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Self file pg2 [pg1] [pg3] [Directory] Self
and social inclusion read
more _______________________________ In a message dated 98?06?18 11:45:19 EDT, Bill Tillier writes: Dabrowski goes one step further in suggesting that these extreme mental states are often associated with deeper insights and growth. Thus in the experience of deep depression, we question our values (often to the brink of suicide) and hopefully emerge with a clearer and stronger sense of both yourself and of the world. The inauthenticity of the group mind is replaced by the authenticity of thinking for oneself. >> Bill??If this were true, it would be extraordinarily interesting. However the opposite possibility seems equally plausible??that an individual emerges from depression by attuning himself more adequately to society's needs, Or by waiting it out until the social need swings in the direction of what he's been offering all along. Depression has been demonstrated by quite a pile of animal and human research to be primarily a product of loss of control and social isolation. Presumably, then, a sense of social inclusion and regained control should get someone out of a depressed state. This means being in synch with society, even if it's synchrony with a need one fills as an iconoclast, a voice suddenly yanked in from the wilderness. Or if it means getting ultra?prophetic and assembling one's own group. So it would be interesting to implement something I generally hate, a mathematical study of recovery from depression. The goal: to measure the frequency of a socially out?of?synch sense of self?discovery versus that of a socially in?synch sense of finding one self. An archetypal socially in?synch way of "finding oneself" is through religious conversion, rearrangement of emotions and mentation to fit a new social group after exclusion from old ones. In my opinion, "finding one's self" is generally a matter of discovering the group in which one feels one has a place??in other words in which one feels that one is wanted. But a statistical study would prove whether Dabrowski's optimism or the gloom of Bloom provides a more accurate picture of depression's ejection seats and their parachutes. By the way, it's
entirely possible that depression evolved as a mechanism for saving
up one's energy for a more propitious occasion, then became exapted
into a mechanism which, in extreme cases, would lead to self?destruction
while contributing to the function of the group as a collective intelligence,
a neural net which shuts down its dysfunctional nodes as part of its
learning process. However the equivalent of depression appears very
early in the evolutionary calendar??among prokaryotes some 3.5 billion
years ago. So in examing depression's evolution, it seems fruitless
to search the usual hunting ground of evolutionary biology, the hunter?gatherer
days of the savannahs. One has to go back to the first 350,000 years
or so of life. Howard
John Skoyles to IPP, 12/1/98 Rat pups need it [touch]: deprived of touch they stop making the proteins needed for growth; touched and massaged, premature babies also thrive better -- increasing their weight by at least 20% more than if they were left on their own (Polan & Ward, 1994; Schanberg & Field, 1987). Mum for her young thus works as a kind of network server to which they allocate important brain functions via their contact and attachments. Young brains, in addition to the above need her to regulate their sleep-wake cycles, their activity levels, their temperature, immune system, hunger and toilet functions, oxygen consumption, certain neurochemicals and heart rate (Hofer, 1984; 1987; 1996). Oddly, these homeostasis tasks are not more complex than the house warmth regulation done by central heating or air conditioning systems -- our brains should be able to do them in a stand alone PC manner. Crippling them to need contact must have advantages as without her, their bodies' regulation goes awry and so risks their survival (Hofer, 1996).
We are tied to geography more then we realize. It has to do with the hippocampus which is central to your sense of control, reality, and the coherence of the internal geography on which you depend for sanity. The hippocampus developed as a smell brain, then was used to map out territory by early nocturnal mammals who used smell to create their mental maps. The hippocampus then became the structure which categorizes and places the bits of perceptual input which we register and store in memory. It stores data by creating a kind of mental map, a topography, a grid, one which makes everything make sense and gives you a sense of self and belonging. Speaking in terms of evolution, the new generation is a restless probehead for the collective intelligence of the group. It can't use the environment of its parents as it becomes an adult. It can't encroach and become a competitor so it has to find a new home, a new niche. To do so it has to test a bunch of new realities. This causes topographical and hippocampal chaos??a loss of the old maps and a desperate need for a new one on which to anchor the sense of control which is central to "finding one's self." Finally, the new generation's members build a new topography and settle into it. Your sense of self is where you fit into that mental map which contains your remembered and perceived reality. It also places you in the latitudinal and longetudinal framework of a supportive group. Hippocampal topography, self?discovery, and adhesion to a sympathetic subculture in which one carves out a niche are all associated. Each helps you gain a sense of a grip on life. If the map becomes chaotic, you begin to lose your sense of self and become quite depressed and desperate. Time to find refuge in a new mental geography??or, in the case of folks in their 40s and beyond, refuge in the old one of their parents from which they fled, and which they now modify in terms of their experiences and their generational modes of perception. They reach back for a map which they developed so early that it's embedded in them strongly. However they see the old through their maturing generation's new behavioral repertoires and perceptual categories. At this point, they are likely to switch to a more conservative or nostalgiac subculture, one dedicated to bringing back the new vision of the "good old days." This maintains a continuity in the group structure, allowing it to grow from one developmental stage to another without disintegrating. Youngsters are probeheads. Mature adults are adhesion devices. But the search for a hippocampal map and the ways in which one clings to it are engines of social evolution?? diversity generators in the young and conformity enforcers in their elders. We seem to have a narrow ring of consciousness into which we accept a small part of our experience and from which we eject many of the other things integral to our external or emotional lives. This show?ring is the self. We allow what is socially acceptable into this spotlighted circus?like display area, and exclude what is considered despicable. If custom demands we demonstrate loyalty at a time when we feel the need to make a break with someone who's been close to us, we handle the disposal problem out of the limelight. Our strategies may be elaborate, but they can't be accepted into the self. A woman whose relationship with her husband has been changed by circumstance may indeed find that, for reasons she can't verbalize, the alliance no longer fits. To confess to herself that raw self? interest drives her to discard a bond which custom holds must be emotional and permanent would be more than a bit distressing. It would seriously shred her sense of social acceptability. So she buries her feelings and acts them out in such a way as to force a break up. She keeps her actions thoroughly suppressed??out of the bright lights of the circle of consciousness. To "her," to her conscious self, her actions do not exist. Prod her, and she will either not remember them or will deny them vehemently. But the various blades she uses to drive her husband away finally serve their purpose. He makes a move to escape further mutilation. She registers the self?defensive maneuver with great avidity. In fact, it is the very thing she needs to justify what she was trying to achieve. Using the husband's action as excuse, she can now claim that *he* precipitated the breakup. Now she can move to end the relationship consciously. In fact, not just consciously but self righteously. I've seen this in a number of cases. The elements of delusion involved have been noted as clinical commonplaces in divorce. Plus, I've used the "she" example because studies have shown a rather chilling fact. It's wives who generally decide to end a relationship. And these women generally begin their machinations in a seemingly methodical way roughly two years before the actual split. This doesn't mean they proceed consciously. One friend was kicked out of his house by a wife he dearly loved. It's been three years now since the separation. He's been faithful to his wife and has worked to repair the relationship all that time. But he was a bit surprised six months after he'd been evicted to find out that his wife was convinced that he hadn't been shoved out of the door. In his wife's opinion, it he'd up and left her. It's always conceivable that