2021 02 25 - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

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• Notes on Bryan's take on Slavich (and beyond)

  • Generally seems too binary and at least implicitly feels like there's an agenda for "progress" when considering what is "beneficial" to the individual. Four specific problems:
    • inflammation could not have evolved if it was ONLY a bad thing
    • inflammation is only related to infection and injury as a result of or in response to being cast out/ostracism
      • the immune system can't understand the social environment so there needs to be mediation by the brain and its interpretive mechanisms
      • indeed Slavich makes the argument throughout that the brain, in its imperfect mediating role, oftentimes sends the "wrong" signal because there's not actually a physical threat
    • individuals are best adaptive, or "benefit" most from low inflammation system only if they're NOT in a high chronic-stress environment, one in which they are actually realistically likely to get injured (e.g., in war time, that is certainly not the case)
    • related to above, the complexity of context is not taken into account: This low inflammation system should be considered "beneficial" only by virtue of particular contexts, in particular periods of time (IG: And I'd argue depending also on developmental age, history, and the goals of the individual and the group at that time)
  • Is it a "good" thing, generally, to ALWAYS reduce inflammation?
    • Taleb thinks it's NOT good to always reduce (IG: although I wonder if it depends on the time scale, the health of the organism more generally at that moment, and the outcome we're tracking -- is it to reach sexual maturity or long life or healthy long life?)
      • From Taleb's Antifragility:
    • Fever example: low vs too high (may be nonlinear, differential impacts); acute vs chronic
    • Maybe even chronic high inflammation responses are adaptive for certain conditions or environments (Stalingrad sure seems to need that response); in those cases, those individuals who DON'T get easily stressed, get killed
      • IG: yes... or maybe not. Maybe after a certain period of time on super-high alert, all organisms do burn out; maybe those organisms that can calm their stress responses, focus, problem-solve, conserve energy, and MODULATE their inflammatory response are the most successful in these chronic high stress conditions; so flexibility in the inflammatory system, some level of variability marked by high spikes of inflammation for some time which then give way to some periods of calm and restoration; maybe that's the most "adaptive" response
  • There's an almost ideological criticism to be made against social safety theory: there's a problem with presenting a model that stipulates what is more or less healthy, adaptive, and likely to lead to longer lives with less sufferring;
    • it is the presentation of progress or "good" vs "bad/evil" that is problematic at a more fundamental level, more so than any particular mechanisms or process that is outlined by Slavich
      • there's a moral quality that suggests that there are "good genes" and bad; those inflammation genes wouldn't work that way if there weren't good reasons for it (in the past)
      • this is a problem not only with Slavich, but most of science (certainly almost all of psychology), most politics, sociology, etc.
    • implicit in the paper are two problems:
      • the conditions we live in now are "unnatural" ones (as Slavich gets also) in that we don't for example live in the savannah, etc.
      • the conditions we live in now are likely not going to be the same as we move forward over evolutionary time (thinking otherwise is short-sighted /naive)
    • But you can easily imagine a world in which the exact reverse processes are rewarded (IG: do you mean social safety and low inflammation systems?)
    • Also contradicts part of social baseline theory: the normal state, most of the time, should be and often is, when you're with other people (consistent with Slavich that social safety is good; isolation is bad)
      • but there are times of acute stress and in those specific cases, inflammation is precisely the right response (IG: Slavich acknowledges this and I'd say even requires it for his model; he knows the antifragility work and though it isn't the core of his model, it is wrapped in it. I think your bigger issue and the more accurate/interesting criticism is about chronic inflammation and whether that is ever a good thing or if it's really always harmful as Slavich claims)

• My connections to follow up re. Slavich "progressive take"

  • picking up on the relation between phenotypes and genotypes and whether there's a binary relation (there's not): elaborate differential susceptibility hypothesis (not a great discussion in Wikipedia, but link for quick and dirty): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_susceptibility_hypothesis
  • 
  • I don't think that Slavich is saying that it is ALWAYS a good thing to reduce inflammation; he knows its a necessary and important regulator and essential coping mechanism in times of high stress, even chronic high stress
    • but I think this might have been emphasized more in the 2014 paper... or maybe I just assumed the argument without it being there.
    • {{TODO}} Need to look up the section in the older paper.

• Pulling Slavich and Coen's models together is key, combining them with an ontogenetic framework is important, and reconciling these with their implications for the co-creation of the self, how cognition-emotion relations work, why we need physical contact with one another, how collective consciousness works and how it may give rise to individual consciousness

• Need to integrate the developmental work on moral reasoning (connected to "beyond good and evil")

  • Kohlberg's: Stages of Moral Development; https://courses.lumenlearning.com/teachereducationx92x1/chapter/kohlbergs-stages-of-moral-development/
  • Katherine Nelson's: Script Theory
  • Piaget

• It's really important to integrate the work of Hurbert Hermans' dialogical self Theory. It's not a well supported theory in terms of data, but it's a middle ground between psychology and philosophy (some sociology I guess as well) and can give us some terms and conditions to move forward in discussing the self as not arising from or residing in the individual

  • e.g., current pub (but much more before): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228913307_The_Dialogical_Self_Toward_a_Theory_of_Personal_and_Cultural_Positioning
  • ABSTRACT: The dialogical self proposes a far-reaching decentralization of both the concept of self and the concept of culture. At the intersection between the psychology of the self in the tradition of William James and the dialogical school in the tradition of Mikhail Bakhtin, the proposed view challenges both the idea of a core, essential self and the idea of a core, essential culture. In apparent contradiction with such a view, the present viewpoint proposes to conceive self and culture as a multiplicity of positions among which dialogical relationships can be established. Particular attention is paid to collective voices, domination and asymmetry of social relations, and embodied forms of dialogue. Cultures and selves are seen as moving and mixing and as increasingly sensitive to travel and translocality. Three perspectives for future research of self and culture are briefly discussed: the shifting attention from core to contact zones; increasing complexity; and the experience of uncertainty.

