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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. Going back to pattern matching, Bach has matched his patterns to those pulsing syncnronousl in our brains. js: I think cognitive binding offers a new approach to this question. Here I offer two theories. First, an account of abstract aesthetic percepts needed to understand the percepts of Bach's music. Second, I offer a modification of this to cover cases such as representational pictorial and scriptural art. This latter theory enables not only provides a theory of visual aesthetics but covers some aspects of musical aesthetics to be discussed not dealt with by the first one.The first theory in outline is this: (1) The world around us is made of entities that offers coherent but often partially masked and distorted information [a cat behind a chair visual divided up by the chair legs] as to their existence. (2) These entities have to be reconstructed as objects and scenes containing by the brain from its sensory inputs. This is called binding. (3) Though only partial understood, present research suggests this is done by 40 Hz (gamma) rhythms of neural network activation in the brain (though it is likely such frequencies might serve other functions, and binding also use other processes). hb: I would suspect there is a wide range of frequencies, amplitudes, and rythms available for binding. If there were only one rythm, we'd get might confused. The simple act of seeing a baseball coming our way necessitates simultanously binding and differentiation a bunch of iputs rapidly. We can't get the twists of the seams on the ball (something Ted Williams, in tests with a high speed, controlled pitch, could see) mixed up with the curve of the ball, its velocity, the decrease in its speed, the growth of the ball's form in our eye, the sounds of the crowd around us, the since of where the first baseman is so some part of our mind can plan the toss we'll make once we've caught the ball, or the propriosensive feel of where our hands are and how they are positioned. Neural music, I suspect, simultaneously has to bind and separate, much as the sound of symphony is separated in strains which writhe around each other maintaining their unity and separateness simultaneously. (4) These binding processes are innate but open. That is we are born with the capacity to bind the coherences present in sensory input, but nothing in this binding processes pre- specifies which coherences. hb: neat insight.( hb: Uexkulls Innenwelt and Umwelt diffentiation, which he, you, and I know is old as the hills and new as can be. js: (6) Nor are binding processes limited to processing only coherence arising from spatial-temporal natural senses and objects but also, nonspatial ones if they can be created in coherences in artificial stimuli. hb: good one. this hints at the uniquely Skoylesian insights which have led to a further understanding of something my own work has tossed around for decades now-- the crowds we carry in our mind. js: (7) Music developed to provide the listeners with a highly structured stimuli input that contain coherences and so create binded percepts. This happens at several levels and through several auditory manipulations. Notably, the auditory stimuli of music are structured within tonal space. Individual pieces are generated from varied manipulations of recognizable patterns embedded in higher-order patterns. hb: yup, we are on the same wavelength. js: (8) Such artificial coherences when bound by the binding processes in the brain create artificial percepts with the 'feel' of actual percepts. Mere percepts would be boring when repeated. However, by arrangement and manipulation near infinite creations can be made with them. Thus these percepts can entertain us. hb: absolutely, right on, bro. js: To put this in more detail: Our brain faces a problem: the world out there is normally made up of whole entities. But its sensory input through its eyes concerns only the patches of colour, darkness and motion detected upon its retina. The visual field seen by the brain lacks information as to what entities were responsible for its contents. A patch of rednesses is marked out not upon it as originating in say someone's jumper. The brain must therefore find away to turn such patches of colour, darkness and motion upon its visual field into information about entities in the world outside. We might call this task, identify binding. Moreover, the patches upon our visual field link only to parts. For instance, a cat laying behind a chair is whole but seen on our retina though the chair's legs it is cut up into portions -- head, body and tail. Before we can link the patches with the cat we need to put them back together in our experience as whole entities. hb: machine analogy coming. in my photography I'm now playing with a program which will stitch nine images of a single object into a far large coherent entity than the camera can catch in just one photo. One moves the camera as the eye roves nystagmatically to capture the entire panorama. Then the program matches the edges and lines and puts them all together. Kauffman's model of a search web divides the space it probes into patches. Ant modelers, a very active bunch of computer folk, use similar approaches to in imitate and understand the search pattern of an ant colony robotically or mathematically. Ironically, the modelers are doing what the mind does. They are trying to create via mathematics an Innewelt of approximated ants, virtual ants, robotic ants, which match the behavior of real ants out there in the Umwelt. Now that we are stuck with the cocky but very inaccurate mechanism of a symbolic brain we are trying to push it to catch up with forms of internal simulation our motor and other "intutive" centers handle easily--the motion of complex dynamic entities. It isn't easy. David Berreby, in a phone conversation yesterday, mixed up a cocktail of his thoughts, mine, and those of Mike Waller. As filtered through the limits of the Bloom brain it tastes like this: our species, Homo, took a gamble on abandoning the old senses for a new one--that vast and empty symbol space opened up by a prefrontal cortex of unprecedented size and cranial centrality. But the vacuum of this new arena was enormous. We've been filling it in for at least 45,000 years now, and still the hollows dwarf those parts which we've managed to populate. We've filled it with the props and lighting of culturally spawned and stored concepts. But we have a very long way to go. Which leads to a thought which hit after David hung up the phone. Humans are distinguished from all other animals in being able to vividly be able to feel, see, and speak with internal casts of characters from whom we've been separated by decades or by centuries. In _Mindware_, you vividly portray the probable evolutionary importance to our species social abilities of being able to hold in mind people from whom we are separated by spaces and amounts of time which are impossible for a chimpanzee. The result is to stitch together vastly separated patches of humanity. In modern terms, the Serbs of Chicago and British Columbia are as vitally concerned about Kosovo as are the Serbs of Belgrade. All are pulled togeether over distances of five thousand miles or more by an event which ended over 600 years before. David Berreby and I have built on your concept by extending the notion of being able to hold in symbol space friends and family we haven't seen for years. We've added ancestors and the concomitant ability to bear with us cultural milestones from hundreds and thousands of years before. This binds us not only intetribally, but inter-generationally. In this way search space grows exponentially. It includes not just the humans who are now, but many who have been in the vastness of a past long lost but still held internally. Like the brain, we knit together ever larger patches into a coherent umwelt of personal identity and culture. Now for another uniquely human trait. Because of the emtiness still remaining in the arena of prefrontal cortical, conceptual space, we are the only species capable of solopsism and its agonies. Only we can imagine that all before us and around us is a dream. That those with whom we speak are mere pawns of our imaginings, and that, like Pascal crying out in a universe Galileo's telescope had hollowed out, we are hugely and emptily alone. Loneliness is something non-human creatures feel. But not the sense that all is but a whisp of nothingness in a universe so infinite it turns its back and leaves us stranded on a planet lost in space. No other creature has imagination strong enough to create an emptiness so overwhelming that it makes us into nothings in its depth. Forget tool-making and upright stance as the mark of our humanness. We are the species of ancestor- gods, of philosophical angst, and of cosmic loneliness. js: In general, we live in a world which mostly offers us only scrapes of information since many difficulties add together to cause our sense organs to pick-up only parts of what are in reality whole entities -- distortions, interferences, corruptions, intrusions -- even camouflage and concealment. Debugging them out of sensory input to create percepts of external things we might call, coherence binding. Binding is an innate skill but the domains over which it works are left neurobiologically open. This enables binding to be artificially stimulated by artificially coherent input to generate non-natural percepts which mimic some of the aspects of actual entities. At present these artificial percepts are known as aesthetic percepts. hb: hang on, I'm confused. What differentiates aesthetic perceptions from others. Remember, even frogs have in Innenwelt. Does this mean they have an aesthetic perception? js: The auditory sense I suggest, is particularly open for developing novel aesthetic percepts since sound can be modulated by vocally and manually [with musical instruments] created sounds easily in regard to coherent structures such as harmonic scales, tunes, that can be recorded both in memory and by musical notation on paper. 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) International Paleopsychology Project www.paleopsych.org 705 President Street Brooklyn, NY 11215 for two chapters
from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces
of History, see www.bookworld.com/lucifer Subj: Re: Musafer Sherif and Uexkull Date: 98-11-22 01:51:06 EST From: [email protected] (WDAVID) Reply-to: WDAVID To: HBloom HBloom wrote: > > hb: ... a hiqh quality photoprint can be thought of as a set of 1,440 pixels. Howard, why is this? How about a two dimensional array of chromatic stains. hb: a far better formulation. > And even though those pixels can be either on or off in three to four > different colors (meaning each has eight possible positions, not two), one > will lose the real meaning of the photo by thinking on/off rather than large- > scale pattern. You must be discussing digital halftoning here? > In other words, not only does our brain create form from fragments > (Wertheimer), but the form can be independent of the fragments. Spatial integration when applied to imaging... hb: yes. spatial integration is a manifestation of pattern-formation rooted in the map-making of the hippocampus. imaging is rooted in the visual centers of the brain, such as the visual cortex. turning these things into a gestalt implies knitting them in a bundle which can be presented to the prefrontal lobes and to the language areas of Gazzaniga's "interpreter'" in the left frontal lobe. that interpreter, an apparently uniquely human manifestation of brain activity, is a lonely accident of consciousness riding as a brain outsider, informed of what is happening after the fact, in deep need ot sense that it drives the brain and is not an unknowing passenger. The left-cortical interpeter apparently evolved in part to handle complex social relationships. As a product of social networking, it deeply needs to feel that it belongs with its companions, even of the most intimate of those with which it rubs shoulders are the non-speaking brain centers which preceded it evolutionarily and gossip jovially in a non-symoblic language, a language which tosses the interpreter about but which it cannot comprehend verbally. This leaves the interpreter in an "existential vacuum"--one of profound isolation. The interpreter attempt to fill the void with a theory of mind, a theory of the nature of that which drives it, of the neighbors to whom it is a newcomer and a deeply alien one at that. The interpreter--our conscious self--needs a theory it can apply to the predictions of the actions of others. in reality, the rest of the brain manages to predict others' actions fairly well via non-linguistic intuition. but, again, the story-telling, language-based interpreter needs to not only make up a story about what is going on, but to make itself the hero of the tale. From generation to generation this poor, lost evolutionary newcomer oscillates between attempting to side with the companions which shun it within the carapace of its own skull and taking the side of the visual linear apprehensions of external stimuli with which it has been endowed. In the inward-looking phase, it goes "intuitive" and stresses such interior ways of knowing as holism, spirituality, mythic archetypes, volkgeists, and Jungian-style collective consciousnesses (strange that when we go inward we find an army of others waiting for us in the depths of our emotional brains). In those periods when it ricochets in the other direction it moves from the inchoate, emotional darkness of its own interior to the sunny clarity of reason, from a limbic , spatial, and hippocampal comprehension to a visual, verbal, linear comprehension. In literary criticism, this oscilation between generational brain preferences is called the move from classicism to romanticism and back again. In science, it's the shift from reductionism to holism and from mechanistic to organic metaphor. In politics it is often the move from democracy to demagoguery, from liberalism to authoritarianism, from cosmopolitanism to racism, jingoism, and other patriotic bigotries, and from commerce to war. What begins as an oscillatory search pattern in an alienated and still confused bit of new brain not yet having found its place can produce upheavals in philosophy, culture, and geopolitics. It can move the search web of the intermeshed human enterprise from peace to apocalypse. Choas theory saus the twitch of a butterfly's wing produces cascades of hurricane and storm. Meshwork concepts knitting neuronal potassium ion twitches to the individual and group psyche reveal how the tic of an axonal membrane can bring the four horsemen of the apocalypse down upon the earth and its encrustation of humanity. Now the question, again, is how do we gain insight into this process via the knowledge gained from the computer nets with which you work, the mathematical models of Harry Erwin, the search web models of Deborah Gordon, the neurobiological syntheses of John Skoyles, the ethological/endocronological insights of Neil Greenberg, the neural-channel and inhibition-excitation concepts of John Fentress, the narrative-pattern analysis of Francis Steen, the heuristic/metonony thinking of Al Cheyne, etc.? The more modelling tools we have the more mystery we can penetrate. Howard ------------------------------ Brain scan someone high on hash and their cerebral cortex lights up. Look at who is getting depersonalised and you will find their right frontal and anterior cortex are particularly strongly lit. It is not clear whether this is due to activation or distruption but it is yet more evidence for the lateralisation of a sense of self.SeeMathew, RJ. et al. Regional cerebral blood flow and depersonalization after tetrahydrocannabinal administration. Acta Psychiatr. Scand. 1999, 100, 67?75. Depersonalization after marijuana smoking. Mathew RJ, Wilson WH, Humphreys D, Lowe JV, Weithe KE Biol Psychiatry 1993 Mar 15 33:6 431?41 Abstract Depersonalization and other behavioral and physiological indices were monitored before and after the administration of high? and low?potency marijuana cigarettes and a placebo cigarette in 35 physically and mentally healthy normal volunteers. The cigarettes were administered under double?blind conditions during three visits to the laboratory separated by a minimum of 1 week. Marijuana smoking, but not placebo smoking, was associated with significant depersonalization that was maximal 30 min after smoking the high?potency cigarettes. Other behavioral changes induced by marijuana included disintegration of time sense, sensation of ''high,'' increased state anxiety, tension, anger, and confusion. Respiration, pulse rate, and systolic blood pressure also increased after marijuana smoking. Multiple regression identified temporal disintegration as the most significant predictor of depersonalization. MeSH Adult, Blood Pressure, Brain, Depersonalization, Double?Blind Method, Heart Rate, Human, Male, Marijuana Smoking, Regional Blood Flow, Respiration, Substance?Related Disorders, Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S. Author Address Department of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC 27710. ------------------------------ Brain scan someone high on hash and their cerebral cortex lights up. Look at who is getting depersonalised and you will find their right frontal and anterior cortex are particularly strongly lit. It is not clear whether this is due to activation or distruption but it is yet more evidence for the lateralisation of a sense of self. hb: which would indicate that the self is in the left brain. See Mathew, RJ. et al.
Regional cerebral blood flow and depersonalization after tetrahydrocannabinal
administration. Acta Psychiatr. Scand. 1999, 100, 67?75. An article in Psychology Today, Feb 99, ("Fascinating Flirting"), cites studies in which Damasio has shown that folks whose connection between the limbic system and cerebral cortex are mangled have an easy time being rational, but a hard time making decisions. Says Bloom, emotional impulse is apparently more critical to making up one's mind than is that self-styled master of the will, the thinking, talking, stage actor we call our "self."
John Skoyles, in his _Odyssey_, has proposed the use of the term "mindware" for that which many of us are accustomed to calling memes. I'd like to suggest that we consider adopting the use of his term *along* with "meme." Memes, a word based on genes, leads to the "units of selection" mode of interpretation. This sends many folks off searching for the irreducible atom of the meme and the manner in which its development reflects that of genetic and phylogenetic systems. David Hull, John Wilkins, Aaron Lynch and many others have pursued this tack. Hull's made an extremely important contribution to this method of thought with his _Science As A Process_. And Aaron has mathematicized it in a manner which I am not equipped to evaluate. John's contribution is a work in progress, and I believe is nearly finished. Unit of selection thinking has proven highly useful in thinking about ideas, worldviews, etc. However two decades after it was originally proposed by Dawkins, it impresses me that the concept is showing its limitations. The new abstract thinking may be going up the same narrow pathway which has been trodden by post-Hamiltonian thinking about evolution, and by evolutionary psychology in particular. The approach has proven wonderfully illuminating, but sometimes one needs more than a single route to comprehend a reality. And at this point, the post-Hamiltonians have managed to forbid the use of any other byways of analysis. To do this, they've had to exclude vast areas of empirical data from their thinking--not exactly a wonderful thing in science. I mean, to say that because something doesn't fit the theory of the moment it doesn't exist, no matter how much it is plain as the zit on a teenager's face, is a scientific sin. So let's keep up the memetic thinking but go beyond it. Skoyles' "mindware" evokes another metaphor entirely: that of computer software. Skoyles points out that it does not take a change in hardware to utterly rearrange the functions of a computer. It simply takes software which will integrate the system in new ways, making it a wordprocessor at one moment and a number cruncher the next. New ideas, particularly breakthrough cultural inventions like writing, have this impact on the brain. They affect its "evolution" in a non-biological manner. For example, in one of his essays, Skoyles shows how the invention of classical Greek sculpture allowed humans for the first time to include certain motor functions of the brain in consciousness, thus breaking into new brainwork territory. All without altering a single cerebral organ. However the new mode of expression *did* rewire the interactions and connections between these organs. These alterations were not genetic, yet they have been relatively permanent. (Nothing is absolutely permanent.) Skoyles has shown several other instances of this kind of rearrangement via mindware of neuroendocrinological and cerebral function. His mastery of both the history and the neurology of these biocultural leaps forward is astonishing. You can find his work on the topic at www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/index.htm. They will also appear in several books for the International Paleopsychology Project's New Paradigm series. At any rate, Skoyles'
"mindware" offers a route for thought well worth taking, while
still running up and down the memetic roadway to our heart's content.
Howard Dorion Several points now I have read the proposal more closely. In your summary for chapter three you mention the following three chapters discuss the prefrontal cortex this should be _two_ chapters. In chapter five you mention the 'Darwin' quote about our brain functioning in an unlimited ways. These words come in fact from Gould describing what Darwin believed and by mistake I put them into quotations as belonging to him. I like particularly the image contained in the sentence that begins the summary for chapter seven, 'the keeper of a galactic zoo would put human captives in the monkey house with the other apes'. The idea of including sleep is a good one. You mention in the last paragraph the mind calendar ?? where does this come in the book? ?? chapter 2? This mind calendar mirrors the cosmic calendar in the 1976 book: that book ends with a discussion of SETI. Earlier I suggested how neural plasticity might enable us to speculate in this direction: should this be included as a way to increase the parallelism? Your ideas are fascinating as to consciousness playing the role of operating system ?? the 'I interface'. Who is Tor Norretranders and where has he published his ideas? The piece I published in Trends in Neuroscience pointed out that visual input from our eyes is blocked for an hour and a bit each day if you count up all the times we blink, converge and wizz our eyes about. That we do not is due to the parietal cortex jumping in and providing a 'continuity input' so the higher cognitive facilities still receive a 'visual input'. I have other ideas upon consciousness, one of them is that it reflects an 'indexing system' that enables information to be shifted around the various neural network faculties in the brain. I submitting the following rather condensed abstract [there was a word limit] for the Tuscon conference next year. I am not dogmatic about theories of consciousness ?? I think it will turn out to involve several phenomena [including Howard's PR one] ?? so I am not suggesting these ideas should be included unless they obviously fit in ?? I include below more for your interest. ?? Is consciousness the indexing used to enable the intrabrain transfer of information? 'Experience', according to Chalmers (1996), 'is the inside of information' ?? but the inside of neural information of what kind? Here I propose the information of consciousness comes from the indexing used by the 100 billion neurons of the brain to share information. Neural networks in separated parts of the brain ? cerebellum, basal ganglia, parietal lobe, frontal lobe, etc ?? need a framework around which to index communication between them. The brain, after all, cannot arrange consortia to agree data transfer protocols as happens with the Internet. Cotterill (1996; 1998), however, notes that the brain internalises its body 'physics' (for example, its biomechanics, and its temporal?spatial?causal unity as an effector embodied with physiological needs such as hunger, safety, warmth etc). This, I conjecture, would provide the required indexing framework: all the parts of the brain exist in the same body, therefore when they internalise its 'physics', they internalise the same framework. Thus, any information indexed in regard to it will be transferable to any other part. The use of the body's physics to index information for communication, however, would create inside the collective information processing of the brain a virtual 'phenomenology' ? since information exchanges between networks will occur around an internalised 'virtual' body with 'virtual' temporal?spatial?causal properties. An optical analogy of this virtuality would be virtual images: these do not exist except for a focusing operation which brings their rays together. In consciousness, the indexing of intrabrain information transfers 'focuses' within the brain's information processing a virtual copy of the body and so gives it the phenomenology of a spatial?temporal?causal unity û albeit at a virtual level. Not all information processing in the brain, however, needs to be exchanged or exchanged between distant networks. Thus, a split will exist between brain information processing that is (i) indexed to phenomenology and that (ii) is not ? a possible reason why there should exist in the brain both conscious and unconscious information processing. This could be why visual information is not part of consciousness in blind sight since this is due to injuries stopping its transfer from the primary visual cortex to the extravisual cortex (Stoerig, 1996): without the possibility of such transfer it does not get indexed upon an internalised phenomenology. While visual information that gets transfered to the extravisual areas receives phenomenological indexing and so becomes part of consciousness. Moreover, if consciousness and the indexing needed for intrabrain information communication are linked, this could explain why consciousness is inaccessible to the neural networks responsible for higher cognition ? while enabling the information transfers needed for conscious information processing, such indexing only enables such transfers ? it is not part of them and so not available to introspection. Chalmers, D. J. (1996). Conscious mind. OUP. Cotterill, R. M. (1996). Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, 245?266. Cotterill, R. M. (1998). Enchanted looms. CUP. Stoerig, P. (1996). Trends Neuroscience. 19, 401?405. >John, >
>Here's my stab at the proposal. I think it looks very exciting.
In case >you're not familiar with a couple of things I've added,
the "I interface" >idea comes in part from Tor Norretranders,
while the offline sleep and >running > blood flow > brain evolution
tidbit (barely mentioned) is from >Walter Bortz. > >There may
be problems in tone, fact or what I've said about you in the author
>section. Please don't hesitate to suggest additions or deletions.
I'm >forwarding this to Howard to get his feedback as well. >
>Looking forward to hearing from you and hope you are doing well,
> >dorion ------------------------------
In a message dated 99?06?14 20:37:25 EDT, Chris McCulloch writes: Subj: sigh... Date: 99?06?14 20:37:25 EDT From: Snotpanda To: Howl BloomWell, cutting out of my Instant Messaging with you in favor of IMing with the San Francisco girl was a waste of time and precious emotion! Although, it probably freed you up so you could have dinner and go to bed, which is only good. hb: it was, apparently, an unwelcome necessity. I got to sleep at 5:40 am and awoke to work at 8. When we got off, I realized that when you'd been bumped and I'd prepared for your return, I'd deleted the first half of our conversation. I wish I hadn't. It had important material. The kind of stuff we discuss can come in extremely handy for future books. And without you there, it wouldn't come marching out of me. However I was hoping things would go a lot better than they did with ms. San Francisco.cm: I don't know what happened with her...we began a brief conversation, wherein I told her that she had been on my mind lately and that I needed to talk a little because I was having a crap weekend. Fine so far. But her responses took forever, for which she apologized, explaining that she was sending some files at the same time she was talking to me. Then she just got cut off after writing "hi" for no reason in the middle of a conversation. hb: odds are almost 100% that she was holding multiple IM conversations, something that drives me nuts. The "hi" would have appeared when she was trying to type it to some other person who had just shown up and it landed in the wrong IM box. So this is her precious "independence," eh? Excuse my language, but it sucks. I waited and waited, but she didn't log back on...so she probably didn't get disconnected, or she would have gotten back on a moment later. After about fifteen minutes of waiting, I called her house and got her machine. This means that she was no longer hooked up to her modem, since she only has one phone line. I know that it's a machine and not voicemail, so that means she either wasn't IMing me from home, or she was not answering the phone. The protector in me fears she got jumped by a mugger. The jealous, hurt idiot in me fears that the same guy who has showed up in the middle of our last two or three phone conversations showed up in the middle of our cyber conversation, and she didn't even have the decency to write "gotta go" or anything. hb: sounds accurate to my paranoid mind too. Neither one is a pleasant scenario for me to contemplate. I am just having no luck with women this week. My girlfriend, if she can still be called that, has not called either. I left her a message at work today, after being on hold for a couple of minutes and then being told by someone who doesn't normally answer the phone that she was "uh...in a...meeting or something". hb: it sounds like one of those periods when it's time to wait for time and tide to wash a new woman up on your beach. Alas, making it through such times is an emotionally tumultous thing, one in which the mind coughs out its acidic chaos and makes you wonder if you're really human or have landed on the wrong planet??or even if there's any planet for you at all. I'm a real cheerer upper tonight, aren't I. cm: Again, the paranoid in me fears that she didn't want to talk to me (at least not while at work) and she got someone to get on and give me a bogus story. hb: sounds highly probable based on your description. cm: I'll assume she was in a meeting, just to give her the benefit of a doubt, hb: good idea. paranoid thoughts often prove to be dead wrong. and sometimes, just sometimes, the prove to be dead right. cm: and I'll asssume she's been too busy to return the call since this afternoon, neither being a stretch of the imagination. Christ, even my cat is being pissy with me lately! Women!!! hb: LOL. cm: Went to see Judy again today. An hour is not enough time to spill your guts to someone. I was a little hung over, too, which made me nervous and angry at myself at the beginning of the session, but after a few minutes of talking, I felt okay and unhindered by the previous night's debauchery. She gave me the number of a psychiatrist who can give me anxiety medicine while I'm in therapy with her, which is good. hb: good. Also, I showed her some of my drawings, which she said were good. hb: I forgot to tell you, she is a HUGE Starwars fan. Starwars is handy because it does such a good job of being the quintessential myth, so it gives us poor muddled humans a narrative framework with which we can try to figure out what the hell is going on with us and with which we can also make ourselves feel a bit more human and at the same time unique. Another good one for my purposes is the Odyssey, since its series of adventures fits my own life nicely. Imagining yourself as Yoda, Obe Wan Kenobi, and Odysseus can do good things for you as you go through the tumult and struggles of life. They help organize the chaos. (Carol Fleisher Feldman. "Self-Making as Cultural Cognition: Comments on the Papers of Miller and Bruner." In The Self Across Psychology: Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and the Self Concept, edited by Joan Gay Snodgrass and Robert L. Thompson. New York: New York Academy of Sciences: 1997: 293-300. For narrative as a way of map-making and plot as the formation of an inner topography [Bloom's phrase] see: p. 296) cm: Things are going well with her, I guess. It just seems like one hour, once a week is too few and far between. hb: I know the feeling. cm: Good thing I've got Bloom on the side!!! hb: <g> cm: In all seriousness, I appreciate you speaking with me about all of this stuff, and "mentoring" me, if you will. I'm glad you get some good out of it, too. I never had an official mentor, and indeed did not finish college (partially because I never had any truly engaging teachers), so this is a neat experience for me. hb: I was never able to find a mentor either. Drove me nuts. Being your own mentor is weird, but it's what I was forced into. However maybe it allowed me to cut things to my own shape more than I could have otherwise. cm: You be sure to let me know if I'm keeping you from your work or anything, though! hb: we'll see what happens when my virtual girlfriend gets back from vacation on Thursday. I generally set aside an hour and a half a night for her, then eat dinner. But frankly, bouncing things around with you is extremely good for me. I've begun reading the book on writing called "If You Want to Write" by Brenda Ueland. Mostly, it's good so far and very Bloomian. She quotes Blake a lot (as did you recently). I've never read Blake, except maybe a poem or two. I think I've seen one of his drawings, too. Now I'm really curious about him??he seems like a blazing creative renaissance man! hb: he's quite amazing. Half?mad, half?marvelous...and a good 100 years ahead of his time. cm: He seems like the kind of guy you'd really like. Ueland's only missteps in this book so far, I think, are when she claims that idleness is the only way real, full ideas come, hb: let's put this to what, in science, we call an empirical test. I hate idleness, can't even handle ten seconds of it. If Ueland is right, then I've never produced a real, full idea in my life. But I put I've outproduced her (or him) a hundred to one. Her hypothesis fails! cm: and that what some people call "creative idleness"??i.e. reading a book or watching TV or listening to music??is not valid in the idea forming process. Bullshit, I say! hb: hear, hear. you are right. she is wrong. cm: Reading is a launch pad for many of my ideas! It's a little like priming the pump. To say that sitting in a field or staring at your typewriter is the only valid form of quiet time to let your brain do its work is crap. hb: hyper stimulation and unlikely justapositions are the mothers of invention. twiddling your thumbs beneath a tree is something I hope never to be forced to do. cm: Nature and books act on your mind the same way, hb: yer right. Examining the tree and discovering new things in the process is the opposite of thumb?twiddling. and they are equally joyous inspirations and celebrations of life, I say.That is all for now, Mr. Bloom. I'll keep you posted on further developments in this saga. I'm hoping to chat with Ben tonight, too, so that I can let you know tomorrow when we can all get together. hb: great. May the force be with you??Obe Stay well,chris >>
see \cnt\confuciu.s In a message dated
98-08-31 13:42:30 EDT, skoyles writes: Subj: The sociobiology of individualism
vs collectivism Date: 98-08-31 13:42:30 EDT There has been some discussion
of social boundaries but not the different way they are experienced
in individualistic and collectivistic societies. GOOD POINT, JOHN. EVEN
THE TERMINOLOGY USED BY CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCHERS IMPLIES A DIFFERENT
WAY OF DRAWING BOUNDARIES AROUND THE SELF. INDIVIDUALIST SOCIETIES ARE
CALLED "EGOCENTRIC," IMPLYING THAT THE BOUNDARY IS DRAWN TIGHTLY
AROUND AN INDIVIDUALISTIC "I." COLLECTIVIST SOCIETIES ARE
CALLED "ALLOCENTRIC," IMLYING THAT THE BOUNDARY OF SELF IS
DRAWN AROUND A GROUP OF OTHERS (ALLO IS OTHER IN GREEK). ACTUALLY THIS
IS A MATTER OF DEGREE. IN EXAMINING THE SENSE OF SELF IN BOTH ANIMALS
AND IN HUMANS IN A HIGHLY INDIVIDUALISTIC SOCIETY, IT'S BECOME OBVIOUS
THAT THE SENSE OF SELF INVOLVES OTHERS NO MATTER HOW YOU SLICE IT. IT
ALSO INVOLVES ALL ELEMENTS OF CONTEXT WHICH CONTRIBUTE TO A SENSE OF
CONTROL OR LACK OF IT. WHICH IS WHY I FINALLY WAS FORCEDD TO CRANK OUT
THE HIPPOCAMPAL/TOPOGRAPHIC THEORY OF SELF--BASED PARTIALLY ON YOUR
INTERPRETATION OF THE HIPPOCAMPUS' ROLE IN MAPPING OUT OUR SENSE OF
REALITY. BUT DESPITE THE FACT THAT EVERY INDIVIDUALIST CONTAINS A MULTITUDE
IN HIS OR HER SELF, THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ALLOCENTRIC AND EGOCENTRIC
SOCIETIES. Loosely, individualists are `I' centred whilst collectivists
are `we'-centred. Something like difference is spotted by most anthropologists,
social anthropologists, cross-cultural psychologists and generally by
well-travelled observers. They are two ends of a continuum with members
of modern industrial democracies, the ancient Greeks and hunter- gatherers
being at the individualistic end while the Chinese, Japanese and other
members of premodern agrarian societies are at the collectivist one.
