Books and Life

Lately I've been reading a lot book about consciousness.

First, it was Joaquin Fusters "The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity", which, besides the very interesting concept of perception-action cycles between the environment and the organism, and a way of thinking about the brain that involves hierarchical feedbacks between different regions, his underlying mission - to convince his reader that consciousness is 'just' an epiphenomenon of physical organic matter to be too implausible to take seriously. At Amazon, I gave him 2 stars out of 5 - seems harsh right now (perhaps would of gave him a 3) but I trust my earlier perception, inasmuch as reading his words, and his cavalier way of presenting epiphenomenalism, got deeply under my skin.


Now I'm reading two books coming from 2 different perspectives. If Joaquin Fuster represents a conservative view (the mind as a non-causal epiphenomenon of organized matter), Christof Koch represents a moderate view, and Marjorie Hines Woollacott, a liberal view.

Fuster wont even allow consciousness any causative role, even though Roger Sperry's emergent interactionism makes it very clear that conscious, existential qualia guide neurnal processes - i.e. as the 'meanings', 'memories', and 'gestalts' of experiences. Fuster's view is an impossible one. Ugly, reprehensible, and sickening. It obviously strikes a negative chord in the human mind, because, well, the nature of human existence - the consciousness of our consciousness - itself generates the affects and forces that inspire concerted reactions to the world. The mind which demotes consciousness to an 'epiphenomenon', who sees all the psychodynamic complexity, representation, and meanings about self "not significant", or at least, not significant enough to change their orientation towards the world, one really can't help but wonder

Jokes aside, the issue must come down to developmental differences in life experiences. The rule probably is: 'what happens earlier has a large effect', although it isn't iron clad. Point is, I can not understand the person who wants to degrade life and the meanings that emerge within it to the dustbin. How can one inspire oneself, and be in the world, and live with others in a meaningfully alive way, if one harbors a suspicion that none of it ultimately 'means' anything beyond the luke-warm 'requirement' to be moral because epiphenomenal matter likes it.

Reflection upon the self, and the paradoxical 'gestalt', of knowing your own awareness, and being in awe of it is an emotional experience that speaks to me, and tells me: "this could not be unless consciousness amazes itself", that is, has causative influence in neuronal organization.

Next was the much more enjoyable

Christof Koch is a tall lanky German-American biologist, scientist, physicist, who believes that consciousness exists in all of matter, and in a certain organization, automatically becomes sentient. Koch, I must admit, does make clear the logical implications of "what" the world looks like when you want to explain how reality unfolds. The underlying assumption is: "mathematics is fundamental", and reflects ways of organization in the world. Koch therefore wonders (at one of his more extreme moments) that maybe one day the internet - itself a thousand times more powerful than the brain, could become sentient.

One part of me thinks "you're fucking insane". Something in me doesn't like the idea - doesn't like the degradation of the human mind, human self, and human meanings, to some arbitrary show of engineered "minds" - with no other proof to a 'mind' than the claim that the robot in question has been designed to organize vast amounts of information (though nowhere near a human brain).

I'm skeptical that silicon can ever match the complexity of carbon, so, unless we mimic the universe, it seems likely that silicon will never be a useful source material for creating complex sentient life-forms.

All in all, Kochs views are interesting; his theorizing and beliefs about the possibility seem far-fetched, inasmuch as the biochemist Nick Lane believes silicon to be a less efficient element for complex systems than carbon. I think I'll trust the biochemist.

Finally,

This book arouses different emotions in me. Her passion for her subject and her belief in an underlying meaning touches me. However, I don't think she is very rigorous in her argument, and, the psychoanalytical part in me can't help but wonder whether she promotes a simplistic spirituality, or what can almost be a fetishistic and naive commitment to views that inculcate narcissism and self-importance.

I am not at all saying that Marjorie is any kind of person, but some of her arguments, examples, and theories, really have little empirical justification. With 'bottom-up' approaches, we work not merely from biophysics, but also from academic psychology - that is, the steven pinker type, experimental approach that seeks to explain things in more 'parsimonious' ways.

I think this approach makes sense because humans have a very nasty habit of deceiving themselves. I feel Woollacotts approach contradicts important ideas about human evolution - such as our situatedness, sensitivity to immediate social context, and proclivity to unwittingly enact defenses, for example, by insisting on a certain view because one is 'in the throes' of an affective experience, partially dissociated, that prevents one from changing course in ones thought or speech. Experience is fundamentally psychodynamically organized, as different "meanings" interact to bring consciousness into a comfortable affective state. This means that a human organisms fundamental concern is "affect regulation", i.e. controlling feeling, which also entails having your mind pushed 'this' way and 'that' way by meanings that promise a certain response (in the other) or the 'self'.

I am basically saying that Marjories picture is overly certain-of-itself. Ontological statements can really screw up human thinking and acting by 'stereotyping' our thought to focus on the world in presumptuous ways, which of course dissociates potentially important information. Emotions, then, are 'rudders', that guide our cognitive awareness towards particular 'cognits', to borrow a term from Fuster.

I am very open to the idea of panpsychism. I am also open to the possibility of Psi, as if it exists, it indeed shows that there is a level of consciousness, ontologically unique to human experience, that allows consciousness to "skip" the space in between two objects. I like the idea, but I do not think Marjorie presented the idea in any meaningful mechanistic way. She assumed what must logically be assumed (that a 'mind' surrounds the mind within physical matter) and even drew a nifty diagram, with a big consciousness that swallows up a little consciousness. But this doesn't make any connections with known physical laws, thus, requires a lot of assumptions (i.e defying occams razor).

I am not saying she is wrong, but I do think it's presentation was simplistic, and so might offend people who are more interested in usable information, rather than "baseless theorizing".