he, too, was doing things which he has excluded from his circle of awareness. But other experiences in helping others are making it increasingly seem to me as if the selves we keep in darkness are often far larger and more powerful than those we spotlight consciously as us. By the way, one factor in this is society's lexicon of what is acceptable and what is not. Not to mention the social vocabulary for what exists. For example, in German there is the word schadenfreude??a joy in someone else's grief, pain, or loss. We probably have the feeling, but not the word. Without that tool to grip this emotion, it remains in the unlit realm outside the circle of awareness, outside the tiny spotlit stage we call our self. Which indicates that one task of us knowledge explorers is to haul as many things of this sort from the darkness as we can and give them names and concepts with which we can handle them. Ours is the task of expanding the ring of awareness, so more and more of what we live and are each day becomes a part of that still?evolutionarily? embronic entity we call our rationality. > proto?humans in their dance/chant groups. Psychoanalysts talk of > regression in service of the ego, Howard talks of phylogenetic integration > (or is it regression?). >hb: integration??our past and future fused, white hot, and ready for a new (or >old) mold.The old swords into ploughshares bit. So, "...Is the African?American church the anvil on which the swords of 20th?Century collective violence will be transformed into the ploughshares of 21st?Century peace?" BILL, WOW, THIS IS GREAT. Feats [sic] don't fail me now! LITTLE FEATS, OF COURSE. FEATS, DO YOUR STUFF! > > One thing Vygotosky's account makes clear is that, in speaking with one > another, we allow others access to our own minds. We give them power over > us and assume such power over them. >hb: this may explain why when we are listening our blood pressure rises, a >sign of subordination. when we are speaking, it lowers again, a sign of >dominance.Hmmm.... BY THE WAY, IN AMERICAN BLACKS BLOOD PRESSURE IS USUALLY HIGHER. I SUSPECT THIS IS A RESULT OF THEIR HIERARCHICAL SUBORDINATION. > > How did we ever come to allow one another such access? >hb: a mother wolf opening her mouth and disgorging her stomach contents to her >pups as they lick her lips is one example of access.Actually I don't think it is, not in the sense I'm interested in. And this is something I'm going to have to explain clearly in the book.The feeding activity you cite is surely triggered by subcortical brain centers. And we are just chock full of *subcortical* access to one another's brains. That's the whole world of interindividual communication gestures. VERY NEAT OBSERVATION. But language is cortext to cortex. That's the difference. Cortex to cortex interindividual communication is unique to us??except perhaps for birdsong. MORE MEATY FOOD FOR THOUGHT. All those ape cries, for example, are subcortical. And one of the key problems in the evolution of language is getting those proto?humans to have the control over the vocal tract etc. needed to use it linguistically.> That takes us back > to our proto?human group gathered together in dance and chant. The > collective synchrony of that activity provides a vehicle for nourishing the > trust needed to support such intimate commerce in one another's minds. >hb: aaah. brilliant.Here's another point I've got to get clear on. There's more to this than just warm fuzzies. Warm fuzzies are nice, they're essential. But they aren't the whole ball of wax. The folks in this group are acting out stories??they have to *act out* stories because their language isn't sophisticated enough for them to be able to tell stories. And so there's the story about how we all banded together and drove off that nasty lion. And there's the story about how we go out into the woods and gather fruit and come back and have a good meal. And there's the story about how you mate with my sister and I with yours (this particular story is of great interest to Tim Perper these days). These enacted stories are what makes the difference between a bunch of apes who hang out together (and thus are genetically intertwined) and a real group where a real group is a bunch of folks who have some awareness of the group and who have some basic mental grasp of reciprocity. Enacting group stories is how they get that sense, and get that sense lined?up in all regions of the brain.
AHH, HERE WE HAVE WHAT SEEMS GENETIC IN HUMANS??THE NEED FOR A STORY OF HOW THINGS CAME TO BE, A SEQUENTIAL NARRATIVE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER WITH BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND END. SEQUENTIAL ORDERING CAN BE SHOWN IN BACTERIA, WHO, LIKE ALL OTHER ANIMALS I'M AWARE OF, PAIR CAUSE AND EFFECT IN THIS MANNER AND USE A NARRATIVE FORM (THIS PRECEDES THAT HENCE THIS CAUSES THAT) TO MAKE PREDICTIONS. YOU'VE PROBABLY SEEN MY ESSAYS ON FUTURE PREDICTING MECHANISMS WITHIN BOTH PLANTS AND ANIMALS, AND THEIR ABSOLUTE CENTRALITY TO THE EXISTENCE OF LIFE. BY THE WAY, THE BACTERIAL MANNER OF MAKING A SEQUENTIAL PAIRING (FIRST THIS HAPPENED, NEXT THAT HAPPENED, HENCE THIS CAUSED THAT) IS BY EJECTING WHAT AT FIRST LOOKED LIKE FOOD BUT TURNED OUT POISONOUS, THEN USING THE CHEMICAL CUES EMITTED BY THAT SUBSTANCE IN THE FUTURE TO PREDICT THAT IF THEY EAT IT IT WILL MAKE THEM SICK, AND AS A CONSEQUENCE TO REFUSE TO TOUCH IT. SAME CALCULATION WE MAKE VIA THE NEGATIVE IMPRINTING ON CERTAIN FOODS CREATED BY NAUSEA. A BACTERIAL KIND OF "IN THE BEGINNING...."> And, > I suspect, the sustained precise synchronization to mutual rhythms helps > stabilize brain activity so that we can engage in complex mental activities > stretching over long periods of time >hb: which brings us back to another ancient use of music??synchronizing labor >via work songs and synchronizing emotions and motor readiness via war chants.Yep. All that stuff. And Bruce Jackson makes a very important point about work songs in the AA slave community. The work song is a way of taking possesion of their activity. They didn't ask to be here and don't want to be here but they have been cooerced. The work song is a way of taking this cooerced activity into their own sphere of intention. WONDERFUL, IN OTHER WORDS MUSIC IS A MEANS OF ROPING IN ACTIVITIES WITH A LASSO OF CONTROL AND PREDICTABILITY, TWO THINGS WE NEED TO PREVENT THE CHRONIC OVERDOSE OF STRESS HORMONES IN LEARNED HELPLESSNESS. SEE MY WRITINGS ON THE SELF?DESTRUCT MECHANISMS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO SENSE OF CONTROL AND SOCIAL CONNECTION IN _THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE_. Here's a very fine work song (from VA in the 1850s):A col' frosty mo'nin' De niggers feelin' good Take yo' ax upon yo' shoulder Nigger, talk to do wood. WOW, THIS NAILS YOUR POINT MAGNIFICENTLY.> improves children's spatial skills. In such a group, each person is both > hypnotist and subject. >hb: interesting idea. how does it work?I don't know. I just made it up. Of course, since those folks didn't have a Self it follows that they can't really be either hypnotist or subject. So maybe it's not such a good idea.> And when, in music, we return to such groups, we do > so to reestablish and nourish that primal nexus of trust, the rhythmic > cradle of human consciousness. > > At this point we can begin to think about Howard's inner lizard running > free in the mind's dance hall. >hb: delightful image, bill.First it does the lizard quadrille, and then the monster mash. ROFL >> > And that's which I'm going to need in order to pull off the final chapter: > > We Are the World: Music and Humankind in the Next Millennium > And, of course, this chapter will discuss its titular event. Do either of you guys remember off hand just when "We are the World" happened or where I can get information about it ?? how many people, etc.YES. I WAS HEAVILY INVOLVED AND CAN EVEN TELL YOU HOW MICHAEL JACKSON AND LIONEL RICHIE WROTE THE SONG IN MICHAELS BEDROOM, LAYING ON THE FLOOR, SURROUNDED BY MANNEKINS, AND WITH THE OCCASIONAL UNNERVING (TO LIONEL) VISITATION BY MICHAEL'S HUGE PET SNAKE. DARN, I WISH I'D KEPT ALL MY PRESS RELEASES AND NOTES ON THE THING. I GOT KENNY LOGGINS INTO THE THING. BILLY JOEL AND BETTE MIDLER, TWO OF MY OTHER CLIENTS, WERE IN IT. MICHAEL JACKSON'S SENSE OF GROUP COHESION WITH ALL THE CHILDREN OF HUMANITY IS SO AMAZINGLY STRONG IT IS SAINT?LIKE. I WONDER WHERE I HAVE MY ESSAY ON MICHAEL JACKSON AS (NO KIDDING) ONE OF THE ONLY TWO SAINTS I'VE EVER MET. HE LITERALLY IS THE WORLD AND IS THE CHILDREN. HIS *SELF* IS. VERY MUCH LIKE WHAT EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY WROTE IN HER "RENASCENCE": Until it seemed I must behold Immensity made manifold; Whispered to me a word whose sound Deafened the air for worlds around, And brought unmuffled to my ears The gossiping of friendly spheres, The creaking of the tented sky, The ticking of Eternity. I saw and heard, and knew at last The How and Why of all things, past, And present, and forevermore. The Universe, cleft to the core, Lay open to my probing sense That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence But could not, ?? nay! But needs must suck At the great wound, and could not pluck My lips away till I had drawn All venom out. ?? Ah, fearful pawn! For my omniscience paid I toll In infinite remorse of soul. All sin was of my sinning, all Atoning mine, and mine the gall Of all regret. Mine was the weight Of every brooded wrong, the hate That stood behind each envious thrust, Mine every greed, mine every lust. And all the while for every grief, Each suffering, I craved relief With individual desire, ?? Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire About a thousand people crawl; Perished with each, ?? then mourned for all! A man was starving in Capri; He moved his eyes and looked at me; I felt his gaze, I heard his moan, And knew his hunger as my own. I saw at sea a great fog bank Between two ships that struck and sank; A thousand screams the heavens smote; And every scream tore through my throat. No hurt I did not feel, no death That was not mine; mine each last breath That, crying, met an answering cry From the compassion that was I. All suffering mine, and mine its rod; Mine, pity like the pity of God. Ah, awful weight! Infinity Pressed down upon the finite Me! EXCEPT IN MICHAEL'S