According to anthropologists there is a 'U' in human history with our
species starting off as individualistic HOW COULD THIS BE? EVEN CHIMPS
WHO SPEND THEIR DAY FORAGING SOLITARILY AND WILL NOT SHARE THEIR FOOD
EVEN WITH THEIR OWN CHILDREN HAVE A POWERFUL SENSE OF THE COUNTOURS
OF THEIR SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY. THEY CARRY THE CROWD WITHIN THEMSELVES AND
KNOW WHERE THEY STAND IN ITS HIERARCHY. THIS DETERMINES SUCH THINGS
AS THEIR HORMONAL AND IMMUNE SETTINGS AS THEY DIG FOR BULBS BURIED IN
THE GROUND (AS IN THE CASE OF BABOONS) OR HUNT FOR FRUIT IN THE TREES
(CHIMPANZEES). OUR SOCIAL WORLD IS ALWAYS WITH US, TO PARAPHRASE WORDWORTH.
OR, TO PUT IT MORE BLUNTLY, OUR SOCIAL WORLD IS ALWAYS US, IT IS ALWAYS
THE RAW MATERIAL FROM WHICH WE FASHION AN IDENTITY. IF THIS IS TRUE
FOR BACTERIA AND BABOONS, THEN SURELY IT WAS TRUE FOR THE FIRST HUMANS.
then with the rise of agriculture and urbanisation YES, THE WEB OF OTHERS,
THE HIPPOCAMPAL MAP OF SOCIAL LATITUDE, LONGITUDE, AND PERSONAL LANDMARKS,
GREW DRAMATICALLY UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF AGRICULTURE AND URBANIZATION
(URBANISM HAVING ACTUALLY PRECEDED AGRICULTURE, DESPITE THE COMMON MISCONCEPTION
THAT IT WAS THE OTHER WAY AROUND). becoming collectivist then a return
to individualist with the Classical democratic Greeks and modern Western
industrial society. TRUE, AND YET, AS YOU SAID, ALL OF THIS IS ON A
CONTINUUM. Here I want to focus on their sociobiology. If you think
about it, something has been left out in the discussion of the evolution
of human social nature. Basically most would agree that (1) people need
to live in groups, (2) they need to socialise on the same `wave length'
and lastly (3) because of this people often experience others outside
the social boundary of their group as foreign and `not one of us'. BUT
HOW MANY GROUPS? Human evolution left people open to develop sociability
based upon belonging to one or many overlapping social groups. (1) People
can learn to focus their sociability near exclusively upon one group
with little or no room left for other kinds of social identifications
NOT ONCE THEY ARE IN THE INTERURBAN WEB, THEY CAN'T. AND THE RESEARCH
FOR MY CURRENT BOOK INDICATES THAT THAT WEB AROSE TEN THOUSAND YEARS
AGO. IT ALSO INDICATES THAT THAT PALEOLITHIC CITIES IN THAT WEB ROPED
THEIR RURAL SURROUNDINGS RAPIDLY INTO THE MESH. -- collectivism. Their
`I' and `we' identities are much the same. As a result their personal
identity and their goals tends to merge with the `we' of their group
-- thus they become `we-people'. No surprisingly, they get called `collectivists':
they focus their sociability upon making and sustaining loyalties to
their collective. They do not experience `we' to be an aggregation but
as a structure of mutual bonds and social intimacy. (2) In contrast,
people can learn to join, participate and if need be leave a multitude
of groups -- individualism. HMMM, AMAZING HOW WE ARE ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH.
THE NEUROBIOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF GREEK CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION IN MY
CURRENT BOOK COMES UP WITH THE SAME THING. I LOOK AT HORMONES, YOU LOOK
AT NEURONS, AND WE UNCOVER DIFFERENT FACETS OF THE SAME THING. NICE.
I LIKE IT :) Like collectivists, they identify with their group -- but
the need to move between groups forces them to focus their identity
and goals upon that the bit of them which remains the same what ever
group they enter -- their `I'. HENCE THALES' INTRODUCTION OF THE PHRASE
"KNOW THYSELF" IN ROUGHLY 600 B.C., AND ITS RAPID MEMETIC
SUCCESS, MAKING IT, ACCORDING TO ARISTOTLE, ONE OF THE MOST WIDELY USED
APHORISMS EVER. They have many `we' identities and only a single constant
`I' one. Hence, they are individualists -- separate from their groups
able to move between them. Rather than experience the social `we' as
a source of deep bonds and intimacy, they experience their groups to
be aggregates of people. YEESH, ARE WE ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH. THE CONCLUSION
OF GLOBAL BRAIN'S LATEST SEVERAL FOUR CHAPTERS IN A NUTSHELL. Thus,
neither collectivism or individualism is more or less social than the
other. They just express this common part of our species heritage differently.
The sociability of collectivist is a `we' sociability focused and fixed
upon one group -- usually the extended family with identifications at
least in Japan extending to work place and emperor. The sociability
of individualists is a different kind of `we' -- a changeable one. Paradoxically,
it can mean they show more sociable than collectivists. As Triandis
and colleagues observe: `It is not that people are less sociable in
the individualistic countries-- in fact it seem that they are more sociable
than in the collectivist because they have to work hard to get into
and remain in their ingroups'(Triandis, Bontempo, & Villareal, 1988,
p 333). I SEE WE HAVE BOTH BEEN STEEPED IN A LOT OF TRIANDIS. HIS WORK
SEEMS TO GET AROUND. Thus people in individualistic societies come to
value friendship more than in collectivist ones. As Euripides put it,
`if any man think wealth or power of greater worth .. than a good friend
--he is mad'. The social world of individualists is not given: they
have to win and make their own social contacts. They need in place of
extended group a network of friends and acquaintances. Not surprisingly,
a key difference between individualism and collectivism concerns ingroups
and outgroups. Collectivists have a ultra strong sense of `us' vs `them'.
They are intensely loyal to those within and ready to take advantage
and exploit those outside. Not individualists however: they after all
keep joining and leaving groups, so ingroup members of one group are
also likely to be outgroup ones of another -- if not today than tomorrow.
Thus they are likely to develop a much weaker sense of `us' vs `them'.
With this goes less loyalty to ones group --but this is only the other
side of their ease of showing good-will to new groups and friends. AN
EXTREMELY INTERESTING CONCEPT OF THE ORIGIN OF PLURALISM AS A FIERCELY
HELD "IDEOLOGY." Collectivists may look after each other,
but this is a long-term and exclusive commitment. Individualists look
after each other --but in the short-term and with flexibility -- they
do not expect or want strong bonds outside the close family. It is a
different kind of cooperation and loyalty built less around attachments
and more around social choice and mobility. This can be seen in some
research done by Sang-Chin Choi, Uichol Kim and Soo-Hyang Choi. They
asked what the word `we' meant to a group of collectivists -- Koreans
and individualists --Canadians. 95% of Koreans suggested `affection',
`intimacy', `oneness', `sameness', `bonding' `of same kind' or `cooperation'.
Only 5% suggested `me and others'. In contrast, 60% of Canadians suggested
an aggregate of people -- `I and others', `two people', `people and
me' or, `it just means a group of individuals'. 15% suggested, `people
who share same interest, hobbies, or perspective'. Only 15% gave words
which overlapped with the Korean experience of affection and intimacy
(Choi, Kim & Choi, 1993: 201-202). Why should ingroup-outgroup differences
arise? People need to share `wavelength' -- shake 'hands' socially in
the same way with each other. But not all social wavelengths are the
same. There are differences which go beyond ones merely of style and
manner and have effects upon the nature of the relationships people
can have together. _ When we meet, we may intend that the social interaction
happens in an exact and prearranged manner the nature of which depends
upon with whom we are interacting and our social relationship to them.
Such handshaking is highly learnt and relationship specific -- it is
tight. _ Or we may allow reactions that are not learnt but based around
innate primate social reflexes such as smiling, coordination of responses
and eye contact. Such handshaking uses innate processes and useable
between anyone -- it is loose. We are all capable of both. Imagine going
back in time and meeting her majesty, Elizabeth I, the Queen of United
Kingdom. After waiting in attending room you are brought forward by
a lady-in-waiting where upon you kneel, holding ones body erect but
avoiding eye contact and say something like, `I am your humble servant,
your majesty' while the Queen ignoring you causally says, `you may rise'.
That is a highly ritualised and relationship specific interaction. Now
imagine meeting, Kanzi, or any other `talking' chimp. You meet: one
of you smiles, you glance in their eyes, they look back, do a chimp
smile and you both just hug. This interaction uses social reflexes common
not only to all people but social primates -- face and eye contact.
NEAT THINKING. And it is also highly nonspecific -- we interact similarly
with anyone: the retarded, the foreigner seating next to us on an aircraft
or even a royal lover. Such relating does not support role differences
or hierarchy. We all can interact both tight and loose. The difference
between us lies in which predominates. Some cultures emphasis as the
norm one more than the other: the result is seen in our degree of collectivism
and individualism. We can see how this creates or not social flexibility.
Collectivists require social interaction to be wave length precise --through
the careful sequencing of responses with each other which act as a source
of ingroup-outgroup boundaries. Ritualised, sociability is strongly
tied to being born in a culture since its little details --knowing what
to do in what social circumstances with whom and when -- which only
come from growing up among those constantly performing them. Arthur
Waley, an observer on traditional China suggests there were 300 major
and 3,000 minor rituals which had to be mastered (Waley, 1938: 67).
ONE OF OUR MEMBERS, JOHN LYNCH, PROPOSES THAT CONFUCIUS WAS THE MOST
ADVANCED OF ALL SOCIAL THINKERS. CONFUCIUS PUT TREMENDOUS STOR IN THESE
RITUALS. IN OTHER WORDS, HE TRIED TO REINFORCE THE FRAMEWORK OF A RIGIDLY
HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE, ONE WHICH WOULD HAVE CEMENTED THE INDIVIDUAL
IN PLACE AND ELIMINATED THE PLURALIST'S POWER TO FLOAT BETWEEN GROUPS
AND CHOOSE THOSE ROLES WHICH SUIT HIM OR HER. Outsiders have no chance
to touch a person's sense of social recognition through rituals --they
will always be sensed on the outside. Collectivists are thus going to
much more readily to sense people from outside as foreign while themselves
are special and above others. That tightens the exclusively of their
ingroup -- and makes a sharper sense of other people being different
and divided from them. IT ALSO MAKES THEIR SOCIETY LESS PERMEABLE TO
THE CURRENTS FLOWING FROM GROUP TO GROUP ACROSS CULTURAL AND GEOGRAPHIC
BOUNDARIES. THESE CURRENTS ARE QUICKLY ABSORBED AND REWORKED IN A PLURALISTIC
SOCIETY. SO I'D SUSPECT COLLECTIVIST SOCIETIES WOULD DO WELL IN PERIODS
OF STABILITY, WHERE RAPID COLECTIVE CHANGE IS NOT A NECESSITY, BUT WOULD
DO POORLY IN A RAPIDLY SHIFTING ENVIRONMENT, WHERE SOCIETY NEEDS TO
SNAP UP FOREIGN IDEAS, ADAPT THEM, AND TURN THEM INTO TOOLS AND WEAPONS
ALMOST INSTANTLY. IF THIS IS CORRECT, WHAT HAS JAPAN BEEN SO ABLE TO
ALTER ITSELF, ABSORB IDEAS, REINVENT THEM, AND TURN THEM INTO HIGHLY
COMPETETIVE TOOLS SINCE THE MEIJI RESTORATION OF ROUGHLY 1868? HOW DID
THE ARCHITECTS OF MEIJI SOCIETY MANAGE TO COMBINE COLLECTIVE IDENTITY
WITH WESTERN ELEMENTS. WHY IS IT THAT ONE OF THE FIRST BOOKS FROM THE
WEST THEY SEIZED ON AND POPULARIZED WAS A BRITISH WORK ON SELF-SUFFICIENCY,
A JAPANESE BEST-SELLER DURING THE LATTER DECADES OF THE 19TH CENTURY.
DID THE JAPANESE INTERPRET A BOOK WHICH WE THINK OF AS CALLING FOR INDIVIDUAL
SELF SUFFICIENCY DIFFERENTLY? WERE THEY TAKING IT AS A CALL FOR GROUP
SELF SUFFIENCY? FOR GROUP FREEDOM FROM THE DOMINATION OF THOSE WHO HAD
HUMILIATED THEM WITH THE BLACK SHIPS BLASTING CANNNONBALLS IN THEIR
HARBORS WHEN PERRY INVADED THEIR SELF-MADE ENVELOPE OF IMPERMEABILITY?
Individualists, in contrast, are flexible interacting in relatively
ritual free ways --ones which any human can do and quickly learn --
a brief smile and `how are you'. It is opener to outsiders encouraging
them to intermix. The rules are simple and easily picked up by anyone
not just those who grow up with them. Thus, individualists make it more
easy for each other to reciprocate the buzz of social acknowledgement
to each other. That, of course, weakens their sense of ingroup-outgroup
difference and sense of outsider's foreignness. Experiencing other people
as being like themselves, there exists more opportunities for group
overlap and so shifting between groups -- and roles. Tight sociability
also allows stronger hierarchical role relationships to form -- lose
sociability, in contrast, puts people more on the same level. It is
not for nothing that the above example of ritualistic sociability concerns
a commoner and a Monarch. The problem with innate sociable reflexes
such as smiling and eye contact is that they make individuals, (even
when of different species), equal. To put people on different levels
they must be displaced with learnt social responses such as bowing and
formula expressions of greeting appropriate to each other's social rank.
In collectivist societies, such things as eye movements and smiling
are cultivated and controlled. Greetings are elaborated and prolonged
-- up to 20 minutes in Japan. Thus in general, they tend to be much
more hierarchical and respecting of social position than individualist
societies.Social wavelengths admit another dimension of variation: how
much they colour human attachment. Is everything a person says or does
in someway communicating their mutual presence to each other. Or is
space allowed for other emotions and activities that psychologists call
`engagement' to emerge and develop? Not all things individualist do
concerns echoing deep mutual wavelengths. Much time is spent in the
free and open exchanging of our time on activities where handshaking
has been done only superficially --engagement. We are indeed quite happy
to spend time with people without bothering with elaborate social attachment:
in a railway carriage, bus or aircraft we talk to the person in the
next seat but it is not a relationship. We will never meet again, but
that does not stop us passing the time away agreeably in conversation.
Individualists are happy exchanging wavelengths that just acknowledge
mutual presence without seeking deeper social bonds. Such interactions
happen as widely as when at work or when serving on a jury. And at play-time
as children: two kids on nursery play floor play a game, have great
fun together and have no concern when mum picks them up that they may
never meet again. Their play carried no obligations and said nothing
about who they are or what they might do tomorrow. It was just fun.
Individualists spend most of their adult time like this. Social engagement
lets individualists be socially promiscuous --having uncommitted excitement
and friendliness. Engagements contrast with attachments which centre
upon a deep social bond between people. In individualistic societies,
such attachments are limited mainly within close families like between
a child and its parents --they are usually `blood bonds'. In collectivist
cultures they are much wider found outside the immediate family linking
people to extended kinship networks, teachers, employers and such figures
as the local big-chief, boss or emperor. They expect more obligations
and social duties. Engagement is much more limited in collectivist societies.
MARY DOUGLAS HAS DEALT WITH THIS USING HER OWN VOCABULARY--GRID AND
GROUP. GROUP, AS I UNDERSTAND IT, INVOLVES CLOSE, PERSONAL BONDS. GRID
INVOLVES RIGID, HIERARCHICAL BONDS. IN THE ILIAD, ACHILLES HAD STRONG
GROUP BONDS WITH HIS LOVER, PATROCLUS. HOWEVER HE ALSO LIVED FOR HIS
GRID COORDINATES, THOSE WHICH WOULD GIVE HIM IMMORTALITY AS A HERO.
HEROISM WAS DEFINED AS A HIERARCHICAL POSITION ATTAINED IN AN ABSTRACT
COORDINATE SYSTEM. ACHIEVING THE HIGHEST POSITION IN THAT COORDINATE
SYSTEM, HE FELT, WOULD GUARANTEE THAT HE BE REMEMBERED MANY GENERATIONS
DOWN THE LINE. MEANING THAT MOST OF THE SIGNIFICANT OTHERS FOR WHOM
HE WAS PERFORMING, MOST OF THE MEMBERS OF HIS INTROJECTED AUDIENCE,
HAD NOT YET BEEN BORN. HOWEVER HIS STRATEGY OF HEROIC ACHIEVEMENT WORKED.
WE REMEMBER THE GUY OVER 3,000 YEARS LATER. HE IS A PART OF OUR MENTAL
GEOGRAPHY--A LANDMARK AGAINST WHICH ALEXANDER THE GREAT, CAESAR, NAPOLEON,
AND TO SOME EXTENT YOU AND I, MEASURE OUR IDENTITY. WHY THE LONG-LIVED
NATURE OF THE COORDINATE SYSTEM WITHIN WHICH ACHILLES WAS ATTEMPTING
TO FIX HIMSELF? I RECORD THINGS PERMAMENTLY IN COMPUTER FORMATS WHICH
THEN TURN OUT TO BE TOTALLY UNPERMANENT AND UNREADABLE FIVE YEARS LATER.
THAT WAS NOT TRUE FOR ACHILLES HIERARCHICAL GRID. WE CAN STILL READ
IT VIVIDLY. I SUSPECT THE REASON IS THIS. THE SYSTEM OF "HEROISM"
IS BUILT INTO THE SAME HEIRARCHICAL SYSTEM WE SHARE WITH KANZI AND CRAYFISH.
IN CRAYFISH IT TRIGGERS THE SAME HORMONES IT DOES IN US. IT IS A NEARLY
UNIVERSAL CODE FOR POST-CAMBRIAN MULTICELLULAR CREATURES. WHETHER IT
IS ALSO INTEPRABLE IN SOME WAY BY PRE-CAMBRIAN UNICELLULARS, I AM NOT
SURE. THEY, TOO, HAVE THEIR ATTRACTION AND THEIR REPULSION CUES. AND
THESE WORK VERY MUCH AS OURS DO, SOMETIMES EMPLOYING THE SAME CHEMICAL
SIGNALS. IS IT POSSIBLE TO COMMUNICATE ACHILLES' SIGNALS OF ATTRACTION
TO A BACTERIA? I SUSPECT NOT, BUT IT WOULD BE AN EXTREMELY INTERESITING
EXPERIMENT IN INFORMATION EXCHANGE, ONE FROM WHICH I SUSPECT WE COULD
LEARN A GREAT DEAL. THE TRICK, I THINK,WOULD BE TO HIT A BACTERIA WITH
THE TALE OF ULYSSES ACHIEVEMENT TRANSLATED INTO ITS HORMONAL CONSTITUENTS--A
VERY SPECIFIC MIX OF TESTOSTERONE, DOPAMINE, SEROTONIN, AND PROBABLY
A FEW PHEROMONES WE HAVEN'T YET COME TO KNOW. Here we can see how circumstances
interface with the mind: some societies provide little or indeed prohibits
opportunities for engagement. Moreover, the circumstances in some societies
make it hard to live without shared obligations, while others allow
alternatives such as legal contacts. In summary, attachments from a
communication viewpoint tend to be more ritualistic while engagements
tend to be freer and more spontaneous -- brief smiles and eye contact.
In contrast, attachments are less open and use more sharing of a wavelength
together. Both individualists and collectivists form attachments but
only individualist develop the ability to ready form engagement readily
with others outside their immediate group or family. This both reflects
and creates the nature of individualist communication: in individualist
societies, communication has minimal ritualism -- it has a broad waveband
that gives people space to interact through culture-neutral forms of
interaction. Fitting this individualists, readily engage in nonattachment
relationships while allowing attachment ones -- except for close-family.
In contrast, collectivist societies, communication maximises ritualism
-- it has a narrow waveband that forces people to interact in culture-dependent
forms of interaction. Fitting this collectivists, seek attachment-style
family relationships in public rather than engagement-type ones.According
to Edward Hall, we interact in rhythmic interlocking dances -- a flowing
synchronisation of how rather than what is said. Attachment often forms
around this subtle conversational dance while engagement does not give
much space for this social interplay. Instead it engagement focuses
upon what people are conscious of doing. After all, they must be `here
and now' frank and to the point: no time exists to dally with conversational
dances. Thus people say what they mean, don't beat around the bush.
They may be rude and say what they feel. The contact is not relational
but fast, changing quickly and stimulating. You would expect individualists
to have more frank communication and collectivism more subtle unsaid
ones --and they do. Collectivists when they interact are concerned with
the `how' -- the relationship -- attachments and social obligations.
They interact around subtle unsaid cues and flow of being together and
share subtle prolonged expressions of hello and farewell. In between
they seek not to do something but share presence in indirect generally
evasively, even secretive, communication. As one anthropologist observed
of the Amhara communication, `When the speaker is quizzed about the
issue at hand or the object he desires, his reply still may not reveal
what is really on his mind; and if it does, his interlocutor will likely
as not interpret that response as a disguise' (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey,
1988: 44). A person can do this only if knows the person or this type
of relationship well. As Edward Hall notes they, `talk around and around
the point, in effect all the pieces in place except the crucial one
.. this is the role of his interlocutor' (Hall quoted in Gudykunst &
Ting-Toomey, 1988: 44). As Michael Bond of Hong Kong University notes,
`a communicator in such a culture monitors the other's non-verbal displays
carefully, proceeds with circumspection to discover the balance-point
with the other, and considers fostering the relationship to be more
important than prosecuting the business being discussed' (Bond, 1991:
51). Collectivists seek social attachment not social engagement, mutual
social obligations not interactive promiscuity. Indeed, engagement is
disliked by collectivists: its superficiality and openness to manipulation
threatens people who normally interact in terms of attachments. It levels
people and gives space for the emotions that are dangerous to a closed
ingroup bound by mutual bonds. When people engage they may have fun
or cooperate but will as readily engage in competition, conflict and
contest. Such personal emotions could set off personal ambitions and
rivalry. That is fine -- between groups in which case they can strengthen
group bonds. But at the personal level contest causes jealousies, animosities
and eventually ingroup splits. Thus a person starts showing hostility
then a little `I' arise which risks the collective. Markus and Kitayama
note, `the experience of ego-focused emotions, either positive or negative,
is readily accompanied, at least in Japanese culture, by the felt disturbance
of a relationship and thus by a strong need to restore harmony'. If
you experience life in terms of a common `we' the you seek to avoid
the emotional upheavals which might complicate and conflict your relationships.
Indeed individualists assume some conflict is normal in relationships
-- after all, they are natural to friendly sport. Not surprisingly,
as Harry Triandis, Robert Bontempo, Marcelo and Villareal observe: `In
collectivist cultures, one attempts to `paper over' conflict within
the ingroup, which often requires illicit behaviours that are hidden
from ingroup members, in individualist cultures, one is more likely
to bring conflict to the open' (Triandis, Bontempo, & Villareal,
1988, 325). Markus and Kitayama observe something similar: `among those
in predominantly interdependent [collectivist] cultures, .. a seemingly
unchallenged norm directs individuals to restrain their inner feelings
and particularly the overt expression of the feelings. Indeed many have
well-developed strategies that render them expert at avoiding the expression
of negative emotions' (Markus and Kitayama, 1991, p. 236). Here we can
see how the ways our minds can start shaping society. THIS IS AN EXTRAORDINARY
SYNTHESIS OF MATERIAL AND A TRULY ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION.
