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?

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.

I feel so lonely. My sister is gone. The most important thing in my mind, symbolized, "Ashley".
But I'm paranoid. Smoked too much weed, the efficient cause of my anxiety, nervousness and general fearulness.

Reading so much too. Terrence Deacons Incomplete Nature is blowing my mind away with it's sophistication and analysis of dynamic patterns. I enjoy it. Love it. But right now, with paranoia, all this sophistication and nuance and delight with such abstract subjects, is part of the process of my reflexivity. I am thinking this way and that way, hyper-time. I get a rush of anxiety, followed by a sense of my fearfulness, the agitation in my body, in my heart. The heat.

This is a horrible feeling. With so much weed in me, for some reason, I perceive "more". What is weed other than the good-feeling cannabinoids endogeneously produced by our brains? This neurochemical modulates experience in a "backwards" direction, so that you seem more open to the temporality of your emotional flow. In the brain, its also of interest that the endo-cannabinoid receptors are at the post-synaptic cell, which means their influence happens retroactively, with released molecules modulating the electrical activity of the pre-synaptic cell. The consonance between the phenomenological state of "openness" to a temporal flow of affectivity and the post-synaptic effect on the pre-synaptic cell, are essentially identical processes, scaled up to the level of perception, and yet perception maintains a causative influence on synpatic-firing rates between neurons in its capacity to direct its attention, inhibit its attention, or modulate breathing to regulate autonomic processes.

I distract myself by embedding myself in my meaning. The meaning is "beyond" me something I search for, long for, cry for, feel like a baby for, and I feel the 'meaning' is something that is owed to me, something I deserve, and need, because I am a being embedded, vulnerable, scared, and needy.

The words I write also distract me. The most irrelevant thing, yes, but a technicality that sometimes intervenes in our thought processes, leading to obsessive over syntax, or correct selection, if, like me, you use your two index fingers to type.

Ashleys gone, and I really feel her absence. My body, in a sense, is regulated with her body, which I experience as a 'longing' for her. She's my sister, so my longing is of a very non-sexual nature. It's a loving, caring, playful, intellectual and psychotherapeutic relationship. It's just something my body likes, I love, and with her, just over a day now, I really feel an almost physiological "separateness", as if I can feel her absence emanating from her room, and knocking on my door. Likely an elaboration provided by the weed, but the point is, I miss her, and she's barely been gone. I still have 6 more days, so I have to just find something healthy to do. Talk at the library, for example, seems like a good thing. But truth be told, at 30 years old, I am fucking horny and always conspiring at my id'iotic times, to fuck this girl or that girl, many of whom are barely out of highschool. <-- Admitting to this, as a truth about human nature, is rarely admitted to, because people fear being seen as a 'weirdo'. Sexual ideation towards physically pubescent females is pretty normal and natural. Its a reflexive response, a tendency, an 'attraction' towards females of any physical form that matches our sense of attraction. It's there. The job, however, of a morally mature mind to regulate the appearance of these thoughts, and, even if indulged in from time to time, you recognize a fundamental hesitance to ever pursue it in action. And even despite this, its still probably best to resist fantasizing altogether.

My dream, my one simple want in life, is to write, to help, to contribute to the creation of a better world, and to revel in the pride I feel in being a human, connected to a deeper metaphysical meaning, and to be able to imbue my world and the worlds I interact with with power.

Ultimately, though, I want to meet someone. My body longs for someone to hold. I have this sense of 'wanting to hold a body' - a female body. Sensually, more than sexually. I want to be in a type of embrace that has the aura of divinity to it. The physical connectedness of two self-aware, naked beings, holding each others body, touching, stimulating, loving - and really loving, and letting all flow from what you feel to be the deepest and most encompassing expression of human experience, a sexual, sensual, and relational embrace of love.

And my deepest longing is children. I want to play my part as the next being in this long chain of beings to bring into being a being to be patterned by my being, and the being of my wife, and others whom the being of my child will grow around. What could be more meaningful? If you know how to get your emotions flowing in a healthy way, you can do it. You can use the mystery of consciousness to design good into the world, to support, help, and show, how love truly is the basis of it all. And it's ok. It needn't overwhelm us. Life can be a celebration of being, a declaration of selfhood, amidst the deeper awareness of an emptiness, a oneness, which pervades everything.

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.