CASE YOU CAN LEAVE OUT THE UNIVERSE AND ADD THE MIRROR OPPOSITE OF WHAT
MILLAY IS GETTING AT??HE NOT ONLY FEELS THE PAIN OF A WORLD OF KIDS,
BUT FEELS ALL OF THEIR POTENTIAL JOYS AND WORKS TO BRING THOSE LATENT
JOYS TO THEIR HEIGHT OF ECSTASY. HE DOES THIS BOTH VISCERALLY AND CONSCIOUSLY,
WITH VIRTUALLY ALL HE IS. HE IS A CASE STUDY IN GROUP UNITY AS THE ULTIMATE
TRANSCENDENT PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. > > I think it goes like this
(& I'm making this up, but not quite from > nothing). Let's conjure
up the 3?D complex of the various language areas of > the brain.
We'll see areas in both hemispheres but there will be different >
areas in each hemisphere. The highest level of linguistic control will
be > on the left. Now take that whole complex of brain areas and
make a mirror > image of it. That gives us the music areas of the
brain, with control on > the right. > hb: neat idea, but it needs
quite a bit of research to indicate whether or >not it's accurate.Yes.
Note that what gave me the idea was reading that *this* hunk of tissue
on the left is involved with language and the corresponding hunk on
the right is involved with music.> SORRY FOR THE CAPS,
BUT IT SEEMED THE ONLY OPTION LEFT (OR WAS THAT RIGHT?) onward and upward
to the world where Neitzche's Zarathustra dances on mountaintops like
a bubble in a sunlit sky, taking the world in a perceptual act of joyous
mastery??Howard << I think
grooming in apes hb: absolutely.
which implies that ants, bees, and bacteria have their own ways of judging
self worth, and that self worth is a misnomer for social value??being
valuable to and valued by those around us. Frankly, the cells of our
bodies are also judging their value to the larger organism on a constant
basis, and pulling their apoptotic plugs, committing suicide, when it
appears that they're not needed or wanted by another soul (or cell,
as the case may be). Being creatures of words, we hand a primal inner
judge which we share with even the most lowly cellular life forms an
intricate script and get it to make philosophical or poetic declarations
as it does in us From this perspective,
the emotional payoff hb: all the work related to this subject I'm aware of backs you solidly on this statement. Of course, this hb: yup. although certainly hb: since death
is a pretty extreme thing, and since death is the ultimate sentence
for, say, a leukocyte in the immune system which receives no signals
whatsoever of being needed, I'd say that the cellular version of feelings
of worthlessness have consequences every bit as mighty as do ours. Peter Plantec recently posted an interesting quotation asserting that individual consciousness is a property that arises between people, not within them. This strikes me as an idea with an ancient pedigree, or at least ancient antecedents. Aristotle for example speaks of friends seeing themselves in each others' eyes, which I don't think means they all look alike, but rather that it's the people around us who keep us being what we are. Many centuries later Hannah Arendt proposed that individuality was something created by action in a community. The idea of my individuality is meaningless without other people, much like the idea of my tallness. (Tall compared to who?) It's intriguing to me that people thinking about consciousness and the mind/brain should have arrived for completely different reasons at similar conclusions. So I'm interested in the taxonomy of this idea. If anyone can point me to its advocates and its origins, in any field ?? brain science, ev psych, political theory, psych or social psych, whatever ?? I'd appreciate it. Oh, incidentally, it also strikes me as true. Thanks in advance to all. David
<< Subj: the
"detachable self" ------------------------------ In a message dated
4/30/00 5:33:46 AM Eastern Daylight Time, skoyles writes: hb: Yes, it sure as heck is. However there's a catch. Personality can be an attractor or a repulser depending on circumstance. When we're in control and have a tight web of social contacts we radiate cheer and confidence. Cheer and confidence attract. When we lose control of our lives and are deprived socially we go into depression and our personality contracts. We are glum and insecure, radiating social cues which drive others away. In theories of individual selection, this makes no sense. But things are rather different in a theory which says that a group competing with other groups needs collective wits--collective skill and intelligence. Neural nets operate on a simple rule--give resources and influence to assemblies which make headway in solving the problem of the moment; retract goods and attention from assemblies whose guesses go astray. In the words of Jesus Christ, "To he who hath it shall be given. From he who hath not, even what he hath shall be taken away." The networked intellect of a group operates in much the same way. Chilling and unpleasant, but true. So personality is a billboard, a social interface. And it can say either "come and join me" or "by all means go away." js: When we say
an hb: an interesting point. js: Such strategies,
narratives and games interpret experience and js: Each conscious
self exists through the attention that it can grab from hb: very neat point. We become in large part who others want us to be. We deliver whatever we can assemble within ourselves that fits a social need, that brings others' crowding round for more of what we're offering. I watched The Full Monty last night--a film in which this process is painted vividly. A group of steel workers are out of jobs. The mills in which they worked are deserted and crumbling. They feel like unwanted scabs dropped from an embarrassing sore in the skin of society. At first they lose their confidence and give up almost totally. (Learned helplessness is at work here.) Among other things, they lose their sexual potency. Then they spot a new need when they stumble across Chippendale's--the strip joint where men take if off to please a crowd of women. So they work like blazes to remold themselves to fit what women desire and will pay for--a show of men who strut their naked bodies, and do it proudly. One self doesn't work, so they fashion another, and in so doing satisfy a need in their society. js: It becomes embodied
in their comments, >John--As you
know, I've been seeking the relevance of all these musings on
My hunch is, confirmatory of your opening comments, is that the retreat into the cave is not to find oneself, but to escape the unwanted self?image that interplay with others keeps driving home to the troglodyte. It could be seen as an adaptive behaviour which, much as a plastic mask allows damaged skin to heal out of direct contact with environmental infection, allows the cave dweller to effect personality reconstructions without having these continually destroyed by others who ? for all sorts of reasons (many discreditable) ? continually seek to maintain the old parameters. A coffer damn would be another parallel. That said, I cannot recall ever having been overly impressed by the success of such endeavours. Retreats are rarely good for the morale of troops, and my own inclination would be to stick it out in the social battlefield if at all possible. >> Mike??the theories in two books would back you up mightily. One is my humble (hah!) volume, The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history, whose all?too?presumptuous author presents evidence indicating that without the crowd rubbing shoulders round us we do what ants and bacteria deprived of contact with others of their kind do??we curl up and die. As for part two, the rallying of the troops, McNeil's Keeping Together In Time indicates that if you get a group of humans to do any sort of movement in synchrony, whether it's dancing or drilling battlefield maneuvers, you create a "muscular bonding" that makes them loyal to each other. Howard Rachlin, in his article "Self and Self?Control," which started this train of thought, supports McNeil in a fascinating way. Rachlin has done experiments which indicate that humans bond not on the basis of genes, but on the basis of what he calls "functioning together." (p. 89) In other words, humans will act the most altruistically not toward those who share their genes, but toward those with whom they've regularly labored for a common cause. This implies that our bonds create functional groups whose survival we put above that of our selves as individuals??a strong support for the notion of group selection through what that fellow Bloom calls "intergroup tournaments." It also has implications for the sense of self, which is not the lonely thing it purports to be, but as Rachlin says, "_may_ include other people with whom we function together." (p. 89) I'd alter that "may" to "must." A person who hasn't found his group and his function in it hasn't found his identity. S/he hasn't found his/her self. Ironic that what