Bond, M. (1991). Beyond the Chinese face. Hong Kong: Oxford University
Press.Choi, S-C., Kim, U. & Choi, S-H. (1993). Indigenous analysis
of collective representations. In U. Kim, & J. W. Berry, (Eds.),
Indigenous psychologies, pp. 193-210, Newburn Park, Calif.: Sage. Gudykunst,
W. B., & Ting-Toomey, S. (1988). Culture and interpersonal communication.
California: Sage. Markus, H. R., & Kiayama, S. (1991). Culture and
the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological
Review, 98, 224-53. Triandis, H. C., Bontempo, R., & Villareal,
M. J. (1988). Individualism and collectivism: Cross-cultural perspectives
on self-ingroup relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
54, 323-338. Waley, A. (1938). Introduction. In A. Waley, (Trans.),
The analects of Confucius, pp. 13-79. London: Allen and Unwin. More
discussion upon collectivism and individualism can be found at http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/lv1.htm
Evidence for individualism in the Classical Greeks http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/lv2.htm
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/lv3.htm http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/lv4.htm
The 'U' of history at http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/lv5.htm
Dr. John R. Skoyles In a message dated 98-08-31 11:38:58 EDT, konsler writes: << If I don't
feel a little more Long term, I see hope. Short term my brain gets glued to obstacles. 'tis just the quirk of the way in which my synaptic structure works. Which leads to another thing so obvious it's been said a million times by you and me. It takes a whole mess of brains seeing things from slightly different points of view to carve out a successful and hopefully quick-witted social entity. So my gloom-meistering can hopefully prove of value, despite it's immediate effect of paralysing readers with despair. Those who've got the energy will take it and use it to carve a path to victory. Let me put it differently. If those of us who know pluralism's glow of passion, reason, and surprise don't stand firm for rights of others and ourselves, diligantly holding a dance space open for the wonders of multiplicity, if we don't fuel with all we are and all we have the light of discourse, it will disappear, perhaps for decades or perhaps for centuries. But when it's gone, it will be gone--eclipsed entirely.
In a message dated
98-09-17 11:50:05 EDT, David Berreby writes to IPP: Privacy is essential
to a civil society. Starr's assault on this value, his actions and explicit
statements to the effect that truth as an agent of the state defines
it must be more important, have already hurt our public life more than
anything Clinton ever did. Clinton has lied to protect his privacy and
given the context of Starr's egregious assault on same I have no problem
with that. >> David--a poweful and important statement. Now, where
can you publish such a thing? (By the way, note the very active role
which the definition of boundaries has taken in this affair. we discussed
boundaries in the abstract a few weeks ago. but once groups assert their
rights to define them, and use those definitions in an attempt to expand
power, all hell breaks loose in society.) Howard _______________________________ In a message dated
8/21/01 11:28:03 AM Eastern Daylight Time, mroele writes: Walter the
Wonderhealer; is this hypnosis or a placebo-effect, in which shaman,
quack, Dr. in white coat, etc. can activate members of the committee
in the brain (who can in turn influence bodily functions) not reached
via other means? when the old prayer says "may he cause his countenance
to shine on you" it is referring to a form of attention which is
the oxygen of the human soul-emotional attention, attention so fixed
on you and beaming that it lights you up internally. What does it mean
to beam? It means the pupils are fixed and on you and most important,
are dilated as all get out. The dilation of the pupils is an unmistakable
sign of gut-level emotional interest. If we can't get that interest,
that gleam in the eye that's cast upon us, by being good, we will get
it by being bad. If a sibling has managed to become the focus of all
eyes by being conventional, we will lever attention our way by being
rebels. The need for attention forces us into whatever behavioral niche
we need to get that gaze to focus and to open its eyes with anger, with
amazement, with delight, or with disgust-whatever it takes. Attention
is it, the indispensable, the sina qua non that turns our internal engines
on. Without it, we literally sicken and, in the worst case, even die.
Plants are photophilic, phototropic photovores. They eat sunlight, and
without it they die. We are intentiophilic, intentiotropic intentiovores.
We must eat attention ravenously. Without it we can not survive. Attention
in every sense of the word is what, in the long run, keeps us alive.
Why? Because we are modules in a larger entity-a social brain. We fight
for connectivity. We search and search until we can find something that
will attract the attention of those close to us, those far away who
might mouth our name, those even further who would give us fame. We
battle and scramble to tweak the brains of others. We act as antennae,
for good or bad, of the public mind. Howard Perhaps that should be adtendiovores-adtendio
is the latin root of the word attention (oed). It means a stretching
(tendere) toward (ad). Intentio is intentio : effort, exertion, attention,
intent / attack, accusation (http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Latin/search-f.html,
downloaded 04/08/01) how about just attendiovores? Hb: This is wonderful thinking, John. Now how do we connect the motor neurons to the joy, exaltation, and transcendent emotion centers--presumably the dopaminergic structures in the striatum and a few others, like the nucleus acccumbens, and the mossy fibers of the hippocampus with their gleeful potions of dynorphin B? How does joy in group immersion evolve? Do groups that have the capacity to fuse their members in emotional synchrony win out over groups that have no such group ecstasizers? Do males who can rouse their collective spirit to the highest pitch win battles of words or weapons over others and thus gain access to more sex--to more women and wombs? The success of rock stars and other group synchronizers at gathering groupies seems to indicate that those who generate gang fusion have the opportunity to out-impregnate all comers. Do their followers gain similar privileges? If you're part of the in-group of a performer, a headman, chief, or politician who excells at rousing mass passions, do you get more women? My experience in the film and television world and general knowledge of the sexual politics of Washington, DC, and of Paris, where the Prime Ministers are often discovered to have more mistresses than the press can count, say yes. Howard
An author friend
actually put an ad in the Village Voice in 1972 offering to exchange
jobs, families, husbands, pets, cities, and apartments with someone
willing to trade selves for a year. When the year was up and the alternative
selves had been thoroughly lived, she wrote a book about it. Tell me
more about being a joker. Joking goes to the very heart of the human
mystery. cb: What I think is interesting is what is it about these situations
that makes me take on these roles. We need to find people in different
walks of life - including someone people living in the Middle East etc..
We should not confine our experiments to Americans - anyway lots more
to come later hb: An Indian immigrant from Goa came over a few weeks
ago. His multiple selves are dizzying. In India he was a Catholic--normal
in Goa, but very abnormal once one leaves for the rest of the Indian
subcontinent. When he moved to the US at ten, he went from being the
child of two highly educated, highly payed professionals to being the
son of a cab driver. His father hadn't changed, but in America many
professionals from other lands have to take on menial jobs. My friend
lived in a black neighborhood, was beaten up nearly every day, and found
that he had the most in common not with other Goans, but with other
immigrants who shared his level of intellect...other outsiders with
brains that weren't being recognized. So his friends were Hungarians
and Poles. Strange the things we culture-jumpers, culture-spelunkers,
and role changers undergo. I'm glad you're one of the outsiders who
go inside to heal and save, then come out to get an overview, endure
the isolation of being excluded, then dive back in again in a new role...seeking
understanding as you go. I'm one too. I can't wait until you come over.
Howard
<< Subj: Re:
questions of identity Date: 98?03?10 08:57:41 EST From: JBrody (James
F. Brody) Sender: JBrody (James F. Brody) To: (Howard Bloom) Howard,
Please do NOT the following remarks pass on... I have more on this topic,
part of the Grand Dad series and a concept called "mode jumping."
The phrase described a personal event, that of my acting like my mother
in some contexts and my father in others, either one while simultaneosly
experiencing criticism and reservation from the style of the contrasting
partner. HAVE ALSO EXPERIENCED THIS MULTIPLICITY OF ROLES WITH DIFFERENT
(AND SOMETIMES WITH THE SAME) PARTNER, DEPENDING ON THE NICHES OF HER
EMOTIONAL CONTOURS. A London psychiatrist I know validated the observation
with himself and some of his clients. It also glimmers when children
"act just like their father" when attempting to annoy mother
and the reverse when opposing dad. FUNNY, BUT I'VE BEEN PONDERING THESE
VERY THINGS THE LAST COUPLE OF MONTHS AND OBSERVING THESE ALTERATIONS
IN VARIOUS OTHERS. These events seem particularly annoying when they
occur in the context of visitation after a divorce occurs. They would
be easily ascribed to social learning except there's a more coherent
string of evidence that accounts for these phenomena even when there
has been little or no contact between the child and the corresponding
parent or grandparent. I've since assembled a data ladder that reaches
from Kauffman through genes through psych adaptations in order to account
for my personal experiences within a scientific framework. I SUSPECT
THERE'S A STRONG ELEMENT OF EXPERIENTIAL ABSORPTION. FOR EXAMPLE, THERE
ARE PATTERNS IN MY GRANDMOTHER WHICH WERE MIRRORED DIRECTLY IN MY MOTHER
AND EFFECTED ME. I NEVER EXPERIENCED THESE IN MY GRANDMOTHER BUT DISCOVERED
THEIR HISTORY IN A REVELATORY LETTER MY MOTHER HAD WRITTEN TO A COUSIN.
MY MOTHER WAS TOTALLY UNAWARE THAT IN DESCRIBING HER MOTHER SHE WAS
DESCRIBING HER SELF. I SUSPECT I'VE "INHERITED" OTHER MEMETIC
PROPERTIES IN THIS MANNER, AND THAT THEY MAY GO BACK THOUSANDS OF YEARS.
DO YOU KNOW ELLEN LANGER (HARVARD PSYCHOLOGIST, AUTHOR OF _MINDFULNESS_)'S
STORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUSLY CREATED, MULTI?GENERATIONAL POT ROAST MEME
IN HER FAMILY? I'm still writing this up; it will be part of the genetics
paper that I abstracted for you a month or so ago. Jim howard in caps It's been two or
three hours since I last wrote you and so many things have happened
since then. I miss you like crazy, kitten-child. The realization that
you miss me too has stoked me like a furnace. Every thought I have I
share with you. When I'm not keeping my mouth and vocal chords under
strict discipline, they talk to you, they say your name, they make it
clear that they, with their independent will and all the hidden mes,
long for you as much as I do, kitten-queen, baby princess of my purrs.
Howard (to K.C. McCulloch) hb: here's something I wrote up today on one aspect of my own work during the last few months. see if it helps: It's become increasingly obvious that since the days of Newton we've been operating with a set of axioms which have proven enormously useful but also enormously limiting. The time has come to do what all good scientific expansions do--unearth unspoken assumptions and go beyond them so we can see a broader picture, one in which science as it's known today becomes a subset of a system far larger and more potent in its explanatory ability. The first fruits of this effort are revealing a cosmos in which interaction is more basic than atoms, contradiction is unity, matter is flow, and form is the dominant mystery. Common patterns are revealing themselves in altered guises at every level from the subatomic and microbial to the neurobiological and geopolitical. Quarks, suns, cellular receptors, cerebral components, self, art, and ethnic warfare, all are crowd behavior, pavanes whose steps we can now trace to the Big Bang's choreography.
Communication is
existence. Relationship is entity. And cosmos is the dance of mass identity. Subj: Re: Lamarck Still Walks? Date: 98-11-18 18:24:45 EST From: acheyne (Al Cheyne) To: [email protected] At 12:46 AM 11/18/1998 EST, you wrote: > >hb: given that every hierarchical social system demands competitive behavior, >that we can trace hierarchical systems back 220 million years to spiny >lobsters, and that we can infer that since spiny lobsters and we both have >hierarchical sysems with huge similarities we are likely to have picked these >up from a common ancestor much older that 220 million years old, it seems >likely that competetive behavior is rather antique--much older than, for >instance, the dinosaurs. If your implication is correct and it takes a theory >of mind to be competetive, then theory of mind goes back much further >evolutionarily than theory of mind theorists are currently considering. If >theory of mind is the ability to build an interior model of another's behavior >such that one can anticipate that other's behavior accurately, then theory of >mind goes back at least to amoeba, which casts us back over a billion years. >If theory of mind is NOT the ability to build an interior representation >allowing for prediction of another's behavior, then what is it? Yes, I know >that the experiments demonstrating that apes have elements of theory of mind >and monkeys do not impose a stricter criterioon than mere prediction. They >involve specific and very tricky forms of prediction. Could you refresh my >memory on these? It's been several weeks since my last brush with theory of >mind, and alas, my memory is somewhat lacking. ac: Of course competitiveness has always been with us. What seemed to me rather intriguing to think about was the possibility of intentional representation of the very notion of competition that would be a part of a Theory of Mind--to generate a scenario of self and other in competition--to anticipate moves and counter moves--and to understand this _as_ competition. hb: hmmm the puzzle of a doppleganger self--an interior representation hanging in the void opened by prefrontal cortical symbol space has been dogging me ever since David Berreby brought his chorus of inner voices and their opposite, the doubts which lead to inner emptiness and to Pascal's infinite vacuum of poisoned nothingness over here. I guess we are on the same wavelength, pursuing the same puzzle, after all. ac: Yes, "theory of mind is NOT the ability to build an interior representation allowing for prediction of another's behavior." Many organisms do this by a variety of mechanisms. ToM is the putative ability to represent another's internal states of mind--hence the name Theory of Mind--(Perhaps it would more accurately, if awkwardly, be called a theory of theory of mind). Ultimately, of course, ToM is just another way to predict another's behavior. hb: yup, one with innumerable inaccuracies, one in its infancy because it's like a bow we are still fumbling with. we haven't yet learned the tricks of aiming it---or even if those tricks exist. yet we've managed to predict the movement of planets and atoms with our symbolic mind. predicting the movements of the heart--ours or those of others--still eludes us. and the heart is what a theory of mind must ultimately be able to handle. ac: It is even (and more interestingly) a way to predict ones own behavior. hb: absolutely--predicting the motions of the self is the most difficutl challenge of all. what a paradox--the inner self is the closest thing to us and the greatest mystery. however it contains numerous other mysteries. Monakow, a German vitalist writing after World War I, got it right when he wrote of: "the activity of the universe (Worldhorme) within which we human children are highly organized necessary parts. As such, we are timporally and partly also spatially--through free mobility--closely bound up with one another; we [also] form ties with animals and palnts and also with inorganic bodies, into which we merge after death.... There is undeniable glory in the thought that an indelible temporal bond links us, not only with our ancestors and our descendants, but above all else with the whole rest of the organic world." (quoted in Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: 92) We contain in ourselves the history of the universe from which inorganic and organic self assembly has erected us. We contain the subatomic, atomic, molecular, genetic, and ecological history of our evolution. We exhibit all these levels at each moment of our being. Blake was right about finding a universe in a grain of sand. If we find the many levels of our selves, we will find the universe from which we have self-assembled. We will probably find the self-assembly processes as well--many intricate and different self-assembly processes nested within each other, as quarks are nested in atoms, atoms are nested in molecules, molecules are nested in genes, and genes are nested in the human beings who self-assemble in complex society. ac: Vygotsky argued that this is a major function of language--to describe and predict--and possibly to prevent--one's own action--(language and action systems instantiated perhaps as two massively reentrant and hierarchical sets of mappings--to give it a contemporary Edelmanian frame). hb: I'm afraid I have a prejudice against Edelman as an overhyped repackager of the obvious. however we agree on the principle. language is a predictive tool which grows in power as the generations continue to add new levels of understanding to our culturally stored knowledge. the idea of language as a part of the prefrontal cortex' capacity to restrain action and plan longterm futures rather than grabbing for immediate reward is covered best in John Skoyles' _MIndware_ (called Odyssey on his website). ac: Yes, the primate studies on ToM they do involve the study of "trickier" forms of prediction--being able, for example, to differentiate between instrumental and accidental actions of others by relying on others internal states of knowledge or ignorance (being present or absent when certain critical events occur, being present but not in a position to see or not, and so on). hb: ah, yes. many thanks. now I remember the footage of the experiments testing a chimp's ability to determine intention versus accident. ac: In complex societies such distinctions may become quite important hb: very much so. anticipating the strategies of subtle and brilliant adversaries is one of life's great challenges, great pleasures, great learning opportunities, and great tests of survival ability. some adversaries will kill if they win. ac: in preventing systemic destabilization by random events. hb: a minor suggestion of a correction in the course of the theory being proposed here. we have an easier time predicting "random events"--that is inorganic events--than we do predicting the moves of a bear who will double back and follow us when we think we are following him, or of a Don King, a masterful yet strangely clumsy man of power whom I've had to struggle against. Were Don King an Assyrian general and I an enemy soldier, one slip in prediction and I'd be dead. ac: Yes, of course, all complex systems must have there own versions of such safeguards. All I am suggesting is that the human societies must have their own specific mechanisms. Perhaps having theory of mind constitutes one of those mechanisms. I agree that there is profit in understanding the continuity of organic life. I think it is also interesting to discover what has evolved. Sorry if the disagreement is exasperating, but it is generating some interesting thoughts for me at least--I had not thought of connecting Vygotsky to the ToM issues before. hb: Al, this is extremely useful. all my thanks for bearing with my grumpy resistance. Howard In a message dated 98-10-08 13:28:57 EDT, dberreby writes: << Subj: Parts
of Clusters Here's what I'm
getting from this interesting discussion (and other The industrial
image of heredity, VERY, VERY INTERESTING FORMULATION, DAVID. of original
and copy, is wrong. We From genes up,
the components of living things work in teams, and each Living things are
dynamic, always changing through time, and contingent -- A central paradox
of life is that boundaries need to be well-maintained What people here
have said about genes and brain modules is also true of Apologies for the
absence of clarity here. I'm posting this not to try to DAVID, PLEASE PURSUE.
SEEMS TO ME YOU'VE POSED THE QUESTIONS, WHICH IS THE FIRST STEP TO SOLVING
A MYSTERY. IT MEANS YOU ALREADY HAVE FORMULATED THE CONCEPTUAL TOOLS
WITH WHICH TO TACKLE WHAT MAY HAVE SEEMED A CHAOS BEYOND HANDLING. cheers--Howard Subj: multiple selves Date: 98-11-28 18:42:57 EST From: H.Caton(Hiram Caton) Howard, I really warm to this topic. I came to it obliquely, through efforts to find an adaptationist approach to crowd behavior, especially political crowds. Since large aggregations of people living in permanent settlements is a recent phenomenon, a Darwinian must postulate some functional underlying structures of human sociability on which stratified societies can be built. I came up with two mechanisms. One is <facultative eusociality>. FE is a property of groups; by definition individuals can't have it. It's expressed as short bursts of highly interactive group directed behavior. These bursts may be formless but they are also prescriptive and highly ritualized as festivals, pageants, worship, and ceremonies. The second mechanism is <play>, that is, shamming, teasing, mocking, hoaxing, imposture, faking it. Play is extensive among animal species. It seems to be confined to juveniles. The Darwinian interpretation calls it <practice> in developing behavioral repertoires needed by the mature individual. The long maturation period of humans, plus the need to acquire very complex repertoires (eg language competence) demands that adults retain the play 'faculty' in order to regress to the child's level of understanding and social competence. Accordingly, the play 'faculty' extends across the life span, as we see in the ease with which grands dumb down to grandchildren. They have no problem playing the monster or tooth fairy. The play 'faculty' is markedly expressed in festivals and ceremonies. In stratified societies, costumes and masks are used to enable various social groups to change their persona, that is, for a bounded time, they pretend to be other than they are. hb: very interesting observation. In the _Lucifer Principle_, there's a chapter on the notion that each of us contains all of the functions or personalities a complex society could demand within our selves. However only one of what Herman Hesse called our thousand personalities is expressed. We have to let the others out to exercise from time to time. We have to give them parole from their captiivity. hc: Children easily become so absorbed in the sham that they are frightened to tears. But adults too can become absorbed to the point of 'conversion' to a new persona--a Moonie, a Marine, a Bolshevik, a cyberhead, an animal libber. When political crowds are examined cross-culturally and over long periods, you find that they invent or take over rituals that give permission to assume the crowd identity by playing at being persona significant for the event. For example, the leading identity played by the crowds of the French Revolution was 'citoyen', defined as a participant in public affairs--a thing unheard of under the royal auspices. Similarly, the civil rights marches led by ML King marked the first time that blacks had ever openly avowed readiness to act as citizens. This was decidedly a 'conversion' or transforming experience for the participants (they discovered that they were 'somebody', not just 'nobody'). hb: yup, affirmation of personalities waiting to be set free--new ones created by fresh historical context--is an important aspect of mass human phenomenon. in the first of these mass movements I dissected---the rise of the Beatles--individuals had feelings which they thought were theres and theres alone. that sense made them feel violently uncomfortable. being possessed by strong emotions or perceptions which others don't seem to share gives one the impression of being insane and produces a considerable amount of internal pain. the Beatles expressed many of the feelings about sex and drugs which a generation's members had felt in isolation. In doing so they validated the feelings and took them from the realm of insanity to something one could admit with pride and use to bond with others in mass rituals of record listening, rituals which may have taken place in the confines of a living room, but which one knew were being shared on numerous continents by a sympathetic multitude. In other rituals the individual goes further and loses his or her self in divine sublimation. This, The Lucifer Principle says, is the "spiritual" experience of sensing a oneness with the group, an immersion in its collective identity. This is something on which we seem to agree quite strongly. We also share a common starting point, a common curiosity. By the way, I was called in as a consultant on the 25th anniversary of the Beatles' invasion of America, which gave an opportunity to dig further into a crowd phenomenon I'd been picking apart analytically for quite some time. hc: In examining conversion experiences I found that their efficacy depends on installing behavior routines that dumb down individuals to group play. The games specific to the group install the new persona. I found this to be true regards of the religious, political, or social complection of groups. Of course, the purposes of the indoctrinating group differentiate the content of the induction process. I'm appending some excerpts from an essay of mine on this topic. They are from Reinvent Yourself: Labile Psychosocial Identity and the Lifestyle Marketplace, in Indoctrinability, Warfare and Ideology: Evolutionary Perspectives, pp. 325-343, ed. I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt and F. Salter, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ...... My claim that indoctrination is a positive thing refers in the first instance to the positive affect that the acquisition of a strong group identity has on people. hb: excellent obervation. It instils pride, energy, commitment, a sense of power and well being, and operational competence. These rewards create a craving for indoctrination-the tougher, the better, since the capacity to endure hardship and pain are signs of strength. The value of these attributes to mission performance is confirmed by most organisational heads and by organization theorists. Their importance for the evolution of culture cannot be overestimated. Cold War thinking would have it that these traits are wholesome and admirable in ourselves and allies, but odious and fanatical in opponents. hb: interesting observation. ........... there remains a serious obstacle to dispassionate study of indoctrination and propaganda. I mean the ineluctable impression of the childishness of it all. The beliefs and attitudes expressed are childish; the emotions approach the infantile; the rituals and games used to give indoctrination effect seem to come straight from the playground. These observations prompt patronising and exploitative attitudes among practitioners. Thus an architect of "consent engineering" (advertising), Edward Bernays, hb: Hiram, you're the only other person I've ever run into who's aware of Bernays' work. You'll see it in the footnotes of my current book, _Global Brain_. hc: believed that the public forms its opinions on the basis of little information and that its reasoning is wholly based on association of images, or suggestion (Combs & Nimmo 1993). Once formed, opinions and tastes are "logic-proof," Bernays believed. He advised politicians to substitute pseudo-arguments for rational persuasion and to create pseudo-events to dramatise their objectives. Democracy is a phrase to lull the herd into believing in its power while the reality is the invisible manipulation of public life by elites. This line of thought could be illustrated indefinitely from observations by practitioners and scholars alike. Lies, hoax, fraud, puffery, twaddle, imposture, madness-these terms constantly recur in the literature. But this unending stream of pulp fiction really is what the public wants (Preston 1975; Schudson 1986). They like melodious babbling. It is soothing to hear "Coke: It's the real thing;" and "You can trust your car to the man in the star." Imitative Learning and Internal Models. There is a saying that to understand the child you must become as a child. One way to implement this advice is to relinquish the ivory tower and reflect on one's childish enthusiasms for sports operas, the Simpsons, and sentimental causes. Another way is to spend some hours playing with children and notice what you do. Unless you are a reluctant playmate, you will automatically dumb-down to mimic the moods and thoughts of the kids. Adults can communicate with children partly for the same reason that children and adults communicate with animals and animals communicate across species. The common language is the non-semantic signifiers of basic intentions, such as approach and avoidance, threat, nurture, play and so on. Beyond that, the more relevant reason for my purposes is the elucidation by child development and animal behavior studies of the centrality of imitation to learning. Imitation is the learning process through which the infant acquires its sense of self; the learning process basic to child and adolescent cognitive developmental; and the primary learning process for the acquisition of roles and of group identity. These studies, which build on the investigations of Jean Piaget, are largely ethological in method and conceptual orientation (Parker, Mitchell & Boccia 1994). They help understand why indoctrination and propaganda achieve such effects as they do, while throwing light on the irrational elements of life. The lability of the Self's psychosocial identity derives from the fact that Self is not a homogeneous medium but is relational, and in a double sense. First, the infant acquires the capacity to experience Self only in relation to Alter. This is a fact of developmental history, but it is also a fixture of all subsequent psychosocial organization. The reason is that Ego recognises self thanks to social mirroring, that is, having my behavior sent back to me (imitated) by Alter (Meltzoff 1990; Gopnick & Meltzoff 1994; Watson 1994). One test of this thesis, relevant to mention in this context, is what happens psychosocially when Self is deprived of Alter, as in solitary confinement. The result is analogous to sensory deprivation: disorientation, hallucinations and other disturbances known in the prison idiom as "stir crazy." No prison punishment is dreaded more than the ultimate ostracism. The second sense in which Self is relational is in respect to itself. This relation is called "self-practice." Infants express it in automanipulations of the body, and in imitating (mirroring) behaviors expressed by Alter. These early behaviors lie in the developmental path to the acquisition of hand-eye coordination, acoustical-visual coordination, and Ego-Alter emotional and behavioral synchrony. The infant's self-practice develops into a "theory of mind." The theory includes an "Internal Working Model" (IWM) by which it compares actual behavior with intended behavior, e.g., in learning to walk or to play automanipulation games with Alter. The IWM operates a feedback loop enabling the infant to observe its own behavior, compare it with the IWM image of self, edit out the flaws, and replay to achieve the desired effect. Goals are for the most part presented by Alter as actions that the infant is meant to imitate, e.g., saying bye-bye. Alter may wave her hand, or she may wave baby's hand to show what is wanted. Leaving aside discussion of age thresholds when the infant's cognitive capacities accelerate by leaps, the process is one in which it acquires competence to produce a desired effect by modelling in imagination the action to be performed, then rehearsing it (Donald et al. 1993; Freedman & Gorman 1993; Mehler & Dupoux 1994; Parker & Milbrath 1994). This is true of motor control as well as of social interaction. Here are the main points to be distilled from this analysis: oImitative learning occurs through an iterated series of trials, or performed actions, whose goal is the competent performance of a model behavior. The goals and models are acquired by the infant-child through interactions with Alter that call up the infant's native psychophysical potential. The spontaneous babbling precursor to language acquisition illustrates. oThe activity of imitative learning is play. It is play in the sense of improvisation (trying oneself out to see what happens), in the sense of amusement (infants have a lively sense of humor), and in the sense of "just kidding" (feigning, shamming, hoaxing). Shamming mood states and social interactions is the self-practice that the infant and child rehearse in acquiring social competence. By that I mean the capacity to recognize Alter's non-verbal signals of mood state and to reproduce those signals for Alter. By the age of three, the child has acquired dexterity in recognizing and producing these elements of communicative competence and is likely to delight in fast-moving muppets theatre. Adults also enjoy muppets, even though the actors and the props are transparent frauds. The unreality actually enhances the fantasy game. oHoaxing and self-hoaxing are indispensable to building the child's social competence (Groos 1899; Piaget 1951; Fagan 1984; Parker & Milbrath 1994; Watson 1994). Unlike communication between computers, human communication requires that interactants express their mood states. Thus, greeting exchanges are the ritual opening of communicative mood synchrony. To be socially competent, according to the studies I summarise, means to have the capacity to call up mood states, or signs of them, as occasion requires. (Autism, shock, and mental illness impair this capacity). The child, in shamming a mood-to terrify Alter, for example-is often captured by the sham and breaks the play by becoming really terrified. It may then be said that the child hoaxes itself. oThe social play of children consists of promiscuous mingling of mood and character imitation (shamming, let's pretend) and really intended signals. This is why play is so volatile and often issues in blows and tears. But children are learning behavioral scripts (characters and roles) whose performance and onset/offset comes increasingly under their control. hb: interesting idea. hc: To put it another way, they are becoming proficient in mature lying, by learning to "role play." Children very adept in such games become actors, confidence artists, entertainers, moralists, politicians, writers, etc. oThe child of ten years has memorised many behavioral scripts and can perform them tolerably well as occasion requires. Scripts standardise personal performance for defiance and submission, conscience and transgression, bullying and comforting, exaltation and sadness, reverence and blasphemy. Some of these scripts are detachable, generic roles that can be played in all seasons. Others are specific to personal and social identity. oThe extensive shamming of games insinuates the standing awareness that identities can be faked. hb: the emphasis in these paragraphs and in the summary of Bernays (not the aspect of Bernays I use in my work) on lying is disturbing. You mentioned above that to understand children you have to make contact with your own childish enthusiasms, genuine feelings which you might not want to confess in an academic forum. To understand children, then, you have to stop lying and start expressing your genuine feelings. The success of the Beatles and of many other crowd enthusiasm catalysts or mass leaders is in their *destruction* of lying. Those swept up in political or pop crazes are freed from their lies and given a socially acceptable way of expressing their previously hidden feelings by pop idols or leaders. In advising leaders and pop stars, I stressed the responsibility to be honest. Art or leadership was about self-revelation, not lying and puffery. There were other consultants who built artificial identities--the puffery you're talking about---for their clients. Frankly, mine did better than theirs in attracting lasting group followings. Though I must confess that both falseness and intense honesty found their niches and managed to succeed. And I'll also confess that I have no understanding whatsoever of how the liers pulled it off. Nor, frankly, do I have any sympathy with the presentation of false fronts. hc: The child uses this competence to lie his way out of trouble. But awareness of "serious" psychosocial identity lability occurs during the developmental changes associated with puberty. Youth discover stirrings not previously experienced. Sexuality becomes a vast mystery to be explored, anxiously or with passion. There is a growth spurt of physical prowess and associated feeling of power. Constellations of potential new social identities loom in peer bonding. Adolescents learn new social roles, become conscious of competition for status, and play evasion games with teachers and parents. Each has acquired many selves and awareness of the potential for acquiring more. hb: sounds good. hc: Human delight in darting from one self to another leaves its mark everywhere. Consider the soccer tribe. They stream into the grounds wearing the colours and waving their club's banner. Some will don costumes and body decoration that mimic the club's totem. For several hours they go into a frenzy of cheering their side and execrating opponents. For a moment the contest is the most important thing in the world. hb: all this is darned good stuff. hc: Yet the childish hatred and tribal solidarity are entirely theatrical, that is, a self-hoax. hb: my work on irrational mass behavior began with ecstatic trance experiences in Macumba ritual. My sense was that when one felt that he or she was taken over by a god--Chango, Christ or whoever--one was actually experiencing a powerful inner self which had not been allowed expression in other social contexts. To date that initial intuition has proven itself valid. The soccer ritual also sounds like a way of releasing those inner selves which strain beneath the surface to be free. Again, this is the very opposite of a hoax. If anything the daily life in which these identitifes are repressed is the hoax. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and become hollow men when these most real of all selves are never given their moments to roar, to triumph, to shout and scream with glee. During the World Cup Soccer riots of 1998, one of the worst instigators of mass hate attacks was profiled by ITN. He was the model family man when he was back at home. He had kids, a wife, was faithful, a wonderful dad, and a good friend to his neighbors. Which was the real self--the man who egged on crowds to beat German fans or the man who took good care of his family? My guess would be that the violent self was the most authentic but that both were true. hc: The ritual is respectable so long as it controlled and is confined to the soccer grounds. But it is a rehearsal for war frenzy. hb: this concept
or rehearsal for war frenzy is a darned good one. Howard In a message dated
99-02-03 19:57:36 EST, ftsea writes: > > Kelly's example of charisma
over language reminded me of a time a > watched a > French Canadian
comedian perform, in Canada, in French. I don't speak > French, >
and understand very little of the language, but that guy had us >
English-speakers in stiches. I can't remember an entertainer in my >
lifetime > who made me laugh so hard. I had no idea what he was talking
about, but > he > had > us in his grip. >> > In a message dated 4/26/00 4:01:12 AM Eastern Daylight Time, skoyles writes: Much as biology needed its Linnaeus, so do self-organising entities and their kin. In what are waves, vortices and in what ways not. How should we classify them? Is it a question of the linear propagation vs circular propagation of self-organisation, or it is an issue of the presence of an attractor or not [the two issues might not be entity unrelated]? Sorry for the short reply but I am off to catch a train in a few minutes -- your ideas need a longer reply when I get back.
