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"Beyond your
thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, "the self exists between people, not inside them." David Berreby "Without you guys, to paraphrase Sandra Bernhardt (a quote that is circulating virus-like around the Internet), we wouldn't exist." Alex Burns When, In Disgrace With Fortune and Men's Eyes by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) When, in disgrace
with fortune and men's eyes, Insights... Would you like to
have a 9" x 12" wood plaque with the text of "When, In
Disgrace With "the self as a social positioning system" and "the mapmaker in the brain" instead of "the hippocampal/topographic model of self." the internal theater of others "the centers
of self outside the skull" instead of the extrasomatory extensions
of self. "outriggers beyond the brain--the circuits of self outside
the skull" "brainloops beyond the skull," "synapses
outside the skull," "synapses outside the brain." Long
distance circuits of self. Outboard circuits of self. Outboard circuitry
of self. Long distance circuitry of self. Brainloops outside the skull. _________ Despite 19th Century
Vienna's Sigmund Freud, 20th Century Switzerland's Karl Jung, and all
those who followed in their wake as explorers of the great interior
frontier, the most puzzling terra incognita of all isn't just right
under our very noses, it's behind them--in the non-conscious, unconscious,
and subconscious darkness that surrounds, nourishes, tweaks, twitches,
pulls, prods, and empowers consciousness. Consciousness' next task is
to come to know its most intimate companions. The irony is that to reach
inward we have to reach out and join others in a global enterprise.
As of now, that bold but ever-so-blind project is called consciousness
studies. We have to reach out to reach in. Our ancestors were social
and grew in colonies of trillions. Each individual was wired to be part
of a larger whole. Those were our bacterial foremothers 3.5 billion
years ago. We've evolved as social units too. We're just not smart enough
to know it. Consciousness is a social enterprise. No wonder we need
the illusion of self, the often false sense of individuality. We need
it to gain a sense of control and to wrest the attention of our family,
our friends, our neighbors, and of folks in our mindtribes--our communities-of-interest--thousands
of miles away. Working as attentional nodes is how we contribute to
the larger mind that we can't see, but that's the vital seedbed of self,
soul, and identity. Competing for attention is the way we help our culture,
our society, see. Competing for control is how we give that public vision
it's ability to grapple with reality. Despite 19th Century Vienna's Sigmund Freud, 20th Century Switzerland's Karl Jung, and all those who followed in their wake as explorers of the great interior frontier, the most puzzling terra incognita of all isn't just right under our very noses, it's behind them--in the non-conscious, unconscious, and subconscious darkness that surrounds, nourishes, tweaks, twitches, pulls, prods, and empowers consciousness. Consciousness' next task is to come to know its most intimate companions. The irony is that to reach inward we have to reach out and join others in a global enterprise. As of now, that bold but ever-so-blind project is called consciousness studies. We have to reach out to reach in. Our ancestors were social and grew in colonies of trillions. Each individual was wired to be part of a larger whole. Those were our bacterial foremothers 3.5 billion years ago. We've evolved as social units too. We're just not smart enough to know it. Consciousness is a social enterprise. No wonder we need the illusion of self, the often false sense of individuality. We need it to gain a sense of control and to wrest the attention of our family, our friends, our neighbors, and of folks in our mindtribes--our communities-of-interest--thousands of miles away. Working as attentional nodes is how we contribute to the larger mind that we can't see, but that's the vital seedbed of self, soul, and identity. Competing for attention is the way we help our culture, our society, see. Competing for control is how we give that public vision it's ability to grapple with reality. In a message dated
4/20/2003 8:33:07 PM Eastern Daylight Time, edser writes: HB:- The speed
with which the leucocytes in our body pounce on and digest enemies within
is 600,000 times faster than what the human eye can see. Meaning that
billions of cells that are a vital part of you and me carry out their
duties and perform critical tricks by which we-you and I--stay alive.
They do it in ways we don't understand. They do it without telling us
what they're up to. And they do it at a pace our mind, our self, can't
track, can't sense, and can't imitate. This is the adaptive unconscious
takent to the nth degree. The mind is a very limited thing. It knows
so little about what it really means to be a human being. JE:- The above
proves the opposite. To have any appreciation at all of what you do
not know proves such mind is _not_ limited. Inductive imagination has,
so far shown to be unlimited. Testable theory, built from the inductive
imagination has consistently replaced absolute assumptions within testable
theories of nature, increasing the size of the truth domains such theories
predict. Thus, we can look back at naive views of everything from perpetual
motion to fixed species and appreciate where we were then, where we
are now, and attempt to appreciate where we may be 10 million years
from now.. Regards, John Edser Independent Researcher Imprinting points. It created a passion point around which his most intense emotions, his real ambitions, would form for decades to come. But what made the experience so overwhelming? The sight of four human who'd bonded as a group. The sight of four human who, with the aid of an enormous team, had fought their way to the very peak of the attention pyramid. They were being seen by millions. Kevin could feel that. They were on TV--that mass-attention-center that every kid longed to appear on. And there was a mob of girls screaming hysterically...focusing white hot emotional attention, attention that went from their eyes down to their loins. Kids at the age of five are highly sexual. Sexuality is all about the desire for an extrasomatory extension of the self--or many of them--women or men we literally plug into. The sight of the Beatles on network TV told Kevin, this is where you will be the center of all eyes. This is where you will be the center of the desires of all sexual frenzies, of all mouths, of all nipples, and of all vaginas too. This is where anyone you want will look up to and desire you. Secret number two. Millions of other kids imprinted on that moment too. So when Kevin expressed the dreams that ten or 20 more years of living had built around that passion point of the Beatles, he expressed things waiting in the mass mind of his generation, things needing to be sung, danced, and said. A passion point had tuned a large slice of his generation--worldwide--to the visions that from that point on would dance in Kevin Cronin's head. sh: We can benefit from paying attention to these experiences. They can help us focus our lives and provide us with energy for doing things we want to do. hb: and they can help