2021 02 01 - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

• Late bronze age collapse
• Can you lose your sense of self once it has stabilised?
  • Question for linguist: Can you lose a first language? Probably yes, though depends what you mean by "lose." Z example: Turkic vs Slavic/Romance/Germanic (in that order)
    • V example: 2 years younger, doesn't speak; understands 70% vs 100%. Critical Period Hypothesis
    • Will boys lose Dutch fluency?
  • Schizophrenia: Late onset, adulthood. Inability to inhibit entropy?
• Critical period for vision
  • Ontogeny: Binocular vision 3-8 months?
  • Phylogeny: Vision change driven by fruit or snakes
• IG: Find blog chart or give more information... mirror of blog, stages
• Maturity = inhibition; brakes
  • Aha moment from neuroscience
  • Adulthood as cessation of plasticity; return to youth, disinhibition, ways to increase plasticity
  • IG: something about this
  • Normative developmental transitions: There are developmental stages that are reliable and predictable and that the majority of children go through in roughly the same way, at roughly the same age. This is mostly work by Piaget, Neo Piagetian approaches, and Juan Pascual-Leone (links to come); these guys were all COGNITIVE developmentalists, but there are some really interesting neuroscience around these transitions that was subsequently published. There is a lot of debate about whether these stage transitions are truly nonlinear and "stage" like or whether they are more continuous. I am still a strong proponent of the former, but it almost doesn't matter anymore. There's a crazy amount of studies that tried to de-bunk the stage model, but I think it remains compelling.

    • Before 3 months:

      • infants touch one object at a time
      • orient to interesting stuff; can maintain some attention
      • they're basically really boring blobs if you look at them as just individuals, but there's loads of really interesting things they can do in terms of attunement with mom and we'll get into that in the emotional development and intersubjective foundations of self

    • 3-4 months

      • they can track objects, holding them in mind
      • motor movement becomes smooth
        • by smooth, we mean that it is not jerky and random-looking
        • smooth movements look like there is intention behind them; for two versions see (CAN WE INSERT MEDIA?)
      • proto-goal states emerge (they want an object, but can't get it, so constantly frustrated/crying/seeking help)
        • is this primary suffering or secondary? in other words, is it direct pain from not having, or is it secondary from the knowledge of not having?
          • good question: I think it's direct pain. Thwarted goal in the here and now. I have videos I can show you that are fascinating to watch to make your own judgment. I think this needs to be a part of the multimedia project

    • 8-9 months

      • universal, maturational increases in working memory capacity launch this major shift to coordinated cognition

        • coordinated reaching and grasping

      • coordinated gazing and reaching

      • the birth of true intentionality

        • over what time frame? how long can they sustain an intention?
          • much more interesting question than expected: It depends. The dynamic systems camp showed that the baby can hold in mind an intention for varying lengths depending on salience of desired object, waiting time, strength of memory trace, and even posture (contrary to previous understandings that there was a very short, and relatively set, duration). 100s of studies have looked at the various components of this abrupt shift in cognitive development, usually using the A not B error(which includes elements of working memory, perseveration, and inhibition).

      • reach IN ORDER TO suck/explore

        • Etwas um zu (Heidegger): Something in order to, which he associates with equipment

      • cause - effect thinking and doing is launched and they are constantly delighted to ACT on the world and observe the REACTION (this is huge and an all-consuming practice, constantly banging on something to hear it, yelling to get someone to pick them up, etc.)

        • Knowledge of cause and effect is the second stage in the Progress of Insight in the Buddhist Abhidhamma

      • they are suddenly aware that the world is full of opportunity... and full of frustrated goals

        • affordances? does disappointment come with affordance?

      • they are aware suddenly that they can ask for connection and get it... or not (before this, things just happened, with no volition or action of their own) [note: I really want to think about this in connection to phylogentic cause-effect emergence; so the Aztec story was maybe a good example of a simpler story because maybe people didn't need more complex cause-effect stories? Or maybe they did and that's why they were given stories around "most stuff is random or unpredictable"?]

      • Ba/da phonemes

      • with no working memory, or little, you can't keep a goal in mind, you can't be bothered to look for anything because value can't be held in mind...

