A love for Existence

I'm very high right now. I smoked a joint, mostly to my self; brother has a bad chest cold. And then I started sucking from the vaporizer. Till the bright green weed turned brown.

Now I'm in my room, paranoid, which is more to say, experiencing a heightened degree of attention. My awareness seems "pulled up" or lengthened. These changes in consciousness are fundamentally difficult to explain because of the nonverbal nature of it. Yet, I can say I feel sensations more at my temporal lobes, as well as along the ridge of my nose. Tingling.

The problem with such a state is that an anxiety can creep beneath awareness. The anxiety arises from the experience of idleness; I'm bored, and reflexively I feel this anxiety. A moment later I feel a strong pull towards a particular thought: I'm going to hear voices. Schizophrenia; a paranoid anxiety, relic from my past. It's such a repetitive, and by now, mostly feeble occurrence when I'm high.

I'm not disparaging it, just merely noting a habit in this mind of mine. Nature is kind enough to build the human spirit with a goodness, a lovingness, and a capacity to contain, calm, and soften the hardness of reflexivity. Yet, thoughts still emerge; and they emerge because the brain is reflexive. Past noumenous structures take on a "potentiated" state, so that if certain conditions are met (very stoned, very late, also haven't been sleeping well lately) a certain event has a high probability of happening.

Traumas recorded by the human brain do not just go away. Whatever embodies or is embodied by these structures has an ostensive permanence about it. Yet - were told by neuroscience - that the molecular relationships which constitute this condition can be reshaped through a change in attention. What reshapes what?

I know. Or rather, I should say I know that there is a feeling within me, a power, that forces into my mind the belief that life is fundamentally meaningful. This gnosis is no doubt the sort of knowledge known by ancient mystics both east and west. It can take on many forms and be known in different ways. But it's a feeling of love and compassion, as well as the application of cognitive processes towards understanding. These processes which we embody and come to know strike a chord that feels so incredibly deep - deep enough - that one cannot possibly deny the highest probability in an awesome, beautiful truth at the core of reality.

Our minds are so conditioned by our relatedness to others. I'm reading Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallets "The Ancient Origins of Consciousness". I also read Todd Feinbergs "From Axons to Identity", so I have a sense of his erudition and range of interests. This book has revealed an even deeper level in his scholarship, in that he attempts to explain - or solve the hard problem of consciousness, as he and Mallet put it - by somehow combining 2 third person perspectives and his and Mallets own philosophical perspective. They make a strong assertion, based on no transformative evidence to shut down a counter-argument. They dissociate the plausibility of other viewpoints; they over-believe in what they think they know.

John Hands recent book "CosmoSapiens" has an admirable skepticism about it. Hands heartily demonstrates an even keeled analysis of what humans think they know. Cosmologically? We don't in fact know for certain how things happened. The tendency to make the strong assertion is more emotionally driven: they want to believe it. A species that evolved in the context - and by a context - of mostly stories, is always going to be vulnerable in imaging and thinking in ways ill-suited to reasonable scientific accuracy. In order to gain a deep sense of how to "weigh" things, you need to be mindful of all the possible affective material that may be displaced in this present state of propositional consciousness. My relatedness with the world is a function of my affects - or feeling. Feeling frames perspective; or how you evaluate the other. And feeling is a function of homeostasis processes in the body, and so can be put off kilter by unstable behavior...or thinking, or beliefs.

There is a so little self-analysis to the point that is required: we are RADICALLY social in our functioning. Feinberg describes the poplar difference between hierarchies: namely, non-nested and nested hierarchies. The former are physically separated while the latter are "nested" one within the other as a biological hierarchical dynamic. So, according to this way of describing the different types of hierarchies, human social processes 'entrain' individual human beings according to some central attractor. We can describe this attractor in different ways, largely, ironically, in terms of how we've come to reflexively evaluate the world. One way may focus on cognitive structures, but the emphasis is largely on ecological relationships that mediate the development of higher levels of consciousness; such as tool-use and the frontal lobes; fire and consciousness (Burton 2007; Wrangham 2009; Herculano-Houzel 2016) or even more distant things that seem to have no relationship to dynamical processes (and so is disembodied in its construction) as Joshua Greenes (Moral Tribes) belief that human beings developed compassion as a function of defining themselves as being different from others. 

Difference? For someone who has suffered a severe psychological trauma, I cannot tell you how incredibly unlikely that claim is. My healing comes not from difference; but a recognition of sameness. It's a transcendental awareness that re-cognizes, with a background feeling of awe, the fact that you and I are equally embodied in a context that threatens us left, right and center with suffering. And so what we do - and where we are locked - is a feedback loop that dissociates us from the relevant information: how we feel in our relatedness with others. My claim is that human thought is a function of the other, and so our thinking, fundamentally, is tinged with value, with feeling about. It needs to be recognized that consciousness did not just pop out of nowhere, but evolved. And affect has always been the barometer that organizes the overall state of the organism; however, the mind embedded in those effects is also negotiating meanings with the outside world. In developing languages, we created conditions in which the mind could become fundamentally desynchronized with affective knowing, so that language could eventually evolve in such a way as to support defensive dissociative processes (such as not wanting to know that one aggresses because of a history of being aggressed against; not owning and recognizing the feelings that you once felt as a victim; the dissociation of victimhood, weakness, and most of all, an inhererent vulnerability that comes with being a fragile biological system, built to know pain to promote its survival.)