us liberate and empower our peers. sh: Other people play a huge role in defining our self. A few of those people pay a much larger role than most others. hb: superstars, role models, mothers, fathers, certain teachers, culture heros, heros and heroines from books. sh: We can benefit from paying attention to the influence of these significant others. Some parts of our physical structure and chemical and electrical processes are also important in creating and manifesting a Self. I think there are a lot of hungry hearts out there these days. Our nice life came to an abrupt halt awhile back, and we are looking for ways to move forward. The Baby Boomers are the dominant demographic in America, and it is to them that this book mght be primarily addressed. We are both Boomers and are personally acquainted with the stresses of this time of life. hb: but I also stay in touch with kids who are 20 years old on up to 33. And they need this book too. There's a generation of kids who have grown up (and are still growing up) on Nintendo games and Pokemon TV who need a sense of where they've come from and why. What I know best are the rock heroes--where their passions came from, how they were shaped, and how they in turn became the poster figures on which the next generation would imprint. I was a maker of Passion Points during the 1970s and 1980s--without entirely understanding my role...but trying to figure out it out as I adventured in the world of commercial art, film, disco, rap, r&b, and rock and roll. That was my voyage of the Beagle into the deep, deep heart of self and soul. sh: For lay people, there will be solid information that can help them tap the wellsprings of their own vitality. hb: yup. sh: Scientists may see some opportunities for further research. hb: that would sure be nice. The concepts we're posing are very different from those dominating psychology today. sh: Four Possible Major Sections, with chapters from the mini-proposal: Introduction Why Do We Have A Self? The Evolution Of Self-How Did The "Me" And "I" First Come To Be? 1. Imprints and Epiphanies The Detachable Self-Out Of Body Experiences Growing A Soul-Passion Points: Imprinting And Primal Fire 2. The Sea of Others The Curse Of Trying To Be Normal The Extrasomatory Extensions Of Self-Why We Can't Just Love Ourselves, Or Psychobabble's Bad Advice Othello's Insecurity-Love And The Ghost Of Disaster The Superstar As The Ultimate Outboard Self Maps And The Anchors Outside The Brain-How The Extrasomatory Cables Of Self Jerk And Waggle The Brain's Mapmaker (The Topographic Theory Of Self Meets The Extrasomatory Model) The Ring Of Consciousness The Arena Of Others Within Us The Tyrannical Mob Beneath The Floor Of Consciousness Why Cupid Is A Baby: The Self-Dissolver And Love-Shatterer--Commitment Phobias Couplehood-Unleashing The Hidden Selves Couplehood And The Anchoring Of Self 3. The Self in the Flesh The Mystery Of Identity Growing A Self-The Mutinous Teens And The Lonely Twenties The Mapmaker In The Chaos Of The Brain--The Topographic Theory Of The Self The Biopsychology Of Getting A Grip: Control And The Mystery Of Self So Where Does The Power Of Will Fit In? 4. Self Projection The Conscious Puppet We Call "Me"--Self, Libet And Gazzaniga Getting A Grip--Practical Applications Of The Theory Of Self Mandatory And Elective Selves-The Self As Suit And Tie Self As Social Interface And Billboard Of Control Ego As A Gift-The Value Of Self-Deception Goals--A Map Of The Future hb: sounds promising. Where do you see the over-story--the narrative that holds it all together? Howard Bloom Author
of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang
to the 21st Century www.howardbloom.net Visiting Scholar--Graduate Psychology
Department, New York University Founder: International Paleopsychology
Project; Founder: Science of the Soul Initiative; member: New York Academy
of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American
Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior
and Evolution Society, International Society of Human Ethology; founding
board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding council member, The
Darwin Project; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive
editor -- New Paradigm book series. For two chapters from The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the
Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net For Reinventing
Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine, see: http://howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism
or http://www.howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf _________ hb: neat. sh: What
I haven't seen so far is much detail on the imprinting experiences.
A lot of this may have to be in the form of personal anecdotes gained
via interviews (past or present). hb: both the anecdotes and the smattering
of evidence are in two files--soul.cnt and soul.txt. Human imprinting
is a VERY unresearched field. But I do have material that pertains.
I've been hunting it hither and thither over the last two or three years.
sh: It occurs to me that biographies might be a good source of imprinting
experiences. For instance, meeting Jack Kennedy as a young teenager
was probably a life-defining experience for Bill Clinton. hb: bullseye.
Remember, Kennedy had sexual magnetism, even though we didn't know about
his incessant philandering. Being at the certain of attention and riveting
the eyes of girls seems to be the flashpoint of many imprinting moments.
Look how Clinton continued to associate the limelight of politics with
sex. sh: Finally there could be some "exercises" that help
people discover and rediscover their own passion points. hb: agreed.
It involves going chronologically through your personal history from
the formation of your first memories to you mid-20s or later and finding,
one by one, the things that, as Jim Morrison said, really lit your fire.
Most of them are likely to be snapshots of idols or special contact
with fellow human beings. Though imprinting on the friendliness of dogs
via some words my father said when I was roughly three helped me keep
a sense of physical love that otherwise would have been stripped from
me. I must admit that my dad was human, not canine, so even imprinting
on dogs was imprinting on the love of a special human being, one who
towered over me. Seeing someone on high, seeing a person from below,
the way you see a person on a stage or elevated via a medium like TV
or a novel or magazine article is often another part of the snapshot
that becomes an imprinting point. the figures we imprint on are often
"bigger than life". Which brings us back to the Bloomian theories
about our hierarchical response to height. sh: I think that there is
a middle period of life from the 20's to the 40's when these often get
lost in the effort to fit into and succeed in the world. hb: precisely.
amen. and heartily agreed. sh: But now we have a large demographic,
the Baby Boomers, who are at that place in their life when taking a
look at their youthful passions may help them orient themselves for
the prime of their life. What kind of questions would you ask to bring
out the passion points? hb: if you could do anything at all you wanted
in life, what would it be? What was your biggest dream, your greatest
desire when you were five? When you were twelve? When you were sixteen?