      • Phylogenetic Similarities

        • I wonder if the early brains/minds of babies pre 9 months might be homologous(?) or at least analogous (?) to the phylogenetic processes involved in the shift in consciousness around the Bronze Age
        • how do you even know that others are actually quite different from you? It's not a given. You have to have a pressure to postulate a mind and intentions in others, the capacity to reason about minds. Not saying Jaynes was wrong about the theory of mind coming before mind / consciousness / self , just that this feels like something related
        • So this must be a reduction in plasticity. Probably from the maturation of the inhibitory systems. And this means... that inhibition has systemic "tuning" effects
        • Harmonics?: You are tuning the mind to the distinctions in the enviro that matter and losing the ability for ALL distinctions more generally
        • the creation of "future" and "past" is really important for "selfhood" too. Episodic memory (which we know animals have, but it seems like it's way more limited)
        • But that's long-term not working memory I guess
        • This probably relates to Freud/Rolland's "oceanic feeling" too. That there's a time before the division, both in ontogeny (oceanic feeling) and in phylogeny (garden of eden, before the formation of the prefrontal cortex, etc)
        • You stop exploring and start exploiting. Relatively speaking
        • Carhart-Harris: "The evolution of human consciousness may have occurred through a process of relatively rapid entropy-expansion (with a concomitant increase in system disorder) followed by entropy-suppression (or system re-organization and settling)."
        • This is also what happened with angiosperms. They reduced the genome from gymnosperms and it led to an explosion
        • Flowering plants. They exploded during the Cretaceous. Flowers are important too, but let's not get distracted

      • Back to Ontogeny -That's how it relates to Hebbian theory too probably. The inhibition starts to reward specific paths

        • precisely. basically what i'm talking about above relies on the Hebbian learning processes (what fires together wires together)

    • 18- 21 months

      • the kicker of stage transitions: the most dramatic shift, second only to early adolescence
      • the shift from "sensorimotor" to "interrelational" stage. Dumb names, especially the second, but they're focused on the cognitive shifts rather than the more interesting social and emotional elements
      • this is the dawning of the symbolic stage
      • instead of thinking about objects/things, they become capable of thinking about how one thing RELATES to, stands for, or symbolizes another
      • biggest example of course is the start of full-blown language (not just isolated words, but combos of words and events)
      • combo words means intentionality, especially social, blossoms (e.g., before, kid could say "up" but now... she can say "mama up"... totally different)
      • "naming explosion" happens suddenly (it is so magical, e.g., with my boys: within 2-4 weeks of each other they went from having about 10-20 words to more than 150 within a week. Totally nonlinear); suddenly kids get the power of language as symbols
      • this is the age also that GOALS become coordinated and more complex ("NO" becomes a big one used a lot now, but it doesn't just mean "I don't want to do that" -- as earlier it does -- but more complex: "I don't want to do that because I would rather do this instead."
      • kids' understanding of the social world changes dramatically; this is peak separation anxiety. Suddenly kids who were chill freak out because they want mom all the time, any time they want, no matter what. It is the beginning of an intense realization of vulnerability, neediness, and there's constant checking in to reaffirm personal closeness and thereby minimize insecurity.
        • We need to see exactly what Freud says about this (also Melanie Klein)

    • 3-3.5 years

      • theory of mind comes online
      • all the self-conscious emotions burgeon: shame and guilt in particular
        • Does shame precede guilt? Is guilt internalized shame?
          • the majority of "basic emotions" psychologists and neuroscientists think they come on line at the same time and the main difference is that shame has to do with the self as a whole and guilt is about specific behaviours that don't represent the whole "self"; also they have different action tendencies with shame triggering hiding and withdrawal behaviour and guilt motivating reparation and atonement

    • then puberty

    • sensitive windows important to phylogeny argument because they're weirdly SPECIFIC

  • One example comes from perception research with 9 months old: both for language and face/race recognition, there seems to be a sensitive window after which you stop being able to make distinctions between a) sounds in language and b) faces within races/across races
• Stuart Shanker

All babies are born with the capacity to acquire language and which one (or ones) they end up using depends on which one (or ones) they are exposed to. So it's not so surprising that young babies can hear and tell the difference between speech sounds that us old folks can no longer hear e.g. Japanese infants can hear and discriminate between the "r" and "l" sounds in the English language more easily than Japanese adults. Interestingly, the paring down of your sound repertoire to the sounds in your language (s) of exposure happens around 10 months of age, just around the onset of language production. It's as though the brain is honing in on what it will need to find our way in the social world.