From my own perspective, I think "strange attractors" have something to do with it. I think when two people connect on a deeply empathic level, and therefore share a similar empathic affect, that the "consciousness" which exists within them might 'supervene' upon the matter within and between them, leading to an 'entrainment' of sorts that, perhaps through quantum entanglement, allows the communication of awareness, mind, and selfhood, from one body to another.

Love, and consciousness, seem somehow very similar. If the Universe is diffuse consciousness, and the organic matter which arises within it, instantiations of an organized and directed being, then in social creatures, and later in humans, we find an organization that gives unique expression to an affect, and meaning, that speaks "goodness" and "peace". These two concepts entail human experience - as well as the paradoxical relationship between trauma, fear, and anxiety, and the pleasures of joy, peace, and wellbeing. That is, having suffered as I had, I found myself more easily motivated to find the "deeper meaning" in reality. Reality thus provides a 'way out', when the suffering being searches, explores, and begins to acquire meanings that almost 'draw' it toward some predestined purpose.

Could the universe have a purpose? Could ones suffering, have a purpose, that finds its place within the universes purpose? My life could have gone in many different directions, yet I was built with a basic need "to survive", and to survive, I came, almost inevitably, to the reality of compassion. This emotion at the center, it seems to be, and emanates, a power that draws the human heart towards it.

Magic In The Moment

I depend on some sort of magic in the moment. In every situation, every disequilibration, requires an almost cosmic sensing into how to set things aright.

But the window of opportunity can feel so narrow. I sense so many different selves, the "me's" who exist when I find myself acting in the moment. Contextual conditions - the stresses I feel impinging on me, as a force of a particular situation - speak to neurons in my head that 'make' me do things; I feel "captive" to my body, to the last thing, to the last physiological effect, leaving my 'watching' mind, gasping for expression.

I pop up from time to time. I, or this higher force in me, gives me the experience of being a sort of "father" to myself. But from where does this identification derives its force? It is literally surreal. Existentially speaking, I've "switched", or find myself "switching", by tenderly, and calmly nursing my experience back to a state of equilibrium.

The moment of experiencing equilibrium, of finding, like Goldilocks, a state that is 'just right'. What is this attractor that draws my mind towards it? How can one explain such a phenomena - me, my mind, my being - as being 'brought upwards' by a mental attitude, towards ones own identity, that somehow permits a shift, a movement in bodily affect, and with it, disturbing perceptions recede, consciousness finds itself, as itself, as this embodiment, as it were, of what Buddhism would call 'buddha consciousness'. I make no claims of being such a consciousness, but I do feel 'carried' by a "strange attractor", which I am connecting with, and indeed, coming to identify more with.

How else can a mind be lifted out of it's torpor? How else can I calm the stormy seas of my subcortical brain - the tsunami of dorsal vagal activity, numbing, and dissociation from objective reality? The human being is such a creature which has evolved the preconditions - an essential sociality - that serve as a background to the experience of being "one with the universe". My sense of oneness - deriving from my sense of twoness, of the other - allows me to 'find' my own "higher nature".

The metaphor of a "higher nature" derives from this feeling of sensing into. Who's sensing? Answer: My self with the need to sense. And where are you sensing into? Answer: the self I know I can be.
What allows this transformation, other than a fundamental connection between consciousness, love, and the universe? The organism which experiences this, from the inside, as a subjective being, with a history of meanings, cannot help but consider it's personal narrative as fundamental to the transformation process. Whatever "neural harmony" is found, seems to be the result of a non-material process that acts upon the dynamical states of neurons; and the transformations in the brain are themselves constructions from the energy created in the psychological meaning-making experience.

The relationship is necessarily bi-directional, and, paradoxical. If nature shows us anything, it's that weird, seemingly opposite things seem to 'hold' together, and in their 'holding' together, help to sustain one another. At a basic level, mitochondria need a cell nucleus, and the cell nucleus needs the mitochondria. Cells of tissues, once 'finding' that homeostasis, need one another, as well as their relationships with other tissues, in order to make an organ. In the mind, the 'object' of thought is inextricably tied with an observer. And vice-versa. This reality is itself a consequence of our evolution in large social groups. The "other" within us, is a 'stand-in', for the other humans we relate with. Mutual dependencies sustain the world. Our minds - and all that occurs within it - owes its existence to the presence of other people. So what, given the generative potential of this pro-social organization, can we make of misanthropism, other then condemn the social system - and those in a position to most influence it's direction - of complete thoughtlessness?

Maybe the world pulls all of us along a path until were forced to wake up and face reality. The "reality principle, so ingenuously termed by Freud, is something every mind will one day have to recognize. The need to escape reality, to escape negative feelings, is something so known, yet eagerly dissociated. The larger consequences bequeathed by this inability to 'know clearly' leads to feedbacks in culture that sustain themselves by sustaining individual - yet common - difficulties with feelings, like shame, anxiety, depression, or any state that might represent the self as 'weak' and 'vulnerable'. Money hungry CEO's , however powerful they may seem, necessarily have 'unreflected upon' issues stemming from early life circumstances, such as the modelling of behaviors, and the way the mind becomes biased to self-organize in reference to the 'meaning' of the action: is it good, or bad? Humans are animals subject to non-consciousness meanings that control their behavior. Much of this non-conscious, dissociative meaning comes from shame and pride. We fight along this 'continuum' of feeling as we build our personalities. Everything about our taste, interests, and pleasures, derive their orientation from an earlier experience that represented an 'image', or 'position', such as this, as desirable to the organism's (your) well-being. Each decision was biased by the nature of the communicative display - gaze, facial expressions, prosody, movement - and the 'content' that was communicated, is very often a 'husk' relative to the emotional meanings in the face and voice.

