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We are products of complexity,
but our evolution has focused our
understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the
African savanna.
As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact
the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend
them. So this web frame
explores significant real world complex
adaptive systems (CAS):
- Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the
wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of
stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and
retirement savings of the working class. The
assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
- The US nation was built
from two divergent political
views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also
reflects the development
of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and
Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall
Street into a position of power, while the middle and
working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing
financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions
helped hide the shift.
- Most US health care is still
operating the way cars built in the 1940s did.
Geisinger is an example of better solution. But
transforming the whole network is a challenge. And
public health investment has proved far more
beneficial.
- Helping our children learn to be
effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have
created a robust but deeply flawed education system.
Better alternatives have emerged.
- Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our
good ideas to
become a second genetic material.
- The emergence
of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent
development;
It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all
have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and
explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It
outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.
Example systems frame |
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and
manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these
systems can have disastrous consequences for their human
managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties
psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental
strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage
CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
- Effective iterative planning and
- Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he
reviews.
Complexity catastrophes |
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to
date and explains how the two systems can coexist most
effectively.
Adaptive ecology |
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President
Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and
energy goals.
US vds alignment |
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite
and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly
executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their
successful strategy used the credibility of conservative
religious leaders to:
- Demonstrate religious issues
with the New Deal.
- Integrate the corporate
elite and evangelicals.
- Use the power of corporate
advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American
people to view the US as historically religious and
the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious
socialism.
- Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham.
- Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower.
- Add religious elements to
mainstream American symbols: money, pledge;
- Push for prayer in
public school
- Push Congress to promote prayer
- Make elections more
about religious positions.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends
on persistence.
Inventing Christian America |
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
Financial WMD |
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic
alignment of the American justice system. The result
he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into
resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as
it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a
potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to
extract profits and leave the victim deflated.
Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the:
activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes,
prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are:
Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare
recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the
justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and
responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to
win.
Aligned justice |
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of
staff.
Mechanics of power |
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and
libertarianism.
Libertarianism |
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their
organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs.
He promotes strategies
that help OKR success: Focus,
Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance
reviews, and provides illustrative success
stories.
Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's
view that employees are adaptive and will
respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them
framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture
is tailored for the startups KPCB
invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all
CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the
association to planning.
Startup PDCA |
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take
hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces
including famine and
oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured
that thoughtful leaders
were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the
crisis.
Voltaire's disruptive network |
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges
during the enlightenment.
It was a poem
encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a
humanist book hunter.
Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and
reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the
foundation of the modern world.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms
are discussed.
Constraining happiness |
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of
web services to explore Ada
Lovelace's ideas about thinking
machines and poetic
science. He highlights the value of computer
augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to
fulfill the process.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and
collaboration are discussed.
Arts technology & intelligence |
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of
consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on
the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he
describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the
potential and challenges of associative neural
networks.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the
additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling
evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that
Haikonen's neural
architecture, Smiley's Copycat
architecture and molecular biology's intracellular
architecture leverage the same associative properties.
Associatively integrated robots |
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior
developments that have been successfully implemented.
Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of
memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Developing ideas |
A government sanctioned monopoly
supported the construction of a superorganism
American Telephone and
Telegraph
(AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of
three networks:
- The evolving global scientific
network.
- The Bell telephone network. And
- The military
industrial network deploying 'fire and missile
control' systems.
Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation
engine.
They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing
ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent
opposition and enable the creation and growth of new
ideas.
Once the monopoly was
dismantled, AT&T disrupted.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are
discussed.
Strategic innovation |
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of
BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory and
reviewed.
BREXIT |
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google
are monopolists that
trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues
should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle
class.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments
assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS).
While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts
with relevant CAS history and theory.
Monopoly job killers |
The IPO of Netscape is
defined as the key emergent event of
the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary
of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted.
New economy |
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of
rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy. It was
enabled by the experience of Keynes
and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard,
the necessity of improving
the situation between the wars and the opportunity created
by the catastrophe of the Second
World War.
He describes how it was planned
and developed. How it
emerged from the summit.
And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy.
Like all plans there are
mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as
best it could.
And then Conway describes the period after
Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed
and also compares the relative performance of the various
periods before during and after Bretton Woods.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS)
theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and
infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier.
He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and
against the development
and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a
key piece of the history of our global economic CAS.
Bretton woods |
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008
housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential
mortgage value delivery system (VDS)
by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS
was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one
incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst.
Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Housing amplifiers |
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Derivative systems |
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt
provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as
creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate
different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the
eighteenth century administrations of England and France.
The US embodies two different political and economic systems which
approach the national debt differently:
- Taxes to support a sinking
fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in:
Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social
programs; Starting with Hamilton,
Lincoln & Chase,
Wilson, FDR;
- Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by
individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison,
Reagan,
George W. Bush (Gingrich);
Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US
government does. They argue that the conflicting
sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in
the middle' with a future problem.
And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help
assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the
future.
They conclude the question is still political. They hope
it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed
explanations. They ask who is willing to
push all the coming risk onto individuals.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery
system, key CAS features are highlighted.
National debt |
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second
industrial revolution were the foundation for
American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people
into difficult rural America built a population base
which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets,
Clothes in
department stores;
that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.
The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities;
terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to
leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow
the economy.
Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
- Communications
and advertising
- Credit
and finance
- Public
health and the health
care network
- Health insurance
- Education
- Social
and welfare services
Counter intuitively the constraints
introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2
provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and
fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970
creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post
war America.
Subsequently the
rate of growth was limited until the shift of women
into the workplace and the full networking of
voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web
completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were
muted by the narrow reach of the technologies.
The development of Big Data, Robots,
and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth,
but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of
the middle class.
Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
American growth |
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of
money based on the attractive features of precious metals.
He compares the potential for government edicts to create money
but sees them as lacking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that
precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts.
Government backed promissory notes are analogous to:
- Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy
transaction intermediates and
- Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in
supporting survival and replication in the currently
accessible niches.
Emergence of money |
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith
developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do
this he replaces traditional
economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an
economy is a system in
equilibrium, with complexity
economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex
adaptive system (CAS).
He introduces Sugerscape
to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he
explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics,
Agents, Networks, Emergence, and
Evolution.
Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to
the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces
map strategies to instances of physical and
social
technologies. And he identifies the interactors and
selection mechanism of economic
evolution.
This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition
of wealth.
In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of
adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance,
& Politics
& Policy.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions
and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we
leverage.
Economic complexity |
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the
growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and
their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global
commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for
the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land
and labor to work it including slaves.
He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for
industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of
the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly
copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized
cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to
operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages
and the ways found to
mobilize industrial labor.
Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton
CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.
Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all
prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when
the US civil war
blocked access to the major production nodes in the
American Deep South the CAS began adapting.
Beckert describes the global
reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways
of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion
further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation
states. Beckert explains how other countries responded
by copying the colonial strategies and creating the
opportunities for future armed conflict among the original
colonialists and the new upstarts.
Completing the adaptive
shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in
the colonized global south and how over time they joined
the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing
nodes and creating the current global CAS
dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart
pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers,
spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each
other on cost.
Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of
disconnected peasant farmers,
pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a
highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over
time: of military force, global transportation and communication
networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows,
models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at
key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and
evolved amplifiers. The emergent
system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of
extended phenotypic alignment.
Globalization from cotton |
The structure and problems of the US
health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory.
The network:
- Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the
conflict between two
opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net
or low tax without. The emergence
of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further
constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency
and effectiveness of the network.
- The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous
levels of: salt,
sugar, cigarettes,
guns, light, cell phones, opioids,
costly education, global travel,
antibacterials, formula, foods including
endocrine disrupters;
- Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's
offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress,
amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of
walking, microbiome
collapse;
- Globalization connects disparate environments in a network. At the edges,
humans are drastically altering the biosphere. That
is reducing the proximate natural environment's
connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and
far less diverse. This disconnects predators from
their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that
transform the local parasite
network and their reservoir and amplifier
hosts. The situation is setup so that man is
introduced to spillover
from the local parasites' hosts. Occasionally, but
increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming
broadly infected. The evolved
specialization of the immune system
to the proximate environment during development
becomes undermined as the environment transforms.
- Is incented to focus on localized competition generating
massive & costly duplication of services within
physician based health care operations instead of proven
public health strategies. This process drives
increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope
for each new technological breakthrough.
- Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation
and indirection of service development,
provision, reimbursement and payment.
- Is impacted by the different political strategies for
managing the increasing
cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.
- Is presented with acute
and chronic
problems to respond to. As currently setup the network
is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions
with patients tend to be transactional.
- Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure
which is:
- Costly and inefficient
- Structured around yearly
contracts which undermine long-term health goals and
strategies.
- Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT
which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has
entrenched commercial EHR
products deep within the hospital systems.
- Is maintained, and kept in
alignment, by massive network
effects across the:
- Hospital platform
based
sub-networks connecting to
- Physician networks
- Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA
narrow network legislation
- Hospital clinical supply and food
production networks
- Medical school and academic research network and NIH
- Global
transportation network
- Public health networks
- Health care IT supply
network
Health care |
Deaton describes the wellbeing
of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public
health strategies and the effect of growth in
material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of
aid.
Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. The situation he describes is complex including
powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap
broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The
biosphere, Politics, Economics,
Philosophy and Health care.
Improving wellbeing |
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations
of the major problems afflicting US
health care as of 2006.
Problems of US health care |
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the
modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse
following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the
business, they describe how a calamity
unfolding around them supported building a vision of a
better US health care network. And they explain:
- How they planned
out the transformation,
- Leveraging an effective
governance structure,
- Using a strategy
to gain buy in,
- Enabling
reengineering at the clinician patient
interface.
- Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic
& hot
spot care; to help the patients and help the
physicians.
- Geisinger's leverage of biologics.
- Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.
- Where Geisinger is headed next.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory.
E2E insured quality care |
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader
and son who know that the current health care network interacts
with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that
caused his father's death. But he is confident that these
problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he
asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated,
collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their
patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be
made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical
errors and make care more cost effective.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
including synergistic examples of these systems in
operation. The health care network is built out of
emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals
they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker
explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and
hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh
Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson
highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives.
Bad medical models |
US healthcare is ripe for
disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that
technologies are emerging which will support low cost business
models that will undermine the current network. Applying
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist
these progressive forces.
Disrupting health care |
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent
improvement in quality in medicine by organizing
to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic
plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists.
With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates
the effects of
complexity and how to organize to cope with it.
Following the short review RSS
additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of
complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within
the network of US health care,
contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping
his various examples and reviewing facets of complex
failures.
Complexity checklists |
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on
1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman
starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects'
lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking
broadly across each subject's: Personality,
Education, Parental impacts,
Energy
levels, Partnering,
Careers, Religion,
Social networks,
Gender, Impact from war and
trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways,
which each individual could be seen to select and travel
along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long
life. Others were problematic. The models imply that
the US approach to health and
wellness should focus
more on supporting
the development and selection of beneficial pathways.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most
applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support
necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving
to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may
be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network,
starved of resources.
Promoting longevity |
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots
of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping
with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on
aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to
show how technology has amplified
this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the
independent self, living fully while aging with the
support of the extended family. Central
planning responded to the technological and societal changes
with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But
Gawande then contrasts the power of
bottom up innovations created by experts responding to
their own family situations and belief
systems.
Gawande then explores in depth the challenges
that unfold currently as we age and become infirm.
He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will
have to understand the dilemma of
integrating medical treatment and hospice
strategies. He notes that all parties
involved need courage to cope.
He proposes medicine must aim to assure
well being. At that point all doctors will practice
palliative care.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death,
evolution, cooperation and adaptations
to new technologies are discussed.
Agent death |
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles
mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are
infected each year with malaria and one million die.
Malaria |
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution
of medical science.
Medical science events |
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex
systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of
design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies
that generate complexity
within systems. They do this through a focus on
modularity.
Modular designed systems |
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the
strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer
company IBM.
Compartmented systems |
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer
software design.
Object based systems |
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for
creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data
types and inheritence make object orientation a superior
methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy
to the use of objects.
Software construction |
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved
dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
Tools |
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the
World. He highlights:
- A list of
preconditions resulting in
- Additional niche
capture & more free time
- Building a network
to interconnect memes processes & tools which
- Enabling inter-generational
transfers
- Innovations
that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil
fuels
Memetic trading networks |
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported
the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man
building cultures and
later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson
identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these
are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a
change of approach.
He:
- Explores creativity:
how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter-gatherer,
enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the
evening around the campfire. He notes the power of
fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing
signature of aesthetic
surprise.
- Looks at the current limitations of the
humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect.
- Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and
culture:
- Ultimate causes viewed
through art, & music
- The bedrock of:
- Ape senses and emotions,
- Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied
by humanities,
&
- Exponential change in science and
technology.
- How the breakthrough from
our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat,
supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory &
language.
- Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution.
- The impact on human nature.
- Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are
destroying.
- Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes,
exploration, irony, and
considers the potential for a third enlightenment,
supported by cooperative
action of humanities and science
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory:
- The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework
for representing the cultural CAS while
- Wilson's desire
to integrate the humanities and science gains support from
viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS.
Evening campfire rituals |
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the
economy. They argue it has generated exponential
growth. This has been due to innovation.
It has created a huge bounty of
additional wealth.
But the wealth is spread unevenly across
society. They look at the short and long term implications of
the innovation bounty and spread
and the possible future of
technology.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory.
Brilliant technologies |
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is
inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling
students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane
roles. He highlights a radical and already proven
alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning
processes supported by technology and freed up attention of
teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of
helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative,
Khan:
- Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging
short videos focused on content,
Converging on mastery,
With the help of
neuroscience, and filling
in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach
to the mainstream method.
- Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s,
Inducing holes that
are hidden by tests, Tests
which ignore creativity.
The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to
be supplemented with homework.
Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so
they could mentor them while they attended school, an
inversion that significantly improves the economics.
- Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service,
Working with a
real classroom, Trying stealth
learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at
Los Altos, Supporting life-long
learning.
- Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with
a one
room school, a robust
teaching team, and creativity enabled;
so with some catalysis
even the poorest can
become educated and earn credentials
for current jobs.
- Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based
assessments, College
education;
- Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure
for creativity to
emerge and to support risk taking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for
change but if its force is used to support the current teachers
to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
Education versus guilds |
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The
Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed
by CAS theory and reviewed.
What drives success |
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires
developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining
the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin
shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth
rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the
summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
is used to augment Turchins findings.
Warrior groups |
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael
Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory highlights the value of evolutionary
testing of the food chain.
Natural systems |
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can
take hold. Various social insects have developed
strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable
available niches. Like humans they invest in
specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped
competitors.
Insect superorganisms |
Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
Computationally adapted mind |
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the
impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span:
conception, infantile
puberty, girlhood,
juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are
described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in
how emotions are processed
by women compared to men.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with
the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and
behavioral CAS.
Evolved female brain |
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky
developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time
spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology,
psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he
outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for
scientific research on behavior.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's
details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured
to successfully enter niches we now occupy.
CAS behavior |
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
Emergence of time |
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for
centuries. Now it is finally being characterized
scientifically. That required a transformation of
approach.
Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist
Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access.
In the book he outlines the limitations of previous
psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective
assessments opened the
window to contrast totally unconscious
brain activity with those
including consciousness.
He describes the research methods. He explains the
contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the
psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to
specific neural activity.
He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal
workspace' to position all the experimental details into a
whole.
He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and
treatment of real world mental illnesses.
The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent
consciousness research are outlined.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and
operation introduce constraints which are discussed.
Conscious access |
Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's
brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With
imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the
retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters?
