Subject: A complementary science-supported position of understanding
From: "Peter Fellin"
Date: 17 Dec 1996 14:38:06 GMT
This document - "EPT" - a rather encompassing philosophical thesis and
explanatory platform of terms based on established principle and theories,
was written from my vantage-point of "human self-regulatory centredness'
and my partial enlightenment by Primal Theory/Therapy.
Until about 3 years ago (for about 17 years) I sought to arrive at a *to
me* sufficiently intellectually satisfying 'all-encompassing
cognitive-conceptual grasp' - and an as rational a "grasp" as realistically
possible considering what an ambitiously aimed-for "position of
understanding" it was.
I went about my project by scanning and sampling off-the-shelf scientific
and philosophical principles, theories and interpretations of how and why
[and marginally even of 'what'%] "things" are. However, the main focus of
my 'scanning interest' was (and to a degree still is) areas of science that
attempts brain-related explanations for how and why *we humans* are.
-----------------------------------
% The at the same time most basic and most peripheral ingredient of the
'map' (i.e. "EPT") of how I *actually did arrive* at my goal, is the simply
justified and entirely non-religious conclusion that - we and everything
else are "What Is".
[Perhaps I could justify calling it a "MAAP" -which might stand for "Median
(i.e. derived from and/or tolerably aligned with mainstream
scientific-academic positions/interpretations), Accrued (i.e. by the
process of Science as a whole), Anthropocentric Philosophy".]
The complementary "umbrella position of understanding" I have extracted,
accomodates - as I have almost already implied - the not yet arrived at, or
perhaps forever elusive, "TOE physical" aspect of "What Is" [the ultimate
EPT generalisation - 'EPTly' chosen and thoroughly justified]; however,
more centrally, "EPT" covers and contains a unifying explanation and
concEPTualisation of evolutionary and psychobiological causes; NOT JUST
"why and how we are searching for how 'What Is is' in fundamental physical
ways", but much more generally, how and why - from both the perspective of
"environmental<->individual interactions" throughout evolution or i.o.w.
"selective Situations" in phylogeny and "selective Situations" cuing and
selecting instinctive self-regulatory brain-functional and Behavioural
adaptations and prompting more or less sophisticated ways of Learning the
same - it is that we are the ways we are.
----------------------------
In order to begin to explain the core of my - again *merely complementary*
but complementary in some unique ways - position of understanding, I have
to start from somewhere; so would you please try following my thinking
about "Hibernation" in wider-than-konventional sense.
I annotate, however inconsistenly, hibernation in this broader sense -
"HibernationT". [Here and in other instances throughout my formulation of
"EPT", a tagged-on T signifies that Bronkowski's "Tolerance Principle" is
'EPTly' applied (by me) and the capitalized first letter simply indicates a
somewhat unconventionally streched - or, in some other cases, more narrow -
meaning.]
More importantly, I suggest we think of HibernationT not just as a
periodical and relatively regularly environmentally cued functional
(self-regulatory) adaptation affecting the total behaviour and a *lowering
of the metabolic rate* of just about an entire individual, but as a
functional mode and self-regulatory strategy that ranges all the way to
include very finely localized and highly selective inhibitory
control-signals being targeted specifically onto "motivational type
neurons"$ located at any of the physioanatomical levels of our Central
Nervous System (CNS).
$In this ("the EPT") context "motivational type neurons" are more precisely
(yet loosely) described as the entire anatomical and functional extent of
"reticular activating type" neurons in our CNS.
Such neurons are generally (or de facto) scientifically interpreted as
providing an "essential" tonic "energising background" to any Behaviour or
preoccupation - any focus of "actention" - and indeed to any level,
intensity and specific covert and overt sensory-motor and qualitative
"content" of ConsciousnessT [EPT].
[References: Chiefly, but not just, in respect of Alexander Luria's "The
Working Brain", Chapter 2: I have made use of the "descending and
ascending", "specific and diffuse" aspects and other anatomical and
functional characteristics - also including, but referenced from elsewhere,
the transmittor chemistry - of Luria's broader than usual definition of the
"reticular activating system" (within the CNS).]
As much as "reticular type" neurons can accordingly be seen as the
'energizers of ConsciousnessT', the Endorphins (the exitatory but enlisting
the help of inhibitory transmitters) are agents for more or less selective
Unconsciousness.