In fact, the evidence suggests that this "honing in" may apply to social stimuli in general i.e. not just language. Another study showed that young infants can discriminate between different faces of the same race, a phenomenon that holds for different races; Chinese, Caucasian, African etc. But by 9 months of age, they seem to lose that fine tuned ability and are best at discriminating faces of their own race! Read: social input goes a long way to influencing our social perception. Here's a link to one of the relevant papers in case you're really curious.

Notice that the speech and face processing narrowing is happening around the same time? Why? Probably because it's more efficient to be finely tuned to the social environment you have to deal with, the one you need to find your way in, to have your needs met in etc.

• Neuroscience research: Hypothesizing that regions are involved, in mature brains, you get a decrease in activation in the very areas involved in the thing. Because of efficiency. (This probably relates to mood issues from alcoholism and GABA too?)
• Anxiety in OFC/ACC: Neural processes fired less, because they became more efficient at regulation. Obnoxious because it means that the very systems you expect to increase actually attenuate. Taking your foot off the brakes
  • This feels familiar. I feel like it's an issue in Marxism maybe? Maybe something to do with automation? Like if you fully automate something then the price goes to zero. Maybe that's not related but that's something that comes to mind
  • It's a thing with exercise... like I used to run if I was cold? But as I'm getting better at running, it doesn't heat up my body as much

• i really like that press secretary idea. particularly, of course, because of this idea that what we do internally is largely constituted by external pressures. This also seems to suggest a different take on free will: it's not that we lack free will altogether.

• Instead:

  • it is not as internally driven as we often assume
  • it is largely emergent from/with the social pressures of a specific contextlh
  • it can probably be manipulated better if we shift those social constraints better than if we attempt to rally our internal force to exert this will.

• this is super interesting. I hadn't connected it with free will previously. Most of my thinking on free will has been that we seem to have free will "over a long enough time period" but basically not in the moment. Like we have some minor ability to change conditions, and it's the conditions that change the behaviour, not willpower that directly changes the behaviour in the moment?

• Press secretary also important since it's about coalition building which is probably the original function of language (I think Dunbar has a take like this, about grooming) And also coalition building, consensus, is essentially reality-construction

  • YES. So much yes on where you took it to concensus and reality construction

• So it's important if it is like the first thing. Naming. Categories. Consensus. This relates to something Geertz said... "Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning."

• and another thing related: As the brain is "shrinking" in that it is getting more finely tuned and efficient in relation to its (social -- being the most relevant to humans) environment, the social context itself tends to shrink. I don't think this is talked about enough. There's pruning inside, but also pruning/selection in the social environment such that only those social connection that reify our sense-making and strengthen consensus, get selected and connections strengthened. The rest, the variability gets hacked off as we grow older

  • so this is structural coupling that Varela and Maturana talk about
  • So number of close friends shrinks? Weak ties? Both? This is super important. (forming and dropping lots of relationships/entropy maximization)
  • i share your intellectual and personal interest on this one. I bet i could find evidence of this generally. But what I know about is the specific instances in pathology, addiction particularly. as a person becomes increasingly fucked in their severe addiction, they limit themselves to only those friends who they can use with. makes it very hard, in turn, to stop, even if you have the will in some sense to do so. there are no nodes to hook onto that will reward alternate behaviour. So when you quit, it's not just that you have to leave the friends you scored with, but the friends that helped you give a shit about anything in life...
    • super specific example, but I think it works for other lives/personality development in general...