Shame and pride are 'useful reductions' in that they serve the larger group selection goal of 'shared intentionality'. You cannot get people agreeing or wanting to agree, without a carrot called pride, and a stick called shame. Within and between these psychodynamically related states, lies a spectrum of human emotions listed by major emotion theorists (Ekman, Ledoux, Davidson etc), but for some reason, perhaps culturally and socially influenced, shame and pride have not been seen as the 'master' emotions, the north and south pole, as it were, of the human personality.

Pride is the state that is sought, in the sense that social interactions exhibit actions and behaviors that elicit certain effects on others. It is the "other focus", the 'view from nowhere', or the 3rd person awareness of some deeply human perspective, which impresses itself into the perceiving mind. Eventually, the mind will respond to a situation with a response suitable to the nature of the communicative action. A smile will be released, in the "implicit relational knowing" (BCPSG) that a smile will elicit a good response. Prediction becomes the focus, but the prediction is mostly concerned with what will be 'good' for the organism, and pride, a state which "protects" the mind within, is incessant and inveterate in it's idealizing.

Shame, on the other hand, is feared by the organism. The state itself spurs idealizing - searching - for a "knowledge" housed within, that will give it a way out of its present feeling. Idealizing battles with Dissociation. The shame experienced, expunged, purged from awareness, with the scratching mind striving for a better image of itself.

Shame is a moment of dissolution, a breaking down, a 'cutting' within the mind that keeps certain objects interdicted from conscious knowing. It is a scar on the psyche - a teacher of values, of norms - but can also be used to the point of destruction, where the organism itself becomes defined by it's shamefulness, and so it's existence becomes a hectic and frenzied effort to find pride, find a goodness about itself.

But it can't find itself because it's body now houses the shame. The muscles in the throat, stressing during speech, reflect back to the self an image of brokenness, of weakness. Body and mind, small and vulnerable.

Just as pride becomes conditioned into the body's homeostatic process, so does shame; and so, the presence of mental illness, all mental illness, owes its etiology to the grating force of dissociation on mental functioning. In psychosis, the left hemisphere has lost the power to regulate it's experience, and so the experiencing consciousness suffers as it enacts frantic, worried, and confused behavior. Schizophrenia is the breakdown of the left brain, similarly, because of a long history of dissociated shame and hurt. The human heart, terrified of shame, and envious of pride, throws itself into dissociation by instinct. To forget, and not recall; and to be inclined to think something else, is very human. But it's also entirely animal-like.

Letters From My Mind

I am currently finding it hard to see myself, feel myself, and be myself. I am dissociated. Existing in a "fuzz", with a bodily feeling, in the stomach region, of a general "lack". If it could speak, it would say "something is wrong". I'll say it, because I'm "it": something is wrong.

I don't want to exaggerate or catastrophize, but I do need to speak. to myself, to me, to Michael. I am both me and this suffering me. A tired, forlorn, lonely, man of 30; still living at home with his parents. Going to school, but still not completely opening himself up to others. He speaks to the teacher - I speak to the teacher - and "we" come away feeling good and bad.

Today, things just felt wrong. From the morning, to taking Maggy for a pee, to the walk, to the wait, to the skies above me and the two people sitting at the Go station, looking like drug users, smokers, people who speak loud and bluntly. The bus ride, boring. The book I'm reading, interesting, though depressing. With the way that the day feels, I'd rather not be fighting with the nature of consciousness - is it causative, or isn't it? - and running down a million rebuttals for how consciousness, at least my consciousness, is causative, and constantly interfaces with the contents which trouble me, which I must localize, isolate, and work with in a conscious way. For me, the intrusion of a negative shame response from the facial expression of the short, muscular Arab guy as he looked at me after I laughed at the professors goofiness, requires an instantaneous response - but it is not reflexive; but carefully crafted, it is sensed into. My day has been one long run on in an intellectual realm between me and Joaquin Fusters view of consciousness as merely 'epiphenomenal', and not causative, as it is phenomenologically experienced to be.

In the above situation, how could I effected that organization without the searching of a needing mind? I am that mind. And it is me, and my mindful deliberation, both in the body, in the inhibition of a terrifying emotion which has historically crippled me, and my post-hoc verbal reflection that contextualizes the nature of the experience. Fuster says all this can be done 'without consciousness', in that consciousness is merely 'epiphenomenal'. To me, this is balderdash, as it takes me, and my history, interfacing with a particularly fearful existential reality, and "holding myself", as it were, as I endure the experience, and bring myself back to a state of homeostasis. These processes are fundamentally mental. Meanings, not "cognits". Cognits, as explained by Fuster, are a poor candidate term for what I experience in these sorts of moments. It is the gestalt; the totality of "me" moving, connecting, sensing. Fuster seeks to do away with the "problem" of the observer, acting, agentic ego. But the witness is the inevitable "whole" that is my observing consciousness from moment to moment. I find myself, know myself, through this thing called consciousness. It is in my reflecting, and "collecting" in my reflecting, the sense that I grow bigger, stronger, in knowing myself, which necessitates a realer impression of what consciousness is and isn't. Fuster's view, as well as Churchlands, seems superficial, and a tad arrogant. But the arrogance, itself, inasmuch as it serves as a defense against a long unrecognized neediness, leaves the mind only "half" reflecting. Fuster does something like this. He reads deep, philosophical stuff, but he talks scantly of how his own experience in socialist Spain promoted a dread and discomfort with "oppression", which is the input and impact of the other. Fuster talks about territoriality as if it were the first principle of animal behavior, as opposed to being an "add on" to a later, more primitive distinction. The truth is, threat and safety determine the experience of a humans sense of "territoriality", and so their feeling of "liberty" i.e their freedom to act.