When you were 22? What did you want to do and be and see? sh: If you
agree with some of this basic approach I will start pulling the references
together from the various documents- starting with the neurobiology.
I do have Soul.doc, rockCnt2.doc, rockCNT.doc, braiN(1).doc, braiN.doc.
I suppose you could sent the updated self.doc and I'll just clip on
the new stuff. And any other ones that seem particularly relevant. hb:
ok, tomorrow I'll try to put a package together. Howard Howard In a message
dated 2/5/2003 4:26:14 PM Eastern Standard Time, shovland writes: Subj:
The punchline to self.doc "But the trick is more than just understanding
where the inner gods come from (passion points), it is to invoke them.
The real goal is to make those gods come alive, to make them thrive,
and to help others achieve their own revelations and mystic ecstasies.
However one must do this while suppressing one of the most potent inner
gods of all-the god of violence, hatred, and war. One must unleash the
gods of wonder, of light in darkness, and of creativity. Howard "
As I watch events unfold, it seems to me that the market for both Reforming
the Corporation and Passion Points is expanding. Steve Hovland http://shovland.home.mindspring.com Hb: it's in those
moments that you find your soul, Clem. I've had them too, but only while
performing. never alone. they're the power of collective attention or
of inspiration pulsing through you. inspiration is a flame that comes
from the others buried inside of us, others we've reinvented to forge
our own passions and identity. << I'm an economist and for me it is often economists vs. lawyers, economists vs. accountants, vs. bureaucrats, political scientists, and what not. I have a tribal identification with my fellow economists. When I am with other economists, I'll come on as a specific kind of economist: free market as opposed to Keynesian. Within the group of free market economists, I'll be Austrian School vs. Chicago School. >> Here we have one of the paradoxes of self which has been puzzling me the most. When facing outsiders, Frank has a solid sense of us vs. them identity. When the threat from outsiders goes away, Frank's circle of identity retreats and he jumps into the adventure of defining a specific us vs. them *within* the group??Frank becomes a free marketeer so he can battle the Keynesians with might and main, thus gaining the righteous sense that he is not a part of some undifferentiated pablum, but still has a distinct "me." When Frank is among free marketeers, he needs to draw the circle of self tighter. Now it is "me vs. them." "Me, the one Austrian School adherent in the bunch taking on all these deluded Chicago School bozos." So self is a boundary line one draws which separates outside from inside. However it's extremely elastic, depending on circumstance. When self is a matter of identification with a large group??like economists, the circle is pretty big. When it's Frank against two other economists who agree with him on almost everything, the circle grows quite small indeed. But one way or the other, the inner feeling is "I must be me or die. I have to have a boundary or something in me will cease to be alive. And yet I have to be part of a group to breathe in social oxygen and thrive." I've spent much of the last six or seven months observing romantic relationships. Here the circle of self grows even smaller and more confusing. Self still involves setting up a boundary. What's inside this circular enclosure is "me." What's outside it is not. But the emotional volatility involved in these boundaries, and the phantasmagorical ways in which these outer lines of self dissolve and take new shapes can be hair?raising. All this drags one tantalizingly close to the secret of what a self is and why it has to be??why it evolved and what benefit we get from it. Close to the secret, but still locked in mystery. One of the things I've been tracking is something I call the attraction repulsion curve??a seemingly inescapable element of the courtship ritual. It's named for a phenomenon observed by Hullians back in the '50s when drive theory was all the rage. Here's a description from a previous posting of the classical drive experiment which provides a model for the romantic tangles of identity confusion. The details may be off here or there, since drive theory is now forgotten and the experimental data it produced has been expunged from current overviews of psychology, so is not easily available. In the old days, when Hull's concept of drives was big, experimental psychologists would attach a string to the tail of a lab rat and rig it to a meter measuring tension. They'd train the rat to run down a straight alleyway to a piece of food and carefully note how hard the rat strained to get to the goody via the tail?pull measurement device. Once the rat was used to a treat, they'd put an electrified grid in front of the food. Now, the theory went, the rat would have two conflicting drives: a drive of attraction (to the food) and a drive of repulsion (as it realized that the electrical grid was now permanently in place and hurt like blazes). Sure 'nuff, the rat would run toward the food with great enthusiasm, and as he grew closer, would begin to slow down. At a certain point he'd stop in confusion, not being able to "figure out" whether to go further or not. Now, if you took the measurements of the pull on the tail of the rat to avoid the electrical grid and graphed them, they went like this \. The closer to the grid, the greater the pull to get away. The further from the grid, the lower the aversive drive became. Similarly, if you plotted the rat's attraction to the food, the curve would go like this /. The further from the food, the stronger the attraction. The closer to the food the rat got the more it would take it easy and slow from a trot to a canter. Lay one curve over the other, and the point at which they intersected predicted very nicely where the rat would stop in seeming confusion when confronted with both the food and the grid. According to theory, this