ng: My lectures
and roughly organized essays (used as class notes) seem like hb: wonderful observation and thoroughly consistent with the Bloomian grand unified theory of everything of which another piece is about to emerge in _Global Brain: the evolution of mass mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century_ (Wiley, August 2000). ng: Especially striking
are ideas I apparently proposed that seem to come from hb: Neil, this is wonderful. It happens to me too. My television producer has gotten me in the habit of recording most of my conversations and the lessons I give to my grad student/would-collaborator. The only problems are getting someone to transcribe 100 tapes, then finding the time to read and edit them. One technique which may work in your case is to write immediately before and after giving a class. Writing the day's lesson beforehand will help because your incipient audience will be very much in your mind. Writing afterwards will help because it will allow you to record many of the ideas and images which came to you while you were lecturing. Those ideas tend to slip away within minutes, and must be capture quickly. God what hams we humans are. Any equivalent to this strut-your-stuff delight in lizards? There must be, in the form of coutship rituals, especially when they're given before a rapt and sexually eager female audience. ng: Sometimes I
do not remember them until hb: ditto. it's
good to know someone else goes through this experience. just think of
the implications for neurobiology. one part of the brain is a brilliant
orator if it has the attention of a receptive audience. another part
of the brain turns in the other direction and aims its orations at the
inner self--whatever that is (we still don't know). The outward orator
is often not in touch with the inner sermonizer at all. knowing this,
how do we strengthen the connection between the two? and how do we find
the locus or the meshwork of these two different speakers who dare to
call themselves a single "I." Reprinted from ScienceDaily Magazine ... Source: University Of Rochester Date Posted: Wednesday, April 18, 2001 Web Address: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/04/010413082736.htm Study Finds New Way That Brain Detects Motion How hard to hit the brake is probably the most important judgment a driver can make, and though cognitive scientists have known for several decades that the brain uses changes in the visual image to measure self-motion, a scientist at the University of Rochester has uncovered a new trick that the mind uses to judge just how quickly we're hurtling toward something. The findings are in the April 12 issue of Nature. David C. Knill, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, found that the brain measures continuous changes in an object's size to determine the rate at which the object is closing in. [hb: an a plus future projector-and a fast one.] Scientists have long thought that the brain relies entirely on the relative motions of objects in the visual field, such as the speed at which the taillights of the car ahead of us appear to be moving apart. Knill has found that our brains utilize a second method that in many ways may be more important than the first. "If our brains only used the motions of objects and not their changes in size, then situations like a busy street would confound our ability to navigate," says Knill. "Imagine driving toward a crowd of people. The random movement of people in the crowd would add considerable 'noise' to the pattern of relative motions in your visual field. For example, just because two people appear to move apart does not mean that you are moving toward them. By monitoring how quickly objects grow or shrink, however, you can derive much more reliable information about how fast you are approaching." Complicating Knill's work is the fact that size change and optic flow-the motion of an object in our visual field-are so tightly intertwined. When an image gets larger, its edges spread out across the retina. That movement is one of the cues the brain uses to measure how fast an object is approaching. Knill had to devise a way to increase the apparent size of an object without letting any part of it move in the visual field. His team came up with the ingenious idea of creating a video that looks like "growing" static-amorphous smudges of black and white that grow larger with each frame. No single smudge or feature persisted from one frame of the video to the next, so there was no perception of motion. Instead, all-new smudges of a slightly larger size appeared in each successive frame of the two-second video. By controlling the rate at which the smudges grow, Knill was able to make viewers feel as if the amorphous mass was rushing toward them, even though no single part of any image in the video moved. Surprisingly, after viewing the test movies, people reported seeing stationary images as shrinking. This is an example of a perceptual after-effect and strongly suggests that our brains contain automatic mechanisms designed to directly measure changes in object size without using optic flow information. In the future, Knill says he'd like to see studies done on people who can't perceive motion properly, such as many Alzheimer's disease patients, to learn whether they can still judge an object's three-dimensional motion based on its changing size. Such studies could shed light on both how Alzheimer's affects the brain, and how a healthy brain makes sense of the visual world around us. Even "seeing robots," such as those that might someday drive your car for you, could be helped by this research since it describes a shortcut that programmers could use to help computers interpret a robot's motion from real-world images. Knill began the research while at the University of Pennsylvania, along with his graduate student, Paul R. Schrater, and Eero P. Simmoncelli, assistant professor at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. Knill continues his work in optic flow at the University of Rochester. Copyright © 1995-2001 ScienceDaily Magazine | Email: [email protected] _______________________________
________ Practice rewires the brain thanks to neural plasticity. See John Skoyles' writings for extraordinary insights into this process. Here's the squib from the correspondence with Dorion: 2) Note spelling of my name, D'Orion ("of the hole") or Dorion, not Dorian.... hb: sorry. I thought I'd solved that problem last year. apparently the motor neurons of my brain, which often type out words very different from those "I've" told them to type, put something on paper very unlike what I had in "mind." Howard
Howard Bloom 8/13/01 wrote: I've been poking and prodding beneath the floorboards of consciousness ever since Ted Coons hypotized Dutch television journalist Fons de Poel and tossed me into thinking out that thing called the unconscious mind in new ways. Below are some new reports courtesy of Karen Ellis. A quick glance makes it appear they may also refer to sub-conscious contributors to the selves we do not know--the sources of volition that don't bother to consult with the visible, up-for-public-inspection sense of identity. Jim Kohl 8/13/01
Indeed, Howard, the "sixth sense" in the eye parallels the
olfactory "sixth sense" approach because melatonin and luteinizing
hormone (LH) have regulatory interaction. Human pheromones alter LH
levels in other humans; light exposure and its effect on melatonin also
alters LH levels. Thus, we may need to determine which is the "sixth"
and which is the "seventh" sense. However, the effect is not
limited to seasonal affective disorder/depression. I will, of course,
continue to argue for olfactory primacy: coitus induced ovulation, while
others add detail to the likelihood of melatonin's effect on seasonal
breeding in humans. From a more global perspective: sunlight increases
Vitamin D (a steroid hormone) production, which corrects testosterone
deficiency in rats. Might sunlight exposure have influenced sexually
dimorphic testosterone-related physical and reproductive fitness traits
as primates moved from the under the shroud of trees to the savannas?
Is this why ovulatory women prefer men with testosterone-dependent darker
skin, or perhaps why humans continue to get too much UV exposure for
purposes of tanning despite increases in malignant melanoma? My two
cents worth, Jim Kohl Howard bloom 8/13/01 +beneath the floorboards
of consciousness-the sixth sense in the eye The other three
types, called cone cells, control color vision. It's known that exposure
to light at night can disrupt the body's production of melatonin, which
is produced by the pineal gland in the brain and plays a vital role
in resetting the body's daily biological clock. Earlier this year, Dr.
Brainard and his group showed that the combined three-cone system didn't
control the biological effects of light, at least not for melatonin
regulation. But subsequent work led to the surprising discovery that
a novel receptor was responsible for the effect. "We didn't anticipate
this at all," he says. In the study, they looked at the effects
of different wavelengths of light on 72 healthy volunteers, exposing
them to nine different wavelengths, from indigo to orange. Subjects
were brought into the laboratory at midnight, when melatonin is highest.
The subjects' pupils were dilated and then they were blindfolded for
two hours. Blood samples were drawn. Next, each person was exposed to
a specific dose of photons of one light for 90 minutes, and then another
blood sample was drawn. Wavelengths of blue light had the highest potency
in causing changes in melatonin levels, he explains. In theory, he says,
"If a clinician wants to use light therapeutically, the blue wavelengths
may be more effective. If you wanted built-in illumination that would
enhance circadian regulation, you might want this wavelength region
emphasized. In contrast, if you wanted something that doesn't produce
biological stimulation, you might steer the light more toward the red
wavelengths." But controlled clinical trials will be needed, he
adds. Next, Dr. Brainard's team would like to study the next step in
how light regulates not just melatonin, but all of the body's circadian
rhythms, including body temperature, cortisol and performance rhythms.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National
Space Biology Research Institute and NASA funded the research. Published:
8-9-2001 Religion and revelations express them. Poetry and the 30 characters of a single author's novel let them out to play. But I suspect they're with us-with all of us-day to day. Heavens and hells, gods and devils, they are endogenous as endorphins, but why? Howard
Half of the subjects in the study experienced a return of their symptoms within 12 weeks, though in some cases, the hallucinations remained at bay for up to a year. All the patients were also taking antipsychotic medication. Schizophrenic patients describe voices that not only talk to them but talk about them, haranguing, insulting and sometimes provoking them to hurt themselves or to perform other actions. In many cases, the hallucinations become more intense when the patient is under stress. In a study of 200 patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses, Dr. David L. Copolov, director of the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues found that 74 percent said they heard voices more than once a day. More than 80 percent described the voices as "very real," rather than "dreamlike" or "imaginary," and 34 percent experienced the voices as coming from outside their heads (38 percent said they came from both inside and outside their heads and 28 percent from inside only). A small minority of the patients said the voices they heard were always or almost always supportive and positive in tone. But more than 70 percent described them as always or almost always negative. Dr. Hoffman of Yale said some of his research subjects heard voices intermittently, but others heard them continuously, the only respite coming when they slept. One patient who committed suicide described her voices as "a constant state of mental rape," Dr. Hoffman said. Nicole Gilbert, 37, received a diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1985. For years, she said, she could not read anything because her voices "would tell me that it was about me." "They would say things to try to make me believe that I was Jesus," she recalled. "Then they would torture me and say: `We're just joking. You're so stupid, how could you believe this?' " Ms. Gilbert, who is much recovered and is now a case manager at a mental health agency in California, said the voices seemed so real that she could not believe it when her friends told her she was hallucinating. The findings of studies using brain scanning techniques like positron emission tomography (PET) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (M.R.I.) underscore how persuasive auditory hallucinations are to those who experience them. When patients are hallucinating, areas of the brain involved with auditory perception, speech, emotion and memory show increased blood flow, indicating greater nerve cell activity. "These people are not just crazy; they're telling you what their brains are telling them," said Dr. David Silbersweig, an associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University who has studied hallucinations with brain-imaging. Still, studies so far have come up with differing patterns of brain activation. For example, both Dr. Hoffman's group and a team led by Dr. Philip McGuire, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, found heightened activity in Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe involved with speech perception and processing. But Broca's area was not identified in Dr. Silbersweig's research or in a study by Dr. Copolov that will be published soon. The precise areas of the brain's temporal and parietal lobes that show activity during hallucinations also differ from study to study. The discrepancies are difficult to interpret and reflect the imprecision of even advanced technology in capturing highly complex brain processes. The data are further clouded because the high costs of scans limit the size of most studies. But the disparity in the findings has also led to different theories about how hallucinations arise. Schizophrenia typically strikes in adolescence or early adulthood. Extensive research over the last few decades has indicated that the brains of people with the illness differ in significant ways from those of healthy people. Experts agree that schizophrenia stems from a combination of genetic predisposition and unknown environmental influences. What everyone who studies hallucinations agrees on is that schizophrenic patients misperceive signals generated inside the brain. But scientists are still debating what is being misinterpreted and how this occurs. Dr. Copolov, for example, suggests that the "voices" patients hear are really fragments of auditory memories "that come to consciousness fused with emotional content" and are then incorrectly evaluated as originating from an outside source. The fact that in some studies the hippocampus and other brain structures known to be involved in memory retrieval are active during hallucinations is consistent with this theory, Dr. Copolov said. Other researchers, including Dr. McGuire of the London institute, have argued that what is misperceived is internal speech - the running dialogue most people engage in while thinking. In schizophrenia, in this view, a mechanism that normally distinguishes between internal and external speech breaks down. Dr. Judith Ford, an associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford, and Dr. Daniel Mathalon, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale, have proposed that the brain's auditory cortex may play a role in this failure to identify speech correctly as internal or external. In studies, they recorded electrical activity in the auditory cortices of schizophrenic patients and healthy control subjects. In the control group, the auditory cortex showed a dampening of activity in response to internal speech, they found. But this inhibition was lacking in schizophrenic patients. "When you and I have these thoughts," Dr. Ford said, "we are inhibiting the response of our auditory cortex, saying, `Don't pay attention to this; it's me, talking.' But the schizophrenic patients do not inhibit the response the way normal healthy people do." Dr. Hoffman has a slightly different theory. In schizophrenia, he suggests, a loss of gray matter may intensify the link between Broca's area, involved in speech production, and Wernicke's area, responsible for speech perception. In the normal course of affairs, Dr. Hoffman said, Wernicke's area receives information from a variety of nearby brain areas and distant structures like Broca's. But in schizophrenic patients, who in imaging studies show a loss of gray matter in the superior temporal lobe containing Wernicke's, the signals sent from more local regions may be knocked out or greatly decreased. If so, Dr. Hoffman suggests, the signals coming from Broca's may then become more salient, bombarding Wernicke's area with internally generated words and phrases that are in some way interpreted by Wernicke's as external speech. Dr. Hoffman noted that transcranial magnetic stimulation applied to Wernicke's area appeared to suppress hallucinations in some schizophrenics. "My view is that in schizophrenia it is not just inner speech or an acoustic memory that is misinterpreted," Dr. Hoffman said. Instead, he said, patients "are actually having perceptual experiences that have the same clarity and vividness of external speech." Dr. Hoffman's research team is now using M.R.I. scanning with each research subject to determine which brain regions are active when the subject is hallucinating, and then delivering stimulation to that area. But whatever the research on magnetic stimulation yields, it is already helping some of the 25 percent of hallucinating patients whose voices are not stopped by antipsychotic drugs. "Just stimulating in a single site appears to have a significant impact," Dr. Hoffman said. Other experts call the results impressive. In the treatment, an electromagnetic coil shaped like a Figure 8 is held to the patient's head. The coil produces a quarter-size magnetic field that is then rapidly turned on and off, inducing an electrical field in the cerebral cortex's gray matter. Scientists do not know exactly how the treatment works, but they believe it dampens the reactivity of neurons, an effect that is then passed on to other connected brain regions. Unlike electroshock therapy, long used for severe depression, transcranial magnetic stimulation does not induce seizures at the levels used in the studies and has a far more selective effect on the brain. Nor does the treatment appear to have the serious side effects, like memory loss, of electroshock therapy. The most common side effect, Dr. Hoffman said, is mild contractions of the scalp that some patients find uncomfortable. Also, in contrast to electroshock, patients receiving the magnetic stimulation remain awake, unsedated, through it. John, who participated in Dr. Hoffman's research last summer, said the procedure did not bother him. "This thing kind of taps on your head every second and it's not intrusive," John said. He said his voices got "smaller and not as loud" after treatment, but they did not go away entirely, and the improvement lasted only six months. Without a full cure in sight, John said he has developing his own tactics for fighting the hallucinations, which persist despite the medications he takes. He talks back to them in his head, he said, and criticizes them when they criticize him. Between his own efforts and the treatments, John has made much progress. He now attends school, has his own apartment, goes out with friends and has a girlfriend. "I wanted to try to make the voices my friends, but I found out later that that is not realistic," John said. "I was kicked around by them for a long time. Now, if they start bothering me, I just kick them around instead." Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
Howard In a message
dated 11/20/2002 11:14:25 PM Eastern Standard Time, shovland writes:
from self.doc: "The concept is that of the overself--a master self
which attempts to grab the reins of Plato's multiple horses harnessed
to our chariot (or behind which our chariot is dragged willy nilly)
and take control." Do you think the overself can be distinguished
from the ego? I have some sense that it can be, since the ego sometimes
seems to be working on "automatic." On many occasions this group has dealt with the problem of multiple selves. The threads David Berreby has raised have hit the fact that in different contexts we can "be" different people, and that we are a self in the context of many different subcultural cross-currents, a fact which gives us a choice of which self we want to be, which group we want to identify with when an issue confronts us. A friend of mine who comes from Dublin, works in the Unites States, and is Jewish can choose to respond to the situation in South Africa as a white American male, as an Irishman, as a Jew, as a Zionist, as a medical doctor, as a New Yorker, as a member of the fraternity of those who are slightly rounded not skinny, etc. Then there's Erving Goffman, who in his _ Presentation of the Self In Everyday Life_ pointed out that we use one script in the bedroom, another in the dining room, another for funerals, and yet another for beer blasts. In each situation we trot out a different self. More important in my work is the chorus of selves in our various neuroendocrinological modules--each trying to pull us in a different direction. These are the selves Plato spoke of in his famous image of the three horses yoked to a chariot, each pulling in a different direction--one was reason, another passion and I suspect the third was our animal self. If we walk into our cottage and someone has taken our porridge then slept in our bed, do we respond with our rational prefrontal cortex and left cortical apparatus and approach Goldylocks with sweet reason or do we let our limbic system see red and clobber her? Do we slip into whatever combination of testosterone and epinephrine may be responsible for assertion and try to dominate her, or do we allow glucocorticoids, acetylcholine, and overdoses of endogenous opiates to swamp us into a resigned sense of helplessness, then bundle up in a rug on the floor without eating dinner? An article by Elizabeth Pennisi in Science, 28 November 1997 (yes, 1997, I am, shamefully, a year behind in my reading), "Multiple Clocks Keep Time in Fruit Fly Tissues," lends credence to the idea that there are multiple selves located all over a fruit fly's body and neural system. It seems fair to imagine that a net of cells consulting its own timing device is off on its own sufficiently to be thought of as a self--one constituent in the congress of entities which must be brought into a state of consent before the fruit fly can act. But fruit flies have presumably got a lot less centralization of brain function than we do, so wherefore and howso does data from the lowly fly apply to us higher beings? Pennisi cites the history of similar discoveries in mammals going back to at least 1972, when it was found that the suprachiasmatic nucleus provided a kind of Big Ben lording it over the smaller independent clocks in a rat. Wipe out the suprachiasmatic nucleus and the daily cycles of such things as drinking and "the rise and fall of the adrenal hormone corticosterone" (to quote Pennisi) lost their coherence. If it pleases the assembly of multiple selves in this group, I'd like to propose a new concept and some old data which may lend it a bit of meaning. The concept is that of the overself--a master self which attempts to grab the reins of Plato's multiple horses harnessed to our chariot (or behind which our chariot is dragged willy nilly) and take control. A self which must, in fact, take charge if we're to retain our ability to function, not to mention our sanity. The data backing this idea up comes from an early 20th century neurophysiologist, Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965). One of Goldstein's most intriguing revelations occurred during World War I, when he was doing his bit for the (German) war effort by operating a clinic for soldiers who'd experienced brain damage on the battlefield. One patient, an unfortunate bloke (or should that be something like Herr?) named Schneider showed up at the clinic (or was carried there) with two wounds to back of the head, wounds which had damaged the occipital lobes. Goldstein and his team ran Schneider through a series of standard perceptual tests and found that he passed all with shining colors. Yet they were left with an uneasy sense that something was wrong...profoundly wrong. To quote Anne Harrington in Reenchanted Science: "As soon [as] they began to take a broader look, they discovered that actually Schneider was seriously handicapped in his perceptual capacities; he had, however, learned to _compensate_ for his disorder in a variety of elaborate ways. For example, ...he was able to read almost any text that was given to him by means of a 'series of minute head and hand movements--he "wrote" with his hand what his eyes saw.... If prevented from moving his head or body, the patient would read nothing whatsoever'--all he saw were individual lines and tracks without any overall pattern or meaning." Here comes the most startling part. "Strikingly, the patient was in no sense conscious of having modified his accustomed reading habits; in some unknown way, his injured brain had established a global compensatory strategy of which 'he' himself was ignorant." (Anne Harrington. _Reenchanted Science_: 147.) So here we have a human whose visual apparatus is capable of doing a good part of the process we call reading, but not all of it. He can move data from a page into some temporary form awaiting decryption into speech. However to finish the process of turning it to something he can speak aloud, he apparently needs to shuffle the raw material from one self, from one neural module, to another. Without the parietal lobes, he apparently can no longer do this internally. Somehow, without notification being given to his consciousness, a something in him manages to work out an alternative route. That route is what Carl Sagan would have called "extracranial"--it involves a shift of the datastream outside the skull to the muscles, which in turn write the material again and transfer it to the destination from which recitations come. The phenomenon in which one part of the brain jury-rigs a semaphore system to flag its messages to another has been seen in the days since. One of Sperry or Gazzaniga's split brain patients was presented with pictures only his right, non-speaking brain could see. With the corpus callosum, the bridge between the right and left hemispheres, cut, there was no nice, neat, synaptic way of getting the information from the right brain to the speaker in the left brain so that the "self" could discuss it like an intelligent human. So the patient's right brain wrote the material using his nose, the left brain read the nasal communique, and all was fine--provided no one immobilized the poor fellow's head. OK, we know this all indicates that Plato was right and that there are lots of selves in the brain (and probably a few in other places--women are fond of identifying the gonadal area and a particular structure pertinent thereunto as the seat of most men's thinking; actually, given the importance of the gonads in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis, they are probably on to something). What's important here is something else Kurt Goldstein, a man fond of reversing figure-ground relationships, caught on to. Yes, there are lots of selves. However overriding everything is a desperate need to get them together and subsume them to an overarching pattern. Goldstein called this grander mesh which insisted on asserting its identity or control a brain's drive "to actualize itself according to its inner essence" or "its inborn nature." (Harrington: 150). I prefer to think of this as the overself--the one self which tells us daily that it is a unity and that that unity is us; the one organizer which pulls mightily to yank its neuroendocrinological compatriots together, get them to behave as subordinates, as sub-assemblies, and to present us with that sense of wholeness without which we might lapse into emotional agonies. We have talked of hurricanes of form--self assembling patterns which sweep up innumerable elements and subsume them to a larger coherence. The overself is apparently one of these. When we've discussed consciousness, will, and our illusions of control over our Libetian pre-conscious impulses, as we have many times, we've been talking about the overself. How pervasive that overself is in our lives emerges from another of Goldstein's observations. Twitches of character--the need to oversimplify some things, to operate according to certain fixed habits, to give in to a bit of obsessive compulsiveness or impulsiveness from time to time--all can be regarded as equivalents to the unconscious body movements with which the soldier who'd had two wounds in the back of the head managed to pull his various brain parts together. They are all ways in which we yank the wild horses of our various selves into harness. Goldstein thought that such character oddities were compensations which only those he considered sick use. The healthy, he thought, managed without them. But I strongly suspect there isn't a one of us who doesn't have a small raft of compensations and pathway smoothers allowing us to get our unruly brain parts hooked together so we can manage the illusion of a single self, the vital illusion of overself. It is the different constellation of strategies with which we suck our many selves into a common hurricane of identity which makes the difference between our various personalities. Now the question is where this overself comes from? One answer appears in the notion of control. The complex adaptive systems theory of sociality I've been developing in books like _The Lucifer Principle_ and _Global Brain_ says that we are all modules in a larger social intelligence. That intelligence works like a neural net--shifting resources and attention to modules which show they have the solution to the problems confronting the system at the moment and away from those which demonstrate they haven't a clue. Our primary way of showing we've got the dilemma of the moment knocked is to manifest control. Show that you've got control and the world will beat a path to your door. Show that you're losing it and folks will flee like mad. (The amount of material backing this contention is substantial--but we shan't go into it here.) Now for the tricky part. We are built with what Mike Waller refers to as comparators and what I've called self-destruct mechanisms. Loss of control sets those self-destruct mechanisms off and sends us tumbling into depression, agony, immune-system suppression, and numerous other endogenous aches and pains that flesh (and emotion) are heir to. To avoid internal pain, we must mount the illusion of control internally. This is one reason we need the illusion of a unitary self. It is one source of the clash of boundaries equivalent to that which John Skoyles showed us is basic to the generation of a meteorological hurricane. But Goldstein's formulation of our central self-assembling principle of order as an "inner nature" or "inborn essence" is intriguing. Jim Brody has said that we do have an inborn essence buried in our genes. This is at the heart of his grand-dad principle. Some paleopsych discussions have added bits of imprinting theory. So I'm left wondering to what extent the self is, indeed, inborn, and to what extent it is shaped by circumstance. Since we all have a self, overself is apparently some sort of process built into the common Homo sapiens gene pool. (Those who've contended that the self is a western invention and didn't exist until recently in Eastern cultures may disagree.) But what other factors go into making the various types of overselves and specific overselves we end up with? And given the fact
that even a political entity such as a state or a movement has a crude
self, is it accurate to say "Uber self uber alles?" Howard
Apparently, Schneider's "reading" brain had communicated with his "reciting" brain via the now snipped or smashed occipital pathways. (As mentioned in communication with John Edser and Craig Palmer, we individuals are actually collectivities, including competing gaggles of disparate cerebral operators.) The strange thing is that the brain was able to take a route outside the skull to reestablish the connection and to do it totally outside the boundaries of awareness. This would seem to indicate that we have something akin to symbolic ability which can bypass consciousness. Another example of an extracranial device which connects brain parts appears in Konrad Lorenz' _Behind the Mirror_ (pp. 95-96). Birds normally hone their species specific song and the local dialect thereof by listening to their elders. Birds reared in isolation don't have that privilege. Konishi removed the auditory organs of some baby birds, left those of others intact, and raised both samples in isolation. Those without the ability to hear did not learn to sing. All that emerged from their throats was a cacophonous noise. Those which could hear themselves learned from their own voices and knit the results into song--apparently a trick of brain interconnection akin to that which "Schneider" pulled of in order to read. How did the birds do it? Nikolai and Heinroth, working independently, established that young birds could pick out the songs of their fellow species members from a babble of other bird calls. In fact, they could do it even when the sounds of other birds nearly drowned out those of their species brethren. They then used what they heard to knit together their own imitation of the accepted language of their species. My guess is that the birds reared in isolation with only themselves to listen to gushed a variety of noises (Lorenz agrees with this part--he likens it to a baby's babbling), recognized the parts which fit the pattern of their species' melody, seized on the sounds which fit their perceptual template, and wove them together in the proper sequence. Now this seems weird. A bird needs to exit its own brain, allowing one part of its cerebral apparatus to spew song fragments of a wide variety, then picks up the pieces with yet another cerebral component, its recognition system, and uses the results to perform a process of interneural knitting? We have a great example here of the relative independence of brain modules. (Lorenz' book is replete with them.) But we also have something which, once again, reminds me of John Skoyle's observations on the way in which we use art, tools, symbols, and other cultural artifacts to pull our own brains together in ways which may be radically different from those which existed in the days before we invented, say, the alphabet, the muscular art of the Greek sculptor Myron, or a word for an emotion like schandenfreude. _Global Brain_ has
a chapter outlining the manner in which culture alters brain morphology.