I have much problem with the libertarian disregard, and almost a callousness, an unwanted widening of the circle, a fear of the other, a need to impose limits and enunciate order. I know this feeling because I lived within it. I had my conservative, orthodox views, and regurgitated, cliched phrases. I now recognize that I spoke these ways because of an underlying, dissociated anger - at the other - at the people who've bullied me, who took such mindless satisfaction in hurting another person. This was me! ME! MYSELF! MY ONE OPPORTUNITY AT LIFE! How could such a powerful, super-order narrative arc, not influence the direction of my political views? It's inevitable, because the brain, indeed, is a closed system. And the emotions that battle within it have to be resolved, not by the brain, or the "cortex" (according to Fuster), but by the person who struggles to integrate the meanings - the gestalts - that are approached, not by the physical neurons, but by the mysterious force that brings it all together, into life, and into meaningful engagement with reality.

The years will likely be difficult. Future Michael: don't have fear. Trust. Breathe. Know. Metabolize your emotion constructively, mindfully. Seek and find healthy relationships, find friends, do not seek more than you feel ready for; but understand the necessity of disturbing your comfort level. You can only move forward by tolerating and absorbing - processing - the negative. Breathe. Have love. Cultivate, this mysterious, wondrous thing called compassion.

Shaping Human Evolution

I have a dream. In this dream, human beings have come to better understand how they evolved to behave as they presently do. Something like this charges my fantasies, as it promises to give mankind a more accurate understanding of his current "being in the world" - the way he thinks, feels, imagines, and resolves the various realities he come to experience in his life.

Necessarily, such an enterprise would need a logical timetable. A plausible 'picture' of such a time table is a) "long time", referring to the force of evolutionary biological forces on his present constitution; b) "middle time", referring to the force of historical cultural circumstances on the organization of the brain and mind, and c) "short time", referring to the historical contingencies of development.

Development can in turn be spliced up into: a) Intrauterine circumstances (mother's stress, diet, which in turn is "scaffolded" by her immediate relationships, social background, culture, history, etc); b) Early life experience (0-2 years); c) Childhood (2-11); d) Adolescence (12-18); e) Young Adulthood (19-30).

This developmental picture is enormously ecological, as we can see biological evolution as the "widest circle", with cultural history encompassing the intrauterine circumstances of the mothers pregnancy, and the events of the child's early life.

Now, I will stop to answer an obvious question: from what basis do I argue that man is "acted" upon by the environment? The answer can come in the form of neuropsychology. The amygdala is a deep-brain region that specifically responds to environmental stimuli that is either "good" or "bad" for the organism. It is thus regarded nowadays as a general purpose "relevance" detector, with 'defense' as it's strategic core, and 'instrumentality' (doing things that are advantageous) as a later adaptation. The amygdala becomes activated at .10 milliseconds when shown a mean-face, but consciousness doesn't recognize it until .500 milliseconds. Consciousness is thus 'fed' an image, or perception, that will frame it's form of thought and affective valence. In this way, the vast majority of human behavior is constructed from what Joaquin Fuster calls "action-perception" cycles. Thought, Affect, and Action, become "connected", by the immediate form or "gestalt" of a situation. Through something called a "vitality form" (Daniel Stern 2011), mirror neurons pick up the 'gestalt', organized from the 'bottom' up in motor programs. In the situation, certain 'engrams' will be 'called up' and the individual will find himself enacting a particular cultural, historical, and personal behavior that 'suits' this particular interpersonal interaction.

To go a little further into the etiology of this process, in every human beings life, 'defensive' actions, or stimuli that trigger activity in amygdular neurons, increase in activity and specificity as environmental interactions 'shape' the neurons in this 'primary' nucleic brain center. But what are the parameters in any interaction? What are the primary internalized forces that act upon the organism, causing it to act 'this' or the other way? Michael Tomasellos theory of "shared-intentionality" provides the obvious "setting" that internalized affective process are biased to meet towards. Nervous systems must be wired in such a way that information on other faces, moving body's, and the sound of a voice, may give primary direction to how the organize should 'inform' consciousness. A 'still-face', for example, would trigger neurons in a baby (and later, an adults) brain to stimulate physiological reactions of fear and anxiety; as adults, these feelings are "supervened", as it were, by the instrumental avoidances organized, again by instinct, as the organism learns how to "dissociate" negative affective, psychological, and behavior material, and unconsciously "idealize" positive states, themselves picked up by non-conscious valence-gestalt sensing systems, which can infer and internalize (make available for action systems) behaviors seen in others that result in certain kinds of feedback (positive feedback).

Feedback seems to be what the social brain is organized to care about. Negative emotions, resulting from negative communicative displays (primary = facial/vocal, secondary = meaning content;this does not mean meaning content doesn't amplify the effects in non-verbal communicative displays) generate 'compensatory' activity - this being the locus of what we've historically called "psychoanlysis". Neurology, or the logic of the neuronal systems in our brain, is providing a biological framework for unconscious psychodynamic processes that 'organize meaning' to be biased towards the "positive" in any situation (this process is non-stop, always changing, always adapting, so it becomes increasingly complex as the person ages) and to dissociate, or "inhibit" processes in the amygdala that otherwise generate certain subcortical "anxiety" affects.

A simple way of thinking about human sociality is with reference to what Colwyn Treverthan calls the "Pride-Shame" continuum. Pride and shame would be the two logical poles that would make Tomasellos theory of "shared-intentionality" phenomenologically feasible. People need to be guided to "share positive states" with one another, and to avoid states that were opposite, that is, states where our intentional - or affective - interests were different and incompatible. Between cognitive and affective processes, it is clear that the affective is the more primary, organizing vector, on top of which beliefs later sit. As the self grows, beliefs itself becomes a force upon the affects in the body, leading to stronger feedback loops as time goes forward (i.e as the cortex grows and develops, and myelination continues).

