, a value is unconsciously applied in the process of thinking. The affective is always there. Even in its apparent absence (think Steven Hawking) in thinking about, the mind simply lacks a certain feeling of relatedness to the subject matter that is typically present in most human beings. A lack of affect attunement is therefore a problem for people who can't represent reflexively within their experience the same feelings of what they're observing in the other; it's via a reflexive "reconstruction" of this implicit knowing that we come to the proper inference, and so can guide our experience rationally so as to avoid insulting the other or stressing ourselves.

The human mind is a logical development of one state of episodic consciousness feeling known by the other. How does one even describe such a state? It has cognitive aspects (being known) but it is the affective dimension that does the "work". Neurogenesis is not a passive process; it doesn't happen "just because". Communication is happening between embodied minds, each unaware of the symmetrical conditions that guide them to converge on a state of colloboration, and an even deeper knowing, a love for love; a love for meaning; a love for existence.

The story we need is not just a story, but a likely reality. Or a fact. Retrodiction cannot be verified like prediction, so we must trust our intuitions when we try to recreate past conditions. Nevertheless, fire. When this wondrous thing was handled and used, each moment constituted a new event in reality. The mind conceiving and doing this is not passive: and neither is the brain. The change in affect is correlated to a change in neuromolecular activity. Being stimulated phenomenologically is the same as being stimulated neuroelectrically. A spike in conscious awareness about something, to just finish this point, is embodied in the brain processes that mediate that reality.

Ergo, would it be ok to conclude that self-recognition is somehow generating this neurological growth in brains? Yes. It is the stories we tell one another which we notice. But we have yet to realize that its the micro-phenomenological units - a state of being recognized by the other - that releases positive affects and encourages conversation.

There is clearly, I think, some "self' happening, or existing, perhaps as the fundamental cohesive logic that keeps organisms together to begin with (and which no present theory I've read gives a plausible - or fully explicable -  explanation to). Autopoeisis, a term coined by Varela and Maturana, does a good job by focusing on purpose, since to think of a being existing - in a way we can still not explain with contemporary biology/physics - without some purpose to keep existing, is nonsense. Biologists tend to prefer the term "teleonomy" instead of teleology, to make the point that it is only in the present that "purpose" exists. Perhaps, scientifically, this is an acceptable distinction to make; but can we really ever escape our complete embeddedness, as creatures who evolved in what seems to be a system i.e. a universe? What presumption to speak with such certainty to ultimate questions!

Teleonomy, however, is sufficient to make my point: the organism wants to survive in the moment, and is this not-magic enough to force the question: from whence does this capacity come to leverage dynamic molecular processes to not merely maintain life, but to add complexity to it? Insufficient wonder leads to banal conclusions, and I am afraid to say that Feinberg - whose views in his 2009 book I largely agreed with - is comfortable with "solutions" that are not solutions for other people. Is this a difference between what constitutes a solution? Of course. Solutions are linked to the questions asked. And if the value-laden thinking of the person asking is dynamically tethered to the values of other academics in the same field, a presumptuous conclusion can be made: because the brain is electrodynamically made - a reasonable conclusion - the authors assume, which to me seems unwarranted, that it is impossible for consciousness to exist outside of a brain. From whence does this conclusion arise? From the view, peddled by Feinberg and Mallet (and which seems utterly superficial to me) that consciousness is not radically different from other biological processes. Repeating the views of John Searle, they think it is ok to speak of consciousness in the same way as digestion, meiosis or mitosis. Granted, they say "it is not quite" the same, but this is way too tenuous a statement for my liking. To me, consciousness is OBVIOUSLY different - so irreducibly basic - and fundamental - that to reduce awareness of - the very thing which grants existence and the power to feel, reflect and know - strikes me as cheap. Without wanting to insult Feinberg/Mallet, I can't help but feel like these two human beings have a rather "neutral" affective relationship with reality, and so from this affective dullness (but not to be confused with an ontological neutrality; as said before, thinking is fundamentally tethered to the logic of social processes i.e. power relations) project onto the world their interested take but come to a conclusion that is "compatible" with so much of contemporary philosophy of mind. Physicalism can only be the acceptable metaphysical assumption. To claim anything above - or beyond - what we could possibly know (implying a suspicion that human awareness may not possess the means to know fundamental reality) is not tolerable for them. Ok. However, I still feel that their conclusions are mediated by non-conscious affective needs stemming from their own dissociated need to be understood by important others. Making oneself "coherent" - wanting to take part in a conversation, is not neutral, but laden with affects. To share a viewpoint that is not shared by others risks an immediate affective reaction in the face, voice and body language - and their actual language - that enervates the mind and depresses the body. That people want to feel good, for me, is the reason why overly-strong assertions about reality are made.