The Shame Game

Shame is one of those emotions that nobody ever likes to talk about, acknowledge or [u]even notice.[/u] The most amazing thing to me as a psychologist who studies human evolution and the development of the human mind is how unaware humans have historically been vis-a-vis this emotion. Sure, the ancients had a word for shame, but there was really no significant [i]study[/i] into it. Somehow, the etiological relationship between one affect and another was never explored, perhaps because the world was too "full" of positive meaning, or too in need of a negative meaning, to recognize the messy complexity of emotions which act most strongly on our personality development, which create needs, sensations, thoughts and ideals. Shame, in its true importance, only makes sense in psychodynamic terms, and so perhaps humans had to await the "mechanization" of the mind, in Darwin, Freud, Cognitive Science, and latter day theorizing in various areas of the social sciences.

Perhaps the most astonishing hypothesis of all, in terms of how it changes our thinking about ourselves, is that we aren't "individuals" at all, but expressions of a group phenomena which finds its "homeostasis" in the coordinated functioning of relating minds. When the individual is seen in this respect, at various levels, we can make out the "logic" of organism-environment coregulation. There is "one" thing happening, but it is split up between individual organisms. My mind is built to "care" about your facial responses, vocal tones and body language. I want, in a very general way, positive feedback from my environment.

Of course, one could also argue that all animals are "fitted" to their environments; indeed, they are. But it is purely physical. The mind of one animal does not "sense into" the mind of the other the way our minds manage to attend in very specific ways to complicated mental assumptions implicit in our every moment of thought and perception. We think, in short, as "humans". The "human", it seems, or is often thought, is simply me. But this is wrong. Much research in developmental psychology has shown that the human mind does not become "human" in the absence of the presence of another face. Somehow, the brain wont grow without the 'spark' of moving faces, gesticulating body's and effervescent voices. When that happens, the eyes follow, the mind is 'activated' and brought into being - a being that will become so habitual as to almost seem "my own", and not social, communal, and relational at its very core. Consciousness - or human consciousness - exists as it does because of the other. The "other", is simply what is not you, but what is always present. It may be interpreted generally as "everything" one can think or sense i.e. as an object. But this wouldn't be entirely correct, as the "other" in human beings is most essentially the other person, the other face, whose activity we probe and whose expressions communicate meanings that far transcend the processes of ordinary matter.

In any case, why would shame hurt? Or rather, why is it the most painful emotion, feeling, or affect, known to the human heart? Some psychologists have defined shame as "interrupting interest", which is to say, it brings to an end any will or thought in the mind of the individual currently experiencing it. This is an important point to always keep in the front of your mind: shames power is its ability to literally "shut off" your self. So, if the self is important and meaningful - as of course we know it is - naturally, we will be most phobic and fearful of those emotional states which bring us to a state of weakness and infirmity. But what makes shame so special is that it touches at our very highest level of concern: our interests as social beings, to be liked, to be enjoyed by others, and to have fun. Shame turns that off. It momentarily says to "nope, sorry, you're out. Get the fuck out of here!" and there you go, find something else, like objects, to pass your time. The pleasures of engagement - at least right now - is not going to happen!

Horrible. No? It is, and this is why evolution, as it does, needed to adapt. And it did. We evolved psychodynamic techniques to 'get away' from the perception of shame in ourselves. Yes - this is an interesting irony in the history of thought. The perception of emotion - shame - is reacting the same way as an antelope responds to a lion: with fear. But this is all in our head! How interesting it is, metaphysically speaking, that the mind has become the new environment in human beings! In any case, the perception of shame induced dissociative processes that inclined the mind to focus upon meanings amenable to the needs of the self in the present moment. Every interaction, every cue and every context, has a preexisting network of connections in the brain that it acts upon, so that our way of responding really are whats called "limited cycle attractors" in dynamic systems theory. These are 'basins of attraction' that the meaning-hungry mind is activated when it senses the cues from the world around it. And shame is it's main foe: it knows it. Your brain too knows it. And you, like me and most everyone else (sparing only those who've spent the time to know themselves more deeply) use things like this:

All of these techniques are dissociative in nature in that they defocus you from the unwanted perception.