we feel to be our most private possession, our sense of self, should
be so dependent on our melding with a group of others. But apparently
we evolved to be group modules, or so our motivational structure seems
to say. Without identity in a group we ache intolerably and whither
away. This implies that sometime in our evolutionary history groups
whose members felt the tie of bonds to those with whom they've worked
at making something larger occur consistently outdid groups whose members
were motivated by selfishness or mere genetic loyalty. It implies that
humans cluster most consistently around what that Bloom crank in his
book _Global Brain_ calls shared "behavioral memes." Howard The vast mass of chapter notes awaiting completion in the Bloom hundred?volume oeuvre says that during those periods of confusion in which one is "trying to find his/her self," one is actually attempting to discover into which social brackets one belongs. Of what groups is one a needed, desired, and necessary part? And in what role is one desired? Marriage and a job usually dispel the acid?rain of questionings and self?torturings that go with the "who am I?" question. Now you are a husband or a wife. In addition, you're part of a married couple??rather a small group but a group nonetheless. Plus you are a plumber, carpenter, chiropractor, or psychologist, and as such part of a corporation, a school, a practice, or whatever form of collectivity has chosen to employ you. And somewhere along the line you discover the subcultures which have taste so bad that they deign to include you as a cherished member of their crowd. So the question of who am I won't come up again until you're in your forties and begin wondering who, aside from merely wife/husband, plumber/psychologist, and member of an undiscriminating subculture you are. The question seems to be connected to transitions of the sort Gail Sheehy wrote up in her book Passages long ago. This leaves several questions and an answer. First, the answer. Crawling into a cave and contemplating your navel to find out who you are is, despite what Rachlin says, one of the world's most instant solutions to the question of "Who am I?" You are now a hermit searching for him/herself. A hermit has a defined relationship to society, a defined function, and a defined goal??all without all the painful grunching through daily life it takes to find an occupation, a job, a husband/wife, and what we these days call "a life" (as in "get a..."). The question is this. What physiological changes are responsible for Gail Sheehy's Passages??especially the crises of the twenties when one hasn't yet found one's "self" and those of the forties in which one needs to find one's self all over again? Actually, the twenties problem is easy. One as yet has no permanent vocation, job, social station, and spousal mate. The physiological consequences of being an outsider are the usual unpleasantries which accompany being not even on the bottom of a social heap??high glucocorticoids, low serotonin, and an immune system that's barely shambling from one bug to the next. But why does it happen all over again to men and women roughly between 40 and 50? Is it because our children are grown and no longer show the need for us as parents which for the last 20 years or more we've known? Is it because our job track seems to have taken us as far as we can go and we are stripped of one vital self?definer, a clear and distant goal? Or is it something more internal, like a menopausal shift in our hormones? Howard ?????????? Howard Bloom (founder: International Paleopsychology Project; 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, European Sociobiological Society; board member: Epic of Evolution Society), executive editor?? New Paradigm book series International Paleopsychology Project 705 President Street Brooklyn, NY 11215 Howard Bloom - www.paleopsych.org for two chapters
from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces
of History, see www.bookworld.com/lucifer for serialized chapters from
the upcoming Global Brain: the evolution of mass mind from the Big Bang
to the 21st Century, see http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/glob/default.html
and just for the heck of it, see http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/bloom.htm#Bloom db: The latter depend on (and come from) situations in which identity is involuntarily fixed. I can forget about being half-Jewish in New York city for months on end, but I can't put that identity down for one second on the West Bank. (Last time I tried I got stoned, not in the fun sense.) Maybe this is the wrong image, anyway, you can't build a bridge from point A to point A. hb: Yes, I just ran into an intelligent Arab-American woman the other day who insisted on dealing with me, not as a fellow human being, a hopefully heretical Jewish atheist, but as "you people," as in "why is it that there are so few of you people, but you control the world's media and money." Having counted the change in my pocket (very little) and the number of media outlets I own (none), I did my best to let her know that we were both made of the same stuff. If I was willing to treat her as an interesting bulemic with a brain, perhaps she might return the favor (though I'd prefer not to adopt the bulemia, thank you). No dice. I was just one of the "you people" she somehow finds herself dating, much to her parents' horror and fury. David Berreby and HB on IPP 7/9/98 whether people are all uniform pieces of a group organism or a collection of individuals depends on the question you ask. All men are alike compared to all women, if that's the question; but all men are not alike if the question is should I marry Bill or Ted?" David Berreby to IPP 7/8/98 ------------------------------
<< The So the question
is, which signs do I use to make that judgement that
This would have led to a good deal of forbidden sexuality running rampant in the white male southern mind. Cross-racial sexuality at that. How to deny it as part of the self? By projecting it onto black men and imagining that it was they who were the oversexed ones, not we upstanding pillars of (black female raping) southern manhood. Hence (and here we are talking historical fact), lynching black males for allegedly raping white women went hand in hand with raping female blacks. Here's another interesting historical twist. Some white women did sleep quite voluntarily with blacks. It's fairly easy to guess why. With their men imprinted on black females and showing little really impassioned sexual desre for them, some white females may have been horny as could be. However when the black males servicing their need were found out, they were accused of rape and hung by the real rapists. Dividing lines in the mind go hand in hand with those we map out for social realities. Cheers---Howard
Subj: Re: groups-- not so personal Date: 98-11-03 12:17:46 EST From: dberreby To: Bloom hb: look at empirical instances--the maintenance of a Chinese superorganism for 2,200 years, of an Egyptian identity for 5,000 before the Romans and its persistence since then, Jewish identity and group solidity of one sort or another for 3,200 years, Irish national identity for at least 700 years, Russian group identity for nearly 1,000 years, etc. Then look at the permeable, changeable, yet structurally distinctive entities of language. One can't intellectualize Indo European, Latin, Greek, Japanese, the many Chineses, French,. German, English, etc. out of existence. Each reflects the coherence of a group over long periods of time. >> OK, but it seems to me there's a danger of tautology in here somewhere. Who are the Jews? They who maintain the Jewish superorganism over time. What about all the Jews who fell away? hb: this is tricky. it's a bit like saying, hey, what about those trillions of dead skin cells that fall off of your body every day and the trillions of blood cells that go kaput within you and are cleaned up by scavengers, never to be seen again. With such enormous populations of what you called yourself yesterday having defected by today, how can you still call yourself you. A group is a dynamic entity. It's something like a whirlpool in a fast moving stream. Members come and go--especially through birth and death. Yet the form remains relatively stable, dancing in the flow. This sounds like poetry and hence like sophistry, yet the fact remains that a whirlpool is stable, retains a shape which may slither and slide around its center but remains highly distinguishable, and can carry you under and kill you--one of the best proofs of existence there is. Should this seem dubitable, ask a white water rafter how he feels about whirlpools in his favorite river--and whether he knows their locations. He does--an indication that they are highly durable despite the fact that from one minute to the next their consituent