I am feeling frustrated. A part of me wants to cry out, fall down and curl up into a fetal position.
I don't want to know it or show it. Yet I just can't leave it in there unthought about. I have to go closer, know myself more deeper. Empathize with me, who am I am, and ask: do you need to suffer?
It doesn't have to be that way, at least I don't think. The science part of me, the part that is influenced by scientists and scientifically oriented philosophers, pokes in, and tries to monitor the neutrality of my position.
Yet life isn't neutral. And if it, it a paridoxical 'middle ground' that inter-includes opposing states, which together, in their wicked harmony, makes something magical happen.
Yet to be calm, relaxed, sure of myself. I can be so brittle and think and feel difficult thoughts with a force of persuasion that eats me from within my chest: there's a "knowing" there, from my past, which repeats the same refrain: be afraid, don't move, don't think, creep away and hide. Above all, hide.
It's probably not a coincidence that traumatic surrender produces gestures associated with toddler hood. Baby's are very vulnerable, and thus liable to being traumatically over-aroused. But not every baby's been traumatized, so I wonder, why do I feel this need in me, to fall down and cry, and lament my existence?
I - what is I? I should thank my lucky buttons that I read Joshua Abraham Heschl. I like his ideas about awe and doubt. Not so much the emphasis he placed on the ontological primacy of the former, but because he spoke with such enthusiasm about it. This man had awe for reality, for the fact of consciousness, his consciousness, and the apparent automaticity of all other organisms, to varying degrees.
Jews have this feeling of awe. Their religion has cultivated it, and I think, there may have been enough generations of interbreeding to support the predicted environmental reality: Judaism. Of course, culture is the primary mediator here, and Judaism, such as in Chasidism, and even more specifically, a sect called the "breslovers", named after the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. This knowledge here is a testament to that part of my life - my religious past - where I cultivated a feeling of awe, in my prayers to God, in my abstract forms of devotion - willing, willing, and my mind grew through that, through the biological reality of a particular neuronal network being 'more used'.
I don't know if I believe in God anymore, and it pains me to say that. Even reading that, I experience a second guessing: do I? Or don't I? One part of me pulls away towards a humanistic bent; while another part, the part that sees awe, and cultivates awe, can't help but see a oneness in the world that is not at all different from the views I held before. Our brains are interpersonally created, so why should God, in the form of an imagined companion, not be experienced in a human like way? Are not my words natural properties - emergent functions - that depend on biological materials? The psychological reality - the meanings of words - are more than mirrors for others to understand, but also, and more critically, something I hear presented to myself. My consciousness bears wisdom to my cries, and hears it, responds to it, with compassion. Why do I feel this, and why am I drawn to finding healing in it? The attachment processes of early life, where the mind is forged and given its 'charge', is this the source of the feelings? And if yes, how may one think about it ontologically? That is, to think about this fact in light of the feeling of existential awe.
But I am but a single human sharing a world with 7 billion other humans. Each one of, or the healthy of us, forms a self, and a history, and a narrative. But more than that, we share this same existential vantage point upon the world we experientially encounter. Each of us, then, together, do we make up God? But what of reality and the ineffable emergence of life? The perfect cosmic conditions, arising out of certain astronomical relations, making a sun this sun and having a planet, the 3rd one out, developing this way, and oh yeah, put a moon there to get the life producing waters on the planet moving. And then the chemicals got together, merged in ways that seemed oddly predestined, and developed in ways that involved various ways of combustion and transformation.
That I am a consciousness, emergent upon the process that is this biological evolution. Can I hear my own cries? I do. And I respond.
But would I leave it at that? I'm not big enough to be God, and neither are we together. We emerge in beautiful ways out of processes that began 700 million years ago when Eukaryotic cells evolved and came together in multicellular units. The history, and the subtly of the consciousness that came about in it's various forms. I am now the most complex thing created. 40 trillion cells. Each one processing 10,000 molecules of ATP every second. Which means the body processes 1 quadrillion molecules of ATP every second.
How can one hear that and not be amazed at the dazzling complexity? How can one not then connect our emergence, and our awareness, to this tremendous scientific fact?