was the point at which the decreasing attraction precisely equalled the growing repulsion. Now for the snarl in romance, one with sometimes intoxicating and sometimes devastating results. I've been watching men and women who fall madly in love with each other. At least they do so while the other is a distant and somewhat difficult to attain prize. However the closer they get to winning the person who literally obsesses them, the more confused their enthusiasm becomes. Like the rat, they slow down, torn by a fear which stings them. When it becomes obvious that they've won the desired other and are growing ever more intimate, the fear becomes overwhelming and they run in terror. Before observing this carefully, my impression was that it was only men who fled from "commitment." But observing the cycle many times with seemingly very different people, it's become obvious that woman are as fearful and prone to run away in terror as are men. The only way to get to the heart of the matter seemed to be to worm oneself into the confidence of the people involved and to use every tool of intuition and empathy to help these tortured souls find the unnameable elements behind their inability to let themselves have what they thought they wanted. The goal was to help unravel the knotted string of the Hullian push?pull dilemma so that the folks with whom I was working would be freed of their repetitive agonies. Here's the sense which came from hundreds of hours of soul?diving sessions. While still at a distance, a person saw someone who seemed like he or she could provide a life??a complete shell of coziness, one with a future, open horizons, the ability to reach one's lifelong dreams, etc. Those were some of the exterior sugarplums dancing in the romantically intoxicated head. Equally important were the far less tangible *internal* seductions. There seemed a deep emotional pull which involved, at its very heart, being able to infantilize, to merge with the other person completely, in a sense, to be carried around like a baby, to never lose contact, to never be emotionally or physically alone again, to be able to *free* oneself of the onerous burden of self, the isolation in the circular palisade of identity. None of this was ever verbalized or realized. And I can't guarantee that I've got it right. Not one bit. But that, it seemed, was at the heart of the tiny Libetian flame which preceded what the conscious mind went through ridiculous contortions to explain. (Libet, for those who missed the thread on his work, demonstrated the rise of a neural flicker which apparently signals that a decision has been made just a tad before what Gazzaniga calls the conscious "narrator" comes up with what Gazzaniga seems to have shown is an arbitrary and often off?base after?the?fact explanation for what our non?verbal decision maker has concluded shall be done.) The intense, burning and inexpressible attraction flares unbearably as long as mr. or ms. right continues to elude our grasp. Then finally the god or goddess of our infatuated fantasies softens and begins turning toward us, perhaps beginning to show that he or she wants us as much as we want him or her. Now the panic sets in. The walls of the infinite horizons in our external fantasies close in claustrophobically. And there is a more terrifying prospect which we can't define. Instead of running, as the figures in movie parodies do, joyfully into each others arms, we tend to run away. But why? Analysis indicated that this seemed to be a matter of boundaries, a matter of identity. First off, we have a need to guard our territory, to have our space. Oxytocin lowers this need in both male and female animals when it's time to breed. Whether the endogenous chemical will smother our reflex to snarl enough to allow a permanent coupling is pretty chancy. That may account for the panic about being smothered externally. But it looks as if something far more potent is going on internally. The desire to be rid of the boundaries of self and meld into another, to be babied and held again, is scarifying to the nth degree. And as we approach true intimacy, possibly lifelong intimacy, those barriers show signs of melting away. Where do I start and end? Why do the boundaries of the envelope which defines me keep flickering so ephemerally? Why does it seem as if they will disappear and utterly disempower me? These seem to be the unspoken questions underlying romantic panic. Let's stop here and see what we've got so far. Self is a boundary marker. Self also seems to be something which empowers us. Take that boundary away, and we lose something beyond important, something indispensable. But indispensable in ways we do not know. Perhaps it is, as some have hypothesized, the illusion of control. (Loss of control produces physical and perceptual meltdown?? including: a shrinkage of the hippocampus due to a reversal of that organ's usual production of new brain cells; a shutdown of the immune system; a degradation of health caused by chronic stress hormone overdose; and a blurring of raw sensory capacity and the ability to project likely future outcomes and find solutions to dilemmas. If you can believe the data and explanatory theory proposed in _The Lucifer Principle_ and other Bloom works, loss of control signals the organism that it is no longer a useful node in the neural net of a collective intelligence. Nodes which prove useless abort activation. This is how a neural network exercises intelligence to begin with. By shuttling resources *away* from elements whose approach is counter?productive under the circumstances of the moment and toward those whose approach is proving useful. Utility can be measured very simply by control or lack of it. Those with no control aren't cutting the mustard, they aren't carrying their weight. External signals tell them they're unneeded. Internal signals lash them even harder. As modules in a collective brain we are built, or so says the Bloom corpus of work, to disconnect when we have stumbled into counter? productivity. Were we not, the groups