What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound
like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene
explains the importance of
education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as
well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But
he notes the reading
networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved.
And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing
reading and culture.
He explains the cultural
engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that
enable and constrain reading and culture.
Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural
complex adaptive system (CAS) are
related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use
his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading
and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge.
Evolved reading |
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions. In
particular he explains how:
- Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that
allow
- Life changing real-time
decisions to be made, and how
- Schematic structures provide
encodings of computable control
structures which operate through and on incomputable,
schematically encoded, physically active structures and
operationally associated production
functions.
Receptor indirection |
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific
investigation of meditation's
impact on the brain. They introduce
the book by describing their experiences with meditation,
science and the research establishment, their friendship, how
meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered
traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which
the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to
back them up.
Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology
graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds
work. They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern
tradition of exploring and altering the mind.
Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model
of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at
Harvard. Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of
consciousness. It took over twenty years for
scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align
with this model. Much of the prior
experimental data had to be abandoned.
They introduce meditation's
impact on the amygdala
responding to pain and stress.
They look at the changes in:
- Stress
- Compassion
- Attention
- Self-awareness; and the
potential for use of mediation
in psychiatry.
And they warn of the occurrence of dark
nights.
They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters,
starting with Mingyur Rinpoche,
and detect meditation altering
traits.
Finally they discuss the potential
benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it
broadly to a busy America.
Meditating neurons |
Compassionate CAS |
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant.
Enneagrams define personality
types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever,
Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast,
Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of
childhood driven wounds.
The Enneagram becomes
a tool to enable interested people to transform from the
emotionally wounded base, hidden within
the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence.
Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear. In response each
of us adopts an induced Basic Desire
of the type. But as we develop the inner observer, it will
support presence and
undermine the identification
that supports the armor of the type.
The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type
armor:
- Triadic self
revealing: Instinctive,
feeling, thinking; childhood needs
that became significant wounds
- Social style
groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for
managing inner conflict
- Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for
defending childhood wounds
Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual
distortions reflected in the interests of the variants.
The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development:
unhealthy, average, healthy,
liberation; including their
current center of gravity,
steriotypical social role,
wake-up call, leaden rule, red
flag, and direction
of integration and disintegration.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models
presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures
in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven
by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family
and social life. Emergent evolved amplifers can be
constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies.
Enneagram strategies |
Antonio Damasio argues
that ancient
& fundamental homeostatic processes,
built into
behaviors and updated by evolution
have resulted in the emergence
of nervous systems and feelings. These
feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general
systems supporting enteric
operation, are later ubiquitously
integrated into the 'images'
built by the minds of higher animals
including humans.
Damasio highlights the separate
development of the body frame in the building of
minds.
Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds
supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of
emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the
end-to-end
integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers
hard problem of consciousness.
Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures
and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the
cultural creative process, linking culture to
homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the
development of tools
to improve our lives. But the results of the
creative process have added
stresses to our lives.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Each of the [super]organisms
discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
- Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns
well with CAS theory.
- Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS
examples.
Emergence of feelings |
Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd. John
spent a lot of time alone
during his childhood.
He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the
Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot
training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam;
so the US paid for him to attend University
of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training
corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to
Mary Bruce.
Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a
combat ready pilot in
the Korean War.
While the US Air Force focused on
Strategic bombing, Boyd loved
dogfights. His exceptional tactical ability was
rewarded with becoming an instructor. Boyd created new
ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers
by using them in the F-100.
He was noticed and enabled by Spradling. As he trained, and defeated the top
pilots from around the US and allied base network, his
reputation spread. But he needed to get
nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to
Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at
Georgia tech. While preparing to move he documented his FWS training
and mentored Ronald Catton.
While there he first realized the
link between energy
and maneuverability.
At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie,
he developed tools to model the link. They developed
comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US
aircraft performing poorly. Eventually General Sweeney
was briefed on
the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111.
Sent to the Pentagon
to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to
pressure procurement into designing and
building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a
lightweight maneuverable
fighter. The navy aligned with
Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the
F-X and force the F-14 on
the Air Force. Boyd saved
the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring
the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the
freedom to compromise
on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15). Boyd requested to
retire, in disgust.
Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd
and Sprey secretly
developed specifications for building prototype lightweight
fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16;
and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni.
David Packard
announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on
prototypes. Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a
short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to
prototype.
Boyd was transferred to Thailand
as Vice Commander of Task
Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity
training officer; roles in which he excelled. And he
started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction
and Creation. But on completion of the tour Boyd was
apparently abandoned and sent to run
a dead end office at the Pentagon.
The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd,
Christie, Schlesinger,
and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the
lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's
requirements in a covert campaign. The Air Force
threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's
concept. He accepted he had lost the fight and retired
from the Air Force.
Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable
creative new assemblies. He uses the idea to explain
the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then
highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their
infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he
explains with the O-O-D-A Loop.
Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney
to expose the systemic cost overruns
of the military procurement process. The military
hierarchy moved to undermine the
Spinney Report and understand the
nature of the reformers. Boyd acted as a progressive
mentor to Michael
Wyly, who taught the
Marine Corps about maneuver
warfare, and Jim Burton.
Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have
beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during
the First Gulf War.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of
air-to-air combat within a CAS framework.
Air warrior |
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent
van Gogh in Arles.
Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven
to create, and successfully
invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and
especially portraits. Vincent
worked hard to allow artists like him-self
to innovate. But
Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis.
Nemeczek also provides a brief history of
Vincent's life.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Vincent creates |
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious
memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his
immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer
songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse
and eventual recovery.
Elton stresses the serendipitous nature
of his emergence as a musician. He describes
the contributions of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's
sister, and her mother Ivy;
who formed his early
childhood proximate environment which prepared
him for a job in entertainment: he
developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a
commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs;
entering a network based around Dick James Music.
And he almost got married.
DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing
while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session
work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the
food. A first album supported touring and the formation of
a band. A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an
overnight sensation. And during this period of time
Elton's testosterone
level ramped. Life changed
dramatically.
Stardom provided many rewards but there
were still life's problems to deal with. Elton was
befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of
success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated.
His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and
foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly
in hotels between concerts. His hair abandoned him.
But he was saved by the challenge of
transforming the collapsed Watford football club. He
retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life.
Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints,
Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he
hopes will bring him happiness:
trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the
quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying
Renata.
He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio. Problems stress him. He is
frightened by a cancer
scare, AIDS, inspired by
Ryan White, angered by the
Sun, and saddened at
breaking Renata's heart. But he was there for Ryan White's
final days. And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton
about his string of addictions.
Elton finally agreed he had a problem.
He went to rehab, stopped hating himself,
gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a
higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other
people.
It seemed the higher force was
supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the
Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all;
they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni
was murdered. Princess Diana
died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral.
He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina
Turner. While his new records sold well he found
himself in debt and terminated the management relationship
with John Reid
Enterprises.
Elton and Bernie improved their
situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped
turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton
to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David
entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with
his seminal influence: Leon
Russell.
Elton and David became parents of
two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate
mother and network in California. They quietly get married
when the UK allows.
Elton's mum remains
difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many
at the funeral recall her fun side with him. Being parents
increases the long-term
stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys.
But Elton needs to go out with a bang!
And everyone helps.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details
of the creative process from the perspective of complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory.
My song |
Richard Feynman
outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story.
Richard's personality
encouraged him to patiently
seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles
with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and
practice through building and fixing radios.
Leonardo's life inspired him to try
innovation, which he
concluded was hard. He played
with the emotion
in communications, a skill
which he used later at
Caltech. And he made a game of avoiding following
orders at MIT. Working during
the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and
practice.
Feynman enrolled as a graduate
student at Princeton, where the successful
approach to science was just like his.
His approach was based on
patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for
qualitative exploration. Overtime he added experimental
techniques. He would test
the assertions in articles with amusing investigations;
with his mind aligned by
feelings of joy. Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized.
He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being
taught at Princeton to his current pick. In his summer
recess he explored biology.
Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his
creativity. And his practical
orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway,
supported his desire for choices
and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural
pursuits. Being mostly self-taught, he
developed different approaches to problems than the
standard strategies provided by mass education.
Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father. But are they very
different?
While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about
the implications of the European war. After a friend
enlisted he decided to dedicate his
summer holiday to helping the war effort. Feynman got involved in the
Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he
experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the
physics of the project, him on Niels
Bohr; but was
freed from them by Von
Neumann. The records & reports of the project
were kept in filing cabinets. Richard explored the weaknesses of
the locks and safes deployed to secure these
secrets. Just after the war he was called up by the draft
board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally
unfit.
After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell.
He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match
expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his
recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on
fun. He enjoyed knowing
about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to
use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate
and approximate a value the fastest.
Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a
physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much
fun for Richard. So he used
the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet
beautiful women. Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque
frequenting one, and later
ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he
drank with to sleep with him.
Richard reflects on various times when he made government
officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape;
Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more
things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech. Both
institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making,
but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste
of time and he saw risks in
a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech
and stay there.
Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in
Japan. Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little
Japanese. Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse
effectively, but stops when he
finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his
individualism.
Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics. He
felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the
latest details, fearful that
he could not cope; as the community
worked to understand the laws of beta decay. But
Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity
premise. Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused
on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of
reports. Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang
discussed a failure and a theory to explain it. Richard
felt terrified and could not understand what they said.
His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student
having fun, read every
line and equation of their paper; he would understand it.
And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what
was happening and what still seemed conflicted. He
reported his ideas back to the community. After Richard
returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with
Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of
Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay.
Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply
describing the details of beta decay. He had identified
the workings of a fundamental law. Years later he was awarded the Nobel
prize for physics. He was conflicted about the prize
and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip,
where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese
ambassador.
Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling
it on a digital computer. He explored hallucinations and the reality of
experiences.
Richard lobbies for integrity
in science.
In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science,
Richard was quirky. He would tease those who asked for his
help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to
their part of the agreement. And he paid no attention to the
logistical details of planning. He loved percussion,
playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success. He
eventually discovered art could be
fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying
mathematical beauty of the physical world. He had a great
art teacher. But he discovered although he could
eventually draw well he did not understand art.
Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful,
who were interested in integrating art and science, did not
understand either subject. He found the situation was
similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and
economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the
strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects
made him angry and
disturbed, so he avoided participating in them. It seemed
ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing
culture to the physicists!
He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil. He gets
involved in the California public school text
book selection process which he concluded was totally
broken, but also reveals how his father
provided him with a vision of how our world works,
inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical
theory.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported
his creative development from the perspective of complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Richard draws |
Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life,
expanded from his own highlights:
- His naughty
childhood,
- Wasted
schooldays,
- Apprenticeship with Grant,
- His extramural
activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow,
life with FitzRoy on the
Beagle,
- His growing
love for science,
- London: geology, journal and Lyell.
- Moving from
Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other
books.
- He reviewed his position on
religion: the long
dispute with Emma, his
slow collapse of belief
- damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction
being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's
advice; while describing Emma's side of the
argument. He felt happy with his decision to dedicate
his life to science. He closed by asserting after Self &
Cross-fertilization his strength will be
exhausted.
Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Darwin placed
evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose
complementary skills helped drive the innovation.
Darwin emerges |
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations
of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the
accumulation of small advantageous changes.
Accumulating small changes |
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and
the emergence of agents.
Autonomous emergence |
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can
induce emergent phenomena
which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are
sustained. The mechanism enables
the development of Darwinian competition.
Constraint based phenomena |
|
|
Compassionate CAS
Summary
Tara Brach was worried from
a young age that there was something terribly wrong with
her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded
by developing Radical
Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. . Brach then explains the steps in
applying it: pause,
greet what happens next with unconditional
friendliness; allowing us to:
- Initially attend to the sensations
of our body,
- Accept the
wanting self and discover its source of boundless
love.
- Welcome
fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
with a widening
attention, accept the pain of death and become
free.
- Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions.
for ourselves
and others.
- Focus on
our basic goodness to counter Western culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture:
- Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
turning anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress. , at being betrayed,
towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in
everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness practices holding tender, compassionate, feelings towards a slowly widening circle of people: family we love, friends, people we don't know, people we dislike, every person; recognizing the oneness, where everyone desires happiness. Goleman & Davidson describe the neuroscience involved with this mediation. Research comparing two groups: one practicing loving-kindness meditation, the other acting as a control group just learning the theory; only the meditators showed a reduced implicit bias against out-groups. They also studied masters - Tibetan yogis. .
- Leverage
friendships to understand more about our shared nature
and strengthen Radical Acceptance.
- Realize our Buddha nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature.
.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of
the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic
code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist
presence.
Radical Acceptance
In Tara Brach's book
'Radical Acceptance' she describes how our This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent Buddha Nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature. is
revealed in our awareness once the This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolved
subjectivity
of the conscious self
is removed.
Brach recounts that
as a young girl who was internally: lonely, not at peace, anxious is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. - avoiding pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation. and worried about letting
people down, depressed is a debilitating episodic state of extreme sadness, typically beginning in late teens or early twenties. This is accompanied by a lack of energy and emotion, which is facilitated by genetic predisposition - for example genes coding for relatively low serotonin levels, estrogen sensitive CREB-1 gene which increases women's incidence of depression at puberty; and an accumulation of traumatic events. There is a significant risk of suicide: depression is involved in 50% of the 43,000 suicides in the US, and 15% of people with depression commit suicide. Depression is the primary cause of disability with about 20 million Americans impacted by depression at any time. There is evidence of shifts in the sleep/wake cycle in affected individuals (Dec 2015). The affected person will experience a pathological sense of loss of control, prolonged sadness with feelings of hopelessness, helplessness & worthlessness, irritability, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, and inability to experience pleasure. Michael Pollan concludes depression is fear of the past. It affects 12% of men and 20% of women. It appears to be associated with androgen deprivation therapy treatment for prostate cancer (Apr 2016). Chronic stress depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine, biasing humans towards depression. Depression easily leads to following unhealthy pathways: drinking, overeating; which increase the risk of heart disease. It has been associated with an aging related B12 deficiency (Sep 2016). During depression, stress mediates inhibition of dopamine signalling. Both depression and stress activate the adrenal glands' release of cortisol, which will, over the long term, impact the PFC. There is an association between depression and additional brain regions: Enlarged & more active amygdala, Hippocampal dendrite and spine number reductions & in longer bouts hippocampal volume reductions and memory problems, Dorsal raphe nucleus linked to loneliness, Defective functioning of the hypothalamus undermining appetite and sex drive, Abnormalities of the ACC. Mayberg notes ACC area 25: serotonin transporters are particularly active in depressed people and lower the serotonin in area 25 impacting the emotion circuit it hubs, inducing bodily sensations that patients can't place or consciously do anything about; and right anterior insula: which normally generates emotions from internal feelings instead feel dead inside; are critical in depression. Childhood adversity can increase depression risk by linking recollections of uncontrollable situations to overgeneralizations that life will always be terrible and uncontrollable. Sufferers of mild autism often develop depression. Treatments include: CBT which works well for cases with below average activity of the right anterior insula (mild and moderate depression), UMHS depression management, deep-brain stimulation of the anterior insula to slow firing of area 25. Drug treatments are required for cases with above average activity of the right anterior insula. As of 2010 drug treatments: SSRIs (Prozac), MAO, monoamine reuptake inhibitors; take weeks to facilitate a response & many patients do not respond to the first drug applied, often prolonging the agony. By 2018, Kandel notes, Ketamine is being tested as a short term treatment, as it acts much faster, reversing the effect of cortisol in stimulating glutamate signalling, and because it reverses the atrophy induced by chronic stress. Genomic predictions of which treatment will be effective have not been possible because: Not all clinical depressions are the same, a standard definition of drug response is difficult;
but driven, fearing she was reflecting her depressed and anxious
mother (who had felt unreal
and undeserving of attention as a child, taking comfort
from alcohol and attempting to please others to belong); her external persona,
challenged to argue to win by her lawyer father, aimed for
academic achievement, was politically active, addicted results from changes in the operation of the brain's reward network's regulatory regions, altering the anticipation of rewards. Addictive drugs mediate the receptors of the reward network, increasing dopamine in the pleasure centers of the cortex. The learned association of the situation with the reward makes addiction highly prone to relapse, when the situation is subsequently experienced. This makes addiction a chronic disease, where the sufferer must remain vigilant to avoid relapse inducing situations. Repeated exposure to the addictive drug alters the reward network. The neurons that produce dopamine are impaired, no longer sending dopamine to the reward target areas, reducing the feeling of pleasure. But the situational association remains strong driving the addict to repeat the addictive activity. Destroying the memory of the pleasure inducer may provide a treatment for addiction in the future. Addiction has a genetic component, which supports inheritance. Some other compulsive disorders: eating, gambling, sexual behavior; are similar to drug addiction. to food, and
achievement. She was a thrill seeker including:
recreational drugs, sex, and adventures. This quixotic mental mixture left her
convinced that something was
wrong with her.