The philosopher Raymond Tallis seems to be the only other person I've read who is amazed with what human beings represent. From the big bang till now, evolution has followed determinable laws. When organisms acted, they acted from inbuilt principles that conformed with earlier principles. The ontology grew more complex, but the basic processes were always physical. And remain physical. And yet, simultaneously, there is this 'mental' plane which can assess the contents of it's experienced perception. If 'experienced perception' represents Damasio's idea of the body forming feeling states that bias perception, then the consciousness that looks out upon these dynamics is oddly out of place. It's as if reality, or ontology, has made a U turn, where reality itself, or a consciousness that looks upon reality, can now act directly upon it in a conscious and self-determinative fashion.
That we can be tugged between two, very different states, and, despite what are body may compel us to think, we opt for another perception, another view, strongly suggests that the mind is involved with the ethics of choice. Not merely that either, though: it can change it's own reality - it's own brain - in a manner reminiscent of spinning a merry-go-round. The mind is either going with the motion, or consciously interrupting it, putting a hand upon it as it spins, slowing it down, bringing it to a stop, and then spinning it in the other direction.
That to me is what free will amounts to. The mind immersing itself into experiences and trying to recognize how the past is influencing the present.
Tuesday, 29 September 2015
Tuesday, 8 September 2015
Some ideas on Evolution
The human brains outer strucutre - the cortex - is an expansion upon the lower-level subcortical areas. Thus, the necessity of an evolutionary stage where certain features of the environment generated certain brain functions.
Between the inner and outer brains, it is now known, is a split between 'explicit' and 'implicit' processing. Below the cortex, experiences are generated as if by automata. The phenomenology is the sensation of doing something because one always does this. Indeed, to resist the enaction of a behavior - to conceptualize it mentally as a want and then to impede the execution of an action - feels a bit like a mental '360'. Something wanted, no longer attended to in the same way.
This development must follow from earlier, simpler, ways of being. Tomasellos theory of shared intentionality is an obvious background for human development. His work parallels work from developmental psychology (Beebe, Tronick, Trevarthen, Stern, Emde, Fonagy, Schore) which sees the infants first forms of communication as gestural; but these communications are unconscious, or implicit, in that they act on and through procedural systems. The infants brain detects intentionality/affects via facial expressions, body movements and intonation of voice, and orients accordingly to threat or safety.
What does such information mean for human evolution? It tells me that our ancestors in the genus homo, as suggested by Tomasellos shared-intentionality hypothesis, first began to "share intentionality", or from the perspective if a developmental psychoanalyst, began to experience symmetrical affects that mutually generate a shared attentional focus.
The question, of course, is how these "shared-intentionality" processes evolved in the brain. Developmental psychologists have an under-appreciated term for this process, which they call "implicit relational knowing", or relational "internal working models". They're the most subtle aspects of procedural learning: how to self-organize in particular relational contexts: how to process the object, make meaning of the object, etc, all in accord with a prediction system that guides the organism to act vigilantly towards threatening objects and relaxingly with safe objects.
Early evolution therefore had to establish a sense of trust and confidence i.e. safety, in the human interaction. This could only have happened in small-band hunter-gatherer groups and those close knit connections they formed with one another. Question: what was their attentional focus like? Is it possible that early homo was drawn to perceive more and more in his neighbors intent? So over centuries, faces could become less hairy, eyes more white, as the face of the other was probed for more and more intentional meaning?
The degree of sensitivity in humans to the information held in the face of the other strongly indicates that Schores theory of intepersonal regulation to be true. It pretty much makes sense of the mind in a way that Freudian and behaviorist thinking can never do: it integrates evolutionary logic into the developmental process: the organism self-organizes in terms of a larger 'system' of psychological dyadic regulation. This requires another person, so that mind after mind is patterned and 'recreated', but of course the process is strongly cultural and psychological; genes don't matter, as they set general parameters that can be undone (barring serious neurological injury) by experiences. The evidence of therapy is the strongest demonstration of the power of human relationships. Cozolinos ideas about a 'social synapse' sound appropriate. The idea beneath it is salience: human beings stand as 'desired objects' for one another. Good emotions depend on the other; yet paradoxically, the individual acts for the pleasure of the emotion generated by the interaction: it takes the emergence of a secondary take, explicit consciousness, to notice the contextual factors that determine the feelings generated by interaction.