of which our ancestors were a part would never have had the collective smarts to survive in the sharkpool of snarling and cannibalistic rival groups.) Hmmm, so if Bloom is right, our loss of control could literally threaten us with dissolution (an equivalent to the lysis, the self? disintegration, which an exploring bacterium which has made the wrong choice and discovered a desert rather than a dessert undergoes). Skoyles makes an interesting observation in his _Odyssey_. Not only does he speculate that our illusion of conscious mastery??that after?the?fact explanation of an impulse which did *not* arise in our "rational" self??is confabulated to provide us with the illusion of control, but he says: "If our behaviour is organized by internal cues then we might lose control over them. Could not the troop in our head hand over our freedom to those socially dominant over us?" In wanting to merge with the other, we want, perhaps, to merge with mother. Who could possibly be more dominant? The merger we wish would be the end of us. No wonder we run away. Now things get even more confusing. Jim Brody's grandfather observations have led some members of the group to confess how much they realize at a certain age that they *are* their fathers and their mothers. Yet look how hard we work to differentiate ourselves from our parents, the very people we carry within us, the people whose emotional ingestion informs our personality! Look how hard we fight to erect a boundary of self against a central portion of who we really are. I used to watch with amusement as one woman I knew fought her father every time she saw him. He was the founder of the Conservative Party in her hometown. She subscribed to the left?leaning newsletter put out at the time by Irving Stone. When the two were in the same living room, it was a miracle their political debates didn't cause the ceiling plaster to cave in. I watched these Punch and Judy performances for ten or twenty years...until her father died. Then she *became* her father. She switched her voter registration from Republican to Democratic, joined half a dozen far right organizations, took on her father's profession, and even put the painting her father had cherished and kept above his bed over hers. For decades she'd fought, scrapped and shouted with all the righteous indignation she could muster to differentiate herself from who she really was. Since then, I've run into many cases of the same thing. Child fights parent vehemently during his or her teens, twenties and thirties. Then in his or her forties and fifties, he becomes his parent. This, as John Cougar Mellencamp once pointed out when he was carrying on his favorite sport, vivisecting a film, was what the script of Larry McMurtry's classic _Hud_ was all about. If the theory postulated above is true, then the woman I was observing needed to fight her dad to give herself the illusion that she was able to make a unique contribution to the social web, the neural net of which we're all a part, the collective learning machine, group brain, complex adaptive system, or whatever you want to call it. (If you're an individual selectionist, you'll prefer to call it a delusion.) I suspect that's
part of selfhood. Now to try to comprehend some more. Howard << Subj: Individuality Date: 98?03?24 16:48:17 EST From: msherw (Martha Sherwood) Individuality The debate over whether a particular person is a single personality?space in which he moves more or less continuously, making small adjustments with changing circumstances, or a series of discrete personalities with rather sharp transitions between them, reminds me of an old debate in community ecology, which has implications for the study of speciation as well. In community ecology, there are two schools of thought. The Braun?Blanquet school, which was developed based on data from Europe, where natural plant and animal communities are few and far between, and tend to occupy marginal environments, holds that ecological communities are discrete discontinuous units which can be modelled like species. This view is quite prevalent among oldstyle ecologists and forestry people here in Oregon, where the rugged topography, dramatic changes in rainfall over short distances, and high level of dominance by single tree species produce marked boundary effects: 20 miles of driving east on highway 126 will take you from alpine spruce forest with a bryophyte understory, to a dense mesic douglas fir forest with ericaceous understory, to an open pine forest with grasses, to a xeric landscape with scattered juniper trees, and finally to a nearly treeless sagebrush steppe. Homo sapiens of the 20th century variety is about the only species of plants or animals that spans the full range. In contrast, R. H. Whittaker, working in the eastern deciduous forest of the Blue Ridge mountains, concluded that species assorted across an environmental gradient independently. His environmental gradients were much more gradual, and the number of tree species considerably higher, so his data fit his theory nicely, but be darned if us folks out in Oregon could make his theory (which became the guiding one in American community ecology) fit our data as accurately. So, to return to the personality debate. Say you grew up in the social equivalent of the eastern deciduous forest, an internally diverse community where selection pressures were not intense and the differences between "species" small. Say your environment was on the whole benevolent and predictable, and what forays you made west on US route 20, for hundreds of miles, still put you in environments where you could thrive. Add that the inevitable personality transitions which occur with ageing were not abrubt and did not coincide with dramatic changes in your physical and social environment. Whittaker's community theory of personality probably fits you pretty well. OK, THIS KIND OF ENVIRONMENTAL MODEL FITS WITH THALES' MILETUS, WHICH HAD 80 COLONIES FROM EGYPT TO RUSSIA, COLONIES WHOSE INHABITANTS WERE PASSING THROUGH ON BUSINESS ALL THE TIME. OR THE EVEN