I am mystified by the way natural selection works. I believe in it, but unlike so many others, I do not see it's activity as dealing only with biology.
The cells which came together to build organisms, according to thinkers like Franscisco Varela, already possess some sort of proto-intentionality; a type of "cognition" that shows itself by "finding" the "right fit" try after try.
Some people are of course prone to interpret this progression as accidental, as opposed to a meaningful emergence set by preexisting physical conditions, of which it bears pointing out, we still do not understand. Before biology there is the malestrom of the developing solar system, and before that, the big bang. To split consciousness and biology from the dualism implicit in the big bang (what came before? Nothing; Something? What caused it?) is not my cup of tea.
In any case, when humans become modern day humans with 1200-1400 cc brains, a change that seemed to occur during the lifetime of homo heidelbergensis, it must have evolved within the social processes that now define our human cognitions.
For me, the most basic motivational properties of homo sapiens is a continuum that moves from shame to pride. In agreement with Colwyn Treverthan, I also believe there is a "horizontal" continuum that moves between a sense of egocentricity, to a sense of intersubjectivity, or said differently, "I'ness" and "we'ness".
Both of these conditions imply a larger construct - a social construct - that "acts upon" the motivational states of the actors; The I, since it belongs to an individual organism, is paradoxically motivationally "bound" to the intentional positions of others; the gaze, voice, facial expressions and gestures of others communicate loudly, not to the conscious mind, which merely "registers" the change, but to an unconscious mind that exists to "pick up" these relational cues.
Our society, so stricken by machismo and a belief in it's own rationalism, is still slow to pick up on the reality of the shame-pride continuum. ALL humans pass through it and are shaped by it's dynamics. Dissociation is the neurological/unconscious process which separates the "wheat from the chaff", that is, experiences which our affectively "affording", and experiences which are affectively "depleting".
Throughout, implied in this pruning is the concept of social-status, something seen so clearly in the other great apes that it is quite surprising that people do not recognize it's centrality in our functioning.
The "self-monitoring" capacity, posited by Tomasello to be present as a "view from nowhere" that nevertheless acts by structuring our motivational states, is really the internalization of the phenomenological reality of human intersubjectivity; the minds we have are "two" - we relate to worlds, to objects, to "things"; present within our mental architecture is a 'witness' function and a event that crosses into our phenomenological awareness. The Buddha (it is said) discovered that mental pathology derives from an 'identification' process whereby the mind (or the witness) unconsciously engages the objects, or experiences, which passes through it; failing to recognize the duality that lies at the core of lived phenomenology, the self habitually engages, and by engaging, augments its suffering. His method for 'curing' the mind of this illness was to continuously 'recall' and 'remember' that you are not that which you perceive; there is a difference, phenomenologically, and psychologically, between awareness and experience, and acting and being acted upon.
Because of this connectivity between action and perception, what we see being acted by others, whether in direct or indirect ways, comes into our consciousness (and brain) through the way we experience it affectively, only to reemerge later on in a similar context as a motivational state. Motivational state's are structured by direct and vicarious experiences with others; those which elicit or display behaviors that indicate shame, are tagged "bad"; the instinctive response appears to be an unconscious dissociation from consciousness of the behavioral patterns associated with the 'eliciting' behavior (a certain way of being that the shamed party displayed).
Two simultaneous things are being "encoded" into the brain here: what to avoid (the shameful behavior) and what to pursue (the dominating behavior). The brain is not inherently programmed to follow this route, inasmuch as society can exert negative (or countervailing) feedback in the form of psychological education; nevertheless, the trend is strong enough because dissociation works not simply by "blocking" out the bad thing, but replacing the bad thing with a suite of assertive behaviors; a small sample of such behaviors are the various things society does today; the military industrial complex, corporations, politicians - the lust for power, money; cynicism, hedonism, self-righteousness. The self doesn't simply dissociate the shame that is the root of all this behavioral excess: it creates something in it's stead: the human mind is fundamentally a story-teller, and the story it is telling, at least in today's politics, is one of liberty, "do what thou wilt" "so long as you don't hurt anyone" (sic) ideologies that are ultimately reactionary - there to "hold back the tide" - of a progress that conflicts with their own developmental conditioning.
Dissociation is a process that deserves to be made explicit by our educational systems in as much as it speaks to the "double sided" nature of our motivations. Take bullying: the bully bullies because in his own lived experience, encoded in his brain, is an experience that is similar in 'form' to the perceived behavior in the kid he wants to bully. This "form" is probably Stern's "forms of vitality" which, like in dance, music, poetry, can shift from modality to modality but still retain some affective and intentional significance.
The bully sees in his target 'weakness' - a weakness that "speaks to his own past"; being that humans are operating from this "view from nowhere" ala Tomasello, the brain performs a subtle acrobatics that only inference can disentangle; anger, or hatred, surreptitiously sneaks in front of the organizing shame of weakness; and since shame implies weakness and vulnerability, it would take something like anger - a dominant, assertive emotion - to flip the switch, and reverse ones social standing: dissociation is there not simply to keep the bad out; but to replace it with a fantasy of the "good".
Acting out our fantasies in ways like these is not surprising, but expected given what we know about the evolution of the human mind. Since the mind evolved to "know" what others think, it should not be surprising, but nay, should be totally expected, that an experience of shame is unconsciously converted by the brain into an experience of hatred, when another party who demonstrates or performs for your own eyes the same weakness and shame you could not tolerate to experience in yourself.
Social pain, as neuroscience has shown, is handled by the same areas of the brain that process physical pain. But unlike physical pain, social actors are constantly trying to buttress their self-esteems; behaviors that might elicit shame, or promote an idea of themselves as weak in the minds of others, are dissociated from perception (that is, they are not aware of this motivation). The behavior they enact is instead culled from the social world they want to be part of; and indeed, their unconsciousness of their own explicit need "to be a part" demonstrates the lack of frontal lobe development in the children, adolescents and teenagers (and unfortunately, adults) that developmental psychologists have highlighted.
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