2021 02 15 - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

Worked on:

1. answered some questions in the developmental stages section 2021-02-01
2. reorganized some of the phylogeny material at bottom to more directly relate to the ontogeny material at top. Still not happy with the way it's organized, so didn't complete yet. There might be something interested in taking each stage in ontogeny and seeing if there's a corresponding shift in phylogeny; this could be in terms of the science we have at hand, but also considering some older stories/myths and other cultural artifacts
3. I started a new page on Social Baseline Theory (Jim Coan's work). I'm not thrilled with calling the page by the name of the theory. What's important is that it's a framework that tries to tie together evolutionary explanations of our necessity for social connections with current socially-constituted health and psychological outcomes
4. Equally important, and more rigorous, is Slavich's Social Safety Theory, a biologically based evolutionary perspective on life stress, health, and behavior. He goes from the protein level (cytokines) underlying our inflammatory response to stress all the way up to health, wellbeing, and relationship dynamics. I'll get to that soon, but here is Slavich's Social Safety Theory that summarizes all the evidence.
5. Why #3 and #4 are so important to me/us: There are few rigorous psychological theories of social processes that span both ontogeny and phylogeny. Neither of these theories are developmental per se, but they do try to integrate some critical aspects of early (chronic and/or acute) stress and later outcomes, then tie these to deficits/traumas in social connection. And these elements are anchored in a reasonable evolutionary account of the social basis of human thriving.
   • We're interested in the extent to which they can serve as the foundation for an account of the self as fundamentally socially constituted. Co-creation-of-the-self
   • With their emphasis on the critical role of social connection for survival (and they're different in their social foci, which makes them all the more interesting), they necessarily speak to what happens when there is a lack of social connection, or when that connection is broken too early, or is harmful in myriad of ways. WHICH BRINGS US TO THE SELF AND SUFFERING and whether these are fundamentally linked and whether something that is fundamental to the development of the self, the co-creative aspect of the self from birth(?) becomes messed up because of the breakdown of the social brain as it's severed from its concomitants. (I am now completely out on a limb and I haven't thought this all the way through... which is our next job).

• Consider moving developmental stages from 2021-02-01 to its own page