water molecules are never the same. Actually, didn't a famous Greek mention this aspect of the river itself? Its continuing identity despite the fact that it was never the same from one minute to the next? And if you read Mark Twain on the subject of the Mississippi, doesn't he portray a changing, dangerous, and beautiful beast whose identity continues some 140 years or so after Twain's youthful days working the river? We're talking about a basic aspect of form. Form is a strange lump which maintains itself in the midst of flux. In fact, it feeds on and is that flux made shapeful. And its shape comes in large part from something John Skoyles pointed out when describing hurricanes--the strangeness of boundary phenomenon. Humans are automatic boundary-makers. Hence we generate whorls in the midst of motion. Humans in groups are automatic collective boundary creators. We throw up barriers in spite of ourselves. In that sense we don't choose to make the boundaries, we are compelled by our nature generate them. Boundaries bring us together and turn us into elements of functional entities larger than ourselves, macro beasts of multitudes which defend us from other multitude monsters. Boundaries blanket us with warmth, connection, and personal identity. They situate us in the intersecting space which gives us our sense of control. They help us create the hippocampal maps with which we gain a sense of forceful or satisfying being. Alas, they do so by definining not only an inside to which we belong, but an outside which excludes others and pits us against them. Should we oppose this tendency? Yes, and we've done it successfully to the extent that we've gone from exclusionary groups of 50 to exclusionary groups of between five million (Cuba or Israel) to exclusionary groups of a billion (China). This is a big leap forward in inclusiveness. Again, we haven't done it by choice. It's happened to us because of our nature, because of impulses inherited from our nature as form in a form-making universe, our nature as animals who engage by oppositional embrace. db: Ah, well, MacDonald argues, they don't count. We're studying the Jewish superorganism here. Can't worry about those who no longer called themselves Jews. I think your language observation may be similar. YOu say French reflects the coherence of a group over time. What is the group? Those who speak French. hb:I think that you've spotted something extremely profound. There is meaning in this tautology. yes, we have a compulsion to define ourselves, and it seems one we share not only with chimps patrolling their territories and killing outsiders, but with rivers and hurricanes. in other words, it is another of those heritages fifteen billion years old, not a mere four million years young. The tautology of self-definition is essential to being. db: Bretons. Descendants of Germanic tribes of the 9th century, Prince Poniatowski whose ancestors were Poles. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Cote D'Ivoire. This is a coherent group? Well, sure, in the tautological sense. French is the language of French speakers. Similarly, MacDonald's argument boils down to a circle: Jews who are ethnocentric are ethnocentric. The persistence of the French language is evidence of the persistence of the French language. Does it tell us anything else about the next French speaker who comes through the door? What color his skin will be? Nope. How many children he has? How he feels about Picasso or the Lewinsky scandal? Nope and nope and nope. His DNA? Nope. See Cavalli-Sforza on the varieties of human strains that make up the French population, and that's just the metropole, never mind Francophone Africa or Canada. I guess what I'm suggesting is that one should be careful assuming that membership in one trait group assures membership in any other. hb: hmm. food for thought. have you seen the old statistical studies which demonstrate that the use of one word constrains the nature of the word which is likely to follow. In other words, just one word narrows the possiblity space of the word which follows from total randomness to a far smaller set. Two consecutive words squeeze the probability of the third drastically. and so on. these equations, once a theoretical plaything, are now used in language recognition programs. proof that they work. cultural elements like those reflected in the french language are like long strings of words. I suspect that they restrict the choices of their bearers tremendously. this includes choices about which cross-cultural groups to join. Have you seen my Pythagoras chapter about the creation of cross-culture groups based on common emotional propensities and brain properties after urbanization hit the appropriate boiling point? One thing I failed to mention in that chapter--the sixth century-bc Pythagorean style cross-city-state subcultures I discuss were actually restricted to the Greek macro-cultural envelope--one which included hundreds of city-states stretched from the Black Sea to France and Algeria. However much as these subcultural sheers leapt over city-state barriers, they failed to whip their way through the Persian cultural membrane, or that of the Egyptian culture. Penetrations of these larger cultural barriers took a power drill like an Alexander the Great or a rare penetration device like Pythagoras' alleged visits to India and the very rare visits of Buddhist emissaries to the levant in the hope of grabbing converts, as may have happened under Ashoka in roughly 225 bc. Similar tough envelopes of all kinds exist today. Meaning absorption in a culture allows a good deal of identification with numerous cross-groups, but the nature of those groups is constrained by one's various larger cultural envelopes. db: French cooking and French speaking and French literature do not add up to a bounded entity like a cell; rather they are partly overlapping circles and many people stand within the overlapping territory and many people stand in only one. It sounds hard to keep straight but we have really big brains suited to the task. Language too has not been fully accounted for yet any idiot can talk or type out a few lines (and some may feel this is proof). hb: very true. so does the cell metaphor hold or do we need one which allows for greater complexity? gotta think about it. An initial something which comes to mind--new studies of the passage of smart molecules (and dumb ones) in and out of the walled city of a cell's nucleus. The traffic is enormous. In fact, it dwarfs that of Paris, New York, or Mexico City. It takes a password, a "nuclear localization signal," and an escort, transportin, to get in. It takes another passport, rev, to get out. (John Travis. "Outbound Traffic: Scientists identify proteins that move stuff out of the nucleus." Science News, November 15, 1997: 316-317.) The "membership" of a smart molecule is constantly changing as it goes from a messenger hanging around the cell's membrane waiting for signals from receptors to a traveller along microtubular highways to a visitor in the nucleus, then to an actor in the nuclear process of molecular generation and absorption. Seems a bit like the human dilemma--like the old obervation that the scripts from which we read and the identities we assume change when we move from the livingroom to the bedroom to the bathroom, etc. OK, this is not the answer, just a thought. Gotta chew on this some more. You toss good questions. Cheers--Howard ------------------------------ How about the term
"insulation"? Don't want every part of the system to get overwhelmed
by its neighbors. j. >> the term "boundary" has been
developed as a robust concept in group discussions. david berreby is
the concept's unofficial guardian. it's been extended to the sense of
self, the self-definition of a social group, the envelope of form which
encapsulates a photon, a quark, a self-assembling net, the membrane
of a cellular nucleus, that of the cell itself, and even to the Moogian
envelope of a musical tone. can't beat that multi-layered demonstration
of an evolutionarily stable strategy (boundary creation) showing up
on fractal level after fractal level as this universe hops, skips, and
jumps through its creative leaps--its joyful jumps of phase transition,
its delight in the struggle to give birth to emergence. you know how
the birth ritual goes--swell but remain structurally stable, hit a crisis
that tears you apart until you scream your guts out, then grin with
joy when you see the squalling baby alive and kicking with its own form
and energy after the pain ends. says Prigogine, that's the way emergence
goes. says corollary generator theory, with its fractal obsession, the
Prigogine birthing process happens over and over, umpteenthing to the
google plex, maxingand mini leveling. iterating in an infinity of micro-crises
which swell until they kick off macro heaves of creation. as a human,
you know that you and i have the mini crises which link us to a harshly
birthing universe. we experience them sometimes every hour, sometimes
every day. as psychologists who've studied the works of such folks as
Elizabeth Loftus, we also know that our synthetic memory, trying to
smooth and "normalize" our sense of self, erases these tiny
but nightmarish crises from memory. but being shrewd observers of our
best ethological and psychological subject, our selves, we are not fooled.
