Category: Spirituality

Categories
Psychology Spirituality Intelligence

The Poison of Caged Intelligence

In my travels I have met people of great intelligence. Many congregate in academia, but not as many as academics are wont to think. Sadly, I am often reminded after such encounters of a passage in Olaf Stapledon’s book Odd John. Odd John is “a story between jest and earnest” about a mutant boy of superior intelligence, how he made his way in the world, and how he went in search of his own kind and self-determined his own end. In one episode of his searches for fellow comrades, John stumbled upon a handicapped boy stewing a wicked brew of resentment…

Within the first five minutes of my visit he spotted me as different from the others. He got me telepathically. I got him too, but he shut his mind up immediately. Now you’d think that finding a kindred spirit for the first time ever would be an occasion for thanksgiving. But he didn’t take it that way at all. He evidently felt at once there wasn’t room for him and me together on the same planet. 

Presently I began to ask myself what sort of a devil this baby Satan really was. Was he one of ‘us,’ or something quite different? But there was very little doubt in my mind, actually. Of course he was one of us, and probably a much mightier one than either J. J. or myself. But everything had gone wrong with him, from conception onwards. His body had failed him, and was tormenting him, and his mind was as crippled as his body, and his parents were quite unable to give him a fair chance. So the only self-expression possible to him was hate. And he had specialized in hate pretty thoroughly. But the oddest thing about it all was this. The further I got away from the experience, the more clearly it was borne in on me that his ecstasy of hate was really quite self-detached. He wasn’t hating for himself. He hated himself as much as me. He hated everything, including hate. And he hated it all with a sort of sacred fervour. And why? Because, as I begin to discover, there’s a sort of minute, blazing star of worship right down in the pit of his hell. He sees everything from the side of eternity just as clearly as I do, perhaps more clearly; but–how shall I put it?–he conceives his part in the picture to be the devil’s part, and he’s playing it with a combination of passion and detachment like a great artist, and for the glory of God, if you understand what I mean. And he’s right. It’s the only thing he can do, and he does it with style. I take off my hat to him, in spite of everything. But it’s pretty ghastly, really. Think of the life he’s living; just like an infant’s, and with his powers!

The Shadow of Oxytocin

The stereotypical pencil-necked ‘nerd’, who grew up in soft, comfortable environs, enviously living in the shadow of more socially-successful people, often fits this description. No self-authored person ever exhibits this attitude.

In the Middle Ages, clerics recognized a depression-related phenomenon called scrupulosity, suffered by Martin Luther and perhaps best exemplified by Jesuit founder St. Ignatius of Loyola:

After I have trodden upon a cross formed by two straws … there comes to me from without a thought that I have sinned … this is probably a scruple and temptation suggested by the enemy.

St. Ignatius of Loyola

It is not a coincidence that both the founder of Protestantism and the founder of the Jesuits suffered from scrupulosity and founded movements that became “left-wing”. This will be explored in a future article.

Such people in these times, thanks to the ample arsenal of rhetoric developed over the past hundred years, restyle their resentment as a perverse kind of altruism. This type of preacher situates themselves as selfless allies fighting oppressive systemic structures on behalf of fetishized oppressed communities. Alternating between self-loathing, envy, and inviting others to cathartically join in denunciations, the crybully goads retaliation and then plays the victim. Such people project their darkness as justice, embracing the role of the Hebrew satan (the accuser), whom the God of the Old Testament sent to test the worthiness of the supposedly faithful.

This is part of the shadow of oxytocin, the Spirit of Community.

The Shadow of Vasopressin

At another end is a smaller group tends to embrace some combination of an eschatological streetcorner preacher persona urging the repenting of sin before the end times, a late-19th century brand of evolutionary psychology, or various anti-establishment conspiracy theories. These people are known for their emotional unavailability and distaste for displays of vulnerability. These tend to flame out of academia and become lonely cranks, crying out in the desert, frustrated by their impotence in the world. Sometimes, they snap and go out in a blaze of glory, tragically often taking innocent others with them.

This is part of the shadow of vasopressin, the Spirit of Dominion.

These are both dark holes to avoid falling into. Basic healthy disciplines–exercise, diet, sleep hygiene, constructive creative activity, engaging with constructive people, and becoming galvanized to the acidic vapors of unhealthy people–go a long way towards keeping their own spirit clear of these tarpits.

