Recognizing....

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

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

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

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