Human beings can use all this knowledge - of our vulnerability to shame experiences (or experiences of negative feedback) and a tendency to fall deeply into a "shame attractor" when a parent uses shame too often in discipline, as well as a tendency towards narcissistic action, when others in our world model for children the behavior of ignoring others, in pursuit of their own interests. Much can theoretically done with this knowledge to help individuals develop the regulatory knowledge as well as the neurological hardware of greater executive consciousness, developed by mindfulness i.e the conscious reflection on the minds own activity. Meta-cognition is not a given - human beings have evolved to be reflexive and automatic. Ones capacity to think clearly, and more objectively, is fundamentally related to the ability to recognize the influence of a past "engram" on present experience, and to have the imaginative resources, and a nuanced sense of bodily affect, to move attentional awareness in another direction.

With all the problems in this world, and with all the things humans do in the face of injustice, it could not be anymore important than to increase the awareness - change the brains, and with that, the minds - of more and more people, so that mindfulness will not be felt as some weird new-age belief, but as a veritable neurological technology - something we can use to increase our attentional awareness of ourselves, of our behaviors, so that we can 'attune' our minds to the way that evolution organized us: to be aware of our tendency to respond negatively to negative communicative displays; to recognize our susceptibility to 'shame' states i.e. from more subtle 'awkward' feelings to full-blown humiliation, and to protect ourselves from such states with 'over-determined', manic defenses; to realize, also, that we are prone to have poor recall of past events, and thus learn to speak with more humility about what we recall about a situation. Most of all, human beings need to be realistic about their fundamental emotionality. The brain is built to adapt - and to adapt, in a creature such as us, is inextricably tied to emotional connections with others, and thus, to emotional feedback, a sense of connectedness, and a sense of belonging.

To make a better world, all we really need to do, from the perspective of neuroscience, is to train the brains of tomorrow to tolerate negative feelings, learn from negative feelings, and grow as a person - and as a mind - in the pursuit of 3 things which will likely dominate human behavior in our species future: cultivating relationships, studying the natural world, and technological innovation.

Writings For today

I'm feeling it pretty strongly right now. I'm feeling this intense shamefulness.

I feel like my brother is causing it to me. I feel bullied. I feel unresponded to.

I sense in him this repetitive, wind up gizmo, working from some stereotypical foundation, taking hold in his mental stream, and leaving me to relate with what Louis Cozolino calls 'reflexive social language' - ways of being that my brother has obviously developed to relate with the people he interacts with. The "ways of being" are stereotyped in that they are accomplished in a relatively hypnotic trance-like state, whereby the 'personality' is constructed moment to moment in accord with some underlying pattern of activity.

In doing this, he loses sight of the meaning that his behavioral cues can induce in others. When I speak and I get a blank faced response, I feel exactly like the baby's described in the still-face paradigm. I feel helpless, and reactive, and needing, and I myself come to react with the same neediness that was programmed into me by my early life relations.

My implicit relational memory is riddled with negative expectations. Riddled, shaped as it is, and feeling inside as it does, because the face I interacted with was an unstable one. However much love was in her, in other parts of her existed dissociated shame, and thus an anger, aggressiveness, irritability, all made manifest in grimaces, disgust faces, and intense shifts in movement.

I can only infer from my present experience what my early life may have been like. My mother as I know her now is dissociative. Although not officially diagnosed, she is obviously a member of that category known as 'borderline personality disorder'. Intense sensitivity to any language that may intimate vulnerability (shame or anxiety states) is regulated by 'externalizing', i.e. getting upset, angry, irritable, or even bully another person. A person this "split", that is, unable to 'reconnect" at those moments when she gets aroused, is somehow present in me - as this "core shame" feeling. It's not anything other than a feeling which inhibits and suppresses ventral vagal activity. Perhaps, I wonder, that this wouldn't be such a problem for me if I didn't smoke so much weed - when I have ample experience providing me knowledge of how routinely harmful this practice is to myself.

It's tiring, and frightening. To feel this weak, and pathetic. The other day, yesterday, I felt strong. I was resilient in the face of multiple arguments with multiple people. I was handling myself very well, maintaining focus and affective attachment to the object of my interest. Today, I am experiencing the opposite of that. Not in the beginning - it started off well - but it has since fallen low when I started smoking weed. It was originally related to Charlie Sheen and his HIV and how depressing this subject matter - he and the kind of person he is - was to me; and as I smoked, I fell deeper into a depressive state, leading to a sudden "invitation" to hyper-focus on Jordans responses to me. Feeling this way, my place of focus was externalized as the "facial reaction". Enough emotional input was offloaded for this attentional tast. No big deal? Horrible. I'm lodged in a shitty state with seemingly no way out.

But how can I keep doing this? Have I not fallen low enough? Do I still think I can go as I'm going - knowing my current level of accomplishment, and still smoke weed? Can I afford those "1 times out of 5" where things go wrong, and I feel totally dysregulated, dysfunctional, and alone? This is a horrible addiction that is made all the more horrible by it's subtly. Is it that bad? It's "just" weed after all. But it's a drug. It's in the opioid family, with endorphins and oxytocin. Cannabinoids like THC narrow attentional focus by "diffusing" sensory feelings. We can move from thought to thought with a rapidity and narrow focus that can morph into the popular symptom of paranoia. Depending on the feeling state interacting with the general cannabinoid effect, a person can be creative, relaxed, and open, or severely obsessive, paranoid, and delusional.

I need to write to metabolize these feelings. This writing is for me, although I know others can read it - its for the makeup, the place it provides me. The sense of safety for me to write and access my words.

Sometimes, I too need to cry. I don't cry - I stand by others as they cry, but I've had trouble doing it, something that may be related to the "blunting" effects of SSRI's (and SNRI's), or maybe to my lack of affective interactions with others to provide the emotional 'grist' for a later cry. But right now, I do feel like crying. I feel unsafe. I feel exposed - weak, short, shameful, ugly. The only thing I can't say about myself - because saying it is so unquestionably untrue to me - is that I'm dumb. I have a feeling and sense of my self, deriving from my passion for reading, learning, growing, understanding, and connecting with an underlying meaning, that I am an intelligent mind who understands himself - despite failing in restraining myself, my mind is open to what it sees. No doubt this "skill" derives from my long traumatic history, supercharging, as it were, my brains norepinephrine systems, and the associated vigilance (self and other).