Laughter. Laughter is great, its awesome, but its also recognized as an effective dissociative mechanism to get the self from feeling shame in a personal and internal way, onto an external and objectified take on the action-itself which has prompted the laughter. The psychologist Michael Lewis says this about laughter:

[i]"laughter, especially laughter around ones transgression as it occurs in a social context, provides the opportunity for the transgressing person to join others in viewing the self. In this way, the self metaphorically moves from the site of the shame to the site of observing the shame with the other."[/i]

There is also anger. Anger is a response of the self to its own experience of shame, but at the same time directed towards the cause of the shame response, that is, another person. Anger is way of moving from the "frozen mobility"of a shame state into the "firery assertiveness" of an anger state. It's simply an unconsciously made effort of the brain-mind to bring the self-affect complex to a state of coherency and stability (i.e. familiarity), however unstable it really is.

People also just flat out deny the presence of shame in them. They refuse to acknowledge what they themselves habitually experience, again, and again, simply because they wont give a perception "license" in their epistemological universe. If they admit the perception, and say to themselves, "yes, I notice that", such as for instance, saying "yes, I notice those bodily feelings; in the gut, dropping heart, a desire to want to hide, my face in particular", they open themselves up, as it were, to the "lion" who wants to eat the antelope. People maintain denial because the thing feared possesses a known ontological propensity; the antelope fears the lion because lion, its form, movements and action, have long indicated "threat" to the cells which make up the body of the antelope. Similarly, the [i]feeling[/i] of shame has long held the relevant neurons in the amygdala to notice its destabilizing capacity to the self-system, and so become especially 'charged' in matters

pertinent to the individuals social life - and all the thoughts, feelings and relevant behaviors that coordinate its social life.

The person who doubts the presence of shame, therefore, has [u]good reason[/u] to doubt, as his life provides plenty of examples of where he needs to defocus from the perception of shame in order to "make coherent" the way social life normally flows in his mind. Indeed, environments usually spontaneously construct ways of being, so that many people occupying the same social environment tend to evolve similar ways of processing the complexities of social life, which often means, the complexities of shame-inducement.

Thinking, paranoia, misattribution ("I'm just tired, not shamed", even if the previous circumstance was a social situation that typically results in shame) are also ways to get the mind away from thinking about itself in a way that implies being "defective" as a social person.

All of this is, and exists as it does, because of the counter pole of pride. Pride is what we think we need to have, to maintain, in order to survive. But what is pride? It's a state, for sure, but it is a very general one, one that seems more pervasive than shame, in that it is implicit in so much of what we do. Pride is embodied, its in how we hold ourselves, use ourselves, in our motion in the world. Its also present all the time when we speak, as for instance, right now I can't help but know that as I write, I am being motivated at a self-conscious level, and so reflexively experience myself as intelligent, wise, articulate, and all those great things which we usually wish that others will see in us.

Pride is a powerful force that compels assertiveness. It asserts in human beings as statements, of the propositional kind, where we say "so is so". In shames pervasiveness, and prides opportunism, human beings have evolved grandiose ways of regulating one another's self-states as they talk about truly useless, meaningless, and often-times factually incorrect things. These states can even be conceived as being distributed between the relevant parties, so that they 'act this way' ONLY in these contexts. It is the specific nature of a feedback with a particular person that leads to these ways of speaking, thinking and acting. These states can sometimes seem like a type of 'being' that takes over the humans involved when they fall under its force.

Reality becomes contorted because of pride and the inclinations of the self to assert itself in matters relating to the 'real world'. Everyones imagining an wishes fall through in their actions, so its not surprising, for instance, that an insane person like Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Donald Trump, would find supporters, as it is pretty common for people to "mass aggregate" their individual megalomania onto a 'figure head' that embodies all their own delusions about what constitutes "good" and "value".

Pride and shame can be seen as two forces which 'battle' in the process of human relating. Shame happens when another self does not recognize "me", which is to say, my needs. When emotions 'sympathize' with one another, states are shared, and in sharing states, the brain grows and the mind exults. When one mind reflexively orients to another mind, and expresses through its outer image - the face - what is felt on the inside, it is a "shock" to the other minds homeostasis. Something 'wrong' has happened. If the world were simple, the state would freeze forever and we could know exactly how we feel. However, evolution is resourceful, so what were left to see is what can appear to be a confusing morass of emotions. But on closer look, it is obvious that the mind is noticing a feeling - the shock - when shame happens, but then reflexively enacts a LEARNED adaptive behavior - laughter, talking, denial, anger  - about which the know much more about, and our liable to think is "all that is there".