RICHER ENVIRONMENT OF SOCRATES' ATHENS, THE MOST DIVERSE CITY OF THE WORLD, IN ALL PROBABILITY, AT THE TIME. IF WE CAN BELIEVE PLATO (AND SOUND ARGUMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE FOR AT LEAST THE ACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF THE FOLKS WITH WHOM HE SAID SOCRATES CONVERSED), THEN THIS PHILOSOPHER OF A HIGHLY PORTABLE ETHICS AND SENSE OF SELF DIALOGUED ON A NORMAL BASIS WITH VISITORS FROM DISTANT CITIES (THE COLONIES ALLIED TO ATHENS NOT ONLY REACHED EGYPT AND RUSSIA BUT FRANCE, SPAIN AND NORTH AFRICA). HENCE A PORTABLE SENSE OF SELF. THE KIND OF SELF YOU COULD KNOW BEST THROUGH INTROSPECTION AND "REASON." TO DESCRIBE MILETUS IN 600 BC OR ATHENS IN ROUGHLY 440 B.C. IN A MANNER MORE AKIN TO YOUR CONTINUOUS BUT GENTLY CHANGING ENVIRONMENT, THE HUNDREDS OF COLONIES WHICH FORMED PART OF THE GREEK INTERURBAN SKEIN SHARED BOTH A COMMON CULTURE AND CULTURAL UNIQUENESS PRESUMABLY CREATED BY THEIR DIFFERENT WAYS OF MAKING A LIVING, THEIR DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS, AND THE DIFFERENT POOLS OF INDIGENOUS CULTURE SURROUNDING THEM. (SINCE THERE WERE A GREAT MANY TRIBES ON THE MOVE IN EUROPE AND WESTERN ASIA, IT MUST HAVE BEEN RATHER DIFFICULT TO TELL WHO WAS INDIGENOUS AND WHO WAS NOT.) IN OTHER WORDS, YOU COULD TRAVEL FROM THE NORTH SHORE OF THE BLACK SEA TO LANDS NEAR THE ATLANTIC AND STILL FIND YOURSELF IN TOWNS WHICH PROVIDED YOU WITH A HOSPITABLE ENVIRONMENT. Imagine, on the other hand, that you grew up in the social equivalent of my Oregon landscape, a landscape equivalently diverse, but made up of patchwork communities whose boundaries were quite clear, where selection pressures were intense and the boundaries between "species" painfully obvious. MARTHA, YOUR PHRASE ABOUT SELECTION PRESSURES IS INTERESTING, AND REMINDS ME OF THE CULTURES HERMAN MELVILLE ENCOUNTERED IN THE SOUTH SEA AND DESCRIBED FICTIONALLY IN _TYPEE_ AND _OMOO_. HERE, TO MOVE FROM ONE VALLEY TO THE VALLEYS BEYOND THE PEAKS A THOUSAND YARDS OR LESS ON EITHER SIDE AMOUNTED TO AN ACT OF SUICIDE. BOUNDARIES BETWEEN TRIBES WERE ABSOLUTE. CROSS 'EM AND THE FOLKS WHO CALLED THE SWATCH OF LAND INTO WHICH YOU'D TRESPASSED HOME WOULD SLICE YOU TO BITS. NEW GUINEA HAS STAYED THAT WAY UNTIL RECENTLY, WHICH IS WHY THE PLACE HAS MORE UNRELATED LANGUAGES THAN ANY OTHER SPOT ON EARTH. IF YOU CAN'T TALK TO THE FOLKS NEXT DOOR WITHOUT BEING EVISCERATED, YOUR LANGUAGE HAS LITTLE OPPORTUNITY TO OSMOSE. BUT NOTHING COMES TO ME FROM MY MEMORY OF _TYPEE_, _OMOO_ OR ANY OF THE NUMEROUS ANTHROPOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS OF NEW GUINEAN CULTURES WHICH GIVES ME A NOTION OF WHAT THE INTERNAL SENSE OF SELF MUST HAVE BEEN. ONE THING IS OBVIOUS FROM THE ACCOUNTS OF MELVILLE, MARGARET MEAD, AND NUMEROUS OTHERS: THE PEOPLE WITH WHOM MEAD AND MELVILLE LIVED HAD A VIGOROUS SENSE OF INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITY. THE EXISTENCE OF INITIATION RITES ALSO INDICATES THAT NEW GUINEANS MAY WELL HAVE HAD THE EASILY DISSOLVABLE SENSE OF SELF I MENTIONED IN AN EARLIER POSTING ABOUT ROMANTIC FEAR. THE THING WHICH APPARENTLY DRIVES FOLKS AWAY FROM THEIR ROMANTIC OBJECT WHEN CONSUMMATION OF PERMANENT INTIMACY SEEMS FRIGHTENINGLY CLOSE AND GIVES A SENSE OF BEING SMOTHERED, OF BEING TRAPPED, OF BEING ON THE VERGE OF LOSING ONE'S SELF BOUNDARIES AND BEING SWALLOWED INTO THE OTHER PERSON REFLECTS AN INSECURE QUEASINESS ABOUT LOSS OF CONTROL WHICH ALSO EXISTS AMONG THE NEW GUINEANS. INITIATION RITES HANDLE A SITUATION WHICH COULD PRODUCE INTENSE ANXIETY. MOVING FROM CHILDHOOD TO ADULTHOOD DURING ADOLESCENCE, FOR EXAMPLE, STRIPS ONE OF THE SELF ONE USED TO HAVE. IT PEELS AWAY THE SENSE OF A CERTAIN ENVIRONMENT WITHIN WHICH ONE KNOWS HOW TO RESPOND SOCIALLY AND IN WHICH ONE CAN EASILY FORESEE FUTURE OUTCOMES. IT PLONKS ONE INTO A NEW SOCIAL CIRCUMSTANCE WITH NEW RULES TO WHICH ONE IS BY NO MEANS ACCUSTOMED. THIS COULD PRODUCE A PROFOUND SENSE OF HELPLESSNESS AND LOSS OF CONTROL. THE INITIATION RITE TRAINS THE INITIATE FOR HIS OR HER NEW IDENTITY, PUTS HIM OR HER THROUGH RIGORS WHICH, ACCORDING TO THE FINDINGS OF GROUP PSYCHOLOGISTS, SHOULD INDUCE A SENSE OF INVESTMENT AND DOGGED BELONGING IN THE NEW GROUP. AND THEN INTRODUCES THE INITIATE INTO HIS OR HER NEW COMMUNITY AS SOMEONE WITH AN ALREADY DEFINED STATUS. A DEFINED STATUS MEANS THAT THE INITIATE AND THOSE WITH WHOM HE OR SHE ACTS KNOW HOW TO RELATE TO EACH OTHER. NONE OF THE UNEASY HOSTILITY WHICH COMES ABOUT WHEN ONE THROWS A STRANGE CHICKEN INTO AN ESTABLISHED HIERARCHICAL GROUP AND IT NOT ONLY HAS TO FIGHT TO ESTABLISH WHO IT IS AND WHERE IT BELONGS ON THE HIERARCHICAL CHAIN, BUT THREATENS THE STABILITY OF STATUS OF EVERY FOWL WHO'S MADE HERSELF AT HOME IN THE PLACE, THUS PRODUCING FIGHTS GALORE. AN INITIATION RITE IS BOTH A BOUNDARY CROSSING MECHANISM AND A METHOD OF REMOVING AN OLD ENVELOPE OF SELF IDENTITY AND REPLACING IT WITH ANOTHER. IF NEW GUINEANS, TRAPPED IN THEIR TINY MICRO?ENVIRONMENTS AND UNABLE TO MIX COLLEGIALLY WITH FOLKS FROM MORE THAN A MILE AWAY, STILL NEED INITIATION RITES TO DEFINE LIFE's TRANSITIONS, IT WOULD TEND TO INDICATE THAT THE LOSS OF IDENTITY CAN BE AS SCARY TO THEM AS IT IS TO US. WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE OLD BOTTOM LINE AGAIN. IDENTITY IS A TOOL FOR ESTABLISHING A SENSE OF CONTROL AND A SENSE THAT ONE CAN HAVE SOME CERTAINTY IN PREDICTING ONE'S FUTURE. IT IS A MARK OF THE EXTENT TO WHICH WE ARE MODULES IN A NEURAL NET, A COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE. SHOULD WE LOSE THAT SENSE OF CERTAINTY, OUR BIOLOGY WOULD BEGIN OUR DISSOLUTION. WE WOULD BE THE FAILING NODES IN THE GROUP INTELLECT, THE ONES WHOSE LACK OF SUCCESS WOULD DICTATE OUR DISCONNECT FROM THE SOCIAL WEB AND OUR RADICAL LESSENING OF RESOURCE DEMAND FROM THE COMMUNITY. OUR SELF?DESTRUCT
MECHANISMS WOULD AID IN THE GROUP'S HANDLE ON ITS GREATER DESTINY. WE'RE
BACK TO THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN HUMANS AND BACTERIA. EACH BACTERIUM IS
A TEST MECHANISM FOR STRATEGIES AND THE PROBE OF NEW ENVIRONMENTAL POSSIBILITIES.