Life seems destined towards something. Trauma results in enhanced transcription in norepinephrine neurons. Increased receptor proteins between these cells leads to a greater awareness of the environment: both the external environment, and after dozens of rounds of complex mental simulations, the internal environment of ones thinking, feeling, and imagining. Norepinephrine now powers self-reflection systems. The increased awareness of self - of ones internal environment - provides a "stepping stone" onto the path to enlightenment. Essentially, enlightenment is what's left when one collapses, when ones body becomes formed to suffer - either with a sense of social annihilation, or the existential annihilation that comes with death, life forces a new organization upon the self-reflective organism, powered by the norepinephrine systems that were upregulated by traumatic experience. To survive, for us, now means to survive our own awareness of suffering. To somehow find a new organization, or way of perceiving, that allows a new, higher, more stable organization than the chaos of anxiety, shame, depression and dissociation. I can see, truly, that there is something incredibly powerful about compassion. The emotion can be directed outwards, as well as inwards. Inwards! The serotonin, oxytocin, endorphin, dopamine concoction that produces these incredible sensations stabilize negative states. They are an energy - a reality of a deeper connectivity - that is able to "rebind" what has been broken, neurally, and psychologically (which are yet somehow the same). You need to submerge yourself within it, to find the courage to move yourself - be yourself - for all to see.

Thoughts, And Cleaning Mental Space

My mind flashes from performance – or want to perform – or to nevertheless hear oneself performing, and to feel that jittery urge, that baseless perception: somethings wrong. You don’t sound right. You sound off. You sound….what is the word? What is the word that matches with this idea? Disconnected? Worse???????        Utterly shameful object. Utterly pathetic, weak, morbid, distorted, experienced...as.....I am unknown to myself. I'm in constant tension with my being, with my sense of identity...............At these moments. 

I am here to pour my heart out, to let myself breathe....it out. The toxic shame. The morbid thoughts, feelings, and sensations that collide inside of me, leaving me weak, enervated, crestfallen. 

I know what I am... Or I think I do. My instinct pulls me outwards, towards it, towards some sign, out there, implied by my persistence, by my humanly, animal need to survive. But to what? What does my mind seek after? That feeling. A goodness in the world, whose presence appears in these types of feelings. Explosion of love - only something which can be called love - saturates my being, enlivening my heart - and telling my mind, "this is you". From where I am - right now - the moment contains that special "organization" - of you sensing YOU. You find it, like the compass finds the north. The mind "senses into" at such moments. It finds that higher organization that will help stabilize it's present chaos. From the chaos, the swirling mess that is me, shoots out a torpedo of intention, catching that feeling, and from that feeling, knowing how to guide yourself back to safety, back to sanity, back to the self. 

It is utterly horrifying how real such perceptions can be. I remind myself, "I didn't get much sleep", "I keep drinking extra-large coffees",  "I had 5 green teas", "and your currently stoned" <-- lot of careless things for a person with a trauma history to be doing. But I do it. I find myself following a pre-written script: "this is what you do when you wake up" i.e. coffee, "this stuff is stimulating, plus its healthy" = green tea. Delusions pop into my mind, and because they're impelled by feelings, I do what the body typically impels the brain to do: perform action that will alleviate the need. 

How can we claim "free will", knowing what we do about ourselves? If free will could be quantified, the vast majority of our behavior would be under the heading: "determined by environment/body, via memory and homeostasis interactions". Once in awhile, depending sometimes on contextual factors (being girded by others) or a fortuitous circumstance, or from the practice of mindfulness, we can really relate to ourselves in a softer, gentler, more modulated, and thus, deliberate fashion. We settle the feelings inside of us, and we recognize, respond, and ultimately trust the "other". We move into our body's, and respond from it. The sound which comes out - the sound that is you, which you know, and which you know carries all your vulnerabilities, out there, to be heard, to be interpreted and digested by other minds. An image of me, of myself, enters them; and the self they see, if the wrong one, gets embedded in their memories. A basin of attraction. 

We exist in a whirl pool of activity; what we don't usually reflect upon, is, that we are that activity. We are that whirlpool getting swept round and round, in circles, connecting stereotyped environments, with stereotyped reactions, in, out, in, out, like a coin put into a jukebox, and the movements of the machine putting a record to be heard, certain buttons play certain songs. 

What's frightening is that it's not a metaphor: the dynamics are precisely as deterministic as being "pushed" by a trigger and the brain enacting a response. Our freedom from this reality is an impossibility. A contradiction in terms. Yet, when I find myself embedded in this construct of my unconscious making, I am inspired by a feeling, by an experience, by some ineffable 'witness', that allows me to guide my mind back towards equanimity. 

This still says nothing about the reality of consciousness. The simple capacity to "will" seems to be an energy generator, diverter, causing the energy that "constructs" it's "self", to be deliberately focused by this thing we call consciousness. Willing, I can enhance neural activity in different areas of consciousness. Neurofeedback from an fMRI could allow someone to consciously activate any area of the brain with greater frequency, once it detects the phenomenological correlates. How can this be? Where can this be happening in the brain? The general, most interesting fact about this thought experiment is that our focused consciousness can deliberately change neural activity. Joaquin Fuster, the cognitive scientist, thinks this entire process is automated by non-stop action-perception feedback loops, with my mind recycling the past as it creates the present, governed by biophysical laws determined by the speed and nature of chemical reactions. We, "us" on the inside, are just "going for the ride", as it were. 