Perhaps emotional connection between early homos within tribes deepened their sense of one another. This may have been a period where mirror neurons multiplied as the organism mapped "more" of the others intentional state. But attentional state os . They also, of course, must have been compelled by both sides of the ledger: the carrot of love, friendship, laughter, pleasure; and the stick of fear, anger, anxiety, and shame. The organism is 'pulled' into a dynamic system that requires a dyd
Between the inner and outer brains, it is now known, is a split between 'explicit' and 'implicit' processing. Below the cortex, experiences are generated as if by automata. The phenomenology is the sensation of doing something because one always does this. Indeed, to resist the enaction of a behavior - to conceptualize it mentally as a want and then to impede the execution of an action - feels a bit like a mental '360'. Something wanted, no longer attended to in the same way.
This development must follow from earlier, simpler, ways of being. Tomasellos theory of shared intentionality is an obvious background for human development. His work parallels work from developmental psychology (Beebe, Tronick, Trevarthen, Stern, Emde, Fonagy, Schore) which sees the infants first forms of communication as gestural; but these communications are unconscious, or implicit, in that they act on and through procedural systems. The infants brain detects intentionality/affects via facial expressions, body movements and intonation of voice, and orients accordingly to threat or safety.
What does such information mean for human evolution? It tells me that our ancestors in the genus homo, as suggested by Tomasellos shared-intentionality hypothesis, first began to "share intentionality", or from the perspective if a developmental psychoanalyst, began to experience symmetrical affects that mutually generate a shared attentional focus.
The question, of course, is how these "shared-intentionality" processes evolved in the brain. Developmental psychologists have an under-appreciated term for this process, which they call "implicit relational knowing", or relational "internal working models". They're the most subtle aspects of procedural learning: how to self-organize in particular relational contexts: how to process the object, make meaning of the object, etc, all in accord with a prediction system that guides the organism to act vigilantly towards threatening objects and relaxingly with safe objects.
Early evolution therefore had to establish a sense of trust and confidence i.e. safety, in the human interaction. This could only have happened in small-band hunter-gatherer groups and those close knit connections they formed with one another. Question: what was their attentional focus like? Is it possible that early homo was drawn to perceive more and more in his neighbors intent? So over centuries, faces could become less hairy, eyes more white, as the face of the other was probed for more and more intentional meaning?
The degree of sensitivity in humans to the information held in the face of the other strongly indicates that Schores theory of intepersonal regulation to be true. It pretty much makes sense of the mind in a way that Freudian and behaviorist thinking can never do: it integrates evolutionary logic into the developmental process: the organism self-organizes in terms of a larger 'system' of psychological dyadic regulation. This requires another person, so that mind after mind is patterned and 'recreated', but of course the process is strongly cultural and psychological; genes don't matter, as they set general parameters that can be undone (barring serious neurological injury) by experiences. The evidence of therapy is the strongest demonstration of the power of human relationships. Cozolinos ideas about a 'social synapse' sound appropriate. The idea beneath it is salience: human beings stand as 'desired objects' for one another. Good emotions depend on the other; yet paradoxically, the individual acts for the pleasure of the emotion generated by the interaction: it takes the emergence of a secondary take, explicit consciousness, to notice the contextual factors that determine the feelings generated by interaction.
Perhaps emotional connection between early homos within tribes deepened their sense of one another. This may have been a period where mirror neurons multiplied as the organism mapped "more" of the others intentional state. But attentional state os . They also, of course, must have been compelled by both sides of the ledger: the carrot of love, friendship, laughter, pleasure; and the stick of fear, anger, anxiety, and shame. The organism is 'pulled' into a dynamic system that requires a dyd
Tuesday, 1 September 2015
The Two Sides of Consciousness
I'm now convinced that what we call our "mind" or "self" is a phylogenetic construction created between individual ape-like organisms with greater bipdeal uprightness, hands with better dexterity, etc.