From the above and from a multitude of other more or less closely related
sources of well established scientific facts and tolerably compatible
interpretations, it follows - hopefully not too "inEPTly" so - that just
about any individual has, and/or can usefully be thought to have, an
"Actention% Selecting System" [EPT] or "ASS" for short.:-> [Please note
that I tactfully DID NOT, although I could have, settle firmly and squarely
on the "Actention% Regulating System of the Encephalon":-).
---------
% "Actention" is a hybrid of "activity" and "attention". It is to be used
in phrases such as "a focus of actention" or "..paying {e.g. "a
futile/maladaptive energy and opportunity-wasting"} actention to..",
etcetera.
"An actention" can imply any distinguishable, simple to arbitrarily
complex (or sophisticated), innate or instinctively aquired/Learnt (as a
result of e.g. social influences/interactions) visceromotor or sensorymotor
and/or emotional and/or cognitive (including philosophical-intellectual)
pursuit, preoccupation, habit, or "orienting reflex type" activity -
Thus the notion includes even a basic and regular vital activity such as:
A. A simple amoeba's limited repertoir of only 3 (or 4#) actentions [out of
4 (or 5) possible 'amoebic' states of being] - i.e. how it 1. flees, 2.
feeds (#4. digests the food) and 3. reproduces; with the only remaining and
by EPT classification possible "non-actentional" state (and, by
complementary EPT definition, "non-ConsciousT" state) of 'amoebic being'
being (when caught-up in an "ICTS type" Situation)- a most prototypal form
of HibernationT.
[What "ICTS" means and stands for will be explained later. Meanwhile it
may be alternatively pronounced - strictly phonetically! and preferably as
would someone with a sloppy Polish accent - 'eeatshits' or 'itchy
situations'.]
B. "Breathing". (Such as regularly done by an individual as as complex as
you or me.)
Actention modules that are not only distinct but clearly incompatible with
each other may obviously share some of their "constituent
actention-submodules"; e.g. the closely repeated action/"basic-level
actention" of "taking a breath" will of course be a shared component of
almost all incompatible higher-level actentions - barring the actentions
whose co-distinguishing characteristic is "the holding of ones breath".
(Many times a mere difference in context can be how one "higher level
actention" can be 'EPTly considered' distinct from another.)
Otherwise, "an ongoing actention" *may or may not* involve a
form/developmental level of brain-functioning that by available evidence is
most typical of, and that we most generally associate with, sufficiently
developed human individuals - i.e. "conscious awarness" (the, from a
McLean'esque perspective, "Cognitive - neocortex[+neodentate]-involving
Level of Consciousness", or the corresponding notion - but one more meant
to be a lable, used/defined for therapeutic-diagnostic purposes, of an
existing or expected *brain-operational mode* - "3rd-line consciousness"
["Primal Man, The New Consciousness", by Arthur Janov and Michael Holden].
----------
In most complex multi-cellular animals the ASS consist of neural "actention
modules" [EPT idea background: E.g. M. Gazzaniga, "The Social Brain" and
Leslie A. Hart's "proster" concept in her "How The Brain Works"].
Even merely potential (or subliminal) such "modules" are organised both in
parallel and hierarchially (in a certain sense); and each transiently
active and "behaviourally dominant" actention occurs by way of complex
internal feedback interactions, many of which are shared by other merely
potential actention modules, and with a great deal of "functural overlap"
between nearly all of them.
Within the ASS, actention modules or "prosters" (from "program structures")
that are mutually incompatible compete with each other through "lateral
inhibition".
[I am describing the ASS regardless how potentially stupendously complex
and mind-boggling the factors involved are. Unless we try to stay
conceptually-schematically on top of (or far enough above) *any* great
complexity, and dip into its details only in a elastically anchored,
controlled and carefully choosen "connected-with-an-overview" fashion, i.e.
for negatively or positively confirmatory "sampling purposes", our
intellectual querying/grasping minds would be quickly overwhelmed and
defeated.]
Each "potentially realised" subliminal actention module is being weighted
by cues from both any existing current as well as past (i.e. stored or
"Conditioned-in") patterns of sensory input (both "exogenous" and
"endogenous" input) and, rather most basically, by genetically
pre-established "weights". Thus "actention selection" as an ongoing process
can be factorised in a summary fashion by being described as: More or less
fleeting or constant "Selective Situational ChalLenges" or "selective
Situations" - the implicite meaning of "Situational" or "a Situation" being
inclusive of all relevant interacting factors - that continously
determinesT which actention modules are to become the more or less
transiently *"dominant"* [The Learning Brain, MIR Publishers, Moscow; 1983
English ed.] within the individual's "matrix" of potentially dominant
(neurophysiologically so) actentions.