I feel so lonely. My sister is gone. The most important thing in my mind, symbolized, "Ashley".
But I'm paranoid. Smoked too much weed, the efficient cause of my anxiety, nervousness and general fearulness.

Reading so much too. Terrence Deacons Incomplete Nature is blowing my mind away with it's sophistication and analysis of dynamic patterns. I enjoy it. Love it. But right now, with paranoia, all this sophistication and nuance and delight with such abstract subjects, is part of the process of my reflexivity. I am thinking this way and that way, hyper-time. I get a rush of anxiety, followed by a sense of my fearfulness, the agitation in my body, in my heart. The heat.

This is a horrible feeling. With so much weed in me, for some reason, I perceive "more". What is weed other than the good-feeling cannabinoids endogeneously produced by our brains? This neurochemical modulates experience in a "backwards" direction, so that you seem more open to the temporality of your emotional flow. In the brain, its also of interest that the endo-cannabinoid receptors are at the post-synaptic cell, which means their influence happens retroactively, with released molecules modulating the electrical activity of the pre-synaptic cell. The consonance between the phenomenological state of "openness" to a temporal flow of affectivity and the post-synaptic effect on the pre-synaptic cell, are essentially identical processes, scaled up to the level of perception, and yet perception maintains a causative influence on synpatic-firing rates between neurons in its capacity to direct its attention, inhibit its attention, or modulate breathing to regulate autonomic processes.

I distract myself by embedding myself in my meaning. The meaning is "beyond" me something I search for, long for, cry for, feel like a baby for, and I feel the 'meaning' is something that is owed to me, something I deserve, and need, because I am a being embedded, vulnerable, scared, and needy.

The words I write also distract me. The most irrelevant thing, yes, but a technicality that sometimes intervenes in our thought processes, leading to obsessive over syntax, or correct selection, if, like me, you use your two index fingers to type.

Ashleys gone, and I really feel her absence. My body, in a sense, is regulated with her body, which I experience as a 'longing' for her. She's my sister, so my longing is of a very non-sexual nature. It's a loving, caring, playful, intellectual and psychotherapeutic relationship. It's just something my body likes, I love, and with her, just over a day now, I really feel an almost physiological "separateness", as if I can feel her absence emanating from her room, and knocking on my door. Likely an elaboration provided by the weed, but the point is, I miss her, and she's barely been gone. I still have 6 more days, so I have to just find something healthy to do. Talk at the library, for example, seems like a good thing. But truth be told, at 30 years old, I am fucking horny and always conspiring at my id'iotic times, to fuck this girl or that girl, many of whom are barely out of highschool. <-- Admitting to this, as a truth about human nature, is rarely admitted to, because people fear being seen as a 'weirdo'. Sexual ideation towards physically pubescent females is pretty normal and natural. Its a reflexive response, a tendency, an 'attraction' towards females of any physical form that matches our sense of attraction. It's there. The job, however, of a morally mature mind to regulate the appearance of these thoughts, and, even if indulged in from time to time, you recognize a fundamental hesitance to ever pursue it in action. And even despite this, its still probably best to resist fantasizing altogether.