Joining an ashram, she found it addressed her uncertainties and
insecurity. It allowed her to see with compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. . As she
became a professional psychologist and spiritual teacher she saw
firsthand that many people don't feel they are good
enough. Fixating on this flawed The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
model
of their damaged self, traps them, wasting years missing
enjoyment. Brach developed radical acceptance to help her,
and others, to see how ones anxieties about one's self can,
instead, reveal the deep nature of love is an emotion, which generates a feeling of pleasure at a genetic relative's well-being and pain in their harm. An inseminated human female is genetically a full relative of her partner since she carries his germ-line gametes. From any of their pooled gene's perspective the offspring have a one-in-two chance of including the specific gene. Hence love supports kin selection driven by the selfish actions of genes. Emotions, including love and anger, help drive the interactions between people. Compassionate love also supports the symbiotic partnership of true friends built on fairness and trust. Sapolsky notes the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. The amygdala's projection into the locus ceruleus drives autonomic intensity. .
The trance of
unworthiness
Brach asserts belief of unworthiness can result in:
- Shame is an emotional reaction to being discovered cheating on a friend.
at assumed
deficiency
- Becoming separated from others
- Developing addictions results from changes in the operation of the brain's reward network's regulatory regions, altering the anticipation of rewards. Addictive drugs mediate the receptors of the reward network, increasing dopamine in the pleasure centers of the cortex. The learned association of the situation with the reward makes addiction highly prone to relapse, when the situation is subsequently experienced. This makes addiction a chronic disease, where the sufferer must remain vigilant to avoid relapse inducing situations. Repeated exposure to the addictive drug alters the reward network. The neurons that produce dopamine are impaired, no longer sending dopamine to the reward target areas, reducing the feeling of pleasure. But the situational association remains strong driving the addict to repeat the addictive activity. Destroying the memory of the pleasure inducer may provide a treatment for addiction in the future. Addiction has a genetic component, which supports inheritance. Some other compulsive disorders: eating, gambling, sexual behavior; are similar to drug addiction.
to: foods, alcohol, drugs;
- All failures, ours and loved ones, being attributed to our
problem attributes, increasing the sense of pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation.
and lack of
control.
- Not being able to trust anyone or be loved. Instead
rage is a doomsday machine emotion of uncontrollable righteous anger.
at problem
situations.
- A roller coaster of shame alternating with pride.
Judging others slow and boring, when your achievements are
special and important, but at other times being unworthy
- Focusing on shortcomings which when detected increases
insecurity and encourages trying even harder.
- Deep fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
that there
is something wrong with life.
Brach spent 12 years on an ashram. She found the practice:
waking at 3.30am, cold shower, two and a half hours of yoga, meditation includes a variety of practices with the contemplative goal of altering traits to free the subject of suffering. Goleman & Davidson see three distinct levels of practice: beginner, long term meditator, Yogi; with radically different levels of commitment. Beginners typically do a limited-time-investment mindfulness meditation such as MBSR. Long term meditators typically practice vipassana meditation. Yogis practice Tibetan meditations Dzogchen and Mahamudra, which start like vipassana but in a non-dual stance developing a more subtle meta-awareness. Richard Davidson, Cortland Dahl and Antoine Lutz developed a typology of the practices: - Attentional - train aspects of attention.
- Constructive - cultivate virtuous qualities: loving-kindness;
- Destructive - use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience. These include non-dual approaches where ordinary cognition no longer dominates.
, prayer,
chanting; until breakfast induced a blissful state. But it
didn't last with her habitual feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture: - As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
of insecurity and
selfishness recurring. She internally criticized her need
to impress others. And she hoped, that over- Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time, the insecurity would fade.
But the ego includes: - Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious
- Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness
- Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:
- Consciousness
- Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious
- Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.
can convert anything to its own ends. Brach was mistakenly
thinking she must change to become perfect and belong.
Additionally she notes Western
culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
encourages separation from
family, winning the competition of life; inducing a
feeling of not belonging in the poor and sick. Brach sees
Buddhism challenging this process through its assumption of
everyone's Buddha
nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature. .
Brach notes that her mother
believed she must please her parents, and subsequently
others, to be worthy. And recollects that one meditation includes a variety of practices with the contemplative goal of altering traits to free the subject of suffering. Goleman & Davidson see three distinct levels of practice: beginner, long term meditator, Yogi; with radically different levels of commitment. Beginners typically do a limited-time-investment mindfulness meditation such as MBSR. Long term meditators typically practice vipassana meditation. Yogis practice Tibetan meditations Dzogchen and Mahamudra, which start like vipassana but in a non-dual stance developing a more subtle meta-awareness. Richard Davidson, Cortland Dahl and Antoine Lutz developed a typology of the practices: - Attentional - train aspects of attention.
- Constructive - cultivate virtuous qualities: loving-kindness;
- Destructive - use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience. These include non-dual approaches where ordinary cognition no longer dominates.
student hated being needy,
chastised by a mother who grew up in a large chaotic
family. Brach
stresses the relentless circle of: parents struggling with
parenting, fearing for their children's success and desiring it,
passing
on their cultures messages, and the children growing up to
become parents
with their own challenges.
Brach lists strategies for
managing unworthiness:
Brach stresses the Buddha's insight is that all suffering or
dissatisfaction arises from a mistaken
understanding that we are a separate and distinct
self. This Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can
induce emergent phenomena
which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are
sustained. The mechanism enables
the development of Darwinian competition.
constrains us to
forget loving
awareness which is the essence and connects us with all
life. Instead we experience repeated cravings and
aversions. Brach views the self as an This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas. : an aggregate of
thoughts, emotions, and patterns of behavior. This allows
our mind to conflate 'the self' and 'something is wrong with the
trance of unworthiness' to something is wrong with me. And
appearing to be a self alone this problem must be my
fault.
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
Evolution has provided humans with emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. to help us respond effectively to
our environment. But Brach asserts we are much more
than this, and the emotional mechanism can maladaptively focus
on a sliver: incomplete, at risk, and separate from the rest of
the world; ignoring our other aspects - love is an emotion, which generates a feeling of pleasure at a genetic relative's well-being and pain in their harm. An inseminated human female is genetically a full relative of her partner since she carries his germ-line gametes. From any of their pooled gene's perspective the offspring have a one-in-two chance of including the specific gene. Hence love supports kin selection driven by the selfish actions of genes. Emotions, including love and anger, help drive the interactions between people. Compassionate love also supports the symbiotic partnership of true friends built on fairness and trust. Sapolsky notes the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. The amygdala's projection into the locus ceruleus drives autonomic intensity. , beauty & fragility
of our shared experience, breath of life, Buddha nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature. .
Brach asserts that there is hope generated through escaping from
the self-imposed prison of self-hate and shame is an emotional reaction to being discovered cheating on a friend. .
Brach stresses the Zen
teaching: true freedom is being "without anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. about
imperfection." Everything is imperfect. So instead
we can focus on connecting to the rest of life and experiencing
our shared goodness, with a wise and compassionate indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. heart, by
cultivating
Radical Acceptance.
Awakening
from the trance: The path of Radical Acceptance
Brach sees a great tragedy - freedom is possible, but we pass
our years trapped in the
same old
patterns. Unworthiness supports: self-judgment, anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. , restlessness,
dissatisfaction; undermining our escape to freedom and peace -
even when the opportunity arises.
Brach asserts the way out of the cage is to accept absolutely
everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness
and care our moment-to-moment experience: attending to
everything that is happening without: trying to control, judge
or pull away; Radical
Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. : mindfulness is an active meditative state of non-doing, attentively seeking each 'present moment' with one's body and mind 'being' at rest and so cultivating awareness, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Some traditions define it as observing when the mind wanders. Others use it to refer to the floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting, explain Goleman & Davidson. The thinking mind usually spends a lot of time relating to the future and past which Kabat-Zinn argues limits its ability to become fully aware of the present. In times of stress those thoughts are so overpowering that they crowd out awareness and appreciation of the present. Mindfulness shifts attention to calming internal feelings. It allows review and prioritization of thoughts as they are recognized. Major attitude based pillars of successful mindfulness are: impartial to judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance of seeing things the way they are and letting go. An awareness of the body's state can be built with tools including: inquiry, naming; from Yogi's attention to: - Breathing - which is a proxy for the environmental situation and through its rhythms is a model of our emotional state. Attention to breathing reminds people to feel their bodies too. Belly breathing is particularly relaxing.
- Sitting - erect with head, neck and back aligned vertically. Then attend to breathing moving back to it each time you observe the mind has wandered. When the body becomes uncomfortable, direct attention to the discomfort, observe and welcome it.
- Experience our body - rather than model, judge or hate it relative to an ideal - with a body scan.
- Hatha yoga - very slow stretching and strengthening exercises with moment-to-moment awareness supports being in your body.
- Walking meditation - Intentionally attend to the immediate experience of walking.
with compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. .
We will notice pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation. without getting lost in a
cascade of stories where we are the victim or the
cause. We can enjoy the percepts are internal appearences of the external world and the body according to Haikonen. RSS views them as evolved models that are: - Associated schematically with the signals generated in response to epi-phenomena detected by sensory receptors and
- Acted on by emergent agents.
of eating without
transitioning to assessing guilt is an emotion which alerts us to the risk of cheating on a friend. To be culturally effective the individuals must have respect for the law. Guilt is associated with activation of the posterior cingulate cortex. .
The trance of unworthiness
makes our heart hard, we don't recognize our internal state clearly, or
feel kind. Mindfulness stops us tampering with the stream
of experience and see life as it is. Compassion makes this
acceptance whole hearted. Working together they are
mutually reinforcing in undermining the anger and guilt.
Brach highlights how:
Recognizing when we:
- Are caught in the habit of judging, resisting and grasping
and
- Are constantly trying to control our levels of pain &
pleasure
- Create suffering when we attack ourselves; and recalling
our intention to love life, we can build the foundations of
Radical Acceptance, which allows us to honor and cherish the
pleasure and pain of this ever-changing life.
Directing attention to the wounds allows wisdom and
compassion to enter.
Brach uses her own experience of struggling with a need to
over-achieve due to a fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
of being flawed, as one illustration:
- Spiritual practice at the ashram, while developing a
psychology business, getting married and becoming pregnant;
she miscarried, and was then publicly and angrily criticized
by her spiritual teacher for being professionally ambitious
and ego centered which he implied caused her
miscarriage.
- Hitting
bottom, with self-critical stories streaming through her
Consciousness is no longer mysterious. In this page we use
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory to describe the high-level
architecture of consciousness, linking sensory networks,
low level feelings and
genetically conserved and deployed neural structures into a high
level scheduler. Consciousness is evolution's
solution to the complex problems of effective, emergent,
multi-cellular perception based strategy.
Constrained by emergence and needing
to avoid the epistemological
problem of starting with a blank slate with every birth,
evolution was limited in its options.
We explain how survival value allows evolution to leverage
available tools: sensors, agent relative position, models, perception
& representation; to solve the problem of mobile
agents responding effectively to their own state and proximate environment.
Evolution did this by providing a genetically
constructed framework that can
develop into a conscious CAS.
And we discuss the implications with regard to artificial
intelligence, sentient robots,
augmented intelligence, and
aspects of philosophy.
consciousness for hours
afterwards she eventually found a refuge in unconditionally
loving and wakeful awareness, which she calls the
Beloved.
- This presence allowed her to hear the condemning voices
without believing them. She accepted her problem
actions without resisting them. She accepted herself
completely - the flawed person her teacher described - with
deep and genuine caring.
Brach notes typical misunderstandings about Radical
Acceptance. It:
- Is not resignation - acceptance still allows change and
growth
- Does not mean defining ourselves by our limitations.
It is not an excuse for withdrawal - acceptance should bring
kind attention to our capabilities and limitations while
encouraging the creativity
enabled by living
- Is not self-indulgence - We can accept our cravings and
see them clearly to encourage wiser choices
- Does not make us passive - It accepts our experience as a
first step to wise choices
- Does not mean accepting a 'self.' - We are accepting the
mental and sensory experiences that are modeled as the
self.
It took two years for Brach to leave the ashram, after hitting bottom.
In that time she reviewed other spiritual traditions and found
Buddhism most helpful. She found the Buddhist mindfulness is an active meditative state of non-doing, attentively seeking each 'present moment' with one's body and mind 'being' at rest and so cultivating awareness, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Some traditions define it as observing when the mind wanders. Others use it to refer to the floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting, explain Goleman & Davidson. The thinking mind usually spends a lot of time relating to the future and past which Kabat-Zinn argues limits its ability to become fully aware of the present. In times of stress those thoughts are so overpowering that they crowd out awareness and appreciation of the present. Mindfulness shifts attention to calming internal feelings. It allows review and prioritization of thoughts as they are recognized. Major attitude based pillars of successful mindfulness are: impartial to judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance of seeing things the way they are and letting go. An awareness of the body's state can be built with tools including: inquiry, naming; from Yogi's attention to: - Breathing - which is a proxy for the environmental situation and through its rhythms is a model of our emotional state. Attention to breathing reminds people to feel their bodies too. Belly breathing is particularly relaxing.
- Sitting - erect with head, neck and back aligned vertically. Then attend to breathing moving back to it each time you observe the mind has wandered. When the body becomes uncomfortable, direct attention to the discomfort, observe and welcome it.
- Experience our body - rather than model, judge or hate it relative to an ideal - with a body scan.
- Hatha yoga - very slow stretching and strengthening exercises with moment-to-moment awareness supports being in your body.
- Walking meditation - Intentionally attend to the immediate experience of walking.
meditation includes a variety of practices with the contemplative goal of altering traits to free the subject of suffering. Goleman & Davidson see three distinct levels of practice: beginner, long term meditator, Yogi; with radically different levels of commitment. Beginners typically do a limited-time-investment mindfulness meditation such as MBSR. Long term meditators typically practice vipassana meditation. Yogis practice Tibetan meditations Dzogchen and Mahamudra, which start like vipassana but in a non-dual stance developing a more subtle meta-awareness. Richard Davidson, Cortland Dahl and Antoine Lutz developed a typology of the practices: - Attentional - train aspects of attention.
- Constructive - cultivate virtuous qualities: loving-kindness;
- Destructive - use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience. These include non-dual approaches where ordinary cognition no longer dominates.
, vipassana means 'to see clearly' in Pali. It is the foundational mindfulness (Theravadan) meditation. It aims to allow the stream of experience to move through attention. S. N. Goenka aimed to make vipassana broadly available. In his teaching the focus is on bodily sensations: - Noting the sensations of breathing in and out for hours each day, to build concentration.
- Perform a whole-body scan of whatever sensations are occurring anywhere in the body. The meditator experiences a sea of shifting sensations and awareness.
- Insight is then developed, which brings the added realization of how we link sensations to the self. Insight into pain reveals that we build an object out of various continuously shifting sensations and provoked feelings that can become an emotive response of "mine". Booklets describe how to develop the insights and practice.