Categories
Nutrition Spirituality

The Neural Correlates of Spiritual Fasting

It has often been observed that fasting brings on a tranquil, contemplative state of mind. Prophets famously entered the desert to fast for days. In modern times, fasting is known to bring on a ketogenic energy cycle, and many people attest to the power of fasting to alter their mind state.

A recent study caught my eye that provides an intriguing connection. The title is Phase-locking of resting-state brain networks with the gastric basal electrical rhythm.

The enteric nervous system is a separate nervous system in the lining of the gut. It originates from parasympathetic and sympathetic neurons that colonize it from the neural crest during embryogenesis. The neurons there oscillate at a rhythm of 0.05 Hz, a lower frequency than any rhythm found regularly in the brain. The brain and the enteric nervous system communicate bidirectionally through the vagus nerve. Interestingly, the right and left vague nerve are not symmetric, and stimulating one side or the other has different effects.

It has recently been discovered that there is a gastric network in the brain itself that responds to the enteric nervous system. The study above identified three functional networks that are phase-locked to the gut rhythm:

The precuneus-centered network is in the left-most column.

In the network marked DMN_b, the area of highest activation appears to map to the following Neuromythograph areas:

  • 7m (OBJECTIVE POV) (specifically a subarea 7md (ACTOR)
  • 7PM (Herodotus, the Greek epic historian)
  • PCV (Left: OTHER-PERSPECTIVE / Right: MIND’S EYE AUTOBIO RECALL)
7m

7m is a large precuneus area that has an epithet OBJECTIVE POV. It seems to be related to third-party and the mythical ‘objective’ point of view.

7PM

7PM is engaged when recording and recounting historical experience. Herodotus of ancient Greece was considered the first historian.

PCV, as best I can tell, corresponds to a certain imaginary visual perspective. On the left it is responsible for imagining a scene from another perspective. Thus the epithet OTHER-PERSPECTIVE. On the right it manages autobiographical recall of ‘the mind’s eye’.

Side note: the 1st-person/3rd-person pronoun-confusion symptom of autism relates to underactivation in this same precuneus area.

Here is the interesting part. The rhythm of the gut brain entrains the rhythms of a specific cognitive brain region–the historian, the perspective-taker, and visualization of the past and others’ perspectives. This is really interesting physical connection between fasting and the spiritual experience of fasting that awaits further scientific exploration.

Categories
Uncategorized

anagogy

Anagogy  is the “reasoning upwards” (sursum ductio), when, from the visible, the invisible action is disclosed or revealed. In medieval theology, anagogy was the heaven-projecting complement to the earthly-projecting allegory. Anagogical reasoning has been deprecated in modernity; indeed, such reasoning is often derided as “woo” or “magical thinking”.

In the eastern mystical traditions, anagogical reasoning is only accessible from a state of enlightenment. In the Jewish Essene cult that was contemporaneous with conservative Sadducee and leftist Pharisee schools, the highest form of Scripture interpretation was called ‘inspired exegesis’.

Neuromythography revives anagogy as a first-class reasoning method, but instead of Scripture it is applied to the scientific literature and the brain. This may sound to some like madness, to which one can reply by invoking Emily Dickinson:

Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –

— Emily Dickinson
  • Tags
Categories
Spirituality

Neuromythography for Atheists

The inner mechanisms of a watch, made by a watchmaker.

A recent Aeon essay by biologist Michael Levin and philosopher Daniel Dennett caught my eye:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas

I greatly relish the opportunity to attest that neuromythography is inspired by the same spiritual yearning expressed by well-known outspoken atheist, Daniel Dennett, even if he would chafe at the word ‘spiritual’.

What Dennett calls an ‘intentional stance’ is very similar to the personification stance of neuromythography, as we shall see. Anyway, after Levin and Dennett completes a fairly technical exposition of planarians, developmental programs, and bioelectric epigenetics, they offer an apologia:

[…] isn’t all the talk of memory, decision-making, preferences and goal-driven behaviour just anthropomorphism? Many will want to maintain that real cognition is what brains do, and what happens in biochemistry only seems like it’s doing similar things. We propose an inversion of this familiar idea; the point is not to anthropomorphise morphogenesis – the point is to naturalise cognition. There is nothing magic that humans (or other smart animals) do that doesn’t have a phylogenetic history. Taking evolution seriously means asking what cognition looked like all the way back. Modern data in the field of basal cognition makes it impossible to maintain an artificial dichotomy of ‘real’ and ‘as-if’ cognition. There is one continuum along which all living systems (and many nonliving ones) can be placed, with respect to how much thinking they can do.