It would seem the brain of the birds Konishi studied had evolved with
an open loop whose closure would come from those around it, allowing
the final knit of its neurons to fit not just a species specific but
a local cultural pattern. (The literature on local dialects of bird
song is ample.) If so, the evolution of the individual has once again
fitted it for group living, as Brian Duckett suggests it should. Howard
In a message dated 98-11-29 00:30:07 EST, fentress writes: Subj: Re: Reductionism, Expansionism, and Neighborhood Jumps Date: 98-11-29 00:30:07 EST From: (John Fentress) To: HBloom This is another truncated reply to Howard's interesting comments. I see several snags. One that Howard mentions is defining levels. He is right. Does our brain operate on 7 levels, 13 levels, 27 levels, or what? We need to deal with this, and it is not easy. hb: this is a tricky one. levels is one way of looking at a bit of what the brain does, but it probably is too restrictive a categorization mechanism. Snaggles would probably be as accurate a term, since numerous brain levels--neocorctical, mammalian, reptilian, hormonal, vagal, etc.--can get dragged into a single relatively stable constellation of brain whatevers. The phrase "action patterns" (just raised by Ferdo Knobloch) probably fits many of these constellations nicely. Habit seems to pin a good deal of human and animal life together. Give us (or rats) a set environment and we tend to respond with a pre-patterned neuroendocrinologically based action pattern. You know the experiments on addiction in rats. Take a rat out of his or her habitual surroundings and you can wean the beast from a heroin addiction. Put the rat back into the old habitat and, bang, here comes the addiction again. An action pattern is yoked to a set of environmental cues. The work in which Kurt Goldstein showed how a patient with brain damage could escape bewilderment and despair by finding a new gestalt can be looked at in another way. The gestalt Goldstein observed was one which managed to hook up the parts of the brain and available capacities left to the patient in such a way as to recreate a sense of control over the environment, and hence a sense of self (my interpretation, not Goldstein's--the poor man shouldn't be held accountable for my sins). However this overall pattern a patient needed so badly could also be seen as a new set of habits. Habits are those workhorses of the sub-cortical brain which take the load off the cortical consciousness. They make things automatic, eliminate the need for decisions, and hence reduce that frightful thing called indecision, known to some of those who've published studies about its corrosive effects as ambiguity. One could argue (and I have) that a culture is a collection of pre-packaged habits. With all that in mind, I watched Cary Grant's _Mr. Blandings Builds a Dream House_ last night. The film was essentially a catalog of habits, of the ways in which those habits could encounter major and minor disruptions, of the ensuing emotional reactions (irritation, anger, despair), and of the snags when the habits of two or more people conflict in tiny details (the result is bickering, and eventual reconciliation over a shared dream or sense of accomplishment) . Here were some of the habits hit in the first moments of the film. The alarm clock buzzes. Cary Grant goes into automatic mode and hits the off button. His wife, Myrna Loy, goes into *her* automatic mode and hits the on button again, presumably to get Cary up and rolling for the morning. He hits off again, she hits on again, and so on and so forth. Conflicting minor habits lead to petty conflict. Grant gets up, walks zombie-like to the closet, reaches in to grasp his robe, and closes his habit-guided hand on empty-space. This forces the poor man to switch from subcortical autopilot to cortical search mode--an irritating process which a sufficient number of people find amusing to make this film a classic. Next Grant bumbles over to the bureau, shoves his hand into the sock drawer, and comes up with, not his socks, but his wife's slip. Mryna, after waking up a bit and searching her mind, remembers that she and the maid have decided to move Grant's socks to a basket in the closet. Goldstein would have a field day with this one. Minor quirks of personality are our ways of balancing the peculiarities of our brain, bringing a passle of obsteperous neural elements and environmental obstacles into harmony. Mryna's manner of balancing her brain conflicts with Grant's manner of balancing his. (Again, I am taking liberties with Goldstein, but not with Grant or Loy.) Hence Grant's habit patterns are thwarted and we are once again supposed to be amused by the resulting consternation this produces in the man. And so it goes. When Grant tries to get into the bathroom, his daughter screams--she's already in there. Her habitual time for bathrooming conflicts with his. When he tries to use the medicine closet mirror to shave, he suddenly finds Mrna Loy's face blocking his view as she ducks under his arm and shoves in to check out the daily progress of her crow's feet. Her habit pattern is once again crossing up his. The director is careful to show us how happy Grant would be if only he could get his shave in peace and quiet and cruise contentedly ahead in auto-mode, humming to himself. But the peace of habit will never once be, ahem, Granted to him during the picture's course. If my reading of and extrapolation from Goldstein is right, quite a gaggle of cognitive/emotional/neural/endocrinological elements are plugged together in a sense of harmony and control by each habit. The one over-riding "level" mechanism going on here is the horror of switching out of subcortical habit (if subcortical it is) into the cortical need to agonize and think. Thinking, in this context, looks like a way of putting habit on a new track when the old track is out of repair. Then there are the cultural elements of each habit chronicled in the film. Getting up at a set time to an alarm, finding ones clothes in drawers and closets at the beginning of the day, undergoing a grooming (and presumably an excretory) ritual in the bathroom, etc--these are all patterns we take for granted because they're ubiquitous in our society. jf: Problem 1 as I see it is defining an "entity" (processes included). In doing so we separate part of the universe from the rest of the universe. There are many ways to do this, and the separations are not always complete. So we have a problem. Problem 2 is that we can make broad and narrow distinctions. The larger ones in some sense contain the smaller ones, but the smaller ones can cross over into several larger ones (e.g. same letters in different words). This is the levels problem. hb: good point. Problem 3 is that we must deal with each "level" in its own terms. Problem 4 is that we need to see how our "level" relates to levels defined in both broader and more narrow senses (hierarchies). This allows us to think both in terms of mechanisms and systems, elements and the contexts of their expression. Problem 5 is to see if "patterns" re-emerge at these different "levels", both at adjacent levels and more distant ones. hb: a hint--we call many of these reemeergent patterns analogies. it is astonishing to realize how many people use the word "analogy" (versus homology, or is it the other way around?) to dismiss a phenomenon when, in fact, the reappearance of similar patterns in disparate circumstances--or even in similar circumstances among different species isolated geographically--is as intriguing as similar characteristics determined by common descent. Problem is that "common descent" is another of the artificial categories you've been describing. We're all descended from the first bacteria. Even if we weren't, we're all descended from the Big Bang. So of course there are going to be similarities, It's the interactions between the similarities and differences that's intriguing--how and where which shows up and why. (your image from a month or two ago of alternating interference patterns keeps woggling through my mind.) Howard
In a message dated 98-11-29 09:50:33 EST, fentress writes: I am reminded of the work by early ethologists on "displacement activities". Many of these activities, which occur in stress and/or conflict, become simplified into relatively simple rhythms.......the bird preening its wings, the rodent washing its face, and so on >> Which brings up another mystery from the Cary Grant movie _Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House_. One of the key activities in Grant's and Loy's morning bathroom ritual is a good look in the mirror, checking out all the bumps, lumps, and oddities of one's face, making sure, I'd suspect, that the accustomed parts are still there. Grant goes so far as to stick out his tongue and examine it from several points of view. What is it with these grooming gestures? Why does checking our body out reassure us? Remember, when Harlow's baby rhesus monkeys were subjected to one of the greatest tortures on this planet--being raised motherless in isolation--it was picking at their own bodies they resorted to. Peter Brown, the historian of religion, implies that we do things like this because our body is the one thing that, no matter what happens, we can control. Even when it's out of whack, it's the one solid and assured thing we can hang on to. But, Chris, do grooming actions which involve checking out our own body have the Ekmanesque property of resetting our brains? Surely this is how they reassure us and give us that feeling of a rooted and reassured self Grant and Loy seemed to be seeking in their morning rituals. But exactly what is the mechanism through which this reassurance mechanism works? Howard
In a message dated
8/20/01 2:24:07 PM Eastern Daylight Time, geistvr writes: Dear Howard,
Logically, "self" has to be as old as life itself, as without
a feel of body & periphery, and others no escape from predation
or mating with appropriate partner is possible. Instincta are grafted
into self, but self is primary. Cheers, Val Geist By the way, since
bacteria lived in colonies which eventually battled other colonies,
then feasted on the fallen enemies, colonies whose members did not eat
each other, the primal. seeds of kinship and/or ethnicity must have
sprouted sometime between roughly 3.5 billion and 2 billion years ago
as well. Howard
I wonder if the
individuals who lived in the Pleistocene, when this reaction hb: Interesting question, Glenn. We don't have to go back to the Pleistocene to look for adaptive explanations of those moments when the intuitive centers elbow the narrative self out of the cockpit and take over the controls. Research by the Damasios indicates that intuitive and emotional areas of the brain--for example the ventromedial prefrontal cortex--calculate risk and reward more rapidly and more accurately than the areas of the brain associated with the lofty power of reason. So those humans in whom emotion and intuition are able to muscle the conscious self out of the way when they're faced with an extreme danger are more likely to survive and have kids with similarly structured brains. But you bring up another interesting idea--that this mechanism for tossing the self out of the body evolved during the Pleistocene among our oft-referred-to hunter/gatherer ancestors. Did the self really evolve only among humans? Not if the self is that part of us which "prepares a face to meet the faces that we meet." Frans de Waal says that two male chimps squaring off in a duel to see which will take over the top spot erect their manes and show as much confidence, ferocity, and majesty in their faces and postures as they can. The display of regal fearlessness is a marvel to watch--and highly convincing. But when the face-off is over, de Waal has seen the valiant champions hide behind rocks or trees, check to make sure that no one is watching, then break out in a face which betrays the utter terror which they had hidden during their confrontation. One male chimp's lips flew into such an uncontrollable grin of panic that he actually tried to pull them back into a more seemly position and failed. This would tend
to indicate that even without a verbal narrator in charge of consciousness,
there is a mask the chimps put on to handle their daily politics. A
mask of this sort is the essence of a "self"--an artificial
social interface. Let's move from the lofty world of de Waal to daily
observance for a second. If one lives in New York, one frequently sees
dog owners standing near a tree and waiting while their pet defecates.
The dog shows in his face and his body posture what appears to be acute
embarrassment. If this isn't some mad illusion, but an accurate observation,
then the dog, too, prepares a fact to meet the faces that he meets.
And when one takes his dog for a walk in the park, where meetings with
potential rivals are common, one sees the dog alter his posture markedly
to seem as majestic as possible. OK, so the one taking his dog for these
excursions was me. But the posture of magnificent indomitability laced
with challenge lasted only as long as I kept the dog on his leash. Then
he could be certain that much as he was inviting a rival to battle and
advertising that he'd win, no skirmish would actually take place. The
theatrical nature of this charade was revealed when I removed the leash.
Then, if the other dog was larger than mine, my formerly magnificent
beast would cower and show all the deference of a courtier in fear for
his life. So the dog, too, seems to prepare a face to meet the faces
that he meets. Does he, too, have a self? I'm not at all sure. But these
shreds of evidence make me suspect that the public and private self
showed up in some primitive form long before man hunted and gathered.
Whether that early self had out of body experiences is another question,
and one which my dog seems unprepared to answer. Howard
<< Peter Berger's writings are replete with accounts of how role differentiation modernized consciousness. >> David Klein 3/23/98 to IPP Does Berger take
into account the probability that role differentiation began to have
a powerful impact on consciousness ten thousand years ago? Does he realize
that by 600 b.c., a city dweller like Thales could have a sense of "self"
independent of group identity, probably a rather new thing at the time?
(I believe it was Thales who first said "Know thy self.")
Though I wonder if that could have gone back to the days of heavy international
trade and cosmopolitanism between 6,000 and 3,000 b.c., the days when
Catal Huyuk was part of a trading web that reached from Crete to the
Indus River. HB However the number of subgroup choices widened considerably in the city. Even in Catal Huyuk 8,000 years ago, different shrines (one of every three apartments in the city was a holy place) were panoramaed with wall paintings depicting different motifs of animal power and female sexuality, each presumably representing an identification with a different sect. Ideas presumably flowed in along with imported goods from Jericho to the south and Russia to the East as early as 8,000 years ago. By 5,000 years ago the crossflow of concepts included those from India to the east, Crete to the west ago and Egypt to the south. It's hard to get a precise idea of what kind of conceptual choices men and women could wrap their minds, emotions, group identifications, and sense of self around. But by the 6th century b.c., when written records begin to open our eyelids on a continuous, in-depth history, we know the citizens of Miletus had could pick ideas from every direction of the compass. This meant not only a wide array of gods to whom one could swear allegiance, but such notions as Egyptian geometry, Babylonian astronomy, Homeric heroism, Ionian light-heartedness, Phoenician practicality, and a half dozen varieties of mysticism. Traditional ideas mixed with the new takes boiled up in the minds of each generation's men and women. A Milesian son of Phoenician immigrants speculated in vegetable oil futures or the rough equivalent thereof (he apparently bet on the prospects of the presses used to extract this prized commodity), then used the leisure his profits bought him to speculate in yet another way. He studied the teachings of elders from the web of cities of which Miletus was a part. (Miletus not only traded with major metropolises from all over the known world, but had 80 colonies, spread from the Black Sea to Italy.) The Milesian olive-press speculator mused on the Babylonian obsession with the heavens with such intensity that legend says he walked into a ditch while pondering the stars. He kept abreast of politics and current affairs, making sure to befriend his local dictator--Thrasybulus--so he could stay abreast of geopolitics, and even whisper foreign policy recommendations in the tyrant's ear. Being up on current affairs had almost certainly been a necessity since the cut-throat late Pleistocene, when early tribes had been forced to build wooden palisades to hold at bay the most lethal predators of all, organized packs of their fellow human beings. One little-recognized aspect of the nascent global brain was the need to keep up on the mental twists of your enemies. You came to know their tricks so well that you could use them in your sleep. Miletus' enemies included the Persians--who'd mastered the accumulated lessons of 2,000 years of Levantine imperialism, lessons in both the art of war, the logistic organization of masses of men, their administration of those men (and women) in times of peace, and the strange forms of belief needed to undergird a bureaucratic system. Insights from the enemy synapsing into the Milesian mind also included the innovations of another ominous superpower, the Lydians, creators of silver and gold coinage--a hi-tech financial tool the Milesians had grabbed and made their own, becoming lenders throughout the Mediterranean basin and the land bridges to the heart of Asia and the Ganges basin. It was said that the olive oil speculator, Thales, had travelled to Egypt, learned its mathematical and geometric systems, used them to calculate the heights of the pyramids, then brought them home, where some of his memetic imports would later be attributed to Euclid. Using Egyptian computing techniques and material on the heavens from the Mesopotamians, Thales is said to have predicted an eclipse-one of the first astronomical prognostications of a scientific kind in the Ionian world. He also helped initiate the concept of secular philosophy, reducing cosmogony to a material thing. Look ma, no gods!!! To top it off, Thales did his best to participate in our paleopsychological discussion. He was one of the first who advised men to "know thyself." He didn't say which of many possible selves he meant. As a financial wiz, a guru on policy matters, a replacer of theology and inventor of philosophy, the man could count up quite a few had he really wanted to. For others who wished to leave old superstitions behind yet needed something with more emotional umph than proto-physics, Miletus offered poetry, prose, and history. The choice of possible self-identities must have seemed rather endless at the time. All because of two things that had begun in 8,000 bc--an upscaling of trade to radically new levels and the establishment of walled cities to confound armed rivals and supply intercontinental merchants with goods and services. David Berreby picks up the story many thousands of years later, and many thousands of years earlier as well. Howard
Dreams of a color?blind
society always begin with children But what if children are hard?wired
to group people by race? BY DAVID BERREBY After the civil
rights movement, after feminism and gay rights and disability rights,
Americans have a standardized playbook for creating a political?cultural
identity. You start with the conviction that being a member of your
group is a distinct experience, separating you from people who are not
in it (even close friends and relatives) and uniting you with other
members of the group (even if you have never met them). Sisterhood is
powerful. Second, you assume that your own personal struggles and humiliations
and triumphs in wrestling with your trait are a version of tl? ? struggles
ofthe group in society. The personal is political. Third, you maintain
your group has interests that are being neglected or acted against,
and so it must take action?changing how the group is seen by those outside
it, for instance. The once insulting "black" becomes respectable,
then de rigueur. The supposedly female concern for feelings and relationships
gets redefined as a different kind of moral consciousness. "Oueer"
becomes a term of pride. Once denigrated facets of the group?soul food
for African?Americans, quilting circles for women, sign language for
the deaf?become emblems to be celebrated. Historical forebears, brave
Virginia Woolf and gay Shakespeare, for instance, are claimed and feted.
