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.
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