-----------------------------
The "competition" is "weighted" by
1. The individual's "naturally selected-in" (or pruned-in) genetic code.
(A rather most basic form of 'weighting', that in turn can be thought to
depend on "the laws and interactions in the realm of fundamental physics.);
2. environmental influences on cell-proliferation and differentiation
during ontogeny;
3. current life-time environmental influences on existing cell functions
and structures;
4. the individual's already occurred (past) adverse, or opportune and
pleasant, life-time influences - through their transformation by way of
different kinds of "memorization changes" into various types of memories;
an the adversity-caused one of these I call CCURSEESS [Janov calls them
Pain with a capital P].
------------------------------------
Apropos the principle of "Natural Selection", the EPT notion of "selective
Situations" has obviously two possible - and compatible - meanings. One
"lived" concurrent meaning, and one "once upon a time lived"
phylogenetically significant meaning.
[Although statistical considerations are appropriate in context of trying
to grasp the process of biological (as well as any pre-biotic stages of)
evolution, in either EPT meanings "selective Situation" is appropriately
thought of as a situation "lived" by a single individual.]
[By the way, I did choose "lived" in preference to "experienced" because of
the latter word's greater associability to "various depths of subjective
and/or self-regulatory experience".]
Also, both meanings requires trying to imagine - as vividly-as-possible -
inevitably-likely-to-have-occurred representative (or typical) examples of
A. phylogenetically decisive Situational Challenges "successfully met" (ie.
ultimately always in a reproductive sense - if by "the skin of the teeth")
by our suitably genetically pre-equipped/adapted and in some cases
"crucially mutated" ancestors. In contrast to 'end-of-the-line individuals'
who were unsuccessful in relation to the very *same (vividly imaginable)
"types"* of "naturally selective (actually lived) Situations". In order to
'save thinking time', when trying to grasp the evolutionary causes behind
how we are, we ought of course to make no more than a passing note of such
"naturally pruned-out" individuals.)
B. Each actention (habits, preoccupations a flight or fight reaction etc.)
of an individual's life-time is likewise being ongoingly Situationally (as
per 1-4) determinedT.
Both these (somewhat overlapping) respects of selective Situations - ie.
"concurrent weighting of the constant competition between actention
modules" and "phylogenetically significant selection-in or out (or pruning
in) by Situations" - are in turn divided (EPTly so) into "Types" of
selective Situations: Opportunity-type (O), Adversity-type (A) and a
key-explanatory subtype of A namely "Hibernation Inducing Type of
Situation/s" [HITS], or an in principle synonymous (more 'prototypal' but
meant to be suitably freely extrapolated) "Irritating Cloud {or,
alternatively, "Inductive of "CCURSEESS"} Type of Situation/s") i.e.
"ICTSs". ("HICTS" is inconsequencial shorthand for "HITS" and "ICTS"
together.).
"Selective Situational Challenges" can be analysed from angles and through
conceptual lenses by which I believe we can recognise, as clearly and as
comprehensively as is ever going to be possible, how "templates" for genes
are put to the test in any "kaleidoscopically chaotic" biosphere by the
"Law of large numbers"; but of course particularly in relation to our
human-ancestral superlineage with its as a matter of fact now existing
Human Condition, etcetera.
The biggest and most complex - and demanding of some preparation by the
user - EPT lens, is AEVASIVE (or AEVASSIVE, or for the occassional ironic
emphasis - EVASIVE)
AEVASIVE is an extraordinarily potent, while - given the above preparation
of otherwise adequatly informed and motivated readers - self-explanatory,
acronym intended for flexible use. It stands for "*Ambi-advantageously
Evolved* Vital {more or less; included for an obvious pragmatic reason}
Actention (Selecting) System Incorporating the Various Endorphins (amongst
any other more or less relevant neurotransmitters modulators and hormons).
AEVASIVE can be used in the sense of being a trend or strange attractor in
evolution and a subprinciple to the principle of Natural Selection; loosely
as an aspect of our physioanatomy, a characterising aspect of human
Behaviour in general, and as an objective and super-balanced and
comprehensive more or less specified judgment about human Behaviour,
cultures.