Of course, noticing that the promotion of group consciousness proceeds
by analogy is not to argue that the process of new identity?formation
is bad, even though it may divide communities, polarize families and
challenge traditional values. That the old ways of the South were turned
upside down by the civil rights movement was not a bad thing. All new
affiliations disrupt old If, as seems obvious, some aspects of affiliation with one's kin and allies are innate, where is the border between that natural endowment and the workings of culture? What psychologists and philosophers call naive theories? the common sense of how the world works that people seem to carry by default unless trained out of it?have been much studied in both children and adults. So has the working of the brain in various cognitive and emotional states. Perhaps, then, the time has come for a science of groups and group hatred. "There is no comprehensive field of study devoted to the most serious of human conditions: hate," Kenneth S. Stern of the American Jewish Committee has written. "There is no college from which you can graduate today with a degree in hate. But there should be." Lawrence A. Hirschheld, a psychological anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, takes a step toward that direction in this startling, subtle and challenging book. He rejects the idea that all categones of Us and Them are alike and equal. Instead, he says, his studies of children's thinking show that children have a pervasive tendency to think racially?that is, to see race as natural and important in predicting what people will be like and how they will behave.THERE IS NO ( OMPREI?iFNSI\;F field of study, " u~rites Ster'', "devoted to tlle OlOSt serio`'s of /It)~l~l a~t co'~ditio'ls: l~afe. " March/April 1997 × THE SCIENCES 39 The argument suggests that Hirschfeld would not have been surprised about a fact that, according to The New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin, confounded the prosecutors in the O. J. Simpson case: black women, responding to reports of a black man abusing his white wife, felt their sympathies drawn not to a fellow woman but to a fellow black. 1t , ? ANY STUDIES HAVE DOCUMENTED THE 1 ~ / human habit of categorizing people into Us l ~ . and Them. Strikingly, the habit does not seem to be attached to any particular distinction. As temporary and caused by tanning or changes of clothes. That people come in varying strains is of course unde? niable. But there is a sharp difference between real biolo? gy, in which different genes or phenotypic traits might be traced through populations, and folk biology, which invari? ably draws borders between populations that do not exist in the real world. In other words, not only are people's ideas of race flexible and arbitrary, but also they do not cor? respond to such divisions among humanity as actually exist. In his book Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race and History, Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist and geneticist at Yale John Ahearr`, (left to right) Nacor Castillo, 1990; Junito, 1989 Hirschfeld reports, studies have found that people will devel? op a preference for their own group even if the group is unheard of and arbitrary: one study found the bias even among people who had been told their group was formed on the basis of the last digit of their social security numbers. But race, Hirschfeld says, is different. It may not be built into our brains, but what is built in is a way of sorting peo? ple into categories that makes race a particularly easy cat? egory to use. "We (and our children) mentally represent racial groups with remarkable facility, easily invest them with significance, and readily communicate our ideas about them.... Class, for example, is as potent an explanatory concept. Many would argue that it is more explanatorily potent. Yet class is not easy to think." "The concept of race," Hirschfeld goes on, develops out of a psychological propensity to learn about a spe? cific phenomenon: the world of human kinds. Most important I suggest that this propensity is best viewed as a special?purpose cognitive facility. Our notion of race is unlike our notion of oth? er things.... Racial thinking represents a specific sort of thought more than a specific sort of shared experience. Such a counterintuitive and politically unpalatable posi? tion (Hirschfeld calls it "disquieting") is all the more extra? ordinary because, as he notes, race is a changeable fiction The naive "biological theory," as he puts it?that people will act, by virtue of their race, in this way and not in that? has no basis in reality. The naive theory regards race as immutable, heritable, essential. What is the reality? Item: People seem better at distinguishingindividuals of their own race, but that ability has to be learned; before adolescence, there is no difference by race in accuracy on recognition tests. Item: In the early twentieth century most Americans denied that Italians were white. Item: Preschool children in at least one survey seemed to think racial features were 40 THE SCIENCES × March/April 1997Zuhey, 1989; Tico in Wedding Suit, 1989; Claribel, 1990 University, notes: "There can thus be no genetic test to perform in order to determine whether or not one is 'Cau? casian,' 'Alpine,' or 'Hopi.' The reason is simple: popula? tions are constantly m genetic contact with one another." In sum, according to HirschLeld, race seems to be an idea that comes to people easily and shapes how we order our social lives, even though it has no basis in the real biology of the species. Most of what people believe about race is de? monstrably false; but to say so is to say not much. People's beliefs have enormous practical consequences. You might as × well tell people that romantic love is an illusion of the hor? mones and a cultural inheritance from the troubadours. The fiction of race is a fact; it is just not the fact we think it is. T lirschfeld's approach usefully highlights that point by not? ing that the scientific falseness of race is the bare beginning of an argument, not the end?that the important matter is not the content of beliefs about race but their role in struc? turing psychic and communal life. Race is not only "a bad idea," he writes, but also a deeply rooted bad idea. [Thus] race may be as firmly ground? ed in our minds as it is in the politics of our day. Many people, perhaps understandably, prefer to believe that this is not the case. But racial thinking, Hirschfeld argues, arises in children as young as three, and they come to the conclusion that race is an essential aspect of a person's identity not because "you've got to be taught," but on their own. T>~' HE EVIDENCE FOR THESE ASSERTIONS COMES from a series of experiments Hirschheld and his coworkers have done in the past fifteen years. In one experiment, for instance, he presented sets of color?wash line drawings to 109 children from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in groups of three?, four? and seven?year?olds. Each set included drawings of an adult and two children ofthe same gender. The adults in the pictures varied accord? ing to three kinds of obvious, outward cues: body build (thin versus stocky); occupation (wearing tools, a stetho? scope or a police uniform) and race (black versus white). Thus a child might be shown a picture of a thin black police? woman along with two pictures of children: a stocky white girl wearing a play police uniform, and a stocky black girl wearing ordinary children's clothing. Each child subject was then asked: Which child in the drawing is the adult as a child? Which is the adult's child? Which one is most like the adult? Hirschheld and his col? leagues reasoned that if the children simply relied on out? ward appearances for making their judgments, they should be as likely to rely on one form of outward appearance as on another. Accordingly, they should choose at random. THEY DID NOT. ASKED WHICH PICTURE OF A child depicted the adult as a child, the chil? dren showed a distinct tendency to match racial types instead of body build or occupational types. The children showed that same tendency when asked to choose which child was the adult's child. The third ques? tion strongly suggested that the choices were not based on similarity alone. When asked which child was most "sim? ilar" to the adult (a question that was presumably inter? preted to mean which child bore a resemblance to the adult but no intrinsic connection), the subject children were almost as likely to use occupation or body build to make their judgments as they were to use race.Why would such findings convince anyone that race is aparticularly salient category? Why would anyone think thatbody build or occupational dress is anywhere nearly as salientto children as, say, the color of a person's skin? As a matterof fact, HirschLeld notes, earlier studies have suggested thosecategories are quite important to young children. Both bodybuild and occupational type are named categories, possibility in view of the salience color has for young chil? dren's sortings." To rule out that possibility, Hirschheld and his colleagues asked the children to choose which of two pictures of cars "belonged to" the adults. Thus a picture of, say, a stocky black woman might be shown to the chil? dren along with two pictures of cars: a sleek black car and a "fat," bulbous?looking white one. The children showed no color bias at all in making those choices. A second experiment shows how even very young chil? dren associate "race" with certain individual characteristics that go beyond family relations, such as native language. Hirschheld and his coworkers presented thirty?six three?, four? and six?year?old children with pairs of colored draw? ings accompanied by speech samples. Each pair depicted two adults who contrasted either in race (black versus white), clothing (Western versus non?Western ethnic apparel), style of dwelling (Western versus non?Western) or orientation (forward?facing or backward?facing). Each speech sample was a short sentence spoken by an adult in either English or Portuguese. The experimenters simply asked the chil? dren which of the two people pictured was talking. All three groups of children predominantly chose white or Western images for the speech samples in English. To confirm the result, HirschLeld's group repeated the experi? ment by showing eleven three?year?olds pictures of people whose only obvious difference was that some were much older than others. Here the children's choices were random. That young children would associate non?English speech with nonwhiteness is striking, since, as Hirschfeld writes, the vast majority of blacks encountered by nlidwestern preschool?ers in the United States are native English speakers?and, con?versely, there is no reason to expect that the percentage of non?native English speakers is higher among U.S. blacks than amongU.S. whites. This observation suggests that children construct thesebeliefs to some extent on their own, in spite of thc? lack of anyempincal evidence to support them, (to /i,yI~)Ja~Iicc L' r~c~lsby conspicuous visual cues and known to be associated withstereotypes that develop in early childhood. Psychologistshave shown that knowledge of all three kinds of categorydevelops at about the same age. And body build (as distin?guished from weight) is, objectively speaking, a particular?ly stable feature of people as they grow from child to adult.The investigators were also able to show that the chil?dren's tendency to classify by race was not simply done byskin color alone?which, as Hirschheld points out, is "a real ~5 ; Pregnallt C;irl; Grcck Head; Sandy, 1979The findings, Hirschfeld writes, contradict the general viewin psychology that children's racial thinking is a matter of apply?ing "general learning mechanisms" to superficial differences. HIRSCHFELD PROPOSES A RATHER E AE~ RATEmodel of the mind to account for his find?ings?a model that nonetheless lies in themainstream of what many call evolutionary psychology orbehavioral ecology. According to that
model, the mind isMarch/April 1997 × THE SCIENCES 41 And the switchbox metaphor focuses questions that ought to be asked of any modular theory: What exactly is the preset architecture of the mind that is being proposed? What is left open, later to be determined by a person's environment? THOSE QUESTIONS NEED TO BE ASKED OF Hirschfeld, because in Race in the Making he boldly proposes to link two fields that seldom communicate?cognitive studies and anthropology?by means of a Chomsky?like theory. Human beings, Hirschheld argues, possess a race module: an innate and universal propensity for noticing racial differences and ascribing importance to them. It is a large assertion and, he acknowl? edges, an uncomfortable one. Its fuzzy edges are easy to attack. But it is also a fruitful claim, because even if the model is flawed, its basic shape and premise?a mental struc? ture whose innate tendencies interact with social and cul? tural surroundings?may help to enlighten the deeply entangled issues of racial consciousness. 42 THE SCIENCES × March/April 1997 purposes is a matter that changes with time. My aunt, in her seventies, lives in an ethnic map I scarcely recognize, in which the Germans are distinct from the Insh, and the Irish are dis? tinct from the Scandinavians. To me, born in the late 1 950s all those people are just "white Amencans." But racial thinking is too consistent, Hirschfeld main? tains, to be derived from so many different environmental cues?unless it has a component that is innate. The argu? ment is a racial version of the "poverty of stimulus" argu? ment from Chomsky's linguistics: Children in any culture all end up speaking the same language, even though they hear speakers of varying quality and the syntactic examples they do encounter are much too limited for them to infer what they come to master about syntax. Hence, Chomsky concludes, syntax could not come from the environment. Hirschfeld draws the analogous conclusion: Direct learning has less to do with the way racial thinking devel? ops than is often imagined. Substantial aspects of children's racial cognitions do not appear to be derived from adult culture. THE FAULTS OF A BOOK THIS BRIEF AND THIS bold are not hard to find. Hirschfeld's is a weighty theoretical edifice to build with the scaffolding of a few experiments. That is doubly the case for a group of experiments conducted, as HirschEeld read? ily concedes, only on children in the U.S. and earlier (in a somewhat different form) in France?in other words, on children of Western, industrialized cultures that have much history in common. Like most other
"modules" and "con? tent?specific domains," the
borders of Hirschfeld's mod? ule are not clearly elucidated. But lest
you be tempted to think there is only an innate Us?versus?Them reasoning
capacity, which can be molded to be racial here or gen? der?based there,
Hirschheld explicitly rejects the idea. He insists there is more innate
specificity to racial thinking than that. Yet he also explicitly refuses
to concede that think? ing about race is itself innate. So is the mechanism
a general sorter for human kinds or is it specifically focused on race?
If the innate module is a built?in capacity to theorize about what kinds
of people live in the world, as Hirschfeld writes, then it is certainly
conceivable that a child could grow up using the switch box part of
the module with nonracial settings?organizing the neighboring tribes
by sexual preference, or gender, or occupation. There is nothing in
HirschLeld's studies of young American children to contradict the idea
that his mechanism for racial thinking could serve other kinds of group
distinctions. American children construct race?based identities with
little prompting. It remains to be seen whether Ghanaian children, orJapanese
children, or South African children, would do the same.A more profound
doubt, which Hirschfeld tries briefly to address, has to do with the
theory of the modular mind. Clearly not everything human beings can
do has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Many people drive
cars, but that does not mean, as the linguist Philip Lieberman of Brown
University notes, that one ought to posit a universal driving capacity,
innate to each person, to explain driving. Moreover, as Lieberman has
written, one hallmark of a trait that is subject to natural selection
is that it must be heritable. Heritability implies some variation from
persor operates?just as some people are doublejointed, and just as hair
color and skin tone vary within even a single family. What variations
might arise in the "kind?sorting" module? If such variations
exist, what is left of the idea that a kind?sorting module is innate
to all children?ON THOSE QUESTIONS, AND OTHERS, THE model is silent.
Perhaps that deficit arises because the model needs further development.
Or perhaps no model will ever account for the mysterious flexibility
of racial thinking: the way a person can begin life "white"
and end it "black"; the way a person can hate all blacks but
not good old Dan, who is black; the way distinctions of merely academic
interest (he is a Serb, his wife is a Croat) can be turned into matters
of life or death. But Hirschfeld's book has the great merit of suggesting
a beginmng for a real discipline that might replace 5,000 years of futile
platitudes about why it is that We hate Them. eDAVID BERREBY is afreelance
writer living in New York City. March/April 1997 × THE SCIENCES
44
see sociometric
theory of self, which says we're constantly measuring ourselves for
social standing and acceptablility, then tailoring ourselves to increase
the value others place on us, which means tailoring ourselves to be
better accepted by conforming to group norms and attempting to do those
things we perceive the group needs us to do or wants us to do. We're
trimming ourselves to fit the superorganismic needs, desired, goals,
and outlines of the group, even to fit the group's self image and its
desire for a group sense of self esteem in the hierarchy of groups.
We're like fish constantly trimming our position to fit the great rippling
sheet effect the group makes when it shimmies together to confuse and
overwhelm hungry fish eaters. Though the picture the group presents
to a predator is that of a massive, magnificently coordinated single
superbeast, each individual is constantly wide eyed with what looks
like terror, and making twitch-like nervous movements to keep its place
in the grand rippling sheet. (Mark Leary. "Making Sense of Self-Esteem."
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2/99: 32.) In a message dated 99?08?07 12:25:02 EDT, arlene writes: You are familiar, I'm sure, with one's ranking position and alteration to neurotransmitters (increase dopamine and norepinephrine, decrease in serotonin) plus supression of immune system function and dminishment of self?esteem. hb: yes, it's a key element in both of my books.I wonder what it does to self?esteem when an innovation is imitated BUT the animal is, at the same time, mocked or shunned? >> hb: good question. In most of the human cases history records, the imitation comes after the poor innovator is dead, and the lack of attention he gets while still breathing can do terrible things. Such was the case with Vincent Van Gogh, with Gregor Mendel, and with the father of continental drift, Alfred Wegener. Mendel died in obscurity??the head of his monastery, in fact, reportedly wanted to burn the "useless" notebook in which the monk had recorded his experiments with peas. We all know what happened to Van Gogh (an ear is a terrible thing to waste). And Wegener died in miserable circumstances financially and psychologically. Those who've come up with inventions and seen them stolen by partners have often spent the rest of their lives in futile lawsuits. (Richard "Dick" McDonald who co?founded the McDonalds chain with his brother Maurice "Mac" McDonald was paid, along with his brother, $2.7 million for the operation by Ray Kroc, and lived to the golden age of 89, far longer than Kroc did, but at the age of 80 he was still complaining about Kroc's high profile: ""Suddenly, after we sold, my golly, he elevated himself to the founder," Which means McDonald makes a poor example, but who could resist tossing him in?) . Here's the real question: what's the equivalent to self?esteem in animals? The submissive posture of low ranking bees (who literally bow before their queen), crustaceans, and mammals indicates there is such a thing. Experiments reported in a June 25, 1999 Science Magazine article on animal consciousness hint that chimps may even have something more than endocrinological awareness of their low position. Try this on for size: ???????????? Beyond mirrors Almost everyone agrees that self?awareness, or being cognizant of one's body and thoughts, is another crucial element of consciousness, and many researchers think that chimps possess it. Alone among primates, chimps can recognize themselves in a mirror. But Seyfarth and Cheney contend that the mirror test isn't relevant for species that in the wild would never have the opportunity to look in one. Because primates live together in tight hierarchies, they argued that a better test would involve "social self?awareness" ??whether individuals understand themselves and their relations to other group members. "If you divide self?awareness into its components, then here's an aspect where we may be able to make progress," Seyfarth says. ...Work by Josef Call, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, agrees in part with this conclusion. In the March?April issue of Child Development, Call's team reports that they could find no evidence that five chimps and two orangutans could figure out where a tester should find a hidden piece of food whose position has been switched without the tester's knowledge, although the animals themselves observed the switch. They were not sophisticated enough to realize that the tester had the wrong knowledge of the food's location, presumably because they couldn't fathom that the tester had knowledge different from their own. Still, this was a test of one of the most sophisticated aspects of the theory of mind, says Call. "The theory of mind is not just one skill; it's a series of skills," he says, and he thinks that primates might still understand something of others' thoughts. Indeed, some positive results are now appearing. For example, Harvard graduate student Brian Hare, who works with Call in the lab of developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sought to design a scenario more relevant to chimps' lives than previous tests were. Because chimps forage in groups and have an elaborate set of rules about who gets to eat food first, Hare devised a test that looked at whether one chimp could tell what another chimp, rather than a human tester, was seeing??and presumably, thinking. Their setup involved three opaque cages in a row, with a chimp in the first and third cages and two pieces of food in the middle cage. The doors from the outer cages to the middle one were first opened just enough that each chimp could peek at the food and see that the other chimp was eyeing it too. When the door was opened fully, only the dominant chimp of the pair retrieved the food, as would have been the case in the wild. The researchers then placed a barrier in such a way that the dominant chimp could see only one piece of food, but the subordinate could see both and could also see that only one piece of food was in view of the dominant chimp. This time, the subordinate took the piece of food that the dominant couldn't see, suggesting that it knew the dominant was unaware of this food's existence. And when the dominant chimp was replaced with a chimp even lower on the hierarchy, the newly dominant chimp first went after the food both chimps could see??grabbing the potentially more contested item first??and then retrieved the second piece. Thus the chimp's response varied depending on its fellow's identity and what it could see, suggesting an understanding of another's visual perspective. (Elizabeth Pennisi. "Are Our Primate Cousins 'Conscious'?" Science 1999 June 25; 284: 2073?2076.) ??????????? I'd suspect that a macaque whose innovation was adopted but who was still stomped to the bottom of the social hierarchy would undergo the neuroendocrinolical pains most flesh is heir to when lowered in stature intolerably. Howard
Then there's the
fact that, unlike other animals, we don't limit sexual display to one
small season of the year. females are sexually attractive to us 365
days a year. so we're on show every day in many ways. Howard But do dreams really synchronize humans? What evidence indicates this fact? I suspect dreams may, but what facts can we produce to indicate that this is true? ds: and so on (bringing in folks like Humphrey, Byrne &Whiten, Dunbar, and so on). So far nothing new. The radical theoretical departure is that social intelligence is in part unconscious (I'd really like to say that we are much smarter unconsciously about these things than we are consciously). hb: dreams as practice sessions for the unconscious gadgetry of group cohesion and of productive synchrony. A very, very intriguing idea. And it makes sense of the strange jumble and murkey-but-potent emotional tone of dreams. But, again, what evidence can we produce that this is true? Hopefully I'll finish Philip Ball's molecules book by next week and will then jump into Tim Wilson's book on the adaptive unconscious, which Sharon Begley (science writer for the Wall Street Journal and a silent member of The International Paleopsychology Society's email list) has convinced me is a breakthrough volume. ds: At this point there are two lines of attack: the empirical and the theoretical. The second one is easier, so I'll mention it first. This revolves around deceit and self-deception, which we perhaps don't agree about. Here's the reasoning: deception is advantageous, because it allows you to hog resources without being apprehended. This is as true of the viral techniques of outwitting the immune system of its host as it is of the Machiavellian tactics of the primates observed by Dick Byrne, Franz de Waal, Marc Hauser and others, and, of course ourselves. Homo sapiens are the grandmasters of tactical deception, which lends social life a somewhat predatory quality. Deception also provides a measure of protection (we confide in those whom we have good reason to trust). Self-deception, on Trivers' account, hides the truth more deeply from others by hiding it from ourselves. Trivers calls this 'self-deception in the service of deceit'. hb: I'm working on the proposal for a book that says we do best when we serve each others' needs, not when we subvert them. I strongly, strongly suspect that the self-deception theory has elements of truth, but in the end, gets things wrong. We need to deceive ourselves into an appearance of normalcy. Our interior self is bewildering and peculiar. We desperately need to mesh with our fellow humans. We can not show them the strangeness in our brain--our constant moodswings (we have seven major moodswings per day), our sadnesses and insecurities. So we have to practice being normal and convince ourselves that, indeed, we're normal as can be. So 20 minutes after a daily squall of depression and insecurity, we've forgotten that we ever felt so glumly unacceptable at all. Cheating's not the goal of self-deception. The goal is fitting in. Normal is the key. What in the world is normality? It's tailoring our sense of self to fit an emergent property, an average of what those about us choose to show. An average dictated by averages established by ancestors long ago. Those ancestor's mean--their standard for what we reveal and what we pretend to be--has been passed down to us by culture. That, in fact, is what culture is. If you dig into the mass of research for one of my upcoming books--Passion Points: A Scientific Journey Into the Mists of Self and Soul--you'll find an alternative explanation of our self-deception. Self, say the four theories in Passion Points--is others. It's the others we've introcepted during key imprinting periods. It's also a billboard of control--the quality that gets others to accept and love us. If they knew how out of control we are so many times a day, they's spurn us, shun us, and turn away. Finally, self is like a clutch, it's our social interface. And it's geared to group means, group norms, group customs, and group definitions of what a self should be. Why would self evolve to be a self-deceiver? To integrate us. To synchronize us. To make us a part of a winning team. To make us a part that ups the odds of winning in the constant competition groups undergo. Peaceful competion for group status and group influence. Violent competition for the very right-to-not-be-eaten--the right to continue to exist. The nature of intergroup tournaments is spelled out in The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. Lucifer concentrates on the large-scale competition between groups--in war and genocide. Global Brain concentrates on small-scale competition between the subcultures within a group--and gives a history of how subcultures came to be. The self is a mask, a deceit we impose even on ourselves. But when we sleep the selves without masks, names, or vocabulary get a chance to play. Do they do so in a manner that enhances our ability to integrate with others? Our dreams of being shamed are conformity enforcers. They keep us in line. Which means they're social integrators. Our dreams of being chased--where do these fit into social integration, group cohesion, and group survival. In war--a practice begun by bacteria 3.5 billion years ago--if we run we're dead. Military historian John Keegan explains that once you panic a military troop, you roll it up, you send it running. And those who run are almost invariably killed. There's a psychology of warfare. To win you have to retain your group coherence and your individual confidence. The enemy tries to destroy that confidence with everything from war paint to war yells. Your enemy tries to snip the bonds of group cohesion. It tries to eradicate the emotional state that makes the cohesion of your group a possibility. It tries to induce the very panic you rehearse so often in your dreams. Those dreams of a pursuer whom you can not seem to shake. How does practice of a negative produce a positive? We live the terrors of shame when we dream we're naked in public. That night-time terror is a prod that keeps us normalized by day. Does our dream of panicked flight work in the same way? Is it what keeps us in line with our companions when we go to war? Is a nightmare an conformity enforcer? Is it a night-time cattle prod and not an exercise in things we do by day? Our dreams of flight are social integrators in their own strange way. They give us aspirations which we try to live by day. They're connected to our tribe's ideals, the goals that lift us, give us exaltation, and synch us almost mystically. They synch us through religion, trance, dance, and the uplift of ceremony. A group without a goal is a group that's dying. That's where the aspirations based on flying seem to come in. Aspirations are the next steps we want to climb to reach the summit of whatever mountaintop our culture says is paradise. In The Lucifer Principle, I demonstrate how dreams of paradise motivate groups to climb the intergroup social ladder, to subjugate other groups, and in the process to lift the standard of living for each participant in our group, no matter how lowly she seems. A lowly position in a high-placed group is often higher than the highest position in a group that's losing the intergroup tournament. You can be homeless in America and feel superior to a Yanomamo chief. So we have carrot dreams. And we have stick dreams too. This makes dreams prods and pullers, hell's pricks and heaven's forward-drivers. Dreams are group enforcement engines and group-cohesion drives. This eliminates my notion that dreams are practice sessions for the day. Or does it? What does this do to Paul's "offline simulations," to David's "social interference systems," to my notion of dreams as practice for catastrophe, and to David's magnificent "anticipatory engines"? Dreams as emotional motivation-candy (flying) and as punishment-reminders makes them social integrators, conformity enforcers, and utopian-motivators, something I never thought of until today. Well, David, you've just changed my thinking rather drastically--and for the better, I suspect. ds: The bottom line is that social relations involve a lot of bullshit and fakery, and a lot of the time we don't even know that we are bullshitting and faking. If indeed the conscious mind is highly vulnerable to self-deception hb: in my two Mbs of material for Passion Points, I believe I have a substantial amount of material indicating that self is a mask, an illusion, a trick we play on others and ourself--but not to cheat. Societies that breed cheaters lose! We upgrade and serve the unspoken needs of others within our group. Especially the needs of friends, family members, and superiors. We cheat outsiders only. And cheating auslanders, foreigners, the enemy, is usually reperceived by culture not as the low thing that it is, but as a victory. If we can believe the experience of the Yanomamo and of the African tribes David Sloan Wilson cites, in tribal times we had many enemies--a dozen or so at least. A Navaho who wandered into a Hopi village was offered hospitality. Then he was murdered in his sleep and was stripped of whatever goods he carried or wore. In modern society, the number of enemies has been significantly reduced. The number of allies and co-members of our group has gone up dramatically. So there are very few people we're encouraged to cheat today. ds: it would make sense for an incisive psychological intelligence to be operating at the unconscious level, where it would be free of these particular distortions. hb: evidence? ds: There is a second theoretical argument to be made, based on informational load. The conscious mind seems to have very limited information-bearing capacity and seems to operate in a rather linear and sequential fashion. hb: agreed. ds: As such, it is spectacularly ill-adapted to tracking the enormously complex simultaneous interactions that take place in even a small social group (and bear in mind that as group size expands, social complexity increases exponentially). hb: true. ds: It would surely make sense for this sort of information to be handled by a massively parallel system. Furthermore, there is good experimental evidence, from Reber's work on unconscious learning, that complex pattern recognition occurs unconsciously, and that conscious involvement actually disrupts the learning process. Reber studies how artificial grammars are unconsciously learned. My take is that we unconsciously learn and monitor the grammar of social exchange. hb: I've got a bunch of reber's work in the computer. When the time comes I'll have to dig it out. Some of it I've got in things you've sent me. Meanwhile I have a meeting in a few minutes, a standard issue family crisis, and an interview in an hour and a half, plus another 130 emails to do. So my answers, alas, may become brief. ds: The first most general point that needs to be argued is the existence of unconscious social intelligence. hb: that's where Wilson's work may come in handy. Can you email me the relevant Reber papers? I've probably only got brief summaries. ds: The second line is empirical. With regard to dreams, we are confronted with some really difficult methodological problems. Unless we are 'preaching to the choir' it will be very difficult to convince anyone. They will have problems with (a) the methodology of interpretation, (b) the testability of interpretations, and (c) accuse us of of tendentiously selecting examples. hb: I wish we had a grad student. I wonder if I can get my assistant, Stephen Lee, to gather up the literature on dreams looking for concrete examples, case studies, and statistics on dream-themes. ds: In my view, the best way to go - and I may have to try to convince you of this - is to argue that the output of the unconscious social intelligence is spontaneous narrative activity, of which dreaming is a special case. Spontaneous narratives (Freud's 'Einfallen' - wrongly translated as 'associations') encode unconscious meanings analogically. I think it best to play it this way for two reasons: (1) Because in social
intercourse there are often immediate unconsciously meaningful narrative
responses to triggering events, which are particularly compelling. They
can be easily observed in one's everyday life. (2) It would be pretty
easy to devise an experimental protocol to test this thesis (I think
I have this worked out). We could then bring in dreams as a coup de
gras. By the way, my colleague Rob Haskell has codified a whole array
of cognitive operations that transform raw interpersonal perceptions
into encoded narratives and dreams. hb: sounds interesting. ds: My sense
at this point is that we need to continue kicking ideas around awhile.
The baby is not yet ready to be born, although we are well into the
third trimester. Paul &Howard, I am looking forward to our further
conversations with relish. Paul, I am particularly intrigued with the
neuropsychological model that you began to sketch out in your last message.
One day we three have got to meet up in NYC. hb: yes, here at the Bloom
brownstone, to which, alas, I am confined. ds:On a more personal note,
I really appreciate the concern that you have expressed about my situation
here. Cheers David I knew he'd been in some sort of severe trouble for the previous year and was didn't entirely believe the restaurant story, but gave him the money for friendship's sake. He turned out to be addicted to cocaine. He knew he'd lied and never dared call or show his face to me again. Cheating was a form of social suicide for him, and for another friend whom I helped climb to record company status, then who self-destructed on cocaine, went to the homes of each of his friends, asked if he could stay overnight, got up at 3am or so, looted the friend's apartment, and used the procedes to buy his next hit of cocaine. Every theft ended a friendship. The last was a theft of $10,000 from his twin brother. That one landed him in prison for the next five years. Losing someone I'd worked with for ten years in this way had a far more devastating effect on me that I realized. Several publications--The Village Voice and a leading gay magazine-- covered the story of his downfall and interviewed me as a person who'd been close to him and had been vital to his rise. In the middle of one of these interviews I broke down crying and had to hang up for half an hour to regain my composure. David, I've been through all kinds of hells and have never, ever cried. Kool and the Gang stiffed me for $35,000. But, again, that meant burning a bridge behind them. Without me their career went into a permanent tailspin. Were my services really indispensable? It's hard to know. However I did have a steady track record of taking people no one believed in to star status--and was the architect of the management and touring strategies that held Kool and the Gang aloft for many years. Again, most folks paid. The cheaters tended to end up destroying themselves, sometimes very dramatically. Which brings me back to marriage. When a divorce occurs, some psychologists say that the process produces delusional distortions of memory in the battling husband and wife. Each distorts his or her view of reality to justify the emotional and financial assault of the divorce process and to rationalize the idea that the 80% of the joint property that he or she wants to scoop up is really just fair recompense for whatever phony complaints the mind can turn from fly specks to abuse and from economic partnership to robbery. But these forms of cheating are forms, as I said, of social suicide. The cheating idea is one that's become fashionable in the individual selectionist sect that currently dominates evolutionary psychology. But it's one of those theories that I don't think fit the facts. Field experience can reveal the flakiness of concepts artificial lab experiments are deliberately designed to support. Twenty years of urban anthropology in the real world of business and of ultra-intense human interactions comes in very handy. ds: I am pretty sure that we are designed to grossly underestimate the degree to which we indulge in such nastiness. hb: I agree with you, which seems strange in light of what I've just said. Yes, we are self-rationalizers, but very little of that is involved with individual cheating. I think it plays a greater role in the way one group cheats another--like film producers systematically cheating actors, Jihadists justifying killing Westerners, the Bush team justifying blasting Iraq, etc. Lynn Margulis' work on false memory indicates that it's our failures we erase from our minds, not our acts of theft. We remember having had salaries higher than we actually received, drinking less alcohol than we actually consumed, showing up for work more diligently than our work records reveal, and probably (this is not in Lin's work) being heroic at times when we were cowardly, being generous at moments when we were niggardly, etc. ds: That being said, deception and self-deception in the service of deceit are, and must be, frequency dependent phenomena. They can only ride on the back of honest interchanges, with others and with self. The fable of 'The boy who cried wolf' tells us what happens when this relationship breaks down. The book I'm working on now Natural Born Liars is all about this stuff. hb: great title. You should interview Lorraine Rice about this. She's been working on the same book for the last three years or so and has accumulated many a sharp insight into the matter. ds: One of the most evil consequences of the mental health industry in the US is to further reinforce the belief in normalcy, to make people feel that if they are not normal they suffer from an illness and must take the latest purple pill. This estranges people
horribly from themselves. To mention again Winnicott's great line, that
I shared with you early in our correspondence, there are two kinds of
psychopathology: sanity and insanity. The desirable state is unsanity.