The thought dawned upon me while I was playing basketball at the leisure center. I went there a little bit high (bad habit) and I mention this only to provide a physiologic frame for what my affective state was like. I began thinking about how well I was doing. Which was perhaps prompted by thoughts about the meaning and significance of playing at the gym on Tuesday when adult pickup starts. I saw the Indian kid who once took a fair bit of pleasure in blocking my shot. The message was clear: I'm tall, you're short, shown with zest with the added wiz of a ball hurling in the other direction.
The Indian kid seems to be about 16. He's about 6'1. Maybe 6'2. He's typical for kids these days. Basketball oriented, he wears all the gear that brands him as 'this type of person'. I get the message and try to calm my impulsion to enact an irritated look. Why bother? I then become conscious of myself, of my ability, of the temerity of my affective state: how can he world feel so different now, be so different now? I got to learn that this is a stupid, pointless question. Powerful - but you need to contain it or you'll be sent into endless iterations of the same feeling: it's overwhelming.
I did however get an idea that impressed me. In the past, I existed almost entirely, about a depressing 99 out of 100 times, in a state of unresolved traumatic vigilance. The disordered stress response, now in full swing (say, in 2002) is mutating in a certain way. I become hyper-focused on the voice. The brain now links the voice - the vehicle of self-expression (and development) is broken. When I speak, I do not speak from my body, but from an overly concerned frame of reference that lies outside me altogether.
Trauma heightens the environment, and in particular, the reality of the object. I see myself, unconsciously, enacting not merely the trauma, but the actors on the other side who contributed to the creation of these states: I unconsciously experience them as the view that I ascribe to myself. Being in the presence of other people at 7 pm, perhaps not so long as 3 years ago, was compulsively experienced as tense. Even till this day, I reach a point of 'complexity' that is difficult to track and thus bring back to a stable ground. I can get lost, and the only way out is to limit information from everything except the body.
This story is all about the way the environment "hides" within the ways we act with people. The environment, of course, is the minds and intentional states of other people. When we act, and when we reflect, we do it in tacit reference to the memory of past experiences, and the 'meanings', as affects and cognitive percepts, are "ejected" at later times with only the felt affects/cognitions that come along in a conscious state to dominate awareness.
This makes more sense than you realize. Human brains today are constructions of at least 500,000 years of significant 'altruistic evolution'. I say 'altruistic', because organisms within primate lineages (there were multiple, co-evolving species of human-like creatures) became more intuitively engaged with one another's intentional states. Intentional states for knowing, but at a certain threshold, consciousness became deep enough to sense affective states in partners, and to feel the pleasure of aligning oneself, and helping out another creature.
Evolutionary psychologists give such short shrift to the reality of the existential - that is, of pain, suffering, and the way these experiences stand out in human awareness. Is pain - and the recursive, deeply aware consciousness of it - not uncomfortable, and thus, act as a "negative reenforcement"? In complexity theory language, suffering would compel some sort of creative solution. The solution, of course, is already present in lower animals as bonding and connecting; it's love. But for us higher primates, experiencing the suffering of another stimulated our brains to want to say something or, as is likely the case, make a gesture, such as a hug, to comfort, console, and change the affective state (which is what is being 'read') of the other.
Our human brains today are built out of interest and love. The so-called "machivaellian" brain merely co-opts a system that has built itself mostly from altruistic experiences: hence the reality of psychopatholgy - that every human being is psychodynamically bound to one another through affects such as shame; and through affects, we usually do the same things to get rid of them (dissociate conscious attention from them); and thus much of our societal behaviors are emergent properties of dissociation - a hyper-emphasis on ephemeral things, a short term, individualistic, competitive "game" (until, of course, the emotions of life present their experience in a negative way, forcing a reassessment on things).
The self and the object are the two poles. I am the consciousness who observes the objects: yet I am an object to myself. I've come to this state of affairs via countless iterations of an evolutionary process that has created creatures of a similar phenomenology. We each create ourselves without awareness of the ontological 'structure' of self and other.
The theory of evolution changes how we think about the psychology of the mind. The functions of adapt to survive, and the emergence of love as an antidote, as a way to 'bind' individual 'actors' one to another - is this way of speaking concealing an utter oneness between parts, whose very sense of selfhood, naively extolled in the business notion of "self-interest, is a product of the self-other process, whereby the mind monitors the other as well as the self, encouraging actions that yield positive feedback and discouraging actions that yield the opposite?