I believe the next stage of our social evolution has everything to do with recognizing the social-dynamic that created our distinctly unique human consciousness, and the emotion which creates so much confusion, pain, and over-determined compensation:shame

The Texture Of Defense

Here we are. Again. As people. In a new moment, acting in new way; but not really new. The "external part" is my action, the new context, a different point in time. But the underlying tone, the way were doing it, hiding the evasive "why" of a meaningful dynamic. This doesn't show up so easily. At least not in it's full evolutionary contours.

I have experienced so many different states that comes with being human. I know shame like few people know it. I feel the feelings, and feel the "eyes", inverted inwards, as my own gaze, doing the work of the shaming other.

And what is shame? Few people have defined it in the way that it deserves to be defined. It's as if, the human beings who spend the most time around it, intelligent people, studied minds; its as if these people, known technically as "psychotherapists", or "clinicians", have the minds most suited to probing life in the "mid-range", as Merlin Donald describes it.

But in any case, eyes inward, but the body is bristling with an energy. Just before shame strikes me, there's this budding anticipation of a negative experience. I know that what is happening, here, in these sorts of experiences, is a process in me, my own thoughts, reflexively "looking", not at the present, but at some virtual mental place, performing some mental observer status, watching, until the feeling grows and reaches its apogee, in thought, in thinking, the specific fear thought that may give it away - my weakness, my fearfulness, my doubt in my abilities.

I know shame very well. These sorts of experiences, usually happen weekly, which, btw, is quite wonderful, as it used to be every other moment. Silence alone was enough to keep me from "engaging" me, from extending myself, and hearing myself, and suffering the look of my own gaze. Back then I did not see what I know now: the gaze is not my own, but that of another. Others, plenty of others. Inherently replaceable, changeable, offering the same potential circumstance, if I just happen to give it away. If I let them see that "weakness". Little tolerance, humans beings. We can't even keep our gaze very long in watching the suffering of another. Their "suffering" - the phenomenological quality of their perceptual experience of self in a state of shame - can actually, in fact, provoke a most horrendous mischievousness in particular others. Certain people can't tolerate, in the least bit, the sight of shame in other people. Shyness is basically shame, hidden behind a different word. The experiential beginnings of shyness intimate "I am afraid of you"; but it can also give away an even more intolerable dysfunction: a nervousness in the body, tension in the voice, and the most bizarre inflections in facial and eye changes. The very act of "diverting", which happens so impulsively and reflexively when fear or shame is evoked in social circumstances, speaks to its utter evolutionary vestige.

Shame reflects something of the evil in the natural world. A state imposed on certain creatures to indicate the weakness of their status, and subordination to the group. The psychologist Louis Cozolino suggested in one of his books, quite plausibly, that an act of suicide may function in the same way as apoptosis in the body. Programmable cell death, done for the aid of the body. Programmable suicide? Sometimes, indeed, this happens.

 The human being, however, is a conscious personality, not a cell. And it does battle with its thoughts and isn't typically eager to just kill itself. The presence of good, of reflection, of kindness, received in ones life, stands as the "force" behind this eagerness to persist. To live. In this urge to survive, to remain conscious, to fight for the self. The qualities of surviving, consciousness, seems to hide the hidden force of love. Simple kindness, "imprinted" into your biology, called forth when thoughts of self destruction gain control. The only selves who "do it", were ones who had become too dissociated from the force of love to help themselves.

But yes, shame is a powerful reality. It hides behind actions, or, rather, is concealed by its opposite force, pride. Pride is also just "another word". But we understand intuitively the states which correspond with the general concept of pride. Downstairs, just a moment ago, I am communicating with my brother in a state of 'pride'. Confidence is another word, but it can almost have an obfuscating power in this particular conversation. What I mean is flowing in your experience in such a way that you look forward to your next statement, and also enjoy your own "style" of communicating. Indeed, there is even a subtle 'domination' quality, sometimes, when you communicate. You want to stifle and unhinge people, at least sometimes. Indeed, we do this mostly unconsciously, almost as if were hypnotized into acting these ways because of the pleasure that accompanies it. But make no mistake, there is a fundamental "wrongness" in these actions, because they are violent to the emotional states to the other. Not all, not always, and I'm not saying pride is bad; only a pride that turns the other into an object and 'does with him' whatever your unconscious mentation takes you. It's these sort of careless escapades into nihilism that human beings in our day and age have a difficult time resisting.

So, I've felt pride. I've felt it just as I watch others who speak and apparently appear to be experiencing it in a very similar manner to myself. And they're also likely doing it just like I do it.