or are we? Howard Another detail that seems telling-the change in the gang one wants to make one's own also shifts the script for the conscious self-the narrator Gazzaniga feels resides in the right frontal or prefrontal cortex.. Note how those affected with what the article calls a change of self change the litanies of things they recite-the creed of animal rightists, of new leftism, or simply beginning a conversation with a question about the price of clothing-presumably opening the way for a discussion about how to buy it at the lowest cost. In other words, there's still a self and a very strong one when the right frontal lobe is damaged. Self does not "reside" in the right frontal lobe. But some vital element of its preference does. Howard Ps. Ted Coons has pointed out that to develop a self, we need to both affiliate and differentiate. The taste that leads to affiliation is affected somehow by the right frontal cortex. What parts or processes of the brain handle differentiation? And how do the two work together to produce an identity-a sense of me? Researchers find brain area that controls "self" By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, May 8 (Reuters) - Researchers studying patients with a rare degenerative brain malady that can trigger dramatic changes in personality said on Tuesday they have pinpointed a part of the brain that controls a person's sense of "self." An area in the front portion of the brain's right frontal lobe appears to harbor the sense of self -- in other words, personality, beliefs, likes and dislikes, said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California-San Francisco. Miller said he began looking into the anatomy of the self after noticing that several of his patients with frontotemporal dementia, commonly known as Pick's disease, underwent a stark transformation, changing their religious and political beliefs, and altering their preferences in food and clothing. Miller and several colleagues examined 72 people with Pick's disease, which is similar to Alzheimer's disease. The researchers used advanced brain imaging techniques to determine which areas of the brain had the most severe degeneration. They also evaluated the patients for major changes in personality, values and tastes. Seven patients had undergone a dramatic change of self, the study found. Six of those had their most severe abnormalities in the brain's right frontal lobe. Of the 65 patients whose sense of self had been preserved, only one had the most severe damage in the right frontal lobe. Miller said the findings indicate that normal functioning of the right frontal lobe is needed for people to maintain their sense of self. He also said the findings demonstrate that a biological disorder can break down well-established patterns of awareness and self-reflection. "This is kind of a mysterious area in the brain," Miller said in an interview. "The question is why in this non-language area do we see a loss of self concepts. And the answer is: We don't know." The study was presented during a meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Philadelphia. AN INCURABLE ILLNESS Pick's disease is a slow, progressive, degenerative disease that eventually progresses to death. The incurable ailment involves deterioration in mental function caused by changes in brain tissue, including the presence of abnormal bodies (Pick's bodies) in the nerve cells of affected areas of the brain. It strikes about
1 out of 100,000 people and is more common in women than men. It usually
begins between ages 40 and 60. The change in self represents an early
manifestation of the disease in some patients. Later symptoms include
losses in the ability to recognize objects or people and language abilities.
One patient involved in the study was a 54-year-old woman described
as a charming, dynamic real estate agent who went from wearing expensive
designer apparel to choosing cheap clothing and gaudy beads and asking
strangers the cost of their clothing. Once a lover of French cuisine,
she adopted a love of fast food, particularly Taco Bell. Another patient
in the study was a 63-year-old woman described as a well-dressed life-long
political conservative who became an animal rights activist who hated
conservatives, dressed in T-shirts and baggy pants and liked to say,
"Republicans should be taken off the Earth." The concept of
self has intrigued philosophers, writers and scientists for centuries,
but only recently has the technology been available to study its anatomical
basis, the study noted. It may be deflating to some people that the
very essence of who they are -- including their beliefs and values --
is merely another anatomical process. "I'm far from a philosopher
and I'm a pretty simple guy," Miller said. "I don't know.
I'm so tied to the idea that we are the sum of all of our neural connections
that for me it's kind of my approach." 11:57 05-08-01 Copyright
2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution
of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly
prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall
not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions
taken in reliance thereon. All active hyperlinks have been inserted
by AOL. ---Original Message-----
From: Mike Waller Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 1:39 PM To: Irwin
Silverman Subject: Re: sports, mirror neurons, and culture Irwin wrote:
> I think it was Jim Dabbs who published data to the effect that
> testosterone levels of fans went up after a victory by the home
team > and down after a loss - > > I have occasionally thought
of comparing stats on crime, accidents, > suicide, mental institionalization,
domestic violence etc. - measures > of social dissolution - on winning
and losing days - probably best for > NFL games and would need an
optimal population size (e.g. Buffalo, > Green Bay, Denver) and a
cohesive fan base. When England beat Germany 5:! at soccer last week
in Germany there was, unusually, no subsequent violence on the streets
between rival fans. The German police were quoted as saying that even
the German soccer hooligans were so depressed they had gone straight
home. When England won the World Cup in 1966 it was said that emigration
from England dropped by 6% in the following year. Less on subject, but
none the less amusing, it is said that crime was at exceptionally low
levels on the day of Prince Charles' wedding to the then Lady Di. This,
presumably, because all the little criminals were at home watching the
telly! Mike
Yanomamo and Ache
don't have the benefit of simultaneously choosing to be: Republican
or Democrat; Methodist, Quaker, atheist, Satanist, Wikka-follower, Buddhist,
or Moslem; Scientologist, New Ager, Fundamentalist, scientist; fan or
hater of the Beastie Boys, Beethoven, the Spice Girls, Ska, Reggae,
or John Cage; punk, skinhead, preppie, bohemian, greenie (as in PETA
and Environmental Radical), etc. Nor can they define their identities
by eating pizza, Chinese takeout, quiche, croissants, and choosing between
Italian-Swiss Colony Muscatel and Chateau Lafitte Rothschild. Granted,
they can tilt in various directions of their own, but have nowhere near
the number of predefined pigeonholes for personality available to cosmopolitian,
trans-cultural urbanites. hb to David Berreby In a message dated 98?03?28 20:04:21 EST, dberreby writes: << the group?selection effects that so excite Howard are cultural, not genetic. >> agreed. this is why i keep making such a big deal of the "narcissism of minor differences" as a diversity generator. In other beings, like the cichlid fish of lake nyas, this tendency to pick fights over next to nothing does create genetic speciation. but studies designed NOT to show this effect end up demonstrating inadvertently that humans cluster around common ideas, memes, whatever you prefer to call them. so cultural differentiation is what we've got. especially since our conquering groups, of whom there are many, seem fond of inseminating women of the folks they've beaten, and will travel great distances to do so. The Indo?Europeans invading India, Anatolia and Greece around 2,000 b.c., the Mycenaen warrior, conqueror, colonizers of 1,250 b.c. or so, the Vikings of 900 a.d.??all of whom were related??had several things in common. When colonizing they apparently went out in all?male bands determined to take the native women wherever they landed, mulch the men, and start a new genetically?mixed offshoot of "their own people." I wonder if the Bantu, who also wandered great distances and were ungulate herders, as were the various Aryan groups I've mentioned, did the same. Certainly we know the Yanomamo have similar habits??kill men, grab women and impregnate 'em. And then there are always Jane Goodall's war?making Gombe chimps, who utilized the same strategy. However both the Yanomamo and the chimps seem to have kept their conquests very local, and brought the women home (something the Mycenaeans often did as well). I wonder about groups like the Iroquois, who travelled great distances on their raiding parties. Anyone know what they did with the women of the locations they pillaged? What were they after on their war?making expeditions, anyway? Clothes (the favorite Arab goody to snatch in a raid)? Some minor sign that one had killed (like a souvenir body part from the victim)? <<I think there is a qualitative difference: that the sense of self is defined both by the connections by which we recognize similarities with other individuals, and the barriers by which we recognize differences, and that the smaller the interacting group, the more emphasis we place on similarities when defining ourselves. >> <<I think this is an interesting idea. It's also a problematic idea. Both material in E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology and in the literature of group psychology indicate that when a group is master of all it surveys or is at total and contented peace, its members focus on minor differences