Perhaps Freud's greatest gift was the exposure of the mythic status
of normality, which is sustained by his intrapsychic conformity enforcer
- the superego. hb: interesting ideas. hb: "In modern society,
the number of enemies has been significantly reduced. The number of
allies and co-members of our group has gone up dramatically. So there
are very few people we're encouraged to cheat today." ds: I don't
believe this for a minute. Of course, solidarity is good for a group,
and thus benefits the individuals comprising it, but intragroup competition
for resources in inevitable, as is intragroup social predation. Believe
me, the academic world is almost a pure culture of it! hb: we agree--the
competition within a society is a constant. Academia has institutionalized
a wretched form of cheating--getting grad students to do your bidding
them putting your name on their papers. And, when those grad students
come up with a new idea while under your aegis, making yourself lead
author on the paper in which they reveal their new research or insight,
thus taking credit for the work of others. Admittedly all brainwork
is teamwork. Even here in my near-total isolation I'm tapping the brains
of hundreds of others constantly. But, David, we hyper-diligent footnoters--you
and I-- try not to cheat, but to give credit where it's due. In fact,
we send copies of our work to the many people we cite. Why? They are
often higher than we are on the totem pole. We curry favor. We cooperate
so much more than we cheat that it's amazing. And I propose that the
self-deceptions built into the process-and-thing that we call "self"
are designed primarily to integrate us and to cooperate us. As you said,
cheating is frequency dependent. You can only get away with it roughly
2% of the time. Which leaves 98% of the puzzle of the deception we call
self devoted to cooperation or to some other functions we haven't put
our finger on in this spirited chorus of email thought. Alas, my files
on self and related research are humongous, so there may well be other
Bloomian hypotheses and non-Bloomian research papers relevant to this
train of thought. But, as usual, I'm 200 emails behind and want to spend
time with my wife and kid tonight. Every onward and upward. A hearty
yes to the Smithian phrase, "More fun tomorrow." Howard _________Paul Werbos,
David Smith & HB 1/4/2003
[Irwin] I have followed this thread with interest, having long > been convinced that display is a consuming aspect of human > affairs. But one > sees the same in all manner of animals - display to attract mates, > intimidate competitors, achieve dominance and power, etc. Is > it in the interests of parsimony to invoke self awareness, > which seems so distinctly > a human property, as the mediating variable? > (Skoyles) But all
nonhuman animals spend most of their lives not displaying to each other.
What is novel about humans is display continues in private - our 'face'
does not need other's eyes. Self awareness I would have thought was
closely linked to presentation. Consider appearances - how can we know
how to best present ourselves without a mirror to see how we are seen
by others? Verbal and other display through our actions and words needs
the equivalent of a mirror - a cognitive mirror - in which we can experience
ourselves as others might experience us. Such a cognitive mirror would
need to provide an awareness of self - since this is what is being displayed
- to work. In a message dated 1/3/02 4:25:43 PM Eastern Standard Time, geistvr writes: OOPS, John! JS: "But all
nonhuman animals spend most of their lives not displaying to each other."
Val Geist: Dominant ungulate males do little else but display. In the
mountain sheep where I quantified it, dominance dispays made up more
than 95% of all signals of dominants. If you consider positioning effects,
drawing attention to onself merely by standing in the right place, its
a lot more! What distinguishes ours is Art. Different animals
take different paths to display. songbirds, like humans, waste their
time, energy, and exertions of confidence in elaborations of something
not only seemingly extraneous, but in something with no permanence--song--something
that takes creativity and intelligence. Some chimps, as you say, are
more economical and simply show their erections. But the chimps are
blessed with relatively unpicky, undemanding females, females who some
researchers indicate mate with just about every male in the group once
they come into heat. Pickier females have driven their males to more
displays of absurdity. And when those absurdities have proven accidentally
productive--as have the big trio of speech, consciousness, and self--the
picky females have outdone their sisters in less demanding species.
Chimps are on the verge of extinction. Humans have tripled their worldwide
population in less than 50 years. Howard In a message dated 1/4/02 11:19:19
AM Eastern Standard Time, [email protected] writes: The point being that
the selection pressure for the evolution of "self-awareness, sentience
and consciousness" resided directly in their benefits for in male-male
reproductive competition - that is, not indirectly, in terms of enabling
superior resource acquisition or protection, but directly, for display
value. I dunno! A frog cannot write a poem or engage in bandidage, but
it does pretty well by deepening its voice to appear larger. Same for
hss, I would think. In most settings, tightening the buns and/or renting
a Porsche for the night beats banter all to hell. Outside of our limited
circle, Howard, isn't male display a fairly primitive endeavor. In fact,
in some tribal societies it is pure genital display, much like the bonobo.
Come to think of it, remember the Tom Jones effect in non-tribal society
- a combo of seductive vocalization + genital display (whether he stuffed
tissues in there or not) - not much consciousness at work here - but
the women threw their keys up on the stage. Noone ever threw their keys
at me, with all of my carefully crafted consciousness. << Energy
and nutrients Val, you are implying
something I've been suspecting for a while: that the large brain of
Homo sapiens sapiens was developed in part as a display mechanism prodded
into growth by sexual selection. Language, oratory, music, and dance??all
products of an enlarged brain??have many characteristics in common with
another display luxury: birdsong. Some birds develop brain complexities
specifically so that they can demonstrate their superiority via the
intricacy of their music. For whom do they undergo this high?energy
but no?environmental?payoff exercise in performance? For females. Just
as do today's musical stars (who are hoping to achieve the reward of
numerous sexual liaisons, and who do succeed in this goal if they also
succeed in their careers). In many countries??some Arab cultures, for
example??a man is judged by females in large part on the basis of his
ability to orate powerfully, ornately, and poetically. The idea that
this may have been an element in the origin of song and language complements
the notions of Robin Dunbar on the subject. Howard This is the phenotype, programmed epigenetically to deal with environmental novelty as it occupies and meets novel problems not previously encountered by the species as it colonizes landscapes vacant of its species. This is a rare phenomenon, colonization of rich, vacant lands. However, it does happen. There is thus a wave of environmental giants, dispersal phenotypes, that sweep over the rich land as they colonize. They do not compete for food, only for reproductive success. They compete socially. They are all grown to their genetic maximum in size. Now there is a pay off in being large (combat), and each generation is expected to become genetically larger. Now there is pay off for flouting those luxury organs (attracting females). The innate superstimulus response now selects for more luxury display. Individuals become more ornate with each generation. There is a pay?off for the innovators that solve environmental contingencies. Why innovate? because the cost of innovation is cheap. Energy and nutrients are abundant. Innovation can pay off big, but cost next to nothing, that is, innovation does not detract from the resources available for reproduction. Thus selection for "soft wired brains", large brains (as well as large, ornate bodies and a high reproductive rate). The cortex is a tissue of "low growth priority". It develops maximally only when high quality food is unlimited ? and it is constantly challenged by a curious, un?afraid, determined, spunky individual ? which happen to be behavioural attributes dispersal phenotypes are born with. The colonizers cannot go back to occupied land depleted of resources by their parental populations. They starve. Nor can straying individuals from their parent populations compete with the huge, socially superior colonizers. Genetic exchange between parent population and colonizers is thus throttled. Colonization, of course, does not last long because resources are consumed and eventually, as the colonizers grow in numbers and density on colonized land, competition for food between individuals returns. As the quality of food plummets (because individuals remove in foraging always the most protein?rich food first), so does the development of individuals. They shrink in size. However, they not only shrink in size. They reproduce less and less. They no longer innovate ? the precious energy and nutrients are needed for reproduction. You reproduce or innovate. You no longer can do both successfully. A psychological change sets in: the individuals now act as if quite sensitive to pain, as if perfectly satisfied with a little pleasure only. They become timid. They are increasingly indifferent to social interactions, they spend more and more time extracting nutrients from the environment. They act less and less "bold" and more and more "afraid". Instead of innovating, they now imitate successful individuals. That's certain and very cheap. It helps to save up enough for reproduction. The individuals become (environmental, epigenetic) dwarfs, which do not reproduce frequently, but compensate by living very long (dispersal phenotypes, because they reproduce heavily, have a short life expectancy ? in mammals, less so in modern humans). The "poverty" phenotype, or "efficiency" phenotype resulting is labelled a maintenance phenotype. Maintenance phenotypes are the norm, they are under efficiency selection to do "more with less". Over geologic time their adaptations are refined and they shrink in size. In particular the organs of food procurement are steadily improved due to ongoing severe competition for food. Ergo, dwarfing accompanied by ever larger teeth. Strictly speaking there is no stasis due to efficiency selection. However, the adaptations evolved during colonization remain basically unchanged. You thus expect in the paleontological record that new forms appear "suddenly" (punctuated equilibrium), initially there are very large individuals with primitive teeth and at the end of a species tenure there are small individuals with improved feeding and security adaptations. There is no major innovation till the species colonizes again. Regional fine?tuning after colonization produces geographic adaptations and adjustments, thus subspecies and ecotypes. The "species" precedes the subspecies, and the ecotype precedes it. The available paleontological/archaeological bits we have of Homo erectus follows that pattern ? more or less. It colonizes big areas of land early, its big in body then, its tools ? initially crude (Abbevillian hand axes) ? become refined over hundreds of thousands of years in shape and finish (Acheulean hand axes). Body size has its ups and downs, mainly downs. However, brain size appears to increase a bit, fire appears in temperate, cold climates, hunting becomes a bit more sophisticated as indicated by spears and the killing of large?bodied, adult megaherbivores. Just before extinction (about 225,000 BP), the evidence from Bilzigleben indicates some innovation in tools (burins, cutting flakes, antler tools) clothing, a touch of art. Why no greater change?
Because H. erectus was quite successful maintaining maintenance phenotypes
with the tools and economic strategies it had mastered ? in fact very
successful judging from its 1.5 my + tenure. That's very good compared
to mammals as a whole. This was a competent species. Yes, the big penultimate
glaciation sequence very nearly did us in, did in H. erectus via transformation
(evolution) into probably several new adaptive streams, two of which
survived into the next glaciation ? Neanderthal and us. "Us"
differs from H. erectus in being dispersal?phenotypes?made?permanent.
Upper Paleolithic people are all dispersal phenotypes ? which can only
be done by deliberate intervention, consciously and deliberately maximizing
individual development at the expense of population size. Wish we were
that generous and wise! Cheers, V. Geist, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Science. PS. The above is covered in greatest detail in my 1978 "Life
strategies book..." but also earlier in my 1971 Mountain sheep
book, as well as in several peer?reviewed papers. Valerius Geist writes:
<<You now have a population of giants, of environmental giants.
You are looking at a totally different phenotype from earlier generations.
You are looking at a phenotype that functions in a very rare environment,
but an environment encountered every so often by a species ? the environment
of colonization. The phenotype is a dispersal phenotype. Subj: Re: culture/biology
interactions Date: 97?11?23 02:15:00 EST From: geistvr(Valerius &
Renate Geist) To: HBloom Dear Howard, Re: big brain. Yes, I agree ?
largely, pending minor corrections. Phenotypically, large brains are
a consequence of high quality nutrition plus a maximum of diversity
of organised abilities. And that's more than sexual selection ? as I
use the term. Its social, plus cultural selection, as you said it: "Language,
oratory, music, and dance" but also the profoundly important social
skills to make sound group?decisions, extract concessions from other
groups, but also artistic skills and ceremony, plus all the utilitarian
skills that are huge in inhospitable, climatically severe environments.
Even deer, let alone humans, evolve large brains in climatically severe
latitudes and are relatively soft?wired, that is eager to learn, curious
and consequent. However, I totally agree that the ultimate judges of
how well men do in such endeavours are the ladies, and choose accordingly.
Best regards, Val Geist I have followed this thread with interest, having long been convinced that display is a consuming aspect of human affairs. But one sees the same in all manner of animals - display to attract mates, intimidate competitors, achieve dominance and power, etc. Is it in the interests of parsimony to invoke self awareness, which seems so distinctly a human property, as the mediating variable? In my opinion, self-awareness, sentience, and consciousness are like new eyes on the peacock's tail--new ways of displaying extravagance to get girls. However evolution thrives on unintended side-effects, and consciousness turns out to be a display device with more purposes than a roomful of swiss army knives. in fact, it's the first display device able to think up new purposes for itself and set to work on achieving them. Howard
The self only materializes
in the presence of an audience. When the audience goes away, we fragment
and become a mist of disconnected feelings, a bewildered semi-entity
robbed of our wholeness. Self is a social interface which pulls us together
once again. George Bernard Shaw was very much on target. If our audience
ignores us, we disappear-often in unspeakable agonies. Howard in a message
dated 99?10?22 05:13:42 EDT, MKnight writes: Subj: [evol?psych] Re:
Consciousness and communicability Date: 99?10?22 05:13:42 EDT From:
MKnight In Western culture the most dramatic reification was the reification
of consciousness as "a something"?? a transcendent being,
a self which bubbled?up out of the language we used to narrate our own
behavior. After Descartes "to be conscious" was literally
transformed from something you did into "consciousness", something
you were, a being rather than a doing. In regard to this difference
Billy Yellow, a Navajo medicine man, has observed, "You have thousands
of being words, we have thousands of doing words" (Maybrury?Lewis,
1992). C. S. Lewis, in his Studies in Words (1967), traces this curious
bifurcation of the word conscious, pointing out that the original use
of conscio was "I know together with, I share with someone the
knowledge that"; or using Hobbes' definition, "When two or
more men know of one and the same fact (i.e. deed) they are said to
be conscious of it one to another". Lewis argues that this original
use of conscious to mean a sharing might be better represented by the
word "consciring" to reflect its participatory nature. Consciring
is communication between individuals, a "togethering". From
a descriptive word for knowing in communion with another, conscious
migrated to internalized consciring. Lewis describes this internal sharing
of knowledge with self about self as follows: Man might be defined as
a reflexive animal. A person cannot help thinking and speaking of himself
as, and even feeling himself to be (for certain purposes), two people,
one of whom can act upon and observe the other. Thus he pities, loves,
admires, hates, despises, rebukes, comforts, examines, masters or is
mastered by, 'himself'. Above all he can be to himself in the relation
I have called consciring (p. 187). From Knight, M. & Rupp, G. (1999)
"Two Sciences..." Part I: The Epistemology of Object/Subject
Inter?Dependence. Operant Subjectivity, 22(3), 2?11 >> In a message dated 7/12/01 8:01:52 AM Eastern Daylight Time, skoyles writes: js: Howard Bloom, as I understand him, agues that consciousness is a PR illusion. The brain does not merely control the body to which it is yoked but narrates constantly to the world that this body possesses agency. Whatever happens, the brain tries to spin in what it says that it was in charge. What we call consciousness is a stream of propaganda that keeps filling our conversations with descriptions about there being a 'self' that is not some passive entirely floating and being carried in the river of events but an active swimmer that is in control of what is does and where it goes. It is a view I totally agree with. hb: you put it better than I do. js: The work of J. Kevin O'Regan I think provides an explanation why such propaganda is advantageous. O'Regan's interest is perception. What he has shown is that we do not see the world in terms of an inner model but create our sense of external unity of things in terms of, as he puts, 'The outside world serving as its own, external, representation'. I will not present the evidence for this claim here since he has many papers doing this at http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/index.html Now what you might think is the link between O'Regan's claim that 'the outside world serves as its own, external, representation' and Bloom's idea that consciousness is a PR spin illusion. The answer lies in that what O'Regan claims for the external world happens every time we meet another human. Since we do not carry an internal model of them we must use the information they give 'as their own, external, representation'. As a result, our knowledge of anyone -- as O'Regan would claim of everything in the world -- depends upon the information they provide us. Now what is that information. Well, the main source of information about anyone is what they tell us about themselves. There may be other sources, but chatter and self-narration gives us the main source of information we use to know who anyone is. Thus the brain is advantaged to carefully tailor what it says about itself so that information shapes a perception of itself as a person in control. hb: what's weird is this. to pull this off consciousness must fool itself...a point I believe Lorraine Rice has made. What we call confidence, and beyond that even charisma, is a measure of the extent to which we've fooled ourselves. On days when we are filled with doubt, we transmit that fact via facial expressions, posture, the number of "ummms," "like, I mean"s and other signs of self-doubt in our sentences. All this is an extension of what non-verbal animals do when they face off in competitions for mates, for territory, or simply for position in the hierarchy or for the sheer heck of it. Here's the tale of someone who managed to fool himself in astonishing ways. It's taken from the frustratingly overfilled files of material I've written but haven't had time to put in books. in fact, it originated in a 1999 conversation you and I were having online: ...the robustly confident attract followers easily, but it would be interesting to see whether or not they make good leaders. Fidel Castro was one of these unbeatably resilient children, judging from the massive biography about him by Tad Szulc. He was so incredibly indestructible emotionally, in fact, that the army he'd organized in Mexico and equipped with vessels to invade Cuba was bogged down in a series of Keystone Cop level errors??letting out the troops nearly a mile away from the beaches of Cuba, forcing the troops to wade painfully through a tangle of underwater mangrove roots to reach the shore, being spotted by Batista's army, pinned down in sugar cane fields from which Batista's men drove Castro's cronies by burning down the cane in which they were hidden. As night fell Fidel was laying between two rows of sugar cane with only one comrade still behind him and two rifles left to the entire Revolutionary Brigade. Fear of detection forced Fidel and his single comrade to whisper, but that fact and the outrageous losses of day didn't deter Castro a bit. He spent the entire night speechifying in a whisper to his lone listener about the fact that the possession of a pair of weapons meant that the Revolution had been won, then outlining the glories of the new utopia this victory would bring. The flip side was that once he actually did achieve power, Castro's confidence in the unending powers of his own intelligence??an intelligence of substantial proportions??was so overweening that he tried to run the country based entirely on his own decisions, and in the process ran it into the ground. js: After all, that perception helps its survival. We may be in reality passive and shaped in our actions by contingencies of the world, but we are better off, if people think we are self-determined and in control. No body cares about victims and slaves; our interest is with doers and winners. Hence the brain is advantaged if it keeps spinning in its narrations the story that it is in charge and a full self-determining agent. hb: Peter Drucker, the business theorist, point out that a society that pours its praise, its riches, and its attention into its most successful grapplers with whatever reality is in play at the moment will always outdo a society whose compassion or aversion to competition makes it focus its resources and attention on its losers...those who can't cope. Drucker is talking
about corporations and schools, but the model applies to any sort of
society, from the bacterial and viral on up. Put your chips on winners
and the pot will grow. Everyone will benefit. Sounds heartless, but
whoever said the natural world of which we are a part had a heart? js:
If O'Regan was wrong this would not matter so much since people could
see through the spin and appreciate how little any individual is in
control of events. But because we are dependent upon what the external
world tells us, these narrations play a critical role in how people
perceive and so interact with us and thus our survival. hb: the problem
is that people speak many languages simultaneously. While consciousness
tries to control our words and our posture, our doubts show up in numerous
physical gestures and even in the prosody and, as I just mentioned,
the hesitation signals between the words. There are several selves expressing
themselves simultaneously--some of them not conscious at all. Women,
says the research, are better at reading the signals of these inadvertent,
emotional selves than are men. Men are nor likely to take each other
at face value. I imagine this relates to the role of men as intergroup
fasteners--individuals who can communicate with stranges from distant
groups based on following "universal" sets of rules--rules
like fairness. It pays to have one sex living in abstractions while
another lives in emotional fact. Humans who live in the abstact world
can play the grand game of integrating across social barriers. They
can be traders, statesmen, and empire builders. On the other hand, failure
to read another's emotional signals is death in competition. Alexander
the Great read the Persians inadvertent emotional signals--the signals
of the unspeaking group self. The Persian army he confronted relied
on heavy duty tecnological defenses. Alexander read that rightly as
a fear of death--an attempt to avoid hand-to-hand and face-to-face battle.
So he charged the Persian lines, leaped over the sophisticated, high
cost protective barriers the Persians hid behind, and panicked and army
that was regarded as the most powerful and invincible on the planet.
Seems there might be some lessons here for America and it's Star Wars
defense strategy. But there are also lessons about the group's self,
the group's collective consciousness, and the group's collective unconscious--it's
shared but unspoken emotional tone. js: An honest brain which told stories
that it was often impotent over events [the true situation of life]
would find itself ignored by others; it would quickly be a dead brain
-- who wants to interact with someone not in control of events? Only
brains that were effective in telling the world that they were in control
and in charge have survived: they are the brains that propagated and
become our brains. hb: well put, John. Many thanks. Howard The following is from Nathan Goldberg, a new paleopsych member. In a previous posting tonight I've said that consciousness is a social interface, a billboard, with which we advertise to our selves and others our sense of control. The tool of consciousness is language, which is seen by postmodernists as an instrument of control. Much as I hate to admit it, the postmodernists are right about this one. We attempt to control others and our selves with language. Sometimes the resultst turn out well. On other occasions they are horrendous. The problem comes in the fact that our linguistic narrator, our conscious self, uses logic??an instrument too narrow to grasp the subtleties of real life. Hence studies show that logic does a very poor job of predicting the future and making plans to surmount its obstacles. Intuition, a non?sconscious entity kind enough to pound out messages on the floorboards of our awareness, is consistently better at getting things right, or so say researchers like the Damasios. Since John Skoyles has demonstrated that culture is a device with which we continually upgrade the wiring in the brain, I'd like to suggest that our next task as humans is to find the source of intuition and hook it into our verbal systems so we can take full advantage of its benefits and learn its limitations, then evaluate what reason plus intuition have given to use, figure out where they are lacking, and seek additional tools of awareness, prediction, and control with which to round out our mental took kit. In a message dated 99?10?18 03:01:07 EDT, you write: Subj: HOIWARD: I thought you would appreciate this! Date: 99?10?18 03:01:07 EDT From: goldcort (Nathan) To: HBloomHoward,Below is a paper (rough draft) I just wrote for my notorious "Media Ecology Analysis" class. (The same class where I got hot?and?bothered about entropy, cybernetics and Shannon/Weaver.) I think it's pretty darn good, and I thought you'd like it too. There is an obvious "Bloom influence" and I even considered footnoting you at some points. But I thought better of it, since my professor might get suspicious... :)It certainly leads into the concept of memes, dontcha think?!Peace,Nathan Language, Thought and Control (a draft, by Nathan J. Goldberg) Norbert Wiener puts communication and control in the same class. (P. 16) He sees the two as having similar processes and obstacles. hb: extremely interesting. Although he is right to see a connection between the two, I believe he misunderstands the relationship. I believe that since his Cybernetics theory is based on applying the study of machines to human processes, he cannot even hope to capture the full subtlety and complexity of the human experience of communication. Human communication and control are most definitely related, and they are interwoven in some very basic ways. Benjamin Lee Whorf claims, and subsequently demonstrates, that language controls thought "in its constant ways of arranging data and its most ordinary everyday analysis of phenomenon." (P. 135) hb: I like Whorf's work, but there've been some refutations of it recently which are given a lot of weight in certain corners of the academic community. Your statement, however, seems smack on target to me. Susanne K. Langer agrees, by asserting that the answer to the question "What can I ask?" is "whatever language can express." (P. 83) hb: good stuff. 'Ray, Nathan! These two theorists both go on to show that our language controls not only our thought, but also our emotion and behavior as well. In the human context, then, the most important connection between communication and control is not their similarity of process, but their mutual connection to thought. hb: this last sentence is very unGoldbergesque. It isn't clear. And you are usually clarity personnified. You mean that communication and control are both attempts to exert influence, to poke a crowbar into the mind and move its pieces around a bit? But overt efforts of control do it bluntly??by saying Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not or Do Not, Under Penalty of Death, Transgress This Boundary, while communication says, "Ya know, I saw this strange thing happen the other day," then tells the tale in a manner designed to at least make the dendrites and synapses of the listeners' mind twitch and fire a bit. Or, better yet, to get the listener to stop undressing women in the bar at which you're speaking and rivet his eyes on you in rapt attention. Langer explains that meaning is not a property of those things we use as symbols, but that giving meaning is a function we must actively perform. (P. 56) Words and other "symbols" may be given different meanings by different people (and in different contexts), or in some cases they may even be given no meaning at all. Whatever influences our "giving of meaning" to linguistic symbols, influences how and what we think when we use them. As I will show, to give meaning is not only a way we define and express ourselves, but also an important way we exert influence on others. Langer suggests that humans have an innate need to create meaning through the use of symbols. ("need of symbolization," P. 41; and "symbolic transformation," P. 44) If this is true, there may be many ways to explain the distinctly human "instinct" (though she rejects the use of the word "instinct," much of her writing points to it). Is it really an instinct to create meaning that she has outlined, or is it one facet of an instinct that is more primary and more closely linked to human survival? I would suggest that our "need of symbolization" is merely one expression of the instinct we have to control ourselves and our environment; that is, part of our basic instinct for survival. If language controls thought, then our ability to give meaning (the basis of language) controls our ability to think. This process, then, is the focal point of the connection between communication and control: whatever (or whoever) controls the process of giving meaning to linguistic symbols, controls the range of thought which those meaningful symbols allow the users to think. hb: yoiks, mon, I am getting the strong impression that your instructor has sent you into the never?never land of postmodern constructivism. To the extent that our language is given to us as a complete package, predefined and immutable, we are controlled by the inherited limits of our language. To the extent that languages evolve as we modify meanings and create new symbols for new concepts, we are exerting our own control. hb: neat. As we learn language, each new word or concept brings us a greater sense of power and freedom, a greater sense of control over ourselves and our environment. hb: very much agreed. Part of the stuff I preach which I don't think you've heard yet. As we approach our highest level of language mastery, if we are perceptive enough, some of the limits of our language may begin to become clear to us. This "need of symbolization" then pushes us to develop new words when our language does not provide those we need. However, since the conceptual limits placed on us by our language run very deep, it is rare that we develop any new words which radically alter our world view. hb: agreed. Most often, these new words expand our world in small, incremental ways, consistent with our habits of "projection." (Langer, P. 79?80) hb: hmmm, this cultural incrementalism plays an important role in the conclusion of the book I just finished. There is a struggle going on constantly in the development of language systems, a struggle over the giving of meaning. hb: the very issue I've been analyzing for the past few months while watching the news in three different versions each night. There's a constant battle between nations and other groups over the boundaries words represent??including the critical boundary line between good and evil. Yassir Arafat, for example, has done a masterful job over the last 20 years or so of moving the verbal boundaries so that his group is portrayed as good and his enemies (Israelis and other Jews who support Israael) are subtly and not so subtly condemned as evil via the subtle manipulation of words and narrative. This struggle is going on constantly as languages develop and evolve, not only amongst individuals but also between individuals and the society at large. It can be seen as essentially a struggle over control of the language, and over thought itself. hb: hear, hear. Certainly sounds like you have the wind of truth in your sails to me. As individuals inherit and master their languages, most will encounter this struggle in some way. Their intentions may be to seek freedom by expanding or modifying their own vocabulary, to seek self?control by altering the language to better fit the reality of their own experience, or to seek control over others by adapting the language to suit their own material ends. Language is fundamentally social, a fact to which Langer vaguely eludes, but which she never exactly targets for elucidation. (P. 108: "Where there is no teacher there is no accomplishment." She obviously understands that language is learned through interaction and employed in an interactive process, though her focus is on the underlying symbolic processes rather than on its vastly social context.) hb: another *extremely* good point. So if it is by "symbolic transformation" that we create meanings in language, the meanings are of no use in communication unless our linguistic symbols are understood by some "other" to whom we can communicate. This suggests that those who share a language are in a constant social struggle amongst each other, battling for their own freedom of thought against the controlling influences of others. hb: right on. Most of these "battles" are minor, since the concepts at the heart of any language are rarely brought into question or open to change. But even if most of the battles appear to be of little consequence, they are so numerous and constant that they cannot easily be ignored. We may notice, for example, the frequent creation of specific terms that help us describe the details of our world: terms like "computer nerd," "rock and roll music" and "going postal," etc. We may seek to create our own terms to describe specific familial experiences or to define common experiences within our social group or profession. These new concepts may expand our ability to express our thought, but they rarely provide us with the freedom to think in entirely new ways. hb: hmmmm. Another good point. But there are larger battles in the war over language and thought. There are ongoing linguistic battles which cut to the heart of our conceptual universe, battles which have a major impact on our thought and behavior, battles that go so far as to affect our ability to think and act freely, and to control important aspects of our own lives. Politicians argue over policies, manufacturers compete for market share, corporations and citizens battle in the courts, minority groups struggle for cultural identity and recognition hb: they sometimes go beyond that and ultimately struggle for mastery. , and scientists (and philosophers!) work to reveal increasingly accurate world views. Every one of these battles has a significant impact on the freedom we experience, and on the control we have over our own thoughts and actions. And every one of them revolves around language. Words are created that convey any number of positive associations which are free from the need for logical justification. Langer explains that we use "logical analogy" and metaphor to give meaning to such new terms, and believes that this activity becomes routine. (Langer, P. 139?40: "àif a metaphor is used very often, we learn to accept the wordàas though it had literal meaning there.") Whorf says such associations are "unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group," and they are very powerful influences on our behavior. (Whorf, P. 137) Those who create new words in the public arena often take full advantage of these linguistic habits to promote their interests, when the logic of their cause may not be enough to control the outcome. hb: good point. This is meaty stuff. Politicians promote
their positions by creating terms like "New Deal," "Peacekeeper"
missiles and "tax?and?spend liberal." Manufacturers sell products
like "Mr. Clean," "diet" sodas and "health"
foods. Legal battles are waged between "pro?choice" and "right?to?life"
advocates, over the public impact of "monopoly capitalism"
versus "competitive practices," and regarding the risks to
humans when using "pesticides" or "poisons." Scientists
argue about "behaviorism" versus "free will," or
about "creationism" versus "natural selection."