IF SHE COMES OUT ON TOP DUE TO THE APPROACH SHE'S TAKEN (INCLUDING THAT
IN DEALING WITH HER SISTERS), SHE WILL THRIVE??HELPED BOTH BY THE STRUCTURE
OF HER SOCIETY AND BY HER INTERNAL BIOLOGY. IF THE CHOICE SHE REPRESENTS
GOES AWRY, SHE WILL EXPERIENCE THE OPPOSITE FATE. IN HER SELF?SACRIFICE,
SHE WILL TEACH A LESSON TO THE GROUP OF WHICH SHE'S PART. SELF IS ONE
OF OUR TOOLS FOR A SENSE OF MASTERY AND PREDICTION. SHOULD WE LOSE IT,
SHOULD OUR TOOL PROVE NOT TO FIT OUR SOCIAL OR SITUATIONAL ENVIRONMENT,
THERE GOES OUR SENSE OF CONFIDENCE, THERE GOES OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM, AND
WE ARE PRONE TO DISSOLVE IN THAT SELF?DAMAGING STATE WE KNOW AS DESPAIR.
What forays you made east on route 126, in the course of a mile or two,
put you in environments where survival required rapid adaptation. Your
life history has been marked by unavoidable disruption: at the age of
12, your parents moved to a foreign country; at the age of 40, your
husband unilaterally divorced you and you suddenly found yourself single?handedly
raising three young children on a third of your accustomed income. (This
is not personal, neither is it hypothetical). Whittaker's community
theory probably doesn't work very well for you when dealing with such
a discontinuous social environment. There has been some discussion on
this list about whether there is a meta?intelligence, either external
or innate, which controls the transition between personalities/selves.
Lorraine at least chose to fence with me on the Nestorian debate, suggesting
that if Jesus Christ were both fully human and fully divine, but unaware
of his divinity (a point fully arguable from the Gospel texts, by the
way, since the phrase "son of God" is applied to other biblical
figures, such as Elijah) then everyone is potentially divine. Is it
possible that our hypothesized meta?intelligence, and what our ancestors
called God, are overlapping concepts, and that we all have this higher
level of "Godlike" consciousness, which most people access
only briefly in moments of stress when switching of paradigms is necessary?
I personally believe that some important aspects of God reside, literally,
in the neurological apparatus of every human being. I realize this is
awfully metaphysical, but, on the other hand, it doesn't postulate any
forces which couldn't arise from the physiological matrix that scientists
insist is the right model. Martha Sherwood Jocelyne Bachevalier, professor of neurobiology and anatomy, University of Texas Health Science Center, found that 6-month-old monkeys, their amygdalas lesioned four months before,6 "will not initiate social approach as young babies normally do to play together. And they also seem to have ritualistic behavior, like rocking. These behaviors remained when they became adults," she says. Bachevalier believes that the damaged amygdala robs the young animals of their ability to interpret the social world around them. "I have the feeling that these animals have a hard time interpreting facial expressions or any type of gestures the monkeys can have. Thus they react as trying to avoid interactions," she says. (Harvey Black. Amygdala's Inner Workings. The Scientist 15[19]:20, Oct. 1, 2001. Retrieved September 27, 2001, from the World Wide Web http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2001/oct/research2_011001.html) All this may fit into the emerging concepts of self I've been working on for the last decade or so. When we last left off in the exciting tale of Bloom's attempt to twist the self by its tail and get it to confess its secrets, the picture went something like this. The self is our social interface, the billboard we present to others. The self is also a social positioning device, a mapmaker that shows where we are in the social scheme of things, where we've come from, and where we are likely to be. Which means that when we lose key landmarks in our map of our world-a parent, a spouse, a job-and hence a future-or when we lose our memory and are left with no past, we are plunged into many an unpleasant state. That inner tumult is accompanied by a smashing, bashing, jumbling, and tumbling of our sense of self. Our self is even dependent on the daily map we make of goals, tasks, and rituals (like eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, not to mention getting up, getting dressed, going to work, and coming back home again). Which helps explain why a day without a clear sense of purpose or a grid of ritual-a Saturday with no plans, for example--can toss us into an emotional fog. Or why when deprived of emotionally satisfying terrain, we compulsively grab at a phony set of goals with the pathways that reach them conveniently preplotted-like compulsive shopping, compulsive eating, compulsive gambling, and/or compulsive drinking. Then there are the circuits of self outside the brain-the strange ways in which a disturbance in the limbic system or the enteric brain (yes, the gut) does not simply move the few inches or feet it would take to reach the portion of the brain in which the conscious mind is housed. No, agita doesn't have the courtesy to hustle down the quickest route to awareness and explain itself. Instead emotional upsets send us off to find some friend or bartender who can interpret our discomforts. We may go miles-or even across oceans and continents-to find a Delphic oracle or high-school chum willing to act as long-way-round messenger, delivering bulletins from, say, the limbic system to the right frontal cortex a mere finger's length away. And finally there are the implants of others inside of us-the crowd in the amphitheater of our mind before which we rehearse our thoughts and judge which we should confess out loud and how; and the imprint of others from key points in our growth, the seared images of intensely significant heroes and demons who've changed us emotionally and made us who we are. Those bone-deep imprints of personal gods are the foundation of our passions and of our sense of what it is to be alive and to achieve. They provide the essence of our soul-what I've been calling our passion points. Now back to the shriveled amygdala in the autistic. If Bachevalier and the following article are right, the amygdala provides us with many of the social cables essential to the four roles of self-billboard, mapmaker, passion point container, and recruiter of brain reflectors far outside the compass of our skulls. Does this mean that-lacking a social interface--autistics fail to have a sense of self? Could autistics fling themselves into repetitive rituals and artificial structures like math and music to satisfy the mapmaker in the brain when it's missing all the normal landmarks of a social terrain-when it cannot read the faces and emotional input of others? Could autistics jangled by emotion attempt to reconcile their agita with their consciousness via extracranial brainloops devoid of the input of other human beings? Howard The basic theme,
though, is that none of us are islands. We need each other. We need
each other desperately. Our need is the greatest gift we have to give.
We should stop hiding that..for at heart others are us and we are them.