between themselves and their group brethren. If the group's success reaches a certain point, this tendency will lead to group fission. However if the group is pitted against another group, the individual members focus on their similarities and aim their need for self?differentiation toward outsiders. Which would tend to indicate that "self" is a device that operates on some sliding scale in response to group circumstance. Sometimes the need for the differentiation of selfhood leads to what one Bloom bit of literature calls "the huddle" and at other times it leads to "the squabble.'" In either case it serves an adaptive purpose, tossing the group through phenotypic variations necessary for survival as things change. One of these variations could be called, using Val Geist's vocabulary, a group dispersal phenotype, and the other a group maintenance phenotype. We share this need for differentiation and solidarity with numerous other social creatures. In that sense do they, too, have a sense of "self"? Does some non?self?aware mechanism panic them when they feel they are losing the envelope of "selfhood," as it panics us? Do they strive with all the dominance mechanisms in their possession to keep that envelope of differentiation, whether it be against their fellows in good times or against their enemies when they are in a heavy intergroup tournament? Is the continuum between panic over self?dissolution and glory over having decisively won a match against another group member in them as well? Is our "self" simply the manifestation of a very old thermostatically variable group and individual survival mechanism? One which shows up in our new brain shell, the neocortex as a shadow on the cave of our skull, a shadow of an ancient animal archetype grown distorted in a manner induced by the metaphoric shape and atmosphere of the extra skull space and of the new cavern?interior we call consciousness? <If I'm in a roomfull of Indonesian businessmen, it's going to be difficult to form any concept of my individuality which would include connections to the other people present.>> <<OK, but what's the first thing you do if you can find a common language? Engage in small talk. And what does small talk aim at? Finding some category you can share. I've noticed in highly disparate groups, like an international conference, that people will ask about children and be visibly relieved to find everyone in the conversation is a parent. Now, across all kinds of barriers of culture, generation, religion, they have something they can discuss with sincerity sounds like a good observation to me. this would be a conformity enforcer??a group cohesion mechanism. both the need to cluster and the need to differentiate are built into us. it's the conformity enforcer and diversity generator of the complex adaptive system model of life form behavior. a standard darwinian model calls for both these principles, as does the cas model. <<Makes you wonder if the vast proliferation of consumer tastes as global capitalism expands doesn't serve some societal need for minor points of common ground (you like Pepsi? Hey, I like Pepsi! Another good point. I'm tracing exactly this kind of cross?cultural spread of memes which then create differentiated subcultures within an urban group in my work at this moment. I've already come up with strong signs of it 10,000 to 8,000 bp and onward in neolithic cities. Now I'm tracing it where the details are a bit clearer, in cities which have left us a historical record??Miletus in 600 b.c. and Athens from 450 b.c. onward. Foreigners like Xeno would arrive in a town like Athens from Elea and get a bunch of locals to congregate around some variation of what Artistotle??a century or so later?? called his dialectic method. OK, so it might be given a local twist and turned into the "Socratic" method. Then some populizer like Plato would give it his own spin and get a movement, a subculture, into full swing around it. He might formalize the subculture in an institution like the Academy. Meanwhile other foreigners would waft into town from the Italian colonies carrying Pythagoreanism, which might also take root in Athens. Athenians could then choose between Pythagorean mysticism or the new Aristotelian, highly materilistic rationalism now in vogue at the Academy. Kagan's introverted hyper?sensitives who need to withdraw from overdoses of stimuli might be drawn to the Pythagorean school, and Kagan's extroverted under?sensitives who crave a full belly of stimulation from the outside world might be drawn to the Aristotelians at the Academy. (Aristotle, by the way, was also a furriner??from Macedonia.) Thus the Athenians, driven by their own brain settings, would snatch at a foreign idea to find a sense of group identity which simultaneously made them feel separate from their fellow Athenians and together with others who shared their otherwise seemingly insane sensibilities. This was one of the benefits of urban life. You could choose your group and find room for the peculiar machinations of your own neurobiology. You chould choose your sense of self??your own tag of simultaneous diffentiation and belonging. The cultural colonization or international memetic crosswinds allowing this had gotten their start in the neolithic and gave one a luxury not readily available to members of a tribe, who could find fewer groups which would allow them to differentiate and simultaneously validate their personal peculiarities in the bath of belonging. Needless to say, all of this huddling and squabbling was: 1) a benefit of something tribes had begun with moities and clans??the founding of groups within groups; 2) the radical expansion of the group within a group within a group form of nested hierarchy when the city, a child of trade and greater intergroup contact, came into being. 3) a source of that paradox of diversity generation and conformity enforcement we call the self??which in itself is a built?in biological mechanism making us part of a group level "creative web" like those Eshel talks about in his bacteria 4) and so one and so forth until Bloom ends up dishing out his entire group brain, complex dynamical system theory of social everything including noses for the zillionth time. Howard There's a paradox at work here which applies to Islam, Christianity, democracy, dictatorship, and even to primitive (or enlightened, depending on your point of view) tribes. Social integration and its fruits--protection, peace, security, prosperity, and dignity (in other words, high status for the group in relation to its neighbors and opponents)--are the greatest fruits a leader can offer. To those politicians, theoreticians, religions, and ideologies which promise the gift of plenty we bind our selves by ties of allegiance. We also give resources--influence, good food, good lodging, access to women, and high rank--to those who offer us this salem, shalom, Friede, pace, or peace. The gifts of good leadership and of worldviews which bind us in a positive manner are great. How do we draw the line between these dispensations and manipulation? How do we do it when we are seldom aware of the power the group conveys to us? Several nights ago I watched Pat and Mike, a film written by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon which starred Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. The scriptwriters are two of the best and most perceptive who've ever worked in Hollywood. Yet their words demonstrated an enormous cultural blind spot. Katherine Hepburn is engaged to a man who does not see her potential as "an individual" but instead wants to pigeonhole her as a subordinate figure, the ideal "little woman" who keeps house, entertains guests, and defers to her husband in all matters of higher judgment. Hepburn throws off this form of oppression and becomes an "individual" in her own right, or so says the plot. In reality, something else is going on. Hepburn moves from one form of social integration to another. She bolts from the man who envisions one web of interaction and finds a place in another social mesh. Spencer Tracy encourages her to take advantage of her athletic talents, becomes her manager, guides her through the world of professional sports, sets up connections with promoters, financial backers, and a worldwide network of coliseum managers, newspaper reporters, and the many others needed to make an athlete into a star. Hepburn falls in love with Tracy, despite the fact that the two come from different social strata. She looks up to Tracy for protection and for his skill at integrating her into his vast skein of connections. Meanwhile, she insists on dominating him emotionally. Each is a parent to the other at some times, and at other points becomes his or her partner's child. This complex interdependence--a healthy one in romantic relationships and in marriage--makes the two equals. However at key points in the movie Hepburn delivers the film's central message--that the major goal in life is to overcome ones self in order to become one's self. This is a powerful rallying cry, but a wildly inaccurate way of perceiving the facts. It is also a badly misguided notion of the nature of the "self." It implies that the individual achieves success through rugged individualism. It fails to see that achievement and self-actualization are the result of making wise choices about which social megateams and microteams--which intimate partnerships and larger social matrices--are most suited to one's character. The existence of social webs and the opportunity to choose between them are both the results of large and small scale social integration. Islam, Judaism, Marxism, secular humanism, Christianity, democracy, dictatorship, and their rival isms act as web-weavers. In doing so they make us knots in their macrame, modules in their machinery. Without choosing to become these modules, we would be disempowered utterly. So who is manipulating whom? Is this an I-win-you-lose game, as the word manipulation implies? Or is it really a matter of when-you-win-we-both-win? The answer, I suspect, lies in the degree of pluralistic freedom and freedom to develop one's talents offered by each form of society. Howard
