RIP TIDE

This is meant to be a check list of new ideas that have thrown us into a sea change that leaves many people dislocated, tumbled, and drowning.

BASIC CONCEPTS THAT MOST PEOPLE DON’T GRASP:

1. Every thing changes all the time. Nothing stays the same. On some level everything that seems solid and permanent is really roiling and moving. Quantum mechanics tells us the solid chair that can hold our weight is actually whirling bits of energy.

2. Binary thinking must be questioned. It is the product of Roman debate that only addresses some issues and encourages conflict. It has become embedded in our language.

3. Edges, limits and boundaries have been erased. If there is such a thing as a “beginning” or “end” of existence it is beyond human comprehension and therefore “soteriology” or “teleology” are useless speculation. Both time and space now have no perceivable limits.

4. Under the presumed “reality” of Cartesian, Newtonian, and even Darwinian thought systems, there is another system called Quantum Mechanics that is entirely different and yet determines the other systems. It is not directly observable and in some ways takes the place occupied by religious determinism in earlier times: inscrutable but impossible to escape.

HUMAN BEINGS

1. Humans exist as processes in action acting against/with their environment. They are complex, “plastic,” and temporary. Yet they are the sum of everything that came before and affect what will happen in future.

2. Our understanding is shaped by the way brains work. They are scientifically said to work on the basis of metaphor systems that develop from experience, which is to say what the senses bring to the brain and how well the evidence produces systems that were effective in the past and are presumed to be effective in the future.

3. Humans are animals but “plus” their prefrontotemporal brain load which adds consciousness, morality, self-government, art, and empathy. This does NOT eliminate all the aspects of mammals that were already present, even some that are no longer useful or even deadly. Some animal traits, like instinctual care for children and protection of family, should be kept.

SURVIVAL

1. Evolution is only an account of what has worked so far and therefore leaves out the great bulk of beings who failed or were overcome by changing times. They are not irrelevant.

2. Survival is always two-fold and hard to reconcile between what is individual and what is group survival. Democracy comes close to getting the balance right, but it may not survive because it may not be wanted by some individuals willing to destroy the group.

3. One wing of thinking claims that individuals must be protected for the sake of the whole in terms of diseases, policies, law and order, births, longevity. This will ultimately protect the whole. This is framed as morality.

4. The other wing declares that powerful individuals endanger the struggle between two communities and that one community should be justified in both eliminating troublemakers and dominating other communities. Their morality is based on self-protection.

5. Ever since the advent of meiosis, the nature of sex has been the most key aspect of survival on both individual and community levels. Basic reproduction IS survival. The advantage usually goes to the individual most driven or enticed, but not always. Even the lack of fertility can contribute to the survival of the community, which can be destroyed by over-proliferation, exceeding the carrying capacity of the ecosystem.

6. Both war and terrorism drive sex and death. Insemination goes up, successful gestation, birth and rearing go down. Survival has always been partial. Until it isn’t. Planet-wide and ocean-wide changes in chemistry can eliminate all living things and has in the past. There wasn’t always enough oxygen.

ATTACHMENT

1. Something happens in the brain, constructed of experience and sensing the world until it is built into the sense of what one is. Maybe it’s a little all-senses map, but it is recorded in the cells and goes back early in mammal history to cubs in burrows knowing where to go “home” and who one’s “mama” is.

2. It is deep and “instinctual” because it is key to survival, the basis of “family” which is the grassroots of culture. The way we are living now is weakening this.

3. When attachment was weakened, culture moved in to strengthen the impulses with yearning stories about mother-love, father-guardians, children — oh, the children. But still the wars and famines.

Attached as we might be to our homelands and “our own rooms”, time moves on, pushes us out, and demolishes the house. Actual attachment becomes displaced by the need for attachment and makes us vulnerable to despots.

EMPATHY

1. A scientist named Porges discovered a third strand to the Vagus nerve that connects the double autonomic nervous system directly to the brain. This strand carries message to and front the areas an artist would use to make a portrait, a “Frame of Expression” that includes the face, the voice, hearing, shoulders, breathing lungs and beating heart. This area expresses the thoughts and feelings of the person, and a second person (or even a pet) can pick up what it expresses, even without any words.

2. Expressions that are positive can be called “Love” and if they include attachment can lead to sexual relationship. Our culture confuses “love” with both sex and control.

3. Technical empathy is not what most people think of, which is usually more like sympathy. This human ability lets one person participate in the thoughts and feelings of another human. It is dependent on the pre-frontal cortex — but also rooted deep in the mammalian attachment to the world and the establishment of identity so as to recognize someone like oneself.

4. Some thinkers are exploring the idea of the “extended mind.” They reason that friendship circles and work circles mean that people can share themselves with each other, become of one mind. They see that a computer can extend a person’s knowledge the same way as memory, and reason that through writing or videos or maybe arts people can share feeling and insight.

SOCIAL SYSTEMS

1. Mafia, religion, politics, family systems, clubs, teams, work. proximity, common goals — all these things can develop attachment, identity, shared minds, in systems that make survival of the groups more likely. Until they don’t. Despite peace, they can just fall apart or become irrelevant.

2. We are living through a major “sea change” in the way we think, the information we hold, and what has meaning for us. The process itself — which most people never expected — is changing our society deeply.