But that really doesn't help explain the obvious duality of consciousness and matter. There is a physical "thing", called the brain, and the neurons and glia which make it up; and there is me, my mind, my perceptual experience of reality. Two things, existing, at the same time. Reality, at least as it appears ontologically (as two different "substances") is manifestly dual. 

But mainstream philosophers and scientists are biased to perceive things in materialists terms; as physical principles following basic biological and physical laws. I find this perspective enlightening, but short-sighted. No other creature can operate it's mind from within - can take such conscious, executive action within its own mind, and thus upon it's own physical matter - as human beings can. Humans, or the "whole" of the human self, in being able to organize, serialize, yet find some important qualia in the structure of it's organization,  seem to, as it were, "close the circle" of the paradoxical, circular, feedback processes that characterize the dynamics of physical and phenomenological reality. The minds power to excite itself, in simply 'knowing" it's own states, and realizing a particular organization within itself, seems to realize consciousness at it's most refined, acting upon the physicality of stereotypical matter. The major point is: this 'consciousness' "finds" itself, and acts for itself, from a position of knowing, awareness, and, at its most powerful, compassion.

The compassion, or love, can't help but convince a traumatized person of how beautiful, tearfully, powerfully meaningful, existence is. To be enlightened, seems to mean, to know the reality of our embeddedness. But to have suffered greatly - and I think I have suffered greatly - adds an intensity and paradoxical joy, in losing aspects, interests, and behaviors, that characterized an earlier self. These "shedded" properties fall away as a consequence of the present organization. Love melts them away, keeps them apart, as the meanings in the interactions contradict one another.

It is precisely the sensation of being cared for by a mother. The world, earth, but more generally, the "totality" of the created universe, is my mother. It created me, built me from the stardust of a creative explosion. Chemicals reacted one suitably spaced planets. One planet, Earth, generated complex patterns, leading to an "evolution" of patterns that became full-blown biology. And many, many revolutions around the sun would occur before a species evolved that possessed "consciousness" of itself as an agent - as an existing being. Suffering. Joy. Play. Mourning. Shame and Pride. We get the full circle of things. We get the right and the left, or the yin and the yang.

And yet, paradoxically, when we go through our own suffering - made possible by having this thing called "memory", which we can consciously explore with this thing called "will', we somehow create an experience of acceptance, which allows the release of powerful, pent up feelings. All made possible by "memory" and feeling.

 

Defining "I am"

What are these levels that I think I've reached? Why do I have this sensation of a "level"? It's because I feel something has become me. Has entered me - or I entered it. It's a feedback loop propelled by an ordinary, yet extraordinary meaning. I am this thing. I am.

Something like the above would have made me sneer 5 years ago - I would repeat to my brother and imitate it in a condescending way. I - related - to it, as us monkey-like humans so shamelessly do, as if the word "I AM" was trite, dumb, insignificant.

It amazes me how disconnected we can be from the conveyed meaning content of a real interaction with another human. The other speaks - they say their words, but what do we hear? We hear our own emotional needs at the moment; we enact our typical comedic routine, feel those good emotions - or conversely, enact a surge in annoyance and irritability. The main thing is: we act like we really know the truth of things.

Now, 5 years later, I look upon myself in my present mind and wonder, what has changed? What has changed is my felt conviction of being 'held'; but by what? Who holds whom? Or what is held? I find myself related to myself with a burst of compassion; but yet a calm awareness lurks in the background, taking things in, mindful of the flow of it's breathing, of it's chest region.

My thinking mind derives its strength of conviction from the 'content' in that perception - in my sensing some 'strength' radiating from my heart region. I know I gain access to it by attending to the regulation of my breath; yet it's the feeling itself which I find myself becoming attuned to. Its from there, from the neurons (presumably) where I sense a sort of homeostatic organization, radiating outwards, like a sun, with my mind, above, attending to it.

But what is this mind above? As much as I like to think about a cosmic center in my heart region, My also plays a part, structuring, knowing, in awe of the design, of the form, of the colors and intensities - and the meanings they convey about the world. Within my being, I embody an odd relationship - ontological in nature, between a "perceiving screen", and a felt, interfaced-with reality. The one charges the other, feeling, acting as the conflagration in the background, giving the perceived concept an expressed luminescence in mind.

And ultimately, "I Am", really just gets to the point. If this world is as it is - and resisting its way produces these sorts of effects - and affects; then why suffer in resentment, in opposition, in anger? Why hold up a dispute; and to whom, exactly are you angry at? The question is posed this way because our brains are constructions over millions of years of biological evolution. The minds we have represent the self and the other as basic constructions. The outer world, the world of interactions, is represented within us at the most basic level: we talk to ourselves, as if we were someone other than the one who is talking.

We fail to take account of this habit when we speak and communicate. The imagined 'other', in all its ways, derives from our past interactions. Within us lies the worlds and words of other minds; in us, lies an imagined intentionality - an assumed orientation to the world, which is reflexively projected in our every act of perception. We relate to one another, and in the 'how' of how we relate, is expressed the forces that acted upon our development. Our behavior speaks about our past and the ways we've had to adapt to the world. In our every action, in our every presence, we can learn to know worlds of meaning, intimations, and whispers from the past.

The mind sustains itself in feedback loops. Just like whirlpools, they twirl. Like the dervishes. Like the milky way. The universe dances in circles, twirls in chemical feedbacks, social feedbacks, mental feedbacks. One reality pulls all things along these paths; and then, the paths lose their form, and what remains is all that there is. I am.

notes on development

After reading Jared Diamonds book 'the world until yesterday' I am baffled by some of his terse remarks on child-rearing. To be fair, they aren't "diamonds views"; as an anthropologist, he is presumably taking an "objective" perspective on how pre-state societies conceive child rearing. I am still nevertheless miffed by his frequent mention of his "american friends" and their views on the need to hit children.