• Final Notes for the Day

• Don't want to text now, so I want to put these thoughts here, for later "processing" or talking about

• I really appreciated the voice message reflecting on my insight from the meditation a few days ago which clicked together the proprioception meditation with the post-meditation experience of the transitory nature of emotions and, essentially, suffering. (Can't link to it here, although it's in this wiki, because I don't know how to ... link easily within the wiki (double square brackets doesn't seem to bring up any auto-fill options and I have no recollection where we put it)

  • I want to talk more about several issues that are brought up by both the experience and the "co-reflection" on the experience
  • There's a concept in psychology that's called "co-rumination": rumination is obvious, and it's by far the most reliable (cognitive) predictor of depression. Co-rumination is when you do that rumination with a loving/caring friend or other person. When that other person is empathic, asks to hear more, and amplifies/adds to the original ruminative thinking with his/her own negative emotions and cognitive appraisals, it's also a predictable process for depression (especially in girls). Don't know why I had to go on and on about that. But my main point is that no one really goes on about "co-reflection". Probably because you're supposed to be reflecting on your own if you're doing it right I guess. And it's probably the same or 90% overlapping with "social support" or "empathy" or whatever other vague psychological terms we have. But I'm particularly moved by the power of feeling heard, understood, and then the other person taking an idea or a feeling (or both) further. Further with and for you. Maybe a therapeutic relationship has some of these qualities, but it's entirely different if you're paying someone for that privilege. This feeling feels like it has some elements of a co-emergent sense of self, something that doesn't entirely reside in one person or the other, but that is shared in some symbiotic, dynamically stable, way. I'm not suggesting it feels like "THE Self" so much as a distinct, but shared, "self" or voice or stance like others that are internal. It's like Trevarthen's "emotional narrative" between very young infants and the parent (it's always talked about with the mother, but that is utter bullshit because fathers can feel the same if given the opportunity and if they dig going to that trippy place)
  • B made the point that the brain is more plastic than the body? Maybe ... So the reconfiguration of the brain based on new concepts, impressions, etc. clearly happens. And there is definitely nonlinear changes in the mind/brain. Is this impossible in the rest of the body? Probably. But I'm not entirely sure and would love to learn more. It feels sometimes like I get nonlinear shifts in my flexibility. After weeks or months of being stable at some level in a yoga position, I suddenly flip the plateau and can reach far deeper. I know that must happen with strength training too: it's linear progression until it suddenly isn't. Is that only a function of how we are carving nature at its joints (i.e., like the moment you can finally do a one-armed push up when for months you couldn't, is that really a big shift in capacity or is it actually a tiny increment in strength but our categorization of that into a "new ability" is such that it seems nonlinear?). That's probably a dumb thought, but maybe there are better examples of nonlinear, abrupt changes in physical conditions.
    • More to the point I'm meandering around, I'm not sure the examples B was giving in the voice message are indeed examples of plasticity or nonlinear changes in the brain. For example, understanding new concepts after reading a bunch over a course of a day: that increase in content and even perspective doesn't mean you've necessarily changed the structure or function of the brain. You've just added content. That addition of content to one's repertoire seems distinct from learning, for example, to pull yourself out of a rage episode. That takes practice, like meditation, and then there can be nonlinear changes in that cognitive ability (ok, not just cognitive, but for efficiency, let's leave it at that). But that's different than learning about how plate tectonics work, and even then subsequently being able to explain it to someone else, right? So that content addition also seems different than explosions of creativity (B gave the example of van Gogh), which I do think is about increasing flexibility/variability in the brain/mind; that feels more like a true structural and definitely functional change (as an aside, I think many of those creative bursts of van Gogh's came when he was on meds, not when he was full-out having a depressive or psychotic episode; his antipsychotics made him prone to see more, for example, yellow... at least that's what I vaguely remember. I want to look that up actually). This strongly relates to my long-standing interest in "madness and creativity" and the myths (and truths) around these relations. But that's for another babbling session.

Meta-Mind points

• It feels super weird to refer to you, Bryan, as a separate entity in this. So above, when I'm referring to the voice message, I'm saying "B" was doing so and so in the voice message. This isn't a big deal in and of itself. But it does imply that there's a perception of a third "self" reading this. I know you, B, feel like you're always writing , to some extent, to a public audience. But I (I as in I as also in Isabel) do not feel this way. I feel this is for our eyes for now. And yet I fully recognize that this is a public wiki. Don't know what my point is, but maybe it would be nice to have a consensus on how to refer to one another
• My brain is getting super antsy with not being able to use a different form of organizing the principles we're writing about than "pages" that are essentially feeling like folders more than nodes in a network. Maybe I'm just being stupid, but I would love to discuss this a bit next time we work together.