My dream, my one simple want in life, is to write, to help, to contribute to the creation of a better world, and to revel in the pride I feel in being a human, connected to a deeper metaphysical meaning, and to be able to imbue my world and the worlds I interact with with power.

Ultimately, though, I want to meet someone. My body longs for someone to hold. I have this sense of 'wanting to hold a body' - a female body. Sensually, more than sexually. I want to be in a type of embrace that has the aura of divinity to it. The physical connectedness of two self-aware, naked beings, holding each others body, touching, stimulating, loving - and really loving, and letting all flow from what you feel to be the deepest and most encompassing expression of human experience, a sexual, sensual, and relational embrace of love.

And my deepest longing is children. I want to play my part as the next being in this long chain of beings to bring into being a being to be patterned by my being, and the being of my wife, and others whom the being of my child will grow around. What could be more meaningful? If you know how to get your emotions flowing in a healthy way, you can do it. You can use the mystery of consciousness to design good into the world, to support, help, and show, how love truly is the basis of it all. And it's ok. It needn't overwhelm us. Life can be a celebration of being, a declaration of selfhood, amidst the deeper awareness of an emptiness, a oneness, which pervades everything.

Recognizing....

I almost think there's a psychic quality to the way two people affect one another. There are moments when minds become "mutually aware" of something that is happening between them, but they remain "isolated percepts"; known individually within each person, but without the "cultural scaffolding" of a shared conventionality. To conventionalize something is to sanction it as a way to perceive something. Percepts that do not fall within a cultural "basin of attraction", enter and fall out of consciousness, while their dynamic effects persist in subsequent states of consciousness in a misplaced manner or whats called "emotion displacement".

Conventionalization is mankinds highest form of evolution, as what is "conventionalized' itself becomes a rule-based system that gains its authority by acting upon innate pride-shame sensitivities that organize the "self-world" of every human mind.  When things have been catalogued or come to be known in some implicit way as "undesirable", the brain-mind 'screens' it out, a priori, as an acceptable phenomenological item. Re-opening the mind up to an item that has proscribed is subject to the pride--shame continuum that operates subliminally in every human-human interaction; if the person being communicated with is known in some important way (holding alpha status in your eyes) then anything this person says acts upon the pride-shame continuum, thus opening up certain pathways or closing others.

Because pride and shame is the carrot and stick in human functionality, "what" can be known, or the metaphysical nature of reality, is dependent on how aware a person is of the way others affect them, and how they in turn "orient" to this knowledge. The self can "rise above" it's own orientations, itself a well-woven fabric by the time the mind is functionally complex enough to "stay aware" of it, so that minute instances of shame and pride no longer tug the organism-self in arbitrary, self-serving ways - itself a relic of the normal "tightness" between the working memory systems of the brain and 'exigencies' of the moment - and so allow a true reflectivity on the actual causal processes that influence normal propositional thinking.

Because the "what" is so directed by the "how", truth is something subject to the normal social processes that underlie human needs. But what is human need? A biologist would say "food" "sex" "sleep" and other basic, obvious needs. But this is not the functionally highest type of human need. The genuinely unique human need is itself conceptual, or mental, and is scaffolded by incredible neurological and sociolinguistic complexities. In one word, human needs can be reduced to "recognition". In two words, we can say 'being recognized'. In three: "being recognized [by] others". But what in itself does this even mean? In today's highly industrialized and commoditized culture, it can actually be hard to recognize, indeed, you are rewarded to ignore it, how utterly connected we all are to one another's communicative signals. In fact, it can be argued that the "signal" in the communicative act, itself a container for the felt intentionality of the communicator, is the fundamental source of human consciousness, in that it acts as an accelerator in phenomenology; excitement looms on the other end of an alert or excited facial expression; voices which react excitedly to our presence "charge" our minds with an energy; but it also 'charges' neurons, in that it facilitates neurogenesis. The higher level process of one human mind acknowledging or affirming the selfhood of another mind, somehow, someway, seems to be the key process in all that makes human consciousness what it is.