Neuromythography naturalizes cognition by blatantly and flamboyantly anthropomorphizing morphogenesis. Exciting things happen when you embrace this ‘useful fiction’. Levin, and especially Dennett, are wont to defend themselves against the ‘mortal sin’ of anthropomorphism as established by modern academic norms. Within the framework of neuromythography, we create a ‘safe space’ for anthropomorphism as a mental tool for comprehending and reasoning with such a large concept interaction network (thousands of entities, tens of thousands of connections), and simply do not worry about discourse police handing us a card from their fallacy collectible card game deck. Such people are like critics who attend a theater performance and scoff at the audience for believing that the fake blood was real while engaging the performance. They don’t get what we are doing, because they are too busy puffing themselves up to be open to introspecting and contemplating.

Levin expresses a form of ‘As Above, So Below’:

Agents can combine into networks, scaling their tiny, local goals into more grandiose ones belonging to a larger, unified self. And of course, any cognitive agent can be made up of smaller agents, each with their own limits on the size and complexity of what they’re working towards.

The idea of the body, and specifically the brain, as a hierarchical colonial organism is a central concept within neuromythography. Each character has a role to play, interacting with its neighbors local and remote. Neuromythography also posits that brain nuclei generally have a restricted behavioral function, and that heterogeneity in brain area behavior across experiments is a hint that there exist further cell groups to be distinguished inside of the brain area in question.

Levin and Bennett conclude:

From this perspective, we can visualise the tiny cognitive contribution of a single cell to the cognitive projects and talents of a lone human scout exploring new territory, but also to the scout’s tribe, which provided much education and support, thanks to language, and eventually to a team of scientists and other thinkers who pool their knowhow to explore, thanks to new tools, the whole cosmos and even the abstract spaces of mathematics, poetry and music. Instead of treating human ‘genius’ as a sort of black box made of magical smartstuff, we can reinterpret it as an explosive expansion of the bag of mechanical-but-cognitive tricks discovered by natural selection over billions of years. By distributing the intelligence over time – aeons of evolution, and years of learning and development, and milliseconds of computation – and space – not just smart brains and smart neurons but smart tissues and cells and proofreading enzymes and ribosomes – the mysteries of life can be unified in a single breathtaking vision.

Neuromythography takes up the banner of this spiritual sentiment–a search for meaning within evolution–and assembles the contents of the bag of mechanical tricks into pleasing motifs that (hopefully) reveal the mind of the Creator. By Creator we mean the universalist god of Einstein and Spinoza. As Einstein described it:

Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. […] This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as “pantheistic” (Spinoza).

Neuromythography is a pantheistic reinterpretation in the metaphorical form of ‘magical smartstuff’ as Levin and Dennett put it, but with anthropomorphisms held loosely so that they can be cast away in favor of aesthetically better ones as new scientific evidence emerges. Importantly, we agree with Levin and Bennett that the life of the mind and of society must ultimately reflect the physical wetware that lies inside of our heads, and the programmed biochemical milieu from which those ensemble effects emerge. Social theorists often handwave away biological facts they do not like as ‘biological essentialism’, but it is heartening to see a rather strident atheist such as Daniel Dennett embrace modern biology’s richer view of epigenetics and evolution. Many science journalists see themselves as defending against an ignorant creationist menace, and are resistant to any sort of inquiry that is not structured in the form of an imagined selection mechanism for random DNA copying errors. A more informed view of the deep motifs within biology is, ironically, required to be open to embracing neuromythography.

There will be those that label neuromythography as ‘crypto-creationist’ or somesuch. I think that this is like labeling a modern microprocessor as an ‘Arithometer‘–defensible in the most general and reductive sense, but far from descriptive. For the neuromythographer is as far evolved from the creationist as man is from the lancelet.