Neuromythography

The Architecture of the Soul

Apologia Neuromythographia

There is a long history of mythography. The difference is that I ground my mythography not solely in self-reflection and prior scholarship, but in interpretation of recent neuroscience. My attitude is worship, grasping to appreciate the self as an expression of the the Creator.

The Chinese deify ancestors. Ancients created gods as a kind of psychology.

Pantheons in Social Science

ism: sociology -ist: political science -ity: economics -tion: psychology -ence: philosophy

Biologists

Biologists name new species after Greek, Roman, and other deities and words

Biologists often name biochemical entities (anandamide) and genes (Noggin, Sonic Hedgehog) with epithets

Astronomers

Astronomers name new celestial objects after mythology

Physicists

Randomness, dimensions

Statistical modeling -> quantum non-realism

Shut up and calculate

Feynman – diagrams made it too simple

Psychology

Neuroscience

Neuroscientists name brain areas after discoverers (diagonal band of Broca, nucleus of Darkschewitz).

fMRI & functional connectivity networks

Philosophy

Leibniz: monads “perpetual living mirrors of the universe”: entelechies, souls (w/memory & perception), spirits (rational souls), God -the monad that perceives all others with perfect clarity

Hegel reified words like Notion, Essence, Other, Being, Nothing, Becoming, Sublation

Sartre

  • Being (être): Including both Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself (both as defined below), but the latter is the nihilation of the former. Being is objective, not subjective or individual.
  • Being-in-itself (être-en-soi): Non-conscious Being. The sort of phenomenon that is greater than the knowledge that we have of it.
  • Being-for-itself (être-pour-soi): The nihilation of Being-in-itself; consciousness conceived as a lack of Being, a desire for Being, a relation of Being. The For-itself brings Nothingness into the world and therefore can stand out from Being and form attitudes towards other beings by seeing what it is not.
  • Being-for-others (être-pour-autrui): Here a new dimension arises in which the self exists as an object for others. Each For-itself seeks to recover its own Being by making an object out of the other.
  • Consciousness: The transcending For-itself. Sartre states that “Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself.”
  • Existence: Concrete, individual being-for-itself here and now.
  • Existence precedes essence. The subjective existence of reality precedes and defines its nature. Who you are (your essence) is defined by what you do (your existence).
  • Facticity (facticité): Broadly: facts about the world. More precisely, the For-itself’s necessary connection with the In-itself, with the world and its own past.
  • Freedom: The very being of the For-itself which is “condemned to be free”. It must forever choose for itself and therefore make itself.
  • Nothingness (néant): Although not having being, it is supported by being. It comes into the world by the For-itself.
  • Reflection (reflet): The form in which the For-itself founds its own nothingness through the dyad of “the-reflection-reflecting”
  • Reflection (réflexion):The consciousness attempting to become its own object.

Derrida: deconstruction: finding demons hiding in between the lines of text. “there is no out-of-context”, giving philosophical license to hordes of successors to maliciously quote people out-of -context in pursuit of political agendas.

Foucault: power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, biopower

Husserl: phenomonology

Intentionality

Intuition

Evidence

Noesis & Noema

Empathy & Intersubjectivity

Lifeworld

Economics

Economists invented the Invisible Hand, animal spirits, MV = PQ, NAIRU. Alfred Marshall’s method: math as story

Anthropology

Strauss: structuralism–mythemes as thesis/antithesis/synthesis

Sociology

August Comte religion of man

Emile Durkheim – social facts

Berger & Luckmann – The Social Construction of Reality

Social Stock of Knowledge, divided into Semantic Fields

Signs & Language construct reality

Society-objective

Intersubjectivity – many realities

Habitualization & institutionalization

Institutions gives roles, symbolic universe -> legitimation

Universe maintenance

Society – subjective

Socialization, conversation, identity

Nomos

Biostatistics

Biological determinism: Evolution, gene fitness, divined by statistics

Galton – correlation; nature vs. nurture binary

Pearson – p-value, correlation coefficient, PCA

Fisher – p-value

Spearman: factor analysis, g – IQ

Psychology

Freud

The unconscious: dynamic, economic, topographic -> unconscious, preconscious, conscious -> id, ego, superego

psychosexuality: oral, anal, phallic

life drive : Eros, death drive : Thanatos

In a footnote of his 1909 work, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five year old Boy, Freud theorized that the universal fear of castration was provoked in the uncircumcised when they perceived circumcision and that this was “the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism“.

Jung

Lacan

Lacan reified words like , and presented an algebra that included the phallic function as an analogy for the sqrt(-1)

French & Raven – Five Bases of Power: Coercion, Reward, Legitimacy, Expert, Referent, Informational

These make sense to sociologists, but miss Seductive, Trust, Moral, Shame, and other powers.

Paleontology

Tethys Ocean, Thalassian Ocean