, well aligned
with her suffering. It allows
the changing stream of experience to move through attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. . Ideas
could be inspected without belief. And Buddhist loving-kindness practices holding tender, compassionate, feelings towards a slowly widening circle of people: family we love, friends, people we don't know, people we dislike, every person; recognizing the oneness, where everyone desires happiness. Goleman & Davidson describe the neuroscience involved with this mediation. Research comparing two groups: one practicing loving-kindness meditation, the other acting as a control group just learning the theory; only the meditators showed a reduced implicit bias against out-groups. They also studied masters - Tibetan yogis.
and compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions.
meditations helped manage her feelings of pain, insecurity and
loneliness through acceptance.
Brach was moved profoundly by the statement: The Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows. They can enforce
separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build
diversity. Examples of different types of barriers: physical
barriers, chemical
molecules can form membranes, probability based,
cell membranes can include controllable
channels, eukaryotes
leverage membranes, symbiosis, human emotions, chess, business; and
their effects are described.
boundary to what we can accept is the
boundary to our freedom. And she stresses we live life
through each discrete changing
minute, which she treats as an unrepeatable miracle.
The Sacred
Pause: Resting under the Bodhi tree
Brach introduces the dilemma of responding to situations far
different from asserts that human culture reflects adaptations that developed during human's long hunter-gatherer past, living on the African savanna. Its implications are described in The Adapted Mind. Subsequent studies of the effects of selection on the human genome show significant changes due to our more recent history as well. the African savanna is the environment where hunter-gatherers primarily evolved. Its grassland supported large herbivores that could be hunted easily across the plains. Clumps of Acacia trees: with short trunks, and broad bows; & rocks supported places to hide from large carnivores. Streams, especially important in times of drought, and paths add to the signals enabling orientation. -
our cognitive niche is Tooby & DeVore's theory that reflects a flexible competitive strategy, described by Steven Pinker, which leverages the power and flexibility of intelligence to defeat the capabilities of genetically evolved specialists focused on specific niches. .
She asserts the best strategy is to pause and do nothing for a
period and notice our inner experience. Brach uses the
pause to interrupt our habitual
behaviors allow higher organisms: humans, rats, flies; to perform important behaviors automatically, without involvement of consciousness. Habits are adaptive, being promoted by the release of dopamine into the PFC and striatum, generating a feeling of pleasure and conditioning us. As the dopamine detaches from the synaptic receptors in the PFC and striatum the motivation to perform the behavior subsides. If the dopamine remains at the synapse for an extended period, because it is not removed as occurs when cocaine is present, or when too much dopamine is generated, the habit can become an addiction. , offering the possibility of new and creative ways to respond to
our wants and fears is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. .
She explains how as she hit bottom, she
had paused - facing the shame is an emotional reaction to being discovered cheating on a friend.
and fears that she had previously always run from. It was
the pause that enabled her to accept the intensity of her
suffering and escape from the trance's
cage.
Brach notes that many situations don't require a pause: we are designed to respond
rapidly helped by our emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. ;
but often today we are just attempting to anxiously is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. control our
situation. In these cases the pause allows us to gain perspective and
make a choice integrates situational context, state and signals to prioritize among strategies and respond in a timely manner. It occurs in all animals, including us and our organizations: - Individual human decision making includes conscious and unconscious aspects. Situational context is highly influential: supplying meaning to our general mechanisms, & for robots too. Emotions are important in providing a balanced judgement. The adaptive unconscious interprets percepts quickly supporting 'fast' decision making. Conscious decision making, supported by the: DLPFC, vmPFC and limbic system; can use slower autonomy. The amygdala, during unsettling or uncertain social situations, signals the decision making regions of the frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal cortex. The BLA supports rejecting unacceptable offers. Moral decisions are influenced by a moral decision switch. Sleeping before making an important decision is useful in obtaining the support of the unconscious in developing a preference. Word framing demonstrates the limitations of our fast intuitive decision making processes. And prior positive associations detected by the hippocampus, can be reactivated with the support of the striatum linking it to the memory of a reward, inducing a bias into our choices. Prior to the development of the PFC, the ventral striatum supports adolescent decision making. Neurons involved in decision making in the association areas of the cortex are active for much longer than neurons participating in the sensory areas of the cortex. This allows them to link perceptions with a provisional action plan. Association neurons can track probabilities connected to a choice. As evidence is accumulated and a threshold is reached a choice is made, making fast thinking highly adaptive. Diseases including: schizophrenia and anorexia; highlight aspects of human decision making.
- Organisations often struggle to balance top down and distributed decision making: parliamentry government must use a process, health care is attempting to improve the process: checklists, end-to-end care; and include more participants, but has systemic issues, business leaders struggle with strategy.
in how we respond. She stresses
'Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to
stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience.'
The pause makes Radical
Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. possible.
Brach asserts that running away from our emotional
challenges: parentally unacceptable aspects of our early
behaviors, anger,
neediness, fear; deepens the
trance. Working to exile these emotions shifts their
impact to: knots of tension, self-judgment, and blame. But
Brach stresses the root is shame bound to a childhood
The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
model of being defective.
And hiding re-confirms unworthiness to the self. The
defensive response, such as lashing out, feels automatic, and
helps hide the underlying damage that attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. could
heal.
Brach argues that we chase after pleasure and security to obtain
lasting happiness only to suffer some crisis and struggle.
Seeking to avoid pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation. and
control our experience we dodge the intense feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture: - As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
that represent
our physical and emotional needs. She sites the Buddha's
insight about the path to liberation, a freedom that became
available to him as he reflected on his experience as a young
child sitting under a tree watching the farmers emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances. plow:
- This farming generated turmoil and death for the insects
and produced feelings of sorrow and compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions.
, when
supported by stillness or solitude, in Siddhartha.
- Many years later, while searching for spiritual
liberation, Siddhartha fell exhausted, and recollected the
childhood incident. It helped him see a new
understanding of the path to liberation, stopping the
struggle and meeting all experience with a child's inherent
tender and open presence.
- Inspired he sought solitude under a bodhi tree, remaining
there, still, until he experienced liberation.
Carefully observing Mara (delusion) is a god who represents, for Buddhists, the shadow-side of human nature. Mara entangles us in craving and fear, appearing in the mind as: violent storms, temptingly beautiful women, raging demons, and massive armies; according to Tara Brach.
he noticed the sensations of longing and fear, without
responding, and taking
Buddha refuge is a Buddhist practice used to develop a mental model of safety and belonging. Tara Brach explains there are three fundamental refuges: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Each person can approach the refuges in a way that is sincere for them:
- Buddha refuge can represent the way Siddhartha Gautama coped with his fears of the terrible Mara: meeting it with his full attention, and observing and welcoming it, rather than responding to the feelings emotionally. And the devotional can seek safety in the living spirit of the Buddha's awakened heart and mind.
- Dharma refuge depends on realizing that everything in nature must change. Buddhists can call upon the practices and teachings; they have developed over centuries, which highlight this truth. And they can take refuge in these skills. Lovingkindness mediation can be particularly helpful practices in fearful situations.
- Sangha refuge is the community of monks and nuns that are also practicing and taking refuge.
, realized these self-delusions were
imprisoning us in suffering.
Brach recommends starting the practice of Radical Acceptance
with our own pause under the bodhi tree. We can make
ourselves available to whatever life is offering in each
moment. Otherwise we obscure and distort our experiences
and that is all we know. Brach accepts trying to pause may
be initially terrifying, but iteratively it will provide inner
resources to assist in responding wisely to challenging events
that otherwise highlight feelings of unworthiness.
Offering compassion to the internal wounds results in other
helpful choices appearing to our attention.
Brach sees the pause clearing some space for wise action.
She helps her psychotherapy clients to develop strategies that
will work better than those launched by raw emotions. They
discuss scenarios that might emerge in problem situations.
So in a disagreement, if:
- There was an associated flood of rage is a doomsday machine emotion of uncontrollable righteous anger.
- it may help to
propose a time-out and talk later. During the time-out
the story that is generating the rage can be inspected and
feelings reviewed.
- Attention was lost in an argument - pause and explain what
am feeling. Find out what the other person is
feeling.
The pause can help in relationships even when only one person is
practicing Radical Acceptance. It offers a more positive
situation to the other person so they can relax too. It
can't fix everything but helps obtain resolution.
When feeling anxious, a pause can replace rushing to do
something and allow us to sit still and inspect the discomfort
and restlessness. A pause allows us to become intimate
with what is happening to our gut, heart and mind. The
more we practice the pause the more effective it can
become. Brach reminds us that we often pause in our daily
lives while: showering, walking, driving, getting ready to
sleep; and notes how she has developed a habit to pause before
exiting her car. She believes such pauses sustain us,
acting like rest notes is a written symbol on a musical score associated with a tone. in music is a complex emergent capability supported by sexual selection and generating pleasure. It transforms the sensing of epiphenomena: Contour, Rhythm, Tempo, Timbre; to induce salient representations: Harmony, Key, Loudness, Melody, Meter, Pitch, and perceptions: Reverberation - echo; which allow musicians: Elton John, Elvis Presley; to show their fitness: superior coordination, creativity, adolescent leadership, stamina; true for birds and humans. Levitin showed that listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: auditory cortex, frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, and finally the mesolimbic system, culminating in the nucleus accumbens. And he found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout the session. He argues music mimics some of the features of language and conveys some of the same emotions. The brain regions pulse with the beat and predict the next one. As the music is heard it is modeled and generates dopamine rewards for matching each beat and noting creative jokes in the rhythm. The cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized. - a silent background
that allows the foreground to This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emerge.
Unconditional friendliness: the spirit of Radical Acceptance
After the pause,
Brach explains we meet whatever is happening inside us, even jealous is an emotion driven by the large investment by parents in their children's development combined with a human sexual asymmetry: fertilization occurs inside the female's body, so a male can't be sure it is supporting its own ofspring. thoughts and angry is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress. feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture: - As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
, with ...
unconditional friendliness.
The Buddha when visited by Mara (delusion) is a god who represents, for Buddhists, the shadow-side of human nature. Mara entangles us in craving and fear, appearing in the mind as: violent storms, temptingly beautiful women, raging demons, and massive armies; according to Tara Brach.
would always great the evil god hospitably and invite him to
tea. Similarly we can welcome troubling emotions, saying
"I see you, Mara." Brach proposes we stop making fair-weather
friends benefits another organism at a cost to the behaver. It is differentiated from kin altruism, by Williams and Trivers, since it can apply between unrelated individuals. It can be induced by natural selection when there is mutual survival benefit in group activities and cheating can be detected and discouraged. Humans, leveraging the cognitive niche, can particularly easily, build an evolved amplifier, through sharing information at little cost and significant benefit. But African savanna hunters similarly gain from sharing large game meat with other un-related altruistic group members since the meat would otherwise spoil before it could be eaten. with ourselves, and stop ignoring and rejecting
the darkness within us.
Brach highlights how dramatic failure, upending plans and
letting people down, can result in feelings of worthlessness
which deepen the trap of unworthiness.
She describes some practices that can help:
- Inquiry is a mindfulness practice where the student: performs a body scan, asks what is happening? Asks what wants my attention right now? asks what is asking for acceptance?; attends with genuine interest, unconditional friendliness and care to their heart, gut and mind explains Tara Brach. She warns this is not analytic digging which would generate more thoughts. Instead it aims to awaken our experience at the present moment and focuses on immediate feelings and sensations such as: fear of failure.
is a tool of
mindfulness is an active meditative state of non-doing, attentively seeking each 'present moment' with one's body and mind 'being' at rest and so cultivating awareness, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Some traditions define it as observing when the mind wanders. Others use it to refer to the floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting, explain Goleman & Davidson. The thinking mind usually spends a lot of time relating to the future and past which Kabat-Zinn argues limits its ability to become fully aware of the present. In times of stress those thoughts are so overpowering that they crowd out awareness and appreciation of the present. Mindfulness shifts attention to calming internal feelings. It allows review and prioritization of thoughts as they are recognized. Major attitude based pillars of successful mindfulness are: impartial to judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance of seeing things the way they are and letting go. An awareness of the body's state can be built with tools including: inquiry, naming; from Yogi's attention to: - Breathing - which is a proxy for the environmental situation and through its rhythms is a model of our emotional state. Attention to breathing reminds people to feel their bodies too. Belly breathing is particularly relaxing.
- Sitting - erect with head, neck and back aligned vertically. Then attend to breathing moving back to it each time you observe the mind has wandered. When the body becomes uncomfortable, direct attention to the discomfort, observe and welcome it.
- Experience our body - rather than model, judge or hate it relative to an ideal - with a body scan.
- Hatha yoga - very slow stretching and strengthening exercises with moment-to-moment awareness supports being in your body.
- Walking meditation - Intentionally attend to the immediate experience of walking.
which
helps undermine the trance. By asking questions
about our experience: a body
scan is a mindfulness meditation exercise where the attention is moved around the body noticing the sensations of the visited part. At the same time the brain models the visited part participating in flows in and out of the body with tensions and pain signals flowing out. Move the mind to each part and feel it. Breath in to and out from each region. Imagine breathing in vitality and relaxation on each in breath. Imagine the tensions are exhailed with the out breath. As you let go of the sensations the muscles also let go of tensions. First from the toes of the left foot to the pelvis and then the right foot to the pelvis. From there move up through the torso, lower back and abdomen, upper back and chest, sholders. Then from the fingers of both hands move simultaneously up both arms returning to the shoulders. Then move through the neck and throat, all regions of the face, back of the head and top of the head to an imaginary hole at the top of the head where we release our breath. , what wants our attention, what is happening? we
can engage our attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. .
- Naming is also helpful when we are lost. It allows
us to notice the passing flow of thoughts, feelings and
sensations. Naming also allows us to send
unconditional friendliness to our inner life.
For Brach welcoming almost any thought into attention warmly,
and with a smile, is like welcoming Mara and has a very positive
impact on our attitude. But she warns that traumatic
events from the past should not be welcomed incidentally, since
there is a risk of triggering the old feeling of terror.
In such a case Brach suggests seek comfort with a friend,
exercise rigorously or take prescribed medication.
Life cannot be compared with a vision of perfection.
Instead, welcoming our imperfect and messy life warmly, the way
it is, highlights how alive, present and vibrant the situation
is. Joy rushes in.
Coming
home to our body: the ground of Radical Acceptance
Tara Brach describes struggling to align her parental desires for her, then 13
year old, son Narayan and his own
- driven by his developing is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment. And it is staged, encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications. It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development. The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively. The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time. The rest dissolve. So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal. The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first. The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult. Adolescents: - Don't detect irony effectively. They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.
- Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup. Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards. Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack. Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor. The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards. Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting. And adolescents start to see other people's perspective.
- Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females. Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.
- Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents. Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity. Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.
- Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego. But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations.
.
Initially becoming angry is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress.
and judgmental resulted in parent child
conflicts is Robert Trivers theory to explain the allocation of parental resources to various offspring, from the implications of genetics on the family. Observing that children want to take more than what their parents want to give Trivers concluded a parent should aim to transfer resources depending on the relative benefits to each child and the costs, since each child has the same percentage of the parent's genes. But each child shares only fifty percent of their genes with their siblings so should aim to get resources until the benefit to the others is twice the cost to the child. And the parent may keep back some resources for allocation to further planned offspring. A variety of conflicts ensue: - In the womb the fetus tries to capture nutrients from the mother at the expense of future children. It ties up the mother's insulin to increase the blood sugar available to it and placing the mother at risk of diabetes. Fathers can assist their offspring in this 'fight with the mother' by supplying imprinted genes that help the offspring capture resources.
- At birth mothers must decide whether to let the baby die. This practice is cross cultural but is considered a depravity by present Western culture. That is probably due to the West having captured a majority of the world's resources for centuries.
- Infants use cuteness to encourage parental investment. A mother's attachment delays until it is clear that the baby will live.