The greatest challenge for the future of homo sapiens is whether we truly develop the 'sapiens sapiens' part of our moniker. Can we have the wisdom to understand the necessity of developing children that can break the dissociative process, and do what evolution makes instinctively impossible: think about those things which make us uncomfortable, but nevertheless need to be spoken about. Climate change and the costs we must absorb; talking about mental illness, death, inequality and the discomfort it no doubt costs us to talk about it.
Part of the naivete in the human condition is the conviction that we 'know' something to be true even though our biology is built to 'scaffold' our psychology, that is, to bias our thinking so that we think mostly good 'regulating' experiences of ourselves, as opposed to those which present us to ourselves badly. It is imperative that people understand that this is the actual reality: this is not an 'opinion', but the most plausible, empirically supported description of how human consciousness functions and under what circumstances it evolved to become as it has.
The only rational conclusion about our condition is a paradoxical one: we are individuals yet we are psychically bound to one another. Anything I do influences your response. So long as dissociation - the process which 'deemphasizes' certain past experiences by generating desires that bring our mind some place else can ping and pong people back and forth while each party secretly (to themselves) confabulates another reason (one that doesn't bespeak shame) for why they believe what they do.
Human minds and all that they create are dynamic processes bounded by the inherent limits in a physical system. We have only so many neurons mediating our phenomenology. The meaning one situation has for us interacts with those before and the context that come next. The utter immaturity of dorso-cortical networks makes metacognitive self-control an impossibility for very young children (2 years to 6 years) and even when kids seem to have more self-awareness, or 'moral awareness', in their teens, they are still surprisingly inhibited by the force of cultural standards in self-representation. Not just dress, but being able to talk openly about emotions and feelings is largely experienced with discomfort, which then elicits a dissociation - the unconscious searching for "cognitive coherency", by locating a more palatable frame of reference, and so teens, undergoing neurological 'remodeling' themselves, naturally enact the "low road" behaviors to manage the affective challenges created by highschool.
The thought dawned upon me while I was playing basketball at the leisure center. I went there a little bit high (bad habit) and I mention this only to provide a physiologic frame for what my affective state was like. I began thinking about how well I was doing. Which was perhaps prompted by thoughts about the meaning and significance of playing at the gym on Tuesday when adult pickup starts. I saw the Indian kid who once took a fair bit of pleasure in blocking my shot. The message was clear: I'm tall, you're short, shown with zest with the added wiz of a ball hurling in the other direction.
The Indian kid seems to be about 16. He's about 6'1. Maybe 6'2. He's typical for kids these days. Basketball oriented, he wears all the gear that brands him as 'this type of person'. I get the message and try to calm my impulsion to enact an irritated look. Why bother? I then become conscious of myself, of my ability, of the temerity of my affective state: how can he world feel so different now, be so different now? I got to learn that this is a stupid, pointless question. Powerful - but you need to contain it or you'll be sent into endless iterations of the same feeling: it's overwhelming.
I did however get an idea that impressed me. In the past, I existed almost entirely, about a depressing 99 out of 100 times, in a state of unresolved traumatic vigilance. The disordered stress response, now in full swing (say, in 2002) is mutating in a certain way. I become hyper-focused on the voice. The brain now links the voice - the vehicle of self-expression (and development) is broken. When I speak, I do not speak from my body, but from an overly concerned frame of reference that lies outside me altogether.
Trauma heightens the environment, and in particular, the reality of the object. I see myself, unconsciously, enacting not merely the trauma, but the actors on the other side who contributed to the creation of these states: I unconsciously experience them as the view that I ascribe to myself. Being in the presence of other people at 7 pm, perhaps not so long as 3 years ago, was compulsively experienced as tense. Even till this day, I reach a point of 'complexity' that is difficult to track and thus bring back to a stable ground. I can get lost, and the only way out is to limit information from everything except the body.
This story is all about the way the environment "hides" within the ways we act with people. The environment, of course, is the minds and intentional states of other people. When we act, and when we reflect, we do it in tacit reference to the memory of past experiences, and the 'meanings', as affects and cognitive percepts, are "ejected" at later times with only the felt affects/cognitions that come along in a conscious state to dominate awareness.