Our most private, personal, passionate self is a product of the others
within us. We are born in a sea of others. It is a sea to which we must
return constantly. Without that sea of others we cannot breathe. Others
are the answer to who we are. They are the answer to our most potent
passions and to our most sacred sources of uniqueness--the passion points,
the fonts of personal fire we must feed to awake fully to our unique
possibilities. Finding the passion points in your self and liberating
those hidden in others is what makes self come to a fullness of life
few humans achieve. Passion Points: the Scientific Theory of Self and
Soul is the first book to explain why. It also gives a radically fresh
vison of how. Howard Bloom has been called "the next Stephen Hawking" and "the Albert Einstein, Krishnamurti, Buckminster Fuller, and Isaac Newton of the 21st Century." He is a visiting scholar at NYU, the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, and a member of The American Psychological Society, The American Academy for The Advancement of Science, and The Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Bloom's books include The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the 21st Century. He has used his theories of self to aid the careers of Michael Jackson, Prince, John Mellencamp, Bette Midler, Paul Simon, and Billy Joel, among others. Russell Kick has
written for the Village Voice, is the founder of www.altlit.com, and
is editor of You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide To Media
Distortion, Historical Whitewashes & Cultural Myths. Howard
_______________________________
In a message dated 98?03?24 18:49:29 EST, msherw writes: << each pregnancy results in inhibition of the husband's testosterone level, which never quite recovers, so that eventually he becomes completely impotent. Depending on his world view, he may embark on sexual adventures, rationalizing that his impotence is due to some flaw in his wife, or conclude that he is gay, or conclude that he is worthless as a man and retreat into the den with a fifth of Jack Daniels. His alpha wife, unless she is puritanical, is likely to cheat on him, mostly with alpha males she's sexually attracted to but socially repelled by. >> This would be a classic instance of the phenomenon discovered over the last decade among "monogamous" birds. DNA testing indicates that when a female bonds with a low status male, a significant proportion of her offspring are the result of couplings with males other than her "mate," despite the superficial appearance of absolute fidelity. The female uses her mate as a resource gatherer and protector, but goes elsewhere to find sperm. In other words, she plays around with higher status males on the side, thus giving some of her chicks stronger genes and a greater shot at survival. In addition, "wimps" tend to become either followers or eccentrics. Society as a complex adaptive system or collective intelligence needs both. The followers are necessary to harvest the fruits of whatever resource base the group lives off of . This is true among humans and bees, where resource collection is a cooperative matter. The value of a bulk of follower males in resource gathering is less obvious in chimps, but it's there. Male chimps patrol the territory off of whose resources the group lives. The more patrollers, the better and larger territory the group can seize and protect. Followers add heft, the equivalent of artillery and cannon fodder. However it's the dominant males who get to reproduce more often, even among monogamous birds. It's also the dominants who control an extremely important resource in a collective intelligence??attention. Among chimps, all eyes focus on the dominant male, whose choices and "personality" determine the "personality" of the group as a collective culture. This tendency of all to watch carefully and follow the lead of the alpha male is called formally an "attention structure." The data indicating the manners in which the attention structure manifests itself among humans is rich and well?proven (to the extent anything can be said to be proven). We follow the lead of the males or females on top. The elite. Dominants exist in a bacterial colony (where the top microbes would be those who send out chemotactic signals of attraction; and the wimps would be those who send out chemotactic signals of repulsion). Dominants are also important foci in a chimpanzee band, any other social mammalian, reptilian or crustacean group, and every human herd you examine (including egalitarian bands, where leadership is exercised in very subtle ways). Most important, alpha creatures play a key role in collective information processing. Dominants are those who've managed to "succeed"??to optimize resource acquisition and social networking. Since the attention of the group is focused on those whose strategies best fit the social and external environment, the group as a whole moves in an adaptive direction. Its wimps give up making decisions on their own (saving themselves the stresses of indecision) and follow a direction which has been proven to work well. When circumstances change dramatically, the dominant may lose his or her grip. The strategies that have served him or her so well may now be obsolete. For example among the baboons observed by Shirley Strum, when a garbage dump becomes available those who follow the "unconventional" males who've learned to utilize this resource become far better nourished, healthier, and more reproductively successful than those who continue to follow leaders who stick to what they know best??the tricks of gathering wild plants in the "natural" environment. Those males who've both mastered the art of garbage picking and that of avoiding human baboon?haters with rifles will do better than those who simply have recognize the signs that a juicy goody is hidden beneath the rubble. But males who've become expert in these two skills and are also good at weaving together the social web by acting as conciliators, making friends with the greatest number of females and babies, and cooperating in a productive and peaceful manner with other males, will do the best. To resort to the vocabulary of the complex dynamic systems model of collective intelligence, these males will be blessed by "utility sorters"??the endogenous adjusters of hormonal and neural operation which boost or lower perceptual acuity, confidence, health (by upping the functioning of the immune system), etc. All of this will add significantly to the attractive powers of the males who've mastered social, survival and resource strategies. Among other things, by optimizing levels of such hormones as testosterone and serotonin, the utility sorters will increase both the sexual and general social appeal of those who've got a grip on current realities. The utility sorters will work endocrinologically and psychologically to cause piloerection in creatures with fur??like apes, monkeys and ungulates??making them seem more magnificent. It will straighten up their body posture, adding further to the "positive impression" they give off. (This is not an anthropomorphization. In species in which males compete for position, winners are often the the males that can show the most magisterial and confident presence. One male will measure itself against the grandeur of a rival pacing parallel to it. If it judges itself inferior, it'll back away without a fight. The male that measures itself as the equal or possible superior of a rival may decide to duke it out in battle.) Recalibrated by the utility sorter (a concept with a strong relationship to Mike Waller's comparator genes), hormonal level will also tweak the output of pheromones in a male who's achieved control on all the dimensions I've mentioned. Martha, Lorraine and Jim Kohl have been discussing the impact this has on females??it brings them into heat and draws them in |