<< Subj: Re:
Sage Sighting
A brain is like the set of a tv talk show--crammed with individuals some of whom are audience, others directors, actors, and crew. Though they seem to work cooperatively, each itches for its crack at fame, its chance to pilot the entire enterprise under its own name. Yet the whole thing is presented under the monicker of the soul who has managed to become the star. Cameramen swoop around the set searching for good points of view. Some train their lenses on the faces of the guests and host, and others on the fans reacting from their theater seats. Boom men and women aim their microphones to snatch a telling gasp, while technicians watch the levels to make sure a normal voice won't seem to blast. In the control room another team decides which of six shots on the monitors will be the one that viewers see. The director relays messages to the host via an earplug, hand signals, and cue cards. Though the star is often the last to know, everything is orchestrated to make it look as if he's the one who's running the whole show. Packed in your head are multitudinous participants of a similar kind. Shadow and line detectors, visual coordinators, motor areas, speech centers, movement organizers, balance handlers, future-predictors, past-retrievers, pheromone sensors, time keepers, energy boosters, impulse suppressors, sexual motivators, passion channelers, discipline demanders, urges to become childish and to feed, urges to become vigorous and to lead, the right cerebral hemisphere pulling in one direction, the left cortex yanking in the other, the amgdala attempting to impose its fears and hide, the striatum demanding adventure and a chance to shine. Who is the star, the spotlit puppet of this crew? It's an illusion you call you. This is the self we so much need to feel is in control. Despite the scientific mystery called will, the "self" is seldom actually in charge. The experiments of Alexander??? Libet proved that. The urge to move your finger appears in the brain far out of conscious view. It's sent up to awareness after the action sequence is already under way. Your conscious self may posses some vague notion of why the finger's about to tap and then again, it may have not have a clue. One way or the other, experiments by Sperry and Gazzaniga show it will manage to concoct an after-the-fact excuse. Then, arrogance of arrogance, it will claim to have been the action's generalissimo. Feeling in charge is necessary trickery. To those who "know" they're in control go the spoils--the prizes of the complex adaptive system's group-intelligence-generating machinery. Johnny-come-lately consciousness may be. But this is not a fact which consciousness can afford to see. A group brain also
needs a sense of self--a collective identity. It needs a center of consciousness
giving plot to chaos, and turning randomness to handlable reality. This
is where the competition between subcultures, super-cultures, individuals,
and the biopsychosocial brew comes together to create a collective we
or a collective you. In a message dated 98-07-03 18:39:46 EDT, Reed Konsler writes: How do you suggest we assay for free will...or is there any such thing? >> Hmmmm. We thrashed that out about six months ago. Working from Libet's experiments and others demonstrating that an "intention" arises in our brain before the fait accompli decision is presented to our left brain "interpreter" for a cockamamie after-the-fact explanation, Mike Waller presented his theory of consciousness and will and I mine. Mine was actually one of the many fruits of paleopsych interchange. Mike used organizational theory to show that in a stable environment, a complex system may minimize on energy expenditures by working in a fixed manner. But when it's in a rapidly altering environment, it needs to invest excess resources on a good many internal agents free to probe around and test out various possibilities, some of which lead to dead ends, and some of which may pay off. Mike proposed that consciousness and hence the illusion of will are results of the fact that we are cerebrally equipped for change. Consciousness is our luxury, our free agent, our solver of problems which can't be handled by learned or genetically shaped reflex. Hope I haven't done Mike an injustice with this summation. My take on it went more like this, and complements Mike's. Most of the decisions are actually made in a non-conscious corner of the brain then shovelled up to the verbal and visual territory we think of as us. As Gazzaniga and Sperry showed with their split brain experiments, conscious, after-the-fact explanations of why we "willed" an act can be fairly ridiculous. So if conscious "will" is merely a caboose filled with clowns, what function does it perform? In our group theorizations about self there seemed some agreement that the illusion of self is tied in with the need for another necessary delusion--that of control. You know all the experiments demonstrating that when we lose our sense of control, we go into a biopsychological nosedive, including depression, lethargy, muddled thought, and decreased levels of immune system activity. So having an internal fantasist capable of creating a delusion of control can literally save our lives, not to mention doing us more good than prozac. If this is the case, in what way is will free? The Bloom suggestion on the subject was that the "conscious" seizes on ideas, attitudes, stances, stereotypes, worldviews, emotional strategies, group affiliations, etc. which it then bulldozes back to such actual decision makers as the limbic system, the striatum, etc. The force-feed resets the firing positions of the old reptilian mechanisms sufficiently that our concepts and other "mindware" manage to bias future decisions. Those decisions arise and are conveyor belted up to the conscious mind for the usual bogus explanation of why we, the verbal/visual us, "decided" to do something in whose decision "we" actually did not participate. However we *did* retool our actual decision making reflexes before they had a chance to catapult the finished action-conclusion our way, so in this strange way, our will is free. Besides, sometimes the Wallerian phenomenon takes over. We are up against something our genetically-influenced and rote-learned mechanisms can't figure out, so we do have to do some actual conscious pondering. However non-verbal emotive elements play a large role in our cogitations, even when we have to "think out" what to do next. The reptilian and early mammalian jostlings may be silent, but they are potent. Having arrived at
this position a ways back, where do we go next? Howard
Subj: Re: boundaries and oscillations--personal Date:98- 11-14 13:59:29 EST From: skoyles(Dr. John Skoyles) To: HBloom Howard I have lots of thoughts about oscillation and boundaries but it is hard getting them together in response to the emailling that has been going on. So here is a try. Some ideas upon binding and music. One of the unanswered problems in why is music not noise? hb: very nifty question. one guess. the brain uses quite a bit of pattern matching. NMDA receptors apparently aid in learning by pattern matching between pre-synaptic and post- synaptic outputs. The thalamus is like a musical clutch or clearing house, pattern matching between incoming signals and the waiting rhythms of internal circuits waiting to catch input in their melodic loops. This is why the researchers I cited several weeks ago who studied the manner in which the oscillations of incoming signals from a rat's oscillating whiskers were matched to the patterns geneerated internally by comprehension and perception circuits thought of the brain as an fm radio. From my limited understanding of these things (the only radio I built as a kid which worked was a crystal set--the transistor radio I spent three months on was a dud), both am and fm work via pattern matching. Both take an incoming signal whose wavelength is humongous and match it harmonically to an internally generated signal of far smaller dimensions. Am uses the incoming signal to modulate the amplitude of the radio's internally generated oscillations. FM uses the incoming signal to modulate the frequency. But it's all the same--take a signal 60 miles long (the literal length of a 3 kilohertz signal) and match it harmonically to an itsy bitsy signal within the radio. Apparently this technique, a profoundly musical one, is used in the brain. So one answer--music is music because it matches the brain's music. the brain's music, in turn, is music because it manages sufficient sycnrony of rhythm and melody (frequency alterations and interweavings) to keep from tearing things apart, sufficient conformity enforcement to allow each odd woggle to be read as a sigal by other brain components--much as the ping of the triangle, heard only once during a performance, sill manages to fit into the whole. js: Shuffle up Bach's Goldberg variations and its notes become cacophony. Same notes but no longer something we hear as 'music'. What could have Bach done by organising these notes so we that we so strongly hear 'real' percepts that hold our attention and touch our emotions and give us even a sense of pleasure? hb: for one thing, he's syched his choice of tones, their fusillades, their rhyths, melodies, etc. to the common but extraordinarily complex template of culture. Hence he's synched his output to the shared pattern recognition mask of the multitudes in the Western sphere of influence. His music might well have seemd cacophonous in 1450, when music was radically different, or in India before 1600, when the rhythms accepted as musical would have sounded like raw noise to us, and presumably our music would have sounded like an assault on the ears to an Indian. |