- Infants cry to demand milk. Until weaned the mother won't ovulate limiting her future reproductive potential.
- Young children are in conflict with their father over access to their mother.
- Children are in a position to develop paradoxical tactics to push for more resource allocation.
- Older children may have sexual conflicts with their parents, especially their fathers. Fathers compete with sons for sexual partners in many societies. But this competition is not for their mother.
- Adult children may conflict with their parents over allocation of family resources. This has led to murder.
- Parents attempt to train children to assist the parent's social interests. The implication is that children are wary of their parent's suggestions and typically pay more attention to the advice of their peer group according to Judith Harris.
- Parents sell or trade their children. The price paid for a daughter will likely depend on her virginity. Hence fathers take an interest in their daughters' sexuality.
. But applying a pause let
Brach inspect her anger and body indicate the body's internal homeostatic state: Pain, Fatigue; seconds to minutes before. The signals are conveyed to the CNS via unmyelinated C fibers or lightly myelinated A delta fibers. Damasio suggests this is key to the fabrication of feelings, allowing interaction with the surrounding chemical environment and cross talk between axons. These signals operate unconsciously unless mapped by feelings into consciousness. The interoceptive 'networks': default mode network; project to brain regions that implement social emotions. 's feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture: - As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
. Inspecting
these feelings and stories allowed her to overcome the influence
of the trance of unworthiness
and reject trying to control his testosterone is a hormone secreted by the testes, ovaries, and adrenal glands, in response to stimulation from the hypothalamic/pituitary/testicular cascade, that makes humans more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status, according to Sapolsky. That means players of the Ultimatum Game, if previously given testosterone can become more generous. High testosterone in a fetus masculinizes the brain. Males generate 10 times the amount. It is the trigger for sexual desire in males and females, stimulating the hypothalamus. Testosterone's effect is highly socially contextual so it may encourage acts of kindness or aggression (when challenged). The level of testosterone does not predict which individuals will be aggressive in: Birds, Fish, Mammals including primates. Genes impact the potency of testosterone by altering the enzymes that: Construct it, Convert it to estrogen, code the androgen receptor. This androgen receptor includes a variable polyglutamine repeat which alters the sensitivity to the testosterone signal. The more potent form is associated with boys showing more dramatic 'masculinization' of the cortex. But the detected genetic influences are small. Testosterone decreases activity in the prefrontal cortex and its functional coupling to the amygdala while increasing the coupling between the amygdala & the thalamus. Testosterone shortens the refactory period of amygdaloid & amygdaloid target neurons. This results in impulsive risk taking and more focus on unfamiliar faces and distrust of them. Testosterone increases activity in the ventral tegmentum projecting dopamine to enhance place preference. Winners of fights become more willing to fight in part due to testosterone increasing confidence and optimism and reducing fear and anxiety. And winning at: Chess, Athletics, Stock trades; induces the BNST to add testosterone receptors increasing its sensitivity to the hormone. People become overconfident and overly optimistic. driven
approach to life. Instead she focused her attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. during their
next conversation, including inspecting her body's immediate
reactions. With mindfulness is an active meditative state of non-doing, attentively seeking each 'present moment' with one's body and mind 'being' at rest and so cultivating awareness, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Some traditions define it as observing when the mind wanders. Others use it to refer to the floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting, explain Goleman & Davidson. The thinking mind usually spends a lot of time relating to the future and past which Kabat-Zinn argues limits its ability to become fully aware of the present. In times of stress those thoughts are so overpowering that they crowd out awareness and appreciation of the present. Mindfulness shifts attention to calming internal feelings. It allows review and prioritization of thoughts as they are recognized. Major attitude based pillars of successful mindfulness are: impartial to judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance of seeing things the way they are and letting go. An awareness of the body's state can be built with tools including: inquiry, naming; from Yogi's attention to: - Breathing - which is a proxy for the environmental situation and through its rhythms is a model of our emotional state. Attention to breathing reminds people to feel their bodies too. Belly breathing is particularly relaxing.
- Sitting - erect with head, neck and back aligned vertically. Then attend to breathing moving back to it each time you observe the mind has wandered. When the body becomes uncomfortable, direct attention to the discomfort, observe and welcome it.
- Experience our body - rather than model, judge or hate it relative to an ideal - with a body scan.
- Hatha yoga - very slow stretching and strengthening exercises with moment-to-moment awareness supports being in your body.
- Walking meditation - Intentionally attend to the immediate experience of walking.
of the body she was able to respond with empathy is the capability to relate to another person from their perspective. It is implemented by spindle neurons. Empathy towards others is controlled by the right-hemisphere supramarginal gyrus. Empathy is context dependently mediated by estrogen. It develops over time: Piaget's preoperational stage includes rudimentary empathy, Theory of mind supports the development; initially feeling someone's pain as one integrated being, then for them and eventually as them. In adults, when someone else is hurt the anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala & insula activates projecting [scapegoating] to the vmPFC. If the pain is physical the PAG activates and motor neurons for the area where the other person was injured. The intertwining of the ACC amygdala & insula in adults results in attribution of fault even when there is none which can make it hard to step in and actually help. But in seven-year-olds the activation is concrete: PAG and sensory & motor cortexes with minimal coupling to the rudimentary vmPFC. In older children the vmPFC is coupled to limbic structures. Ten to twelve year olds abstract empathy to classes of people. Brizendine asserts young girls develop empathy earlier than boys, because their evolved greater neuronal investment in communication and emotion networks. Year old girls are much more responsive to the distress of other people than boys are. At 18 months girls are experiencing infantile puberty. By adolescence the vmPFC is coupled to theory of mind regions and intentional harm induces disgust via the amygdala. Sapolsky explains adolescent boys are utilitarian and tend to accept inequality more than girls do. But both sexes accept inequality as the way it is. Sociopaths do not develop empathy. to their
situation.
Brach explains how we typically pay more attention to our Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
mind's ideas and stories than the
feedback from our bodies. Even when we notice our body's
feedback we rapidly move on to the associated dialogue, a
reactivity waterfall. We seek out pleasant experiences and
avoid the unpleasant. We seek vigilance is the state of wakefulness, which varies when we fall asleep or wake up. For Goleman & Davidson it also reflects maintaining a constant level of attention as time goes on, through controlling habituation. Their vigilance includes alerting - being ready to respond to whatever is encountered. through
thinking, judging and This page looks at schematic structures
and their uses. It discusses a number of examples:
- Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity.
- Similarly designers take ideas and
rules about materials and components and combine them.
- Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations.
- Modular components are combined into strategies
for use in business plans and business models.
As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic
details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s
operational plan.
Finally it includes a section presenting our formal
representation of schematic goals.
Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings.
These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business
examples.
planning.
This is particularly true in trance.
But we can restore awareness of our body with a body scan is a mindfulness meditation exercise where the attention is moved around the body noticing the sensations of the visited part. At the same time the brain models the visited part participating in flows in and out of the body with tensions and pain signals flowing out. Move the mind to each part and feel it. Breath in to and out from each region. Imagine breathing in vitality and relaxation on each in breath. Imagine the tensions are exhailed with the out breath. As you let go of the sensations the muscles also let go of tensions. First from the toes of the left foot to the pelvis and then the right foot to the pelvis. From there move up through the torso, lower back and abdomen, upper back and chest, sholders. Then from the fingers of both hands move simultaneously up both arms returning to the shoulders. Then move through the neck and throat, all regions of the face, back of the head and top of the head to an imaginary hole at the top of the head where we release our breath. . It can
help us notice all of the three
progressive layers. Mindful attention to sensations
helps us experience the fluidity of these ever changing signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance. In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively. A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form. Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell. Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state. Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals. Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich. Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors. In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation. To be credible signals must be hard to fake. To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient. To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. .
Brach notes how pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation. can
make us panic, adjusting our body to minimize the discomfort by
shallow quick breathing. Traumatic pain can be so
terrifying that we dissociate is the breaking of the conscious connection between the body and the mind. .
But she stresses these pain signals This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolved
to tell us important details about the body and should be
acknowledged and respected. Attending without fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. allows us to respond with
clarity. She laments that Western culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
includes a trance
where pain is regarded as an enemy. She argues pain is
inevitable, but suffering is optional. Emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. will continue to
cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our
body. Experiencing them there de-represses in Freud's structural model, is the mind's unconscious defense mechanism to shift its desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding other: distressing memories, thoughts, feelings; from consciousness. Freud's free-association method revealed his patients' subconscious operation and inconsistencies: professed love associated with actual hate, indignant morality concealing perverse desires, nonconformity concealing guilt; where they were keeping these things hidden, that are present in the adaptive unconscious. them.
Brach describes her own struggles with chronic fatigue and
Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Doing a body scan, she
noticed the thoughts about sickness and the grip of fear.
But she resolved to greet each sensation. As time passed
her mind became less foggy and her attention deepened. She
began to notice tingling, pulsing, and vibrations. Sitting
in a healthy wood she felt part of the world. Using Radical Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness.
she recognized the symptoms of her illness as parts of the
natural world. She asserts as we let life live through us
we experience the boundless openness of our true nature.
Radical Acceptance of desire: Awakening to the source of
longing
Brach describes how she has become infatuated with desire for some person she
hardly knows, a Vipassana Romance, and the stream of future
scenarios: courting,
marriage,
family; have pushed their
way into her attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. ,
even during meditative retreats. But once it was pointed
out that she should welcome the desire, it was possible to
observe the desire and relate to the sensations of wanting and
passing This page discusses the physical foundations of complex adaptive
systems (CAS). A small set of
rules is obeyed. New [epi]phenomena then emerge. Examples are
discussed.
[epi]phenomena without
reentering the stories.
Brach notes that desire is natural, This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolutions
way of ensuring the availability
and sustainability of further generations is, according to Damasio, the fundamental set of operations at the core of life, from the earliest and long-vanished point of its beginning in early biochemistry to the present. It is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative, whose discharge implies, for every living organism, small or large, nothing less than enduring and prevailing. Damasio stresses that the operations that ensure prevailing ensure life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to protection of life into the future of an organism or a species. Prevailing implies mechanisms for monitoring and modeling the state of the organism, controlling and constraining the flows of energy and resources through schematic agency, and to facilitate exploring the environment and acting on signals of modeled opportunities and threats. Global homeostasis of multi-organ animals requires endocrine, immune, circulatory and nervous 'systems' and results in the emergence of minds, feelings, consciousness, machinery of affect and complex movements. The emergence of feelings allowed the homeostatic process to become enhanced by a subjective representation of the organism's state and proximate environment within the mind. Feelings operating in minds allowed conscious decisions to extend homeostasis to the sociocultural domain. to support the Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
genome. It encourages eating,
sex, and other actions that help us thrive. It becomes a
problem when it takes over our sense of who we are. Brach
notes the Buddha recommends the Middle Way is the Buddha's guidance to relate to desire for: food, sex, love, freedom; without getting possessed by it and without resisting it, explains Tara Brach. .
Brach analyses desire:
- Explaining the Dalai Lama's view that we want to be happy is an emotion which functions to mobilize the mind to seek capabilities and resources that support Darwinian fitness. Today happiness is associated with Epicurean ideas that were rediscovered during the renaissance and promoted by Thomas Jefferson. But natural selection has 'designed' happiness to support hunter-gatherer fitness in the African savanna. It is assessed: Relative to other's situations, Based on small gains or losses relative to one's current situation; and so what makes us [un-]happy and our responses can seem a counter-productive treadmill. For Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in the savanna there were many ways for losses to undermine fitness and so losses still make us very unhappy. Smoking, drinking and excessive eating were not significant and so don't make us unhappy even though they impact longevity. , this is
fundamentally, our wish to exist. Buddhist scholar
Walpola Rahula sees this
This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent
property as the greatest energy in the world. But
Brach warns that even the best experience is still subject
to change.
- Existence is inherently dissatisfying. She
differentiates between simple desires: thirst, tired; where
we can respond directly and straightforwardly, and complex
situations including the trance
of unworthiness where our desire fixates on soothing
once and for all, our anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge.
about imperfection. We hope the next moment will be
more satisfying than the current one.
- She concludes: we are all powered by the energy of stars,
which is an expression of pure awareness. We long for
this but our desires fixate on what passes away, so we
identify ourselves with our wants and how to satisfy
them.
Brach sees people
who were never seen or praised as children as needing to
standout as special. This unresolved desire to matter to
others results in shame is an emotional reaction to being discovered cheating on a friend. and
fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. and a wish to
hide. Over time an association, the wanting self,
develops: wanting leads to fear and shame. The tension and
excitement of wanting arise and it is experienced as:
- My longing for intimacy
- My craving for touch and attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness.
- My fear and shame when I am rejected; so the wanting self,
works to avoid painful emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation.
feelings of fear and shame, disconnecting from and numbing
our body, and getting lost in self-judgment and obsessive
thinking - which increases the shame and wanting.
- Strategies are developed to obtain satisfaction from
substitutes:
Brach recalls as a teen coping with insecurity: inadequacy, need
to prove herself; by completing some practical goal that felt
worthwhile. But the substitution process would also make
her distant, impatient and disconnected from her body.
Brach warns how desire can become an ungovernable addiction results from changes in the operation of the brain's reward network's regulatory regions, altering the anticipation of rewards. Addictive drugs mediate the receptors of the reward network, increasing dopamine in the pleasure centers of the cortex. The learned association of the situation with the reward makes addiction highly prone to relapse, when the situation is subsequently experienced. This makes addiction a chronic disease, where the sufferer must remain vigilant to avoid relapse inducing situations. Repeated exposure to the addictive drug alters the reward network. The neurons that produce dopamine are impaired, no longer sending dopamine to the reward target areas, reducing the feeling of pleasure. But the situational association remains strong driving the addict to repeat the addictive activity. Destroying the memory of the pleasure inducer may provide a treatment for addiction in the future. Addiction has a genetic component, which supports inheritance. Some other compulsive disorders: eating, gambling, sexual behavior; are similar to drug addiction. to
substitutes. And this addiction often develops along with
shame and dislike for our wanting selves. That hatred is
encouraged by An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges
during the enlightenment.
It was a poem
encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a
humanist book hunter.
Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and
reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the
foundation of the modern world.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms
are discussed.
Western religious beliefs
and supporting culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
.
Brach quotes 'we have been raised to fear ... our deepest cravings.'
But Brach tells us to pay compassionate indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions.
attention to our desire. She notes how 'addiction'
anonymous sponsor calls, when an addict is feeling the pull of
addiction, equates to an 'assisted pause.'
For some Radical
Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. can reduce the desire to control and transform
the emotive response is according to Damasio, a process including a collection of actions: release of specific chemicals in sites of the CNS or their transport, by neural signalling to varied regions of the nervous system and body. Endocrine glands are signalled and produce molecules capable of altering body function; altering viscera, that changes the homeostatic state of the organism, and may change the spontaneous feelings too. A cascade of spontaneous homeostatic changes: metabolism, nervous system, immune response, mind builds 'images'; becomes an ensemble of actions each represented in the mind, summarized as a provoked feeling. Attention to the feelings varies depending on the current state of the mind. Emotive responses are generated non consciously by specific nuclei in the brain: - Hypothalamic nuclei
- PAG
- Amygdala nuclei and nucleus accumbens; each nuclei activated by particular streams of signals, from the senses or memory, enabling responses to vast numbers of sensations, objects and circumstances with drives, motivations and emotions.
to the stream of obsessive thoughts. Accepting these
thoughts with 'This too,' replaces pushing them away or acting
on the reactivity waterfall. If the addictive drive is too
strong, you can pause and whisper to your judgments: It's not my
fault.
These drives do not need to lead to suffering. Brach
explains that suffering only comes from being seduced by our
demons or trying to fight them. Experiencing them directly
and wakefully leads to freedom. Brach quotes Pema Chodron
"When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone." So
Brach stopped resisting her Vipassana
Romance - instead welcoming it with "erotic fantasy," and
paid close attention to the sensations in her body and the emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. that were
arising. Brach relates using Radical Acceptance of desire
and finding awareness dissolves the wanting self into its
source. She found the one she loved is everywhere
including within her. The wanting self became a gateway
into love.