Minority groups continuously develop systems of slang and find other
ways to distinguish their use of language (and free their thought patterns)
from the mainstream.
Neurophysiologist Walter J. Freeman, in his Societires of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate (Erlbaum, 1995: 85) reports that "some individuals terrorized by explosions, falls, and other violent events, have reported hearing repeated screams, and only later realize that the cries were their own...." Sounds like a very strange notion--that "we" should make a loud and piercing sound, and that our "self" should remove itself completely, disavowing any affiliation with the person whose mouth has flown open and whose larynx has shredded the air with the razor of a shriek. At first thought it makes no sense. Why would a "self" put a distance between itself and the person within whom it lives and with whom it claims to be identical? And how would it manage such a trick? Let me try to sketch a quick answer to the question. First off, we already know that the self is a detachable add-on only loosely connected to the body it thinks it commands. Digestion, the thumping of the heart, the distribution of the blood supply, the constant death of cells and their replacement by new ones, these and a host of other chores are handled constantly with no participation from the self at all. Decisions to act show up in the cerebral cortex roughly a third of a second before they pop up on the radar screen of consciousness. They are announced to the self considerably after the fact. Then, as Michael Gazzaniga and his fellow split-brain researchers have shown, the self makes up a story to cover for its ignorance. It not only takes credit for deciding to do what, in fact, it only knew was being done once the act was underway, but it supplies a reason for this decision, often one that's phony as can be. How does it get away with such affrontery? More important, why does it bother? Why is expensive cerebral real estate and valuable energy used to create an explainer that often doesn't know its derriiere from its duodenum? Here's a quick sketch of an answer to the questions I've just plomped onto the table. A social group is a learning machine which functions much like a neural net. Neural nets give power and connections to those nodes which are contributing to the solution of a problem at hand and cut much of the juice and most of the ties to a node which is going off in the wrong direction. The nodes in neural nets of humans are, well, humans. Individual humans, that is. Those of us who seem to be on top of things get power and influence. Everyone crowds around them, presenting them with a rich supply of connections and of what those connections provide--influence. Very neural netty. What's more, folks on top of things are rewarded internally with the chemical cocktails which produce confidence and delight--serotonin, dopamine, and a rich mix of others. Managing to have things under control brings yet another bonus--an uptick in the protective power of the immune system. On the other hand, folks who've lost their grip and can't seem to get a handle on things are treated in the opposite manner. They usually get less of society's wealth, less of the immune system's health, fewer connections, and very little influence. "Nobody loves you when you're down and out." Making things worse, the folks who can't get a grip are poisoned by their own internal liquids. They're hit with glucocorticoids and other stress hormones which do such wretched things as removing their sense of confidence and ruining their health. It's all hideously unjust, but it's the way the neural net learns. So where does the conscious self fit into this picture? And why in the world would it occasionally distance itself from the very person in whom it lives? Here's a suggestion or two. Self and consciousness are social interfaces. They're the makeup artists who, as T.S. Eliot put it "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;" That face not only meets others, it meets the components inside our body which decide to gift us with chemicals of health and contentment or punish us with a far more bitter brew. Since neural nets give power and popularity to those who can show they're on top of things, it's critical that the self look like it's got a handle on even the most unlikely of our actions. Even when we slip up, the self works hard to make the mistake seem like either something we did for a good reason, or like it was not our doing at all, but the fault of someone else. To bring us what we need to survive, the self has to appear to be under control at all times. But sometimes we are not in control--in fact, we are wildly out of whack. In some of those instances, the self attempts to pull off the illusion that it still has a socially acceptable handle on things in the oddest way. It steps free of the body in which it's housed and says, "hey, that's not me." This, I'd propose, is what's happening when humans in the grip of instinctual panic scream, listen to the noise, and say "that's gotta be someone else." It's also what's going on when a Jewish concentration camp victim puts Nazi designs on his prison outfit and, as Anna Freud put it, undergoes "identification with the oppressor." Or when a kidnap victim like Patty Hearst abandons her previous self and goes whole hog into joinng her captors. "That pathetic victim so obviously under the thumb of others isn't me. They are in control, so I must be one of them." It also happens when we are hit with catastrophic pain (as I was when thwomped by an enormous kidney stone at the age of 20) and feel that we've floated up to the ceiling and are watching the body writhing uncontrollably on the floor from a haughty distance. The basic algorithm
of a neural net is the one expressed by Jesus in the book of Matthew--"To
he who hath it shall be given. From he who hath not, even what he hath
shall be taken away." The self is the part of us that knows this
very well, and tries its best to make it look like we indeed do hath.
What hath we? The ultimate currency of a neural net, a handle on things.
We are in charge. We have control. That screaming fool who's lost it
obviously can not be me. Michael S. Gazzaniga. "Organization of the Human Brain." Science, 1 September 1989: 947-952. Michael S. Gazzaniga. Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence. New York: Basic Books, 1992. M.S. Gazzaniga, J.C. Eliassen, L. Nisenson, C.M. Wessinger, R. Fendrich, K. Baynes. "Collaboration between the hemispheres of a callosotomy patient. Emerging right hemisphere speech and the left hemisphere interpreter." Brain, August 1996 (Part 4): 1255-62. M.S. Gazzaniga. "Brain and conscious experience." Advances in Neurology, 77 1998: 181-92. Michael S. Gazzaniga. The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Bruno Bettelheim. "Individual And Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38, 1943: 417-452. H.P. Blum. "The role of identification in the resolution of trauma: the Anna Freud memorial lecture." Psychoanalytic Quarterly, October 1987: 609-27. Anna Freud. The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense. New York: International Universities Press, 1946.
<< Fascinating!
My most vivid memory of the detached self occurred when I was But to return to scientific attempts at explanation, it seems we step out of ourselves when something else in us takes over and needs to muscle the sluggish and often overly analytic verbal self out of the way. The animals in the brain grab the controls in either extreme crisis or extreme ecstasy. It's that out-of-body ecstasy which African-American religions often seek. These religions and some evangelical white counterparts court the experience of being gripped by God or Christ and sent into what appears on the outside like an epileptic seizure, but from the inside feels like a visit to the heavenly mansions complete with an immersion in the swimming pool of divinity. When we're seized by god, I suspect we are actually in the grip of the animals within us, just as you were when your nonverbal reflexes told your self to take a hike and put you through a magnificently creative repertoire of microfast escape responses. Now where does this leave my hypothesis that the self dissociates when it wants to have nothing to do with us? Time to ponder. Howard << James John--Many thanks for this. The concept of being damaged by hiding one's vulnerabilities is extremely intriguing.
Hitler and Speer courted this sort of exaltation in the incredible rituals they staged for tens of thousands at a time. They set up every supercue, every supernormal stimulus, they could to kindle in each individual a sense of rapturously merging into "eine volk." I've seen a similar loss of self and merger with the group take place in many a successful rock concert. Walter J. Freeman, in the book you refer to (Socieities of Brains: A Study In the Neuroscience of Love and Hate, Erlbaum, 1995, pp. 129-130) makes an interesting suggestion. He feels that our loss of self in the group is an extension of the bonding experience which occurs in many animals during sex and of the bonding which takes place between a mammalian mother and her infant. Freeman doesn't spell it out, but the hormone involved in both these experiences is oxytocin, which makes us drop our guard and bond with others. Freeman feels that this experience is often associated with ritual dancing, which would also bring in what McNeill calls "muscular bonding"(William H. McNeill. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge, MA: 1995). Since, as Val Geist has pointed out, dance is often a ritualized practice for other group activities like war and rowing, this would also bring some of what Howard Rachlin calls "functional bonding" into the process (Howard Rachlin. "Self and Self-Control." In The Self Across Psychology: Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and the Self Concept, edited by Joan Gay Snodgrass and Robert L. Thompson. New York: New York Academy of Sciences: 1997: 85-98). So if we string together all these beads, we get something like this--some experiences in which we shed our selves are the ultimate in bonding with the group. Others are the very opposite--in shedding our selves we manage to escape the group's ever-prying eyes. Sexual hormones like oxytocin are probably involved in the bonding experiences. Adrenaline and its co-chemicals are probably in charge when we leap into a tree to escape a bear (something I must admit only Val has done). So we have two very opposite ways to have an out of body experience. Which means, I guess, that the mask of self is detachable under more than just one condition. Add in the forms of detachment triggered by trauma, captivity, etc. and you get a self which is uncomfortably capable of hopping out of the body in which it lives. Or very happily capable of it when the experience is ecstatic. What's more, after an experience like Val's, in which the face we make to meet the faces that we meet stands and watches from the outside, thus freeing us of our burdensome audience, another paradox occurs. Here we've been exhilarated by escaping the crowd within, and what do we do with the experience? We turn it into a good story and use it to become the center of the crowd, experiencing yet another form of exhilaration, that of bathing in the gaze of the very folks who so often weigh us down emotionally. Howard P.S. The burden
of being constantly under the scrutiny of internal and external significant
others is truly a difficult one to carry. It frequently forces us to
hide our vulnerabilites, and this, according to the research of James
Pennebaker, clobbers our immune system. Yoiks, this self stuff is bristling
with implications. Howard << Subj: the
"detachable self" _______________________________ Howard In a message dated 4/26/00 4:01:12 AM Eastern Daylight Time, skoyles writes: Much as biology needed its Linnaeus, so do self-organising entities and their kin. In what are waves, vortices and in what ways not. How should we classify them? Is it a question of the linear propagation vs circular propagation of self-organisation, or it is an issue of the presence of an attractor or not [the two issues might not be entity unrelated]? Sorry for the short reply but I am off to catch a train in a few minutes -- your ideas need a longer reply when I get back. _______________________________
Later components of these ERPs involve the controlled executive functions that dominate normal information processing. Brain activity can be precisely resolved in time and space by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques, which measure local changes in blood flow, with recordings of ERPs that can track the time course of neural events. Such techniques have been used to study preconscious and conscious visual attention3. In visual attention, the conscious stages of feature analysis and pattern recognition have been found to occur, at the earliest, 150 ms after a visual stimulus is presented. After 50 ms, the primary visual areas of the brain encode continuity or vicinity (that is, are one or several separate objects processed, and how distant are they?) and other 'local' features. At about 70-100 ms, initial preconscious attentional modulation occurs (such as early processing of 'global' features, including motion, disparity, symmetry and colour). At about 100-140 ms, the contours and parts of objects (figural primitives4) are extracted and pattern recognition takes place. This timescale is prolonged as the length and complexity of the stimulus increase, and a similar (but even faster) processing cascade has been identified in the auditory domain. From these discoveries, we can deduce that savants operate on the early stages of processing - they do not progress into the later, multisensory comparisons characteristic of conscious processing. Because creativity involves the formation of such multisensory interactions in widely distributed areas of the brain, access to the low-level, early processing stages is conceptually unproductive. But Snyder and Mitchell2 contend that the savants' abilities are not islands of genius in an otherwise compromised brain, and that these people do not have 'better' brains for arithmetic and other talents. Instead, the authors insist that we all have the same fundamental cognitive abilities, but that savants have access to the rapid and early low-level processing owing to a functional or pathological loss of the executive brain centres. For example, the ERPs of the 'human calculator' in Fig. 1, a computer science student who is not autistic5, have the same sequence of components - and, therefore, the same stages of information processing - as those of the much slower control subjects. But looking at the amplitudes, those of the human calculator are increased compared with the controls early on, indicating enhanced automatic low-level processing. In the later stages of processing, the human calculator shows smaller amplitudes, indicating less cortical activity. Figure 2 Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during mental arithmetic. Full legend High
resolution image and legend (29k) Evidence from such non-savant geniuses
contradicts the findings of Snyder and Mitchell2, as do results from
extensive training of self-perception of low-level neuroelectric phenomena
in healthy controls and neurological patients6. Under such training
conditions, a person observes his or her own changes in slow brain potentials
- indicative of high or low excitability - on a computer screen, and
learns to modify it by trial-and-error learning. Snyder and Mitchell
believe that training and intensive learning do not open the door to
the early processing that is apparent in such astonishing performances.
But the human calculator in Fig. 1 began to calculate increasingly difficult
sequences of numbers at the age of four, and continued this mental practice
for more than an hour a day until he was tested 24 years later. After
many training sessions, brain-damaged patients and healthy controls
can learn to control their own brain activity - which we normally cannot
consciously perceive - and become sensitive to the changes that underlie
the elementary, low-level processing6. By bringing their brain activity
under voluntary control, these patients can use it to communicate from
the mysterious early state of non-consciousness. The result may ultimately
be that we find we all possess behavioural and physiological strategies
to modify the early stages of cortical processing, with unprecedented
consequences for behaviour and self-awareness. References 1. Selfe,
L. Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in Children (Academic,
London, 1977). 2. Snyder, A. W. & Mitchell, D. J. Proc. R. Soc.
Lond. B 266, 587-592 (1999). Links 3. Martinez, A. et al. Nature Neurosci.
2, 364-369 (1999). Links 4. Singer, W. in The Mind-Brain Continuum (eds
Llins, R. & Churchland, P. R.) 102-130 (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1996). 5. Pauli, P. et al. Psychophysiology 33, 522-529 (1996). Links
6. Birbaumer, N. et al. Nature 398, 297-298 (1999). Links Nature ©
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1999 Registered No. 785998 England. HAWKINS: I wrote a PhD thesis proposal to the chairman of the graduate group in neurobiology. He said, "This is great. But there's nobody at Berkeley who is doing this work, and you have to work for a professor, so you can't do it." He recommended spending four years getting my doctorate in neurobiology, doing research in a related but different area. And then maybe as a postdoc, I could work on what I wanted to. But I had left my job to pursue specific ideas I had about intelligence and neurobiology, not to pursue someone else's research. TR: Why didn't you study this when you were young, and it would have been OK to be a grad student? HAWKINS: I grew up in a family of engineers. My father is an engineer, my brothers are engineers. I was a happy-go-lucky kid who just went with the flow. In my family, that meant becoming an engineer. TR: It doesn't sound like your heart was in computers. But you still went back to them after quitting Berkeley. HAWKINS: I asked myself what I should do with my understanding of neurobiology and intelligence. I decided that I would go back to work and hopefully achieve some wealth and notoriety from my computer work. I would then use those resources to promote my ideas about neural function in a scientific and popular fashion. I created Palm Computing and Handspring primarily so that in the not-too-distant future I will be in a position to develop and promote my ideas about intelligence and how certain parts of the brain work. TR: So you're not at Handspring to be in business? HAWKINS: I love handheld computers and I love building businesses, but those are not the main reasons I do what I do. I plan to use the money that I am making to fund research on the human brain. TR: What do you want to add to the tremendous amount of neuroscience research that's already being done? HAWKINS: In reading about the brain, I found that what was conspicuously absent was any sort of overarching theory to explain it. I noticed brain research was paying little attention to certain things. For instance, look at the cerebral cortex, or neocortex. It's essentially a big sheet of neurons several millimeters thick. Although there are areas dedicated to vision, speech, touch and motor output, it's a remarkably uniform structure-the areas that deal with vision are almost identical to those dealing with hearing. This similarity implies that the same basic mechanism underlies all sensory processing. This is a remarkable finding-yet it has been generally ignored. TR: Why is this discovery so important? HAWKINS: Because it helps explain how the brain processes all the information it receives. The major inputs to the brain are the optic nerve, the spinal cord-touch, if you will-and the auditory nerve. However, there's really only one thing coming into the brain: patterns of neural firings. Now think about what these neural patterns are really like. First, your eyes are moving all the time. While you're looking at my face, your eyes are doing these little dance movements called saccades. Combine this with the fact that a large portion of the fibers coming in at the optic nerve represent a small central portion of the visual field-the fovea. With every eye movement, the neural pattern in the optic nerve changes. This means that vision is not just a problem of spatial pattern recognition, but of time-based patterns. The temporal nature of vision has been ignored by almost all theories dealing with vision. The key to understanding vision is to understand the importance of the time-varying patterns. By the way, hearing and touch work in the same way as well. TR: Hearing seems clearly related to time-based patterns. But touch? HAWKINS: Sure-the role of the fovea is played by your fingertips and the role of the saccade is played by the movement of your fingers over an object. Feeling an object creates a time-varying pattern. As the neocortex suggests, a common mechanism underlies vision, touch and hearing. TR: How does this fit in with your model of the brain? HAWKINS: You have to consider it together with the dominant nature of feedback. People tend to view the brain as a sort of input-output box. [hb-so the self is a social simulator, or a bunch of them] The input comes in, it gets processed, and out pops the result and you do the right thing. Well, if you look at the interconnections in the brain, there are many more fibers feeding backward than feeding forward. There's more information traveling toward the input areas than there is toward the output areas-the ratio can be as high as 10 to 1. This is again something that is well known, but generally ignored because people don't know what to make of it. TR: OK-what should we make of it? HAWKINS: One of the biggest implications is that parts of the brain look like what are called autoassociative memories. This is a type of memory that was partially inspired by neural architectures. It means that you provide part of what you're looking for and you get the rest of it back. Clearly, that's something brains are good at-memory is aided to a huge extent by context. You're given a clue to something-say a taste or smell or image-and then you follow this progression of autoassociative recall. TR: And you see this as leading to a theoretical model of how the brain functions? HAWKINS: Yes, but there are problems. People who have studied the mathematics of autoassociative memory structures have found that if you make big autoassociative memories, they can't store enough data. That is, if I make the memory 10 times larger, I can't put 10 times as many data items in it. I can put bigger data items in it, but I can't put more data items in it. So people have struggled with autoassociative memories as a model for brain function, because they have too limited a capacity. TR: So why do you want to go back to them? HAWKINS: Because I had a different approach. The earlier studies had been trying to apply autoassociative memory only to spatial data. But if you apply autoassociative memories to time-based data, you might be able to overcome their limitations. Remember, when you have bigger and bigger autoassociative memories, you can't store more items-but you can store bigger items. If I view those bigger items as time-based data constructs, then I may not know a tremendous number of things, but I know a tremendous number of temporally connected things. TR: What does all this have to do with intelligence? HAWKINS: It goes back to my view that the brain is not just an input-output box. I think that intelligence is an ability of the organism to make successful predictions about its input. Intelligence is an internal measure of sensory prediction, not an external measure of behavior. When you look at my face, your eyes don't just go randomly around. [end p. 78, begin p. 79] They look at very specific things. Typically they will look from eye to eye to nose to mouth. What your brain is doing during this process is saying, essentially: I see a pattern here that might be a face, and this might be an eye. And if I see an eye here, there should be another eye over there. It's expecting a certain neural firing pattern at that instant. If you were to look at a face, and see a nose where an eye should be, then you'd know immediately something was amiss. TR: So we have fundamental assumptions about things that help us make sense of the world. HAWKINS: Say I moved the doorknob on your front door up an inch. Now when you come home, you'd reach out for the doorknob, and it wouldn't be in the right spot. You'd notice that immediately, a misprediction. What if I made the doorknob a little wider or narrower? What if I made it stickier or heavier? I can think of a thousand changes I could make to your door and you'd notice them all. Now, the approach to this in traditional artificial intelligence (AI) research is to create a door database or door schema-a compilation of all the door's properties. Then the AI machine would test every one of those properties, one after another. TR: And you're saying this is not how real brains work? HAWKINS: I can guarantee you that. Your brain has no door database. We have to have a mechanism that tests all these door attributes at once. Autoassociative memories naturally make predictions about all their inputs. They are a great candidate mechanism. [hb: so music is practice, a playground for temporal pattern recognition and prediction systems, with the traditional elements being the part it's easy to predict-like the givens of a ping pong table's size, the height of its net, and the shape of the paddles-- and the variations and hooks being the tricky parts to predict--the ball.] In a nutshell, intelligence is the ability of a system to make these low-level predictions about its input patterns. The more complex patterns you can predict over a longer time, the more you understand your environment and the more intelligent you are. TR: How did these ideas lead to the PalmPilot? HAWKINS: I was at Berkeley in the mid-1980s, which was just when neural networks were becoming fashionable again. A company called Nestor was trying to sell a neural-network pattern analyzer to do handwriting recognition-for $1 million. I thought, there have got to be easier, better ways of doing this. I took some of the math I was working on and designed a pattern classifier, which I received a patent on. TR: What did you do wityh it? HAWKINS: Just for fun, I built a hand-printed-character recognizer. Then I thought about building a computer that could use it. This started me down the path of building pen-based computers, first the GridPad and eventually the PalmPilot. The pattern recognizer in today's Palm products is based on the same recognition engine I created 12 years ago. It was inspired by the work I was doing in autoassociative memory. TR: So the PalmPilot was just a byproduct, not a goal. HAWKINS: Yes. I figured I could be successful building little computers that used my recognizer. It would give me some time to think about how I would get other people interested in autoassociative memories. Originally, I thought I would build portable computers for four or five years, make a name for myself, and then work full time on neurobiology. TR: It has been almost 15 years. HAWKINS: Yes, but that's still my intent. In the next couple of years I hope to start spending more time on autoassociative memories. If I get to my deathbed and I haven't made a significant contribution to the theory of how the brain works, I'll be disappointed. TR: Meanwhile, might your ideas about brain function lead to other commercial possibilities? HAWKINS: I wouldn't
be surprised. One way to progress a science very rapidly is to find
a commercial application for it. There is nothing like commercial success
to get more people working on a problem. TR: What sort of products do
you imagine? HAWKINS: Building autoassociative memories will be a very
large business-some day more silicon will be consumed building such
devices than for any other purpose. The amount of storage in a human
brain is extremely large. It is impractical to use current memory technology
to build memories anywhere near this capacity. Fortunately autoassociative
memories are fundamentally different than the kinds of memories we put
in computers. When you build memory chips, their capacity is limited
by the physical size of the die. Since silicon will have a certain number
of defects per square millimeter, if you start making the chips too
big, you'll get a lot of chips with defects. Eventually the yield of
good devices becomes unacceptably low-you have to throw away too many
chips, driving the cost up. TR: But this won't be true with autoassociative
memories? HAWKINS: Right-they are naturally fault-tolerant. If some
percentage of the cells don't work properly, it doesn't really matter.
Autoassociative memory chips will be very large and relatively cheap.
TR: What would they be used for? HAWKINS: This is a little like asking
in 1948 what the transistor would be used for. I believe autoassociative
memories, like transistors, will be an enabling technology. The early
applications will be modest. Ask what problems can benefit from a system
that understands its environment, can predict what ought to be happening
next and can recognize unexpected and undesirable events. Any human
job that requires lots of attention to patterns and few motor skills
is a candidate. Security surveillance could be an interesting market
to start with. TR: There are a lot of applications like that. HAWKINS:
How you get there in five steps, I really don't know. What drives me
is my absolute certainty that this is the right approach to how brains
are built. Links Handspring Inc.: November 1998 press release announcing
formation of the company by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky 3Com's Palm
Computing unit November 1997 article in the San Jose Mercury-News about
Hawkins' creation of the PalmPilot phenomenon Return to Articles Online
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