This makes more sense than you realize. Human brains today are constructions of at least 500,000 years of significant 'altruistic evolution'. I say 'altruistic', because organisms within primate lineages (there were multiple, co-evolving species of human-like creatures) became more intuitively engaged with one another's intentional states. Intentional states for knowing, but at a certain threshold, consciousness became deep enough to sense affective states in partners, and to feel the pleasure of aligning oneself, and helping out another creature.
Evolutionary psychologists give such short shrift to the reality of the existential - that is, of pain, suffering, and the way these experiences stand out in human awareness. Is pain - and the recursive, deeply aware consciousness of it - not uncomfortable, and thus, act as a "negative reenforcement"? In complexity theory language, suffering would compel some sort of creative solution. The solution, of course, is already present in lower animals as bonding and connecting; it's love. But for us higher primates, experiencing the suffering of another stimulated our brains to want to say something or, as is likely the case, make a gesture, such as a hug, to comfort, console, and change the affective state (which is what is being 'read') of the other.
Our human brains today are built out of interest and love. The so-called "machivaellian" brain merely co-opts a system that has built itself mostly from altruistic experiences: hence the reality of psychopatholgy - that every human being is psychodynamically bound to one another through affects such as shame; and through affects, we usually do the same things to get rid of them (dissociate conscious attention from them); and thus much of our societal behaviors are emergent properties of dissociation - a hyper-emphasis on ephemeral things, a short term, individualistic, competitive "game" (until, of course, the emotions of life present their experience in a negative way, forcing a reassessment on things).
The self and the object are the two poles. I am the consciousness who observes the objects: yet I am an object to myself. I've come to this state of affairs via countless iterations of an evolutionary process that has created creatures of a similar phenomenology. We each create ourselves without awareness of the ontological 'structure' of self and other.
The theory of evolution changes how we think about the psychology of the mind. The functions of adapt to survive, and the emergence of love as an antidote, as a way to 'bind' individual 'actors' one to another - is this way of speaking concealing an utter oneness between parts, whose very sense of selfhood, naively extolled in the business notion of "self-interest, is a product of the self-other process, whereby the mind monitors the other as well as the self, encouraging actions that yield positive feedback and discouraging actions that yield the opposite?
The greatest challenge for the future of homo sapiens is whether we truly develop the 'sapiens sapiens' part of our moniker. Can we have the wisdom to understand the necessity of developing children that can break the dissociative process, and do what evolution makes instinctively impossible: think about those things which make us uncomfortable, but nevertheless need to be spoken about. Climate change and the costs we must absorb; talking about mental illness, death, inequality and the discomfort it no doubt costs us to talk about it.
Part of the naivete in the human condition is the conviction that we 'know' something to be true even though our biology is built to 'scaffold' our psychology, that is, to bias our thinking so that we think mostly good 'regulating' experiences of ourselves, as opposed to those which present us to ourselves badly. It is imperative that people understand that this is the actual reality: this is not an 'opinion', but the most plausible, empirically supported description of how human consciousness functions and under what circumstances it evolved to become as it has.
The only rational conclusion about our condition is a paradoxical one: we are individuals yet we are psychically bound to one another. Anything I do influences your response. So long as dissociation - the process which 'deemphasizes' certain past experiences by generating desires that bring our mind some place else can ping and pong people back and forth while each party secretly (to themselves) confabulates another reason (one that doesn't bespeak shame) for why they believe what they do.
Human minds and all that they create are dynamic processes bounded by the inherent limits in a physical system. We have only so many neurons mediating our phenomenology. The meaning one situation has for us interacts with those before and the context that come next. The utter immaturity of dorso-cortical networks makes metacognitive self-control an impossibility for very young children (2 years to 6 years) and even when kids seem to have more self-awareness, or 'moral awareness', in their teens, they are still surprisingly inhibited by the force of cultural standards in self-representation. Not just dress, but being able to talk openly about emotions and feelings is largely experienced with discomfort, which then elicits a dissociation - the unconscious searching for "cognitive coherency", by locating a more palatable frame of reference, and so teens, undergoing neurological 'remodeling' themselves, naturally enact the "low road" behaviors to manage the affective challenges created by highschool.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)