I found myself arguing with myself - as is my style - in an imagined conversation with Diamond. I wanted to point out how intergenerational cycles of trauma and violence are created - nay, seeded - when an adult decides to abuse a child. But how could i do that? What I've written earlier about the relationship between shame, dissociation, pride and idealization, fits into this puzzle as the organizing program our brain uses to discard negative self-experience and highlight a positive alternative. I feel a big problem with science is what can be called the fetishization of science as the only way of knowing; unless a study has been conducted showing something, there is a stubborn and naive resistance to realities that can be discerned by examining your own phenomenology.

I take shared-intentionality (Tomasello 2014) as the organizing schema of human functionality. The term refers to a "view from nowhere", which includes within it 'self' and 'other'. Every individual human being experiences itself not merely as an individual, but always and ineluctably "in relation". The concept of a 'view from nowhere' corresponds to some imaginal 3rd person perspective which takes the individual actor and the "culture" he has been exposed to as working AT THE SAME TIME whenever we experience ourselves in action.

This shared-intentionality hypothesis of Tomasellos is operationalized along a shame-pride continuum. The whole study of emotions in man and animals has bizarrely skewed the picture of human emotions. While it is a good thing that neuroscience is now exploring emotions (after a half century of a singular cognitive focus) it is incredibly strange indeed that shame and pride are considered "ancillary" or secondary, apparently because they are more relevant to humans than they are to older species.

The reality is, between homo erectus and homo sapiens lies 600 cc's of brain evolution. An even more important reality - one recognized by psychoanalysis but fervently ignored by the rest of psychology - is that human minds are FUNDAMENTALLY organized around shame dynamics, as the 600 cc's of brain evolution during the lifetimes of Homo Ergaster and Homo Heidelbergensis evidently was the time period where human beings became 'inter-connected' within this larger web Tomsello terms 'shared-intentionality'; that is, it was only via the organizing principles of shame and pride that shared intentionality (a mirroring of intentional states) could even occur to begin with.

But how does this become organized? What mechanisms does the brain use? When you hit a child, are you merely causing the child to become scared? Or is there also a shame aspect - in the sense that the one being flogged experiences him or herself as weak, vulnerable, and to borrow a term from psychoanalysis, as being "a bad object"? Indeed. Experiencing oneself as weak IS related to an experience of shame. But there is at the same time an experience of fear.

The mechanisms of dissociation and idealization are probably not the same at all developmental periods. Early on, the effort to "idealize", is surely not as strong as it would be for a teenager. Nevertheless, experiences of weakness, fear, shame and anxiety, are dissociated; the contents are driven away from consciousness so that organism wont have to experience itself in such a worthless way. At some time period, as the self begins to solidify, and as pride begins to become a consciously preferred state (even if only intuitively known), experiences of shame, weakness and vulnerability are reflexively inhibited by a manic turn to a pride state. The turn is a 'self-corrective' that is made rather unconsciously. It is impulsive; it is what is referred by modern day relational theorists as an 'enactment' - something done to defend the self against the pangs of shame, anxiety and other negative affects.

This way of thinking is important because of the way people frequently conduct themselves in conversation with one another. Enactments often occur impulsively; which means they emerge out of a 'high intensity' affect states. During a conversation, for instance, I may find myself resisting an interpretation because I do not like that I am being challenged. Whatever subject-matter is at hand seems to be 'collapsed' into the very basic, organizing reality of 'shame-pride', or said differently, "low-status-high status". My mind ardently resists being represented as 'wrong', and thus, in the logic of the brain, of being "of low status". The extremely stereotypic and chliched manner of our everyday interactions is what allows us to act in a world that puts short-term gains ahead of long term consequences: this is the essential logic of enactment and low-road impulsivity: we want to feel good NOW, regardless of whether what were saying is true or not; or what relation is it has to promoting a false view in a wider circle; or, as we see most clearly in climate change, how our individual delusions of 'needing to be right', feed into larger system processes like the climate system. In this example, not paying attention to the system dynamics of your own consciousness (the relation between shame and pride) promotes and corroborates certain noxious dynamics at the social level (climate change denial) which, with inactivity, feeds into the probable consequences of not responding to climate change in time (environmental disaster; collapse of civilization).

Besides the moral necessity of paying attention to the reasons for your own reactions (which requires some sort of attentiveness to your embodied phenomenology) with regard to propositions about truth and reality, these behaviors actually DO have very serious and extreme consequences when aggregated at the global level.

Is it impossible to conceive a future where we encourage children to feel a sense of relatedness to one another without fearing being victimized? Sure it is. Can we also imagine a time where we can conventionalize knowledge of our own human nature - our tendencies to dissociate and idealize, as defenses against cognitive dissonance and negative affects? Ultimately, questions like this are political, and however we think about this, we should always keep in mind the brains inherent plasticity.

In an environment where self-knowledge, mindfulness, and right action are deemed important, human beings will experience such cultural values as desirable. Even more importantly, as knowledge of the brain continues to grow, people will be able to experience a greater tolerance for the difficulties infants, children, and teenagers have with self-regulation, as self regulation ultimately depends on well developed dorsolateral functions which don't attain full-maturity until the late 20's.

Ultimately, it needs to be understood how counter-productive the punishing attitude is. Diamond likes to emphasize that the difference between parenting practices in hunter gatherer, farming and herding societies pertain to differences in valuable property. Even if this is true (which it probably is), it still must be understood how inefficacious it is, in terms of long-term social stability, to respond to others with a punishing attitude - as myriad contextual factors intervene between the motive to act a certain way (being exposed to relational stimuli) and acting in that way. It is here, in the facts of brain, society and our inter-locked dynamics, that we can recognize how much more intelligent it is to demonstrate for others what we understand about them, and what we want from them, as how one is seen, affects how one comes to see others.