Opening our heart in the face of fear
Brach describes examples of childhood abuse includes different types of stressor: No mother, Unsupportive mother, paternal deprivation, Childhood poverty, [Observing ]violence, Natural disasters, Bullying; which impact development and produce adult problems. - The adversities are stressful and alter stress physiology producing children and adults with elevated: Glucocorticoids, CRH and ACTH, Sympathetic nervous system activity. Early stress permanently impacts the brains ability to control glucocorticoid secretion. The more stressors experienced and the less protective factors, the less likely it is that the child will cope and become a resilient adult. The stressors expand the size and activity of the amygdala helping it ignore prefrontal cortex constraints. And they degrade the dopamine network through impacts to the development of the mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoids depleting dopamine.
- The problems include attachment issues and adults with: depression (dopamine depletion and lowered thresholds making adult stressors more influential), anxiety, substance abuse (dopamine depletion, excessive adult exposure to glucocorticoids increasing drug craving & poorly developed frontal cortex), impaired cognitive abilities especially frontocortical with impaired hippocampal-dependent learning, impaired impulse control (amygdala), impaired emotional control, antisocial behavior and violence, relationships that replicate the childhood adversities. Abused children who develop PTSD show decreased hippocampal volume. Glucocorticoids decrease hippocampal production of BDNF. Childhood poverty impacts development of the corpus callosum & ensures by kindergarten, poor marshmallow test performance. Childhood poverty increases impacts from environmental stressors: Toxins, Liquor stores instead of fresh food markets, No transport infrastructure, Limited jobs in the immediate vicinity, Little access to low cost capital, Low positions in all social hierarchies.
,
which were still indirectly experienced by the, now adult,
individual as fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. . It
had even seeped into their meditation includes a variety of practices with the contemplative goal of altering traits to free the subject of suffering. Goleman & Davidson see three distinct levels of practice: beginner, long term meditator, Yogi; with radically different levels of commitment. Beginners typically do a limited-time-investment mindfulness meditation such as MBSR. Long term meditators typically practice vipassana meditation. Yogis practice Tibetan meditations Dzogchen and Mahamudra, which start like vipassana but in a non-dual stance developing a more subtle meta-awareness. Richard Davidson, Cortland Dahl and Antoine Lutz developed a typology of the practices: - Attentional - train aspects of attention.
- Constructive - cultivate virtuous qualities: loving-kindness;
- Destructive - use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience. These include non-dual approaches where ordinary cognition no longer dominates.
practice. Brach explains how young children assume they
are the cause of the abuse; creating the belief they are bad. This
trauma shapes the adult
personality. They can struggle with anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. - the dreads - as
they wake up in the morning, fearful of making mistakes.
They can develop stories about their relationships where they
view themselves as undeserving and see the relationships as
insecure.
Most people who are fearful have not
suffered from abuse. Nevertheless they can become
undermined. The pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation.
of fear can seem unbearable. But Brach asserts this trance
of fear can be weakened by saying yes to it with Radical Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. .
The real cause of our fear may not be evident. Brach
asserts the root of fear is our drive to survive and
aversion to deterioration and death is, according to Damasio, the fundamental set of operations at the core of life, from the earliest and long-vanished point of its beginning in early biochemistry to the present. It is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative, whose discharge implies, for every living organism, small or large, nothing less than enduring and prevailing. Damasio stresses that the operations that ensure prevailing ensure life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to protection of life into the future of an organism or a species. Prevailing implies mechanisms for monitoring and modeling the state of the organism, controlling and constraining the flows of energy and resources through schematic agency, and to facilitate exploring the environment and acting on signals of modeled opportunities and threats. Global homeostasis of multi-organ animals requires endocrine, immune, circulatory and nervous 'systems' and results in the emergence of minds, feelings, consciousness, machinery of affect and complex movements. The emergence of feelings allowed the homeostatic process to become enhanced by a subjective representation of the organism's state and proximate environment within the mind. Feelings operating in minds allowed conscious decisions to extend homeostasis to the sociocultural domain. . It is only
problematic when it becomes overactive. That can make our
body and Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
mind rigid. And
typical strategies to avoid fear: physical response with arms
and fists tight, throat contracted, heartbeat raised - becoming
chronic tightening over years; obsession with bad scenarios and
strategies to avoid them: find the cause of the problem,
attribute blame, be on guard constantly, avoid uncertainty is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. This is different from risk, although the two are deliberately conflated by ERISA. Keynes argued that most aspects of the future are uncertain, at best represented by ordinal probabilities, and often only by capricious hope for future innovation, fear inducing expectations of limited confidence, which evolutionary psychology implies is based on the demands of our hunter gatherer past. Deacon notes reduced uncertainty equates to information. ; actually
help sustain it. And these strategic responses can
undermine relationships, worrying partners who don't understand
the responses.
With Radical Acceptance we pause and
then aim to sense the fear within our body. Welcoming the
fear should deflate it, and allow attention to inspect the fear:
tight throat, predictions of activities going wrong,
hopelessness, defeat, terrifying images. When terror
ensues, stop the vipassana means 'to see clearly' in Pali. It is the foundational mindfulness (Theravadan) meditation. It aims to allow the stream of experience to move through attention. S. N. Goenka aimed to make vipassana broadly available. In his teaching the focus is on bodily sensations: - Noting the sensations of breathing in and out for hours each day, to build concentration.
- Perform a whole-body scan of whatever sensations are occurring anywhere in the body. The meditator experiences a sea of shifting sensations and awareness.
- Insight is then developed, which brings the added realization of how we link sensations to the self. Insight into pain reveals that we build an object out of various continuously shifting sensations and provoked feelings that can become an emotive response of "mine". Booklets describe how to develop the insights and practice.
mindfulness is an active meditative state of non-doing, attentively seeking each 'present moment' with one's body and mind 'being' at rest and so cultivating awareness, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Some traditions define it as observing when the mind wanders. Others use it to refer to the floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting, explain Goleman & Davidson. The thinking mind usually spends a lot of time relating to the future and past which Kabat-Zinn argues limits its ability to become fully aware of the present. In times of stress those thoughts are so overpowering that they crowd out awareness and appreciation of the present. Mindfulness shifts attention to calming internal feelings. It allows review and prioritization of thoughts as they are recognized. Major attitude based pillars of successful mindfulness are: impartial to judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance of seeing things the way they are and letting go. An awareness of the body's state can be built with tools including: inquiry, naming; from Yogi's attention to: - Breathing - which is a proxy for the environmental situation and through its rhythms is a model of our emotional state. Attention to breathing reminds people to feel their bodies too. Belly breathing is particularly relaxing.
- Sitting - erect with head, neck and back aligned vertically. Then attend to breathing moving back to it each time you observe the mind has wandered. When the body becomes uncomfortable, direct attention to the discomfort, observe and welcome it.
- Experience our body - rather than model, judge or hate it relative to an ideal - with a body scan.
- Hatha yoga - very slow stretching and strengthening exercises with moment-to-moment awareness supports being in your body.
- Walking meditation - Intentionally attend to the immediate experience of walking.
and, take refuge is a Buddhist practice used to develop a mental model of safety and belonging. Tara Brach explains there are three fundamental refuges: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Each person can approach the refuges in a way that is sincere for them: - Buddha refuge can represent the way Siddhartha Gautama coped with his fears of the terrible Mara: meeting it with his full attention, and observing and welcoming it, rather than responding to the feelings emotionally. And the devotional can seek safety in the living spirit of the Buddha's awakened heart and mind.
- Dharma refuge depends on realizing that everything in nature must change. Buddhists can call upon the practices and teachings; they have developed over centuries, which highlight this truth. And they can take refuge in these skills. Lovingkindness mediation can be particularly helpful practices in fearful situations.
- Sangha refuge is the community of monks and nuns that are also practicing and taking refuge.
.
Brach says "I take refuge in this awakening heart mind."
She explains letting go of any notion that Buddha nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature. is
something beyond or outside my awareness, I look toward the
innate wakefulness of my being, the tender openness of my
heart. Loving-kindness
meditation practices holding tender, compassionate, feelings towards a slowly widening circle of people: family we love, friends, people we don't know, people we dislike, every person; recognizing the oneness, where everyone desires happiness. Goleman & Davidson describe the neuroscience involved with this mediation. Research comparing two groups: one practicing loving-kindness meditation, the other acting as a control group just learning the theory; only the meditators showed a reduced implicit bias against out-groups. They also studied masters - Tibetan yogis. can help with terror. Brach also stresses
that sometimes, when fear is too overwhelming, it is best
treated with medications. These may provide a pause that
enables subsequent Radical Acceptance to face and accept the
fear.
Brach describes how difficult situations can make the fearful
anxious, closing down their attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. .
To recover she suggests 'widening the lens.' Visualize the
situation occurring and then pause and welcome the troubling
sensations. And then expand our attention to notice the
beauty of the world. This helps to dissolve the fears in
an expanded awareness. But Brach notes that to do so
requires that we be open and awake. In recognizing our
experiences and observing them as a stream of thoughts and
feelings seen within a wider view of the world, awareness
expands to easily hold all these experiences.
Brach notes how we hate to abandon the strategies we have
developed to protect us from fear. But she stresses, fear
is intrinsic to life so we must abandon them and accept the
inevitable pain of death. After pausing, check what is
asking for attention - the sensations in our throat, heart and
stomach. And then attend to the water fall of fear and
welcome it into the whole world of attention. It will feel
terrible, icy, painful, but when we stop trying to control the
fear then the mind becomes still and free. Brach explains
"when we come face-to-face with the fear and pain in our psyche,
we stand at the gateway to tremendous renewal and freedom.
Our deepest nature is awareness, and when we fully inhabit that,
we love freely and are whole."
Awakening compassion for ourselves: becoming the holder and
the held
Brach asserts that when we
think harsh judgments about ourselves and others it is
often a strategy to
distance ourselves from emotional are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism.
pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation. : vulnerability, repressed in Freud's structural model, is the mind's unconscious defense mechanism to shift its desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding other: distressing memories, thoughts, feelings; from consciousness. Freud's free-association method revealed his patients' subconscious operation and inconsistencies: professed love associated with actual hate, indignant morality concealing perverse desires, nonconformity concealing guilt; where they were keeping these things hidden, that are present in the adaptive unconscious. anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress. , jealousy is an emotion driven by the large investment by parents in their children's development combined with a human sexual asymmetry: fertilization occurs inside the female's body, so a male can't be sure it is supporting its own ofspring. , fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. . And she warns
pushing away parts of ourselves just digs us deeper into the trance of unworthiness,
since we can't accept our experience when our heart is
hardened. Brach describes how to awaken Radical Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. 's
wing of compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. to
help free us from the trance. Her vision is of a bodhisattva is a Buddhist who has realized the fullness of compassion and lives from compassion. Tara Brach explains the bodhissatva's path and teaching is that when we allow our hearts to be touched by suffering --our own or another's--our natural compassion flowers. She describes their aspiration "May all circumstances serve to awaken compassion." . Our
adversity can become a gateway to clear and limitless
compassion.
By facing suffering and focusing our attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. on it, our
hearts can be opened. That
prepares us for extending
compassion to others.
Brach argues to attend to your body's sensations as you judge
yourself. The tightness is accompanied by pain in the
throat, chest, and heart, and sadness is a feeling, which can induce empathy and compassion. It can last for days, in contrast to the emotions, fear & anger. Mild sadness induces a beneficial state in the brain: improved judgment, memory, motivation, and more socially sensitive and generous. .
Putting a hand above your heart and saying "I care about this
suffering," starts a deep healing process, undoing a lifetime's
aversive messages. That allows the world to be This page discusses the interdependence of perception and
representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Hofstadter
and Mitchell's research with Copycat is
reviewed. The bridging of a node from a network of 'well
known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed
as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and
abstractly.
viewed differently - optimistically.
Brach warns that we have all hurt someone, and the memories in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory. This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus. This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP. The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected. will make us small
and guilty is an emotion which alerts us to the risk of cheating on a friend. To be culturally effective the individuals must have respect for the law. Guilt is associated with activation of the posterior cingulate cortex. . To find
compassion for ourselves it is necessary to take refuge is a Buddhist practice used to develop a mental model of safety and belonging. Tara Brach explains there are three fundamental refuges: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Each person can approach the refuges in a way that is sincere for them: - Buddha refuge can represent the way Siddhartha Gautama coped with his fears of the terrible Mara: meeting it with his full attention, and observing and welcoming it, rather than responding to the feelings emotionally. And the devotional can seek safety in the living spirit of the Buddha's awakened heart and mind.
- Dharma refuge depends on realizing that everything in nature must change. Buddhists can call upon the practices and teachings; they have developed over centuries, which highlight this truth. And they can take refuge in these skills. Lovingkindness mediation can be particularly helpful practices in fearful situations.
- Sangha refuge is the community of monks and nuns that are also practicing and taking refuge.
with
something larger. Feeling compassion for ourselves does
not release us from the responsibilities for our actions.
It releases us from the self-hatred.
Brach introduces mindful prayer, which she considers
transformational. She explains Buddhism's prayers include
earnest wishes expressed in the practices of loving-kindness practices holding tender, compassionate, feelings towards a slowly widening circle of people: family we love, friends, people we don't know, people we dislike, every person; recognizing the oneness, where everyone desires happiness. Goleman & Davidson describe the neuroscience involved with this mediation. Research comparing two groups: one practicing loving-kindness meditation, the other acting as a control group just learning the theory; only the meditators showed a reduced implicit bias against out-groups. They also studied masters - Tibetan yogis.
and compassion. They aren't directed at a higher being,
but demonstrate we are not alone and separate. Connecting
to something larger and loving can help relieve guilty
suffering, when it is understood that suffering is a gateway to
awakening the heart that can link it to the beauty of the
world. Guilt is transformed into tenderness tinged with
sadness. Everyone lives with anger, with fear, with grief
- universal suffering. Our depression is a debilitating episodic state of extreme sadness, typically beginning in late teens or early twenties. This is accompanied by a lack of energy and emotion, which is facilitated by genetic predisposition - for example genes coding for relatively low serotonin levels, estrogen sensitive CREB-1 gene which increases women's incidence of depression at puberty; and an accumulation of traumatic events. There is a significant risk of suicide: depression is involved in 50% of the 43,000 suicides in the US, and 15% of people with depression commit suicide. Depression is the primary cause of disability with about 20 million Americans impacted by depression at any time. There is evidence of shifts in the sleep/wake cycle in affected individuals (Dec 2015). The affected person will experience a pathological sense of loss of control, prolonged sadness with feelings of hopelessness, helplessness & worthlessness, irritability, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, and inability to experience pleasure. Michael Pollan concludes depression is fear of the past. It affects 12% of men and 20% of women. It appears to be associated with androgen deprivation therapy treatment for prostate cancer (Apr 2016). Chronic stress depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine, biasing humans towards depression. Depression easily leads to following unhealthy pathways: drinking, overeating; which increase the risk of heart disease. It has been associated with an aging related B12 deficiency (Sep 2016). During depression, stress mediates inhibition of dopamine signalling. Both depression and stress activate the adrenal glands' release of cortisol, which will, over the long term, impact the PFC. There is an association between depression and additional brain regions: Enlarged & more active amygdala, Hippocampal dendrite and spine number reductions & in longer bouts hippocampal volume reductions and memory problems, Dorsal raphe nucleus linked to loneliness, Defective functioning of the hypothalamus undermining appetite and sex drive, Abnormalities of the ACC. Mayberg notes ACC area 25: serotonin transporters are particularly active in depressed people and lower the serotonin in area 25 impacting the emotion circuit it hubs, inducing bodily sensations that patients can't place or consciously do anything about; and right anterior insula: which normally generates emotions from internal feelings instead feel dead inside; are critical in depression. Childhood adversity can increase depression risk by linking recollections of uncontrollable situations to overgeneralizations that life will always be terrible and uncontrollable. Sufferers of mild autism often develop depression. Treatments include: CBT which works well for cases with below average activity of the right anterior insula (mild and moderate depression), UMHS depression management, deep-brain stimulation of the anterior insula to slow firing of area 25. Drug treatments are required for cases with above average activity of the right anterior insula. As of 2010 drug treatments: SSRIs (Prozac), MAO, monoamine reuptake inhibitors; take weeks to facilitate a response & many patients do not respond to the first drug applied, often prolonging the agony. By 2018, Kandel notes, Ketamine is being tested as a short term treatment, as it acts much faster, reversing the effect of cortisol in stimulating glutamate signalling, and because it reverses the atrophy induced by chronic stress. Genomic predictions of which treatment will be effective have not been possible because: Not all clinical depressions are the same, a standard definition of drug response is difficult;, fear and
anger are "entrusted to us," and can be dedicated to our
awakening.