The positive neuroplastic effects of positive relationships has now established beyond a doubt that "healthy" human relationships promote neurogenesis. But what, persay, is "healthy"? Developmental researchers like Allan Schore, Alan Fogel, Dan Siegel, Ed Tronick, Beatrice Beebe, T Berry Brazelton, and Peter Fonagy emphasize the dyamics of affective processes that organize and motivate changes in attentional state. Traumatologists have also seemed to recognize the necessity of adopting an interpersonal focus, simply because they have success when they actually care verses when they don't. When their affective concern is felt, and most of all, displayed for the eyes of the other, the other is provided a metaphorical experience of "being held". I know this feeling and I was later able to note it after 2 or so years in therapy with a truly gifted psychotherapist. Her way of being with me, looking at me, talking with me, didn't just show a care. It was a genuine, sincere, non-exaggerated care. It was affectively felt, and so organized spontaneously in its manifestation, which then entrained my being, What I felt afterward - the burst of energy - how else is one to interpret this? My psychological functioning, or in Feinbergs lingo - the highest level in a multilevel system that constrains lower levels - is buttressed, ballooned with energy. And to no loss to the psychotherapist treating me. In fact, she gets a burst in feeling kindness, and I feel a transformation in my self-state.

My state of mind at any one moment of relation is also a state of self. Only a dissociated daze is valueless. When we think about, a value is unconsciously applied in the process of thinking. The affective is always there. Even in its apparent absence (think Steven Hawking) in thinking about, the mind simply lacks a certain feeling of relatedness to the subject matter that is typically present in most human beings. A lack of affect attunement is therefore a problem for people who can't represent reflexively within their experience the same feelings of what they're observing in the other; it's via a reflexive "reconstruction" of this implicit knowing that we come to the proper inference, and so can guide our experience rationally so as to avoid insulting the other or stressing ourselves.

The human mind is a logical development of one state of episodic consciousness feeling known by the other. How does one even describe such a state? It has cognitive aspects (being known) but it is the affective dimension that does the "work". Neurogenesis is not a passive process; it doesn't happen "just because". Communication is happening between embodied minds, each unaware of the symmetrical conditions that guide them to converge on a state of colloboration, and an even deeper knowing, a love for love; a love for meaning; a love for existence.

The story we need is not just a story, but a likely reality. Or a fact. Retrodiction cannot be verified like prediction, so we must trust our intuitions when we try to recreate past conditions. Nevertheless, fire. When this wondrous thing was handled and used, each moment constituted a new event in reality. The mind conceiving and doing this is not passive: and neither is the brain. The change in affect is correlated to a change in neuromolecular activity. Being stimulated phenomenologically is the same as being stimulated neuroelectrically. A spike in conscious awareness about something, to just finish this point, is embodied in the brain processes that mediate that reality.

Ergo, would it be ok to conclude that self-recognition is somehow generating this neurological growth in brains? Yes. It is the stories we tell one another which we notice. But we have yet to realize that its the micro-phenomenological units - a state of being recognized by the other - that releases positive affects and encourages conversation.

There is clearly, I think, some "self' happening, or existing, perhaps as the fundamental cohesive logic that keeps organisms together to begin with (and which no present theory I've read gives a plausible - or fully explicable -  explanation to). Autopoeisis, a term coined by Varela and Maturana, does a good job by focusing on purpose, since to think of a being existing - in a way we can still not explain with contemporary biology/physics - without some purpose to keep existing, is nonsense. Biologists tend to prefer the term "teleonomy" instead of teleology, to make the point that it is only in the present that "purpose" exists. Perhaps, scientifically, this is an acceptable distinction to make; but can we really ever escape our complete embeddedness, as creatures who evolved in what seems to be a system i.e. a universe? What presumption to speak with such certainty to ultimate questions!

Teleonomy, however, is sufficient to make my point: the organism wants to survive in the moment, and is this not-magic enough to force the question: from whence does this capacity come to leverage dynamic molecular processes to not merely maintain life, but to add complexity to it? Insufficient wonder leads to banal conclusions, and I am afraid to say that Feinberg - whose views in his 2009 book I largely agreed with - is comfortable with "solutions" that are not solutions for other people. Is this a difference between what constitutes a solution? Of course. Solutions are linked to the questions asked. And if the value-laden thinking of the person asking is dynamically tethered to the values of other academics in the same field, a presumptuous conclusion can be made: because the brain is electrodynamically made - a reasonable conclusion - the authors assume, which to me seems unwarranted, that it is impossible for consciousness to exist outside of a brain. From whence does this conclusion arise? From the view, peddled by Feinberg and Mallet (and which seems utterly superficial to me) that consciousness is not radically different from other biological processes. Repeating the views of John Searle, they think it is ok to speak of consciousness in the same way as digestion, meiosis or mitosis. Granted, they say "it is not quite" the same, but this is way too tenuous a statement for my liking. To me, consciousness is OBVIOUSLY different - so irreducibly basic - and fundamental - that to reduce awareness of - the very thing which grants existence and the power to feel, reflect and know - strikes me as cheap. Without wanting to insult Feinberg/Mallet, I can't help but feel like these two human beings have a rather "neutral" affective relationship with reality, and so from this affective dullness (but not to be confused with an ontological neutrality; as said before, thinking is fundamentally tethered to the logic of social processes i.e. power relations) project onto the world their interested take but come to a conclusion that is "compatible" with so much of contemporary philosophy of mind. Physicalism can only be the acceptable metaphysical assumption. To claim anything above - or beyond - what we could possibly know (implying a suspicion that human awareness may not possess the means to know fundamental reality) is not tolerable for them. Ok. However, I still feel that their conclusions are mediated by non-conscious affective needs stemming from their own dissociated need to be understood by important others. Making oneself "coherent" - wanting to take part in a conversation, is not neutral, but laden with affects. To share a viewpoint that is not shared by others risks an immediate affective reaction in the face, voice and body language - and their actual language - that enervates the mind and depresses the body. That people want to feel good, for me, is the reason why overly-strong assertions about reality are made.