• but it's usually about plants and soil and microbiomes and such... not people

• You could also see press secretary as "inhibition of reality-testing" or even "inhibition of truth" in favor of social gains. If that is true, then the Buddhists could be right, that suffering arises from delusion (moha) or ignorance (avidya), and delusion (along with raga/greed, and dvesha/hatred) lead to tanha... craving. Then vipassana or insight is about disrupting the separate self, "seeing clearly," which alleviates suffering "directly" since it breaks the link to craving
  • Also important... craving (tanha) leads to grasping (upadana)
  • It would be really interesting if this turns out to be literally true somehow
    • If the pain/pleasure system must come online before objects can be grasped
      • must, not sure. does, absolutely. you can't grasp at birth. you can yowl from being pinched from hour 1
        • So the test for this... and I think maybe it has been done in rodents? Is just remove parts of the brain? I think maybe Le Doux did it? Kringelbach talks about it. Maybe it was amygdala vs nucleus accumbens or something. There's some part where if you remove it, they're anhedonic for a while. Then there's some other part where if you remove it they're permanently anhedonic
        • I guess the problem is that if you do it to too young of a rat it might compensate in other ways
    • Or something like that
    • That's just a guess
    • Like I'm saying... what if dependent origination is a pretty good description of childhood development, with inhibition of attention (focusing, but also ignoring stuff) leads to a sense of a separate self which has the (useful) illusion of things being good/bad for it which leads to the drive/will which leads to the grasping of objects and later concepts
    • That might be completely wrong but it would be interesting
• But press secretary also seems "inhibitory" somehow. Maybe not
  • i wonder... i think it is
  • if it's choosing among the options for the one that is most likely to be accepted by the external world/most likely to fit best, then it must be inhibitory...
• is any intention a form of grasping? I mean is craving = to intention?
  • So just making stuff up, my guess is no? Like it is possible to form intentions without craving, just as it is possible to stub your toe and not get the "second arrow" of suffering which causes you to regret it. You still get the pain, but you don't get the second arrow. That happens on meditation retreats for example
  • I'm guessing that you can form intentions without craving, but most people don't do it most of the time
  • I guess habits might be like that? I don't feel a "craving" to do stuff I do every day I guess
  • ok... this is useful.
    • so is this type of specificity. because i do think there's interesting ontogenetic evidence for this.
  • At least not in the way I understand buddhist craving. I could be wrong of course
  • BK: Ask Jake
• god... it actually makes me think i also should re read Melanie Klein but she's a fucking nutcase to dive into...
• good breast/bad breast?
• it's amazing stuff. you just have to leave the plane of reality for a while to really grok her. when you do though, i think it's worth it

The onset of directed reaching demarks the emergence of a qualitatively new skill. In this study we asked how intentional reaching arises from infants' ongoing, intrinsic movement dynamics, and how first reaches become successively adapted to the task. We observed 4 infants weekly in a standard reaching task and identified the week of first arm-extended reach, and the 2 weeks before and after onset. The infants first reached at ages ranging from 12 to 22 weeks, and they used different strategies to get the toy. 2 infants, whose spontaneous movements were large and vigorous, damped down their fast, forceful movements. The 2 quieter infants generated faster and more energetic movements to lift their arms. The infants modulated reaches in task-appropr…

• the thing that isn't mentioned here is that almost all of this reaching/grasping is parent facilitated.
  • the baby can't move anywhere. they have to be placed near objects to reach for. it's the social scaffold that's more necessary than any other affordance
  • and Klein and the psychoanalysts talked about the fact that the mother is essentially blocking or faclitating basic goals for
  • the baby... at first, the baby is almost one with the mother, on the breast, next to her all the time, etc. As soon as the mother pulls away, there is psychic pain and "other-ness"
    • Ohhh yes interesting. Is it... Levinas? Who wrote about "otherness"
      • yes, in philosophy...
      • can't ssay i remember the specifics though
    • I think for Levinas it's like, "what is not me" and must precede other interactions. But Freud is also interested in interoception, like this is partly why he is obsessed with shit, because he thinks that kids have to be taught that it is not part of the body or something
    • About constructing boundaries to the body
  • but that development of a sense of the other seems really important to have before that other is deemed like me or not a la Jaynes

I am afraid to own a Body—
I am afraid to own a Soul—
Profound—precarious Property—
Possession, not optional—

• Geertz paper
• Haptics of writing
• sleep is for forgetting = pruning, getting rid of the detritus to find the signal through the noise, your experience of reading Darwin after your nap.