Widening the circle of compassion: the bodhisattva's path
Brach relates how after she gave her son Narayan an ant farm he
studied their activities within the colony is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents. The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson. These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche. Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains. He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity. So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity. For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions. And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy. It depends on inter-agent signalling. In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence. Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows. A superorganism has a development and operational phase. As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification. Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors. and viewed
them as admired friends. He was shocked when other
children killed ants. Brach explained to pay attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. means we care,
which means we really love is an emotion, which generates a feeling of pleasure at a genetic relative's well-being and pain in their harm. An inseminated human female is genetically a full relative of her partner since she carries his germ-line gametes. From any of their pooled gene's perspective the offspring have a one-in-two chance of including the specific gene. Hence love supports kin selection driven by the selfish actions of genes. Emotions, including love and anger, help drive the interactions between people. Compassionate love also supports the symbiotic partnership of true friends built on fairness and trust. Sapolsky notes the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. The amygdala's projection into the locus ceruleus drives autonomic intensity. .
Brach asserts that the awakened heart is the full realization of
our nature. And she explains that, history indicates forms
of dislike: hatred, anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress. ;
are pervasive and natural parts of life. She suggests this is due to
our conditioning to feel are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture: - As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
separate and different from others. It requires dedicated
training to allow us to embrace all beings with Radical Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. .
Once we look at each person
as being the same is prioritizing benefiting others through: Help, Charity, Truth; even if many are acts of restitution to balance out antisocial acts. Due to the Insula's binding of physical and metaphorical disgust, physically washing your hands can be enough to reduce the need for a prosocial act. , looking past the surface differences
that otherwise divide us
from them, we can offer unconditional compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. to each
person. For Brach this shift in viewpoint is supported by
training to be aware of our Buddha nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature. .
As we transform our joint suffering into compassion, we realize
our interconnectedness with all life: the bodhisattva is a Buddhist who has realized the fullness of compassion and lives from compassion. Tara Brach explains the bodhissatva's path and teaching is that when we allow our hearts to be touched by suffering --our own or another's--our natural compassion flowers. She describes their aspiration "May all circumstances serve to awaken compassion." 's
path. As we pay attention to the suffering of others, our
compassion grows in ever-widening circles. Brach stresses
spiritual awakening is inextricably involved with others, which
she explains is highlighted by the question: What do they
need?
Brach warns that as other people seem more different to us, the
more unreal they become to us. Their needs and struggles
must be the focus. Our evolved tribal response is powerful
but it is also flexible - we can expand our sense of
tribe. We can be kind like the Dalai Lama and treat
everyone equally.
Brach highlights how difficult it can be to have compassion for
someone who is being an insensitive jerk. But by
inspecting our heart, having compassion for the disgust, guilt,
powerlessness, fear; it is then possible to extend the
compassion outwards to the feelings and suffering of the other
person. What do they really need? Brach would
then share the question with them.
An additional risk with those close to us, is to assume we know
and understand them, rather than find out what they need, as
their situation changes. Brach describes using role
reversal to attempt to see the world from another's
perspective.
Brach recalls the bodhisattva's aspiration, "May my life be of
benefit to all beings," and suggests we can extend our thoughts
to every being that is suffering. What matters is that we
care. As others sense the kind environment they too will
relax and open up.
Recognizing our basic goodness: the gateway to a forgiving and
loving heart
Betrayal encourages our This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolved
response: anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress. ; supported
by mental
stories of good versus bad. But, if trapped in the trance of unworthiness, the
Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
mind, conditioned by our competitive
Western culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
, can turn
the anger back onto our self. Especially when we are
confronted with problems: injury, loss of a job, relationship
failure; we accept the criticism. And the anger and
judgment masks our shame is an emotional reaction to being discovered cheating on a friend.
and fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. .
Brach notes we can fight our cultural conditioning by recalling
that our Buddha nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature.
is pure and undefiled. It radiates as basic goodness - the
Buddhist belief that there is no such thing as a sinful or evil
person. It is ignorance,
ignoring our
connection to all life, which supports our lack of compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. and
anger.
Brach asserts that with courage we can recognize the basic
goodness in everyone. Courage is needed to cope with:
looking below the fear, greed and hostility, and the awareness
of the harmful acts all of us have done. It is heroic to
see the world as it is and love is an emotion, which generates a feeling of pleasure at a genetic relative's well-being and pain in their harm. An inseminated human female is genetically a full relative of her partner since she carries his germ-line gametes. From any of their pooled gene's perspective the offspring have a one-in-two chance of including the specific gene. Hence love supports kin selection driven by the selfish actions of genes. Emotions, including love and anger, help drive the interactions between people. Compassionate love also supports the symbiotic partnership of true friends built on fairness and trust. Sapolsky notes the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. The amygdala's projection into the locus ceruleus drives autonomic intensity.
it. Buddhist practice provides meditations includes a variety of practices with the contemplative goal of altering traits to free the subject of suffering. Goleman & Davidson see three distinct levels of practice: beginner, long term meditator, Yogi; with radically different levels of commitment. Beginners typically do a limited-time-investment mindfulness meditation such as MBSR. Long term meditators typically practice vipassana meditation. Yogis practice Tibetan meditations Dzogchen and Mahamudra, which start like vipassana but in a non-dual stance developing a more subtle meta-awareness. Richard Davidson, Cortland Dahl and Antoine Lutz developed a typology of the practices: - Attentional - train aspects of attention.
- Constructive - cultivate virtuous qualities: loving-kindness;
- Destructive - use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience. These include non-dual approaches where ordinary cognition no longer dominates.
which
reconnect us with Buddha nature. First we must embrace
ourselves and then other people. But Brach warns we must
trust in the possibility of goodness to overcome the
trance. Instead of forgiving our bad behaviors Brach tells
us to forgive the shame, anxiety, despondency and fear we
experience when thinking about them. She accepts that
sometimes appreciating herself can feel self-serving. When
this happens she acknowledges her desire to be happy. And
reflects on what others: people and pets; appreciate about
her.
Eventually forgiving ourselves transforms our life. It can
allow us to respond to our circumstances with wisdom and
care. Being forgiven by others can allow us to forgive
ourselves more deeply.
Buddhists think that when we observe our mistakes and
transgressions with the eyes of compassion, we release the
ignorance that keeps us bound to hating and blaming
ourselves. We observe that our imperfections don't taint
our basic goodness.
Once we have forgiven ourselves, and become open, we can forgive
others. At first the intention to forgive provides an
enabler. Forgiving people who have harmed us or our
friends and family is difficult. But not forgiving hardens
and imprisons our heart.
Brach suggests rather than putting a static label on other
people - aligned with their issues, try to imagine the person as
an infant or child, or we are seeing them for the last time, to
help see the goodness in them, asking "Who are you
really?"
Brach explains that Buddhism includes practices which cultivate
loving-kindness (metta). The practice practices holding tender, compassionate, feelings towards a slowly widening circle of people: family we love, friends, people we don't know, people we dislike, every person; recognizing the oneness, where everyone desires happiness. Goleman & Davidson describe the neuroscience involved with this mediation. Research comparing two groups: one practicing loving-kindness meditation, the other acting as a control group just learning the theory; only the meditators showed a reduced implicit bias against out-groups. They also studied masters - Tibetan yogis.
includes simple phrases of care: "May I be happy. May I be
peaceful. May I be filled with loving-kindness."
First send loving-kindness to someone you see as good. As
this goodness opens us up we can extend the wish of
loving-kindness to a broader range of people - eventually
everyone. Seeing basic goodness enables the practice of
loving-kindness, which glows, shines, and blazes forth.
Awakening together: practicing Radical Acceptance in
relationship
Brach notes that, for many people when
they are cut off from others their lives seem empty of
meaning. We need others to help us dismantle the walls of
our isolation and remind us of our belonging. If we feel are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture: - As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
we were abandoned by our parents when we were
infants this can make us feel lonely, small and
frightened. Brach asserts that to awaken from
isolation it was necessary to feel the genuine care and interest
of others. And if these relationships are supported by Radical Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. 's
mindfulness is an active meditative state of non-doing, attentively seeking each 'present moment' with one's body and mind 'being' at rest and so cultivating awareness, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Some traditions define it as observing when the mind wanders. Others use it to refer to the floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting, explain Goleman & Davidson. The thinking mind usually spends a lot of time relating to the future and past which Kabat-Zinn argues limits its ability to become fully aware of the present. In times of stress those thoughts are so overpowering that they crowd out awareness and appreciation of the present. Mindfulness shifts attention to calming internal feelings. It allows review and prioritization of thoughts as they are recognized. Major attitude based pillars of successful mindfulness are: impartial to judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance of seeing things the way they are and letting go. An awareness of the body's state can be built with tools including: inquiry, naming; from Yogi's attention to: - Breathing - which is a proxy for the environmental situation and through its rhythms is a model of our emotional state. Attention to breathing reminds people to feel their bodies too. Belly breathing is particularly relaxing.
- Sitting - erect with head, neck and back aligned vertically. Then attend to breathing moving back to it each time you observe the mind has wandered. When the body becomes uncomfortable, direct attention to the discomfort, observe and welcome it.
- Experience our body - rather than model, judge or hate it relative to an ideal - with a body scan.
- Hatha yoga - very slow stretching and strengthening exercises with moment-to-moment awareness supports being in your body.
- Walking meditation - Intentionally attend to the immediate experience of walking.
and compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. these
relationships enable spiritual freedom. Brach warns that
it is a misunderstanding of Buddhism to think it includes a grim
and lonely path. Relationships, with all their inherent
disturbing, exciting and confusing emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. , are critical to
spiritual awakening.
It is the critical feedback relationships give that calls us
back to Radical Acceptance. That is why the Buddha
considered the sangha is a Buddhist practice used to develop a mental model of safety and belonging. Tara Brach explains there are three fundamental refuges: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Each person can approach the refuges in a way that is sincere for them: - Buddha refuge can represent the way Siddhartha Gautama coped with his fears of the terrible Mara: meeting it with his full attention, and observing and welcoming it, rather than responding to the feelings emotionally. And the devotional can seek safety in the living spirit of the Buddha's awakened heart and mind.
- Dharma refuge depends on realizing that everything in nature must change. Buddhists can call upon the practices and teachings; they have developed over centuries, which highlight this truth. And they can take refuge in these skills. Lovingkindness mediation can be particularly helpful practices in fearful situations.
- Sangha refuge is the community of monks and nuns that are also practicing and taking refuge.
a basic treasure, to be treated with reverence: non-harming,
being true and helpful, taking responsibility when we do cause
pain to others, listening deeply to comprehend another's
suffering, apologizing, and striving for compassion to all
beings.
Brach warns that it is easy to adopt a persona and react from
habit within a relationship. That allows us to use
patterns of: defending, pretending, judging and
distancing. Insight Dialogue is designed to detect such
patterns. Instead of responding when someone speaks we
pause, relax body and Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
mind and
attend to what we are experiencing. It can help to ask
"What really wants attention?" and notice the feelings and
thoughts that are arising. Brach argues, this gives rise
to more understanding and kindness in our relationships.
And it opens up our options. It overcomes the trance of
separation. When fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
arises during the inspection, it is ok to explain, "I'm feeling
anxious is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. right now."
And it may generate a positive response and empathy is the capability to relate to another person from their perspective. It is implemented by spindle neurons. Empathy towards others is controlled by the right-hemisphere supramarginal gyrus. Empathy is context dependently mediated by estrogen. It develops over time: Piaget's preoperational stage includes rudimentary empathy, Theory of mind supports the development; initially feeling someone's pain as one integrated being, then for them and eventually as them. In adults, when someone else is hurt the anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala & insula activates projecting [scapegoating] to the vmPFC. If the pain is physical the PAG activates and motor neurons for the area where the other person was injured. The intertwining of the ACC amygdala & insula in adults results in attribution of fault even when there is none which can make it hard to step in and actually help. But in seven-year-olds the activation is concrete: PAG and sensory & motor cortexes with minimal coupling to the rudimentary vmPFC. In older children the vmPFC is coupled to limbic structures. Ten to twelve year olds abstract empathy to classes of people. Brizendine asserts young girls develop empathy earlier than boys, because their evolved greater neuronal investment in communication and emotion networks. Year old girls are much more responsive to the distress of other people than boys are. At 18 months girls are experiencing infantile puberty. By adolescence the vmPFC is coupled to theory of mind regions and intentional harm induces disgust via the amygdala. Sapolsky explains adolescent boys are utilitarian and tend to accept inequality more than girls do. But both sexes accept inequality as the way it is. Sociopaths do not develop empathy. from the others,
when they feel they are allowed to be authentic.
Achievers can use a stream of self-improvement projects, to cope
with the trance of unworthiness. But Brach notes how a
friend of such a Jesuit priest, declared "Don't change. I
love you just as you are," providing the permission to allow him
the freedom to change. This is at the core of intervention
- a session "in which carefully coached codependents confront
the alcoholic or drug abuser in a loving and nonjudgmental
manner."
Brach suggests that being with good friends, all applying loving-kindness practices holding tender, compassionate, feelings towards a slowly widening circle of people: family we love, friends, people we don't know, people we dislike, every person; recognizing the oneness, where everyone desires happiness. Goleman & Davidson describe the neuroscience involved with this mediation. Research comparing two groups: one practicing loving-kindness meditation, the other acting as a control group just learning the theory; only the meditators showed a reduced implicit bias against out-groups. They also studied masters - Tibetan yogis. ,
creates an environment of togetherness where deep healing is
possible. Spirit Rock Meditation includes a variety of practices with the contemplative goal of altering traits to free the subject of suffering. Goleman & Davidson see three distinct levels of practice: beginner, long term meditator, Yogi; with radically different levels of commitment. Beginners typically do a limited-time-investment mindfulness meditation such as MBSR. Long term meditators typically practice vipassana meditation. Yogis practice Tibetan meditations Dzogchen and Mahamudra, which start like vipassana but in a non-dual stance developing a more subtle meta-awareness. Richard Davidson, Cortland Dahl and Antoine Lutz developed a typology of the practices: - Attentional - train aspects of attention.
- Constructive - cultivate virtuous qualities: loving-kindness;
- Destructive - use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience. These include non-dual approaches where ordinary cognition no longer dominates.
Center
developed spiritual support groups who all approach their joint
discussions agreeing to speak and listen honestly, to be present
and to communicate from the heart. This enables
participants to talk openly about their shameful feelings
without being judged or feeling apart. This can transform
our perceptions of our self and our relationships. Brach
describes how this can allow us to cope with criticism from a
partner by stepping out of the reactive dance and see the
context set by the support group and trust the goodness of who
we are. Once we pause and see clearly who is before us,
the mirroring of inner beauty is a blessing any of us can give
to each other.
