Thoughts about self

Gosh darn! It's hard trying to explain the self.

Since my thought is largely focused on an evolutionary reconstruction of human brain evolution, I have been thinking, once again, with how it happens.

I'm reading Dan Zahavi's Self and Other, and I just finished a section where he analyzed Husserl's understanding of the way the self experiences the other. Beyond this conversation, my mind was being brought to my own interests; I have been saying lately that human awareness is a function of the others intentional state, but Dan Zahavi's critical standard of analysis has got me rethinking this idea into something more phenomenologically reasonable.

To say that all experience is essentially me trying to match the other, is wrong: clearly there is a simple actor - me - who is giving expression to his very personal needs; as I'm currently doing right now.

Yet I still feel that there is more to say about how it is others affect us, and how the energy we feel after being affected does something to us that cannot happen by ourselves.

To anticipate a probable objection: yes, we can feel quite good on our own, as I myself quite often do. But where do such imaginative possibilities come from? We assume, of course, that they are "ours", because when I am by myself, it is just me and my desire for self-expression. And what I feel in the flow, again, is assumed to be a natural property of being human.

This impression is understandable, but ignores something essential: what we do within ourselves when we are away from others most likely derives from pre-existing relations. As someone who has experienced trauma, studies trauma, and has read numerous accounts of the effects of early-life relational neglect on infant, child and adult mental functioning, there is very good reason to believe that these private capabilities are first made real by actual interactions with others before they are able to be recreated in an imaginative mind.

So, on one hand, a fully lived human life achieves well-being by being human; that is, by living a narrative self, enlivened by it's openness to the actions of others, and by its own meaning-making and curious wonderment about the world, the human being fulfills its indwelling biological potential. Because the potential unfolding of humanness depends on the presence and interaction with others, complete humanness requires relaxing into the I-Thou field of human relating. Gazes must look upon you with a disposition of care for affects to arise within. For the early infant (0-3 months), the touches and caresses of the mother already set a flow of back and forth contingent interactions, in which the mother's tender touch responds to the baby's affective expressions; the baby learning at an extraordinarily early stage something that will be integrated within other modalities, when touches are a bother, its expressivity learns a control; all modalities seem to process a basic "vitality form" (Stern) that is set around a rhythm of mutual recognition of the Other; but what is being recognized, other than a self?

So few ask the question: is metaphysics not poking its head into biology? If recognition stimulates the other, and all human thought and relationality occurs in what Burghardt (2005) calls a "relaxed field", why not accept the metaphysical existence of a self? How else does the brain grow, given what phenomenology shows (Zahavi, 2014), comparative psychology shows (Tomasello 2014; Tomasello 2016) developmental psychology shows (Behen, Chugani, 2015) and traumatology shows (Ogden 2006; Lanius 2014; Van Dr Kolk 2015)? It shows that brain volume goes down in negative valenced relational contexts; and goes up in positively valenced relational contexts. Tomasello shows that apes do not possess the motivational qualities to think like humans do; they don't think, in fact, because the other is experienced as a competitor first, so the self and it's own needs are primary. The apes world is not relaxed enough - there is not enough love, or too much trauma. Perhaps these two notions are inversely related.

Secrets of being

I'm so tired, yet I need to speak. My body is tired. I've had a headache for hours; and I've argued much with my mother today. I also didnt eat enough - last ate at 4:30, and so no wonder I'm feeling off.

Yet I feel a deep, deep wound resurfacing in me. I'm afraid of this wound, this familiar, familiar foe.

I don't want to anthropomorphize - and I don't think I'm doing so. Perhaps a rhetorical flourish.

But it needs to be spoken so. This feeling, this pain in me, is me. It's me at another time, me at another place. There is no communing with this inner foe without acknowledging him.

I say a foe, because that is what he has felt like to me. And yet, I regard him as a foe merely as a disruption that can arise and so disturb my experience of self.

The language seems needed, deeply feels needed. I have suffered and do suffer with this feeling of weakness, worthlessness, patheticness; all these words do so little to cover the phenomenology - the unique, vocal-based form of my mental disturbance.

It is always awkward and painful for me to talk about these thoughts, because they're "so weird". Our culture prohibits exploration of subjectivity, which is a shame in itself, since sharing of second-order perception promotes a deep inter-subjective knowledge of the others phenomenology.

We all share one consciousness. This reality is so deeply, hiddenly, and ingeniously true, yet it sits in the middle, beyond logic, beyond any external effort to know. Robert Frost spoke "the secret sits in the middle and knows". The heart knows what the mind can only build language around. Our thinking, like the world that makes us up, is a vast architecture upon and around this basic, simple truth: love.

This truth is not beyond science. So long as this power has physical effects, it falls within sciences observational credo. This love yearns to be known more deeply: we can build the scaffolding of how it is we become with the flow of this energy.

It is a knowing that weaves itself through life forms yet strangled from full expression by the limitations imposed by time, space, and the matter that evolves within it.

But it weaves: it weaves its little knowing through physical reality, coming upon things that suit its immediate knowing.

Now in us, this knowing is a knowing of the nature of the knowing. We know ourselves primarily through our vulnerabilities; we recognize the "emptiness" of being when the world squelches us. Perched at the edge of chaos, complexity theorists say. With Damasio, we see that the human is a dynamical system of 100 trillion cells and 86 billion neurons, which registers the state of its metabolic "knowing", and the mind, outward focused, knows but knows within the dynamism of its body's "knowing'.

This emphasis and repetitious use of 'knowing' is not purposeless, but to point to the nature of this dynamic flow: love is coming to know itself through a physical vehicle. The process of being: drama, comedy? Such was the view of the Greeks. Awe-inspiring: horrifying? The Egyptians and the Hebrews seemed to feel the divine this way. A celebration of life and being - for India. A calm, soothing flow of Qi for the orient.

All these different views touch on the flow of being and the ways it presents itself. The various human cultures are each mesmerized by being in a different way; different contexts; different experiences; different meanings. The flow is different, yet it is the same flow, with different aspects.

Yet awe might be the only cognitive power worthy of being in the company of love. The awe from the knowing: from the beautiful, healing flow of the knowing.

The suffering mind is simultaneously cursed and blessed: the paradox of being crushes upon him. And yet, great knowings can burst from this heart of such people. Its as if the diameter of being widens with knowing deep existential sorrow. The pain of despair - the despairing face; the hole felt within. And the hope for release, or even, a chance to live.

And then what? How many stories does one need to hear to be stricken by the cynical. But my life, and my being, and the life of every being: theres a knowing - a sacred knowing. Can we be content with a sense of trust of that which appears to be beyond our knowledge at this point?

Love is so true. Love is being. Love is true knowing. All is embedded. And somehow, with knowledge of how one is embedded, choice appears, knowledge begins to blossom, and all out of one beautiful insight: knowing emerged, in the evolutionary past. What we call "apes", led to what we call "hominids". And the knowing went further, deeper, with a full blown mind, a memory of its knowings, crafted around the needs of the moments, with others.

One cannot but help but wonder, how profound is this secret of being?