Brach notes that Western culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
sees illness or depression is a debilitating episodic state of extreme sadness, typically beginning in late teens or early twenties. This is accompanied by a lack of energy and emotion, which is facilitated by genetic predisposition - for example genes coding for relatively low serotonin levels, estrogen sensitive CREB-1 gene which increases women's incidence of depression at puberty; and an accumulation of traumatic events. There is a significant risk of suicide: depression is involved in 50% of the 43,000 suicides in the US, and 15% of people with depression commit suicide. Depression is the primary cause of disability with about 20 million Americans impacted by depression at any time. There is evidence of shifts in the sleep/wake cycle in affected individuals (Dec 2015). The affected person will experience a pathological sense of loss of control, prolonged sadness with feelings of hopelessness, helplessness & worthlessness, irritability, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, and inability to experience pleasure. Michael Pollan concludes depression is fear of the past. It affects 12% of men and 20% of women. It appears to be associated with androgen deprivation therapy treatment for prostate cancer (Apr 2016). Chronic stress depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine, biasing humans towards depression. Depression easily leads to following unhealthy pathways: drinking, overeating; which increase the risk of heart disease. It has been associated with an aging related B12 deficiency (Sep 2016). During depression, stress mediates inhibition of dopamine signalling. Both depression and stress activate the adrenal glands' release of cortisol, which will, over the long term, impact the PFC. There is an association between depression and additional brain regions: Enlarged & more active amygdala, Hippocampal dendrite and spine number reductions & in longer bouts hippocampal volume reductions and memory problems, Dorsal raphe nucleus linked to loneliness, Defective functioning of the hypothalamus undermining appetite and sex drive, Abnormalities of the ACC. Mayberg notes ACC area 25: serotonin transporters are particularly active in depressed people and lower the serotonin in area 25 impacting the emotion circuit it hubs, inducing bodily sensations that patients can't place or consciously do anything about; and right anterior insula: which normally generates emotions from internal feelings instead feel dead inside; are critical in depression. Childhood adversity can increase depression risk by linking recollections of uncontrollable situations to overgeneralizations that life will always be terrible and uncontrollable. Sufferers of mild autism often develop depression. Treatments include: CBT which works well for cases with below average activity of the right anterior insula (mild and moderate depression), UMHS depression management, deep-brain stimulation of the anterior insula to slow firing of area 25. Drug treatments are required for cases with above average activity of the right anterior insula. As of 2010 drug treatments: SSRIs (Prozac), MAO, monoamine reuptake inhibitors; take weeks to facilitate a response & many patients do not respond to the first drug applied, often prolonging the agony. By 2018, Kandel notes, Ketamine is being tested as a short term treatment, as it acts much faster, reversing the effect of cortisol in stimulating glutamate signalling, and because it reverses the atrophy induced by chronic stress. Genomic predictions of which treatment will be effective have not been possible because: Not all clinical depressions are the same, a standard definition of drug response is difficult;
as a personal liability. In other cultures the whole band
suffers together - pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation. is
shared. Brach writes 'Not taking pain personally is
essential to Radical Acceptance.' The Buddha stresses our
changing states of body and mind, are This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
influenced
by myriad variables. When we pay close attention to
others we see we are not alone in our wants and fears.
Brach stresses that feelings of separation are part of the human
condition and arise throughout life. But relating to each
other with Radical Acceptance affirms the truth of who we
are.
Realizing our true
nature
Brach explains that when we are trapped in the trance of feeling
separate and unworthy,
Buddha nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature.
appears to be outside of us. She asserts that increased
spiritual maturity including yearning to see truth
and live with
an open heart, starts to overcome reflexes to avoid pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation. and chase pleasure is the outcome of the dopamine reward system, argues UCSF professor Robert Lustig. He, like the early Christians, contrasts [addiction oriented] pleasure with serotonin driven happiness & contentment. . This
allows alignment with our This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolutionary
destiny - to awaken into our natural
wisdom and compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. .
Brach notes Mahayana Buddhism describes our original nature as
the heart of perfect wisdom. This is a source of light ...
so that all fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. and
distress may be forsaken. She argues that at times have a
sudden insight into our true nature. But for this to be
accepted day-to-day depends on a gradual unfolding - a path to
awakening. Brach warns that this 'path' leads to here,
now, always.
Brach admits that she has struggled to accept her Buddha Nature
at times. Instead she identifies as her small self:
self-critical, obsessive, judgmental, guilty of trying to be
sexy; driven by feelings of fear and separation. All too
often, life interrupts her, dragging her back from Buddha
nature, to anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge. and anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress. . But Brach
reminds herself and us, these are opportunities to be
mindful. Snatching time to pause and observe the world can
be an opportunity or a reminder of failing. Brach recalls
Mara (delusion) is a god who represents, for Buddhists, the shadow-side of human nature. Mara entangles us in craving and fear, appearing in the mind as: violent storms, temptingly beautiful women, raging demons, and massive armies; according to Tara Brach. asking Siddhartha why he
felt he could aspire to Buddhahood - leveraging the force of
doubt. Gautama responded by touching the earth, asking it,
the creative power of awareness, to be witness to his many
lifetimes of compassion. And Mara fled. So Brach
held here chaotic feelings with Radical Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness. ,
acknowledging the pain of self-doubt. This allowed her attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. to return to
caring and open awareness.
Brach explains that beside the angry and fearful self there is
an observing
self, which like the other selves, stops us from being
free. Holding on to anything, including this sense of
being the observer, obscures the full freedom of
awareness. Brach uses the question "Who is aware?" to
bring mindfulness to awareness itself and cut through the
illusions of separate and bounded self. It is not easy to
do this. If we are anxious our attention will fixate onto
something, orient from it and add a commentary, to make sense of
what is happening. It helps to relax - Look and see ...
Let go and be free.
Be aware of the movie of life but then release this focus on
thoughts and objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas. and
look at who (our awareness) is looking. Relax, there is
nothing solid - just awareness, which is full with presence of
the real world's immediate sensations. The path to
awakening is a process of wakeful, profound relaxing.
Brach asserts that when we bring our absolute nature to the
relative world of form, love is an emotion, which generates a feeling of pleasure at a genetic relative's well-being and pain in their harm. An inseminated human female is genetically a full relative of her partner since she carries his germ-line gametes. From any of their pooled gene's perspective the offspring have a one-in-two chance of including the specific gene. Hence love supports kin selection driven by the selfish actions of genes. Emotions, including love and anger, help drive the interactions between people. Compassionate love also supports the symbiotic partnership of true friends built on fairness and trust. Sapolsky notes the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. The amygdala's projection into the locus ceruleus drives autonomic intensity.
awakens. Our Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
mind recognizes
empty awareness but our heart supports emotional circuits: Amygdala, Hippocampus, Septum, Habenula, Mammillary bodies; all of which signals the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The broad interconnections of these regions with a part of the frontal lobe suggested to Walle Nauta that it (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) is a quasi-member of the limbic network.
experiences love. All life springs
from one awareness, fully connected, feeling the fullness of
love. Grief at the loss of a loved one provides
recognition of the fleeting nature of this life. But the
loss also reveals our source, loving awareness that is
deathless.
Brach concludes, no matter how thick the clouds of fear, shame
and confusion are, we can remember our longing to awaken
compassion, our longing to be wise and free. Remembering
what we cherish guides us to hold our fear and doubt with
awareness. Moving this way, moment by moment, we find what
we long for. When challenged by Mara we take a step, touch
the ground of this present moment with compassionate
presence. This is the path -- arriving over and over again
in the moment with kind awareness. All that matters on
this path of awakening is taking one step at a time, being
willing to show up for just this much, touching the ground just
this moment. When we get lost we need only pause, look at
what is true, relax our heart and arrive again. This is
the essence of Radical Acceptance.
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
CAS implications
CAS theory describes the emergence of the
dualistic self and the tree of life
linked by the genetic code and machinery. It provides an
analog of the Buddhist presence.
All CAS depend on maintaining a state far from equilibrium to
operate are, according to Abbott, a class including people, families, corporations, hurricanes. They implement abstract designs and are demarcatable by their reduced entropy relative to their components. Rovelli notes entities are a collection of relations and events, but memory and our continuous process of anticipation, organizes the series of quantized interactions we perceive into an illusion of permanent objects flowing from past to future. Abbott identifies two types of entity: - At equilibrium entities,
- Autonomous entities, which can control how they are affected by outside forces;
. Constraints are used to ensure the increase in entropy
is carefully limited.
Deacon
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can
induce emergent phenomena
which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are
sustained. The mechanism enables
the development of Darwinian competition.
describes a way to generate an autogen which provides an
This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent step to obtain an evolvable
This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially
generating a single initialized child cell. For
multi-cellular organisms this 'cell' must contain all the germ-line schematic
structures including for organelles and multi-generational epi-genetic
state. Any microbiome
is subsequently integrated during the innovative deployment of
this creative event. Organisms with skeletal
infrastructure cannot complete the process of creation of an
associated adult mind, until the proximate environment has been
sampled during development.
The mechanism and resulting strategic options are
discussed.
organism.
The This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolutionary processes can then
build and explore additional niches. Dawkins
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations
of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the
accumulation of small advantageous changes.
stresses that all
life on earth started from a single event. This
means that the genetic
code, the mapping of DNA base triplet sequences, such as AAA and AAT, to amino-acids (AAA maps to the amino-acid lysine for example) and transcription termination sequences (TGA maps to stop transcription for example) that has currently evolved. , and much of the genetic machinery, is shared amongst
all the current life forms. Additionally:
- For a 'species' such as Homo sapiens it is the
Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
shared gene pool which is Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic
operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.
The nature of the operations is described.
operated on by evolution.
- For SuperOrganisms is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents. The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson. These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche. Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains. He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity. So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity. For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions. And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy. It depends on inter-agent signalling. In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence. Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows. A superorganism has a development and operational phase. As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification. Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors.
including: Prokaryotes, a single cell system with two main types: (1) Archaea, and (2) Eubacteria. Prokaryotes have their own DNA and infrastructure within a single enclosure. They are biochemically very versatile: Photosynthesis -> Electron transport & phosphorylation, Enzymatic regulation and catalysis of chemical reactions, Catabolize -> phosphate bond energy, ATP cycle, glycolysis, TCA cycle, Electron transports, oxidative phosphorylation, oxidation of fatty acids, oxidative degradation of amino acids; Biosynthesis & utilization of phosphate bond energy -> carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids, nucleotides, muscle & motile structures; membrane barriers & active transports, hormones; Replication, Transcription, Translation, Regulation of gene expression; self-assembly; They utilize cell membrane receptors and signalling to support symbiotic cooperation with other cellular entities, including: in the microbiome, and as chloroplasts and mitochondria within eukaryotic cells. ,
Beas, ants and termites, human groups, nation states; homeostasis is, according to Damasio, the fundamental set of operations at the core of life, from the earliest and long-vanished point of its beginning in early biochemistry to the present. It is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative, whose discharge implies, for every living organism, small or large, nothing less than enduring and prevailing. Damasio stresses that the operations that ensure prevailing ensure life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to protection of life into the future of an organism or a species. Prevailing implies mechanisms for monitoring and modeling the state of the organism, controlling and constraining the flows of energy and resources through schematic agency, and to facilitate exploring the environment and acting on signals of modeled opportunities and threats. Global homeostasis of multi-organ animals requires endocrine, immune, circulatory and nervous 'systems' and results in the emergence of minds, feelings, consciousness, machinery of affect and complex movements. The emergence of feelings allowed the homeostatic process to become enhanced by a subjective representation of the organism's state and proximate environment within the mind. Feelings operating in minds allowed conscious decisions to extend homeostasis to the sociocultural domain.
encourages a subjective
Antonio Damasio argues
that ancient
& fundamental homeostatic processes,
built into
behaviors and updated by evolution
have resulted in the emergence
of nervous systems and feelings. These
feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general
systems supporting enteric
operation, are later ubiquitously
integrated into the 'images'
built by the minds of higher animals
including humans.
Damasio highlights the separate
development of the body frame in the building of
minds.
Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds
supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of
emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the
end-to-end
integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers
hard problem of consciousness.
Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures
and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the
cultural creative process, linking culture to
homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the
development of tools
to improve our lives. But the results of the
creative process have added
stresses to our lives.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Each of the [super]organisms
discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
- Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns
well with CAS theory.
- Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS
examples.
representation of self.
- Pinker
Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
explains how the mind
works. He stresses that Consciousness is no longer mysterious. In this page we use
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory to describe the high-level
architecture of consciousness, linking sensory networks,
low level feelings and
genetically conserved and deployed neural structures into a high
level scheduler. Consciousness is evolution's
solution to the complex problems of effective, emergent,
multi-cellular perception based strategy.
Constrained by emergence and needing
to avoid the epistemological
problem of starting with a blank slate with every birth,
evolution was limited in its options.
We explain how survival value allows evolution to leverage
available tools: sensors, agent relative position, models, perception
& representation; to solve the problem of mobile
agents responding effectively to their own state and proximate environment.
Evolution did this by providing a genetically
constructed framework that can
develop into a conscious CAS.
And we discuss the implications with regard to artificial
intelligence, sentient robots,
augmented intelligence, and
aspects of philosophy.
consciousness
limits
combinatorial explosions as the visually oriented
subjective framework emerges.
- Consciousness can be seen to depend on shared,
general purpose structures built by genes, that are
specialized for each instance of the
This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially
generating a single initialized child cell. For
multi-cellular organisms this 'cell' must contain all the germ-line schematic
structures including for organelles and multi-generational epi-genetic
state. Any microbiome
is subsequently integrated during the innovative deployment of
this creative event. Organisms with skeletal
infrastructure cannot complete the process of creation of an
associated adult mind, until the proximate environment has been
sampled during development.
The mechanism and resulting strategic options are
discussed.
organism;
this emergent dual nature is an assumed separation of the mind and body. It has a long history. Descartes's Cartesian dualism assumes the mind and body are two clocks in synchrony but otherwise unrelated. John Locke commented 'It is impossible to conceive that matter, either with or without motion, could have, originally, in and from itself, sense, perception, and knowledge; as is evident from hence, that then sense, perception, and knowledge, must be a property eternally separable from matter and every particle of it.' Chalmers describes this explanatory gap as the hard problem of consciousness. Damasio explains that the construction of feelings requires there be no duality, and he shows how it then emerged due to the structure of affect in humans.
of all This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
CAS supports the
Buddha's contention
about suffering.
The difficulty of surviving and reproducing in a complex
environment where the sun's delivered daily energy drifts over
tens and hundreds of years, and is concentrated by This page reviews the catalytic
impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an
agent. The infrastructure
reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected
action. The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns.
infrastructure and This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race. At its
core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take
advantage of an alteration in, the genome
or equivalent. The situation is illustrated with examples
from biology, high tech and politics.
evolved amplifiers, ensures current
humans include This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolved strategic mechanisms to assist them.
Turchin
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires
developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining
the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin
shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth
rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the
summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
is used to augment Turchins findings.
describes how This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolved
capabilities support responses for different niches: conflicts
as resources become scarce, and cooperation when food and other
resources become plentiful again or depend on it. At any
meta-ethnic frontier conflict is highly likely to occur and compassion indicates an emotional state where resonance with someone else's distress leads one to help them. The Dalai Lama stresses we must feel compassion for ourselves and others. Tara Brach sees compassion as our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Meditation focused on feeling love for the suffering, strengthens compassion by activating the neuron networks for parental love for a child: ACC, insula, striatum, PAG, orbitofrontal cortex; and inducing a reduction in areas responsible for negative emotions. may conflict
with evolved
responses, subsequently maintained and spread by culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
. In more
stable environments the warrior
elite may benefit from the majority which practices
compassion. Traditional
rice growing regions benefit from cooperation and some:
Central China; are geographically homogenous removing
meta-ethnic pressures - outside of the elite fights about power.
Tara Brach explains how Radical Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness.
can remove the trances our infant experience builds into our personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects: - Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
- Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
- Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
- Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
- Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming
, and reveal
our Buddha nature is the Buddha's assertion that each human birth is the realization of the love and timeless radiant awareness that is our true nature. .
.
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