for - adjacency - pure altruism - selflessness - self / other dualism - individual / collective gestalt - Deep Humanity - biological limitations - evolutionary limitations

adjacency - between - pure altruism - selflessness - self / other dualism - individual / collective gestalt - Deep Humanity - biological limitations - evolutionary limitations - adjacency relationship - From an evolutionary and biological perspective, - the individual organism is district from other organisms and the environment - The individual is defined by a separating boundary and it must exchange energy and materials with it's environment as a necessary condition of survival. It must - receive and input nutrients inputs and - transmit, output and eliminate waste byproducts - The word 'selfless' is a polar abstraction. No individual can be 100% selfless or it would be an act of self-annihilation, a self-destructive act of denying 100% of all inputs necessary for its own survival - Existing as a living, individual organism requires some degree of individual self care - At the same time, the process of sexual reproduction, - in contrast to asexual reproduction - involves two organisms with sperm and egg, and is inherently social - In multi cellular organisms with highly complex social behaviours - such as our species - there is a strong learned component of concern for other as well - Pure selflessness is as rare as pure selfishness - Most of us have degrees of self care and degrees of care for others - Self and other are intertwingled, hence the Deep Humanity terms: - individual / collective gestalt - self / other gestalt

• for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

• paraphrase

  • sense of self is a construct
  • a psychological and social construct
  • it's not something that infants are born with
    • it's actually something that develops as we grow up
  • our caregivers look into our eyes
    • give us a name that we learned to identify with and
    • also basically we learn to see ourselves as they see us
      • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
    • we learned to use language in certain ways
      • mine
      • you
      • yours
      • his
      • hers and so forth
    • that's all very essential to it
  • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
  • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
    • thinking
    • feeling
    • acting
    • reacting
    • remembering
    • planning and
    • tending
  • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
  • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
• I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
  • because the sense of self is a construct
    • because it doesn't refer it
    • doesn't depend on it
    • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity

• this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

  • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
  • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable

• comment

• question
  • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
    • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
    • reference
      • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
        • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?

The duality of self and other is the peculiar symmetrical asymmetry of being human, and possibly of being life itself.

Similarity and differences in the meaning of words between individuals is unavoidable because we all seem to share this quality of consciousness, as well as the quality of experiencing others as objects of our consciousness.

Nature instills the quality of "unique conscious experience" to each of us. Biological replication is the basis for the repetition of this pattern in all members of our species.

Why was I drawn to the content of this youtube, which came from this article interviewing Teodora Petkova: https://medium.com/content-conversations/a-semantic-text-strategy-conversation-teodora-petkova-fa6d8ad7c72f Through this youtube and through the interview with Teodora Petkova, I became aware of Ludwig Wittgenstein's beetle-in-a-box analogy for private thoughts.A meme is reproduced and shared over and over, drawing people who resonate with it.

Hence, my own discovery of this idea demonstrates the mechanics of self and other consciosness. In any rendition of the present, my semantic state has been influenced by countless number of other writers, content developers or consciousnesses, echoing Husserl's Lebenswelt. Once we are bootstrapped into language through a long gestation period of child development, we simply grow our vocabulary of words, and continuously upgrade their individual meaning through the unique experiences of our unique lifeworlds.

This symmetrical asymmetry is a distinct and unique property of the individual human, showing just how entangled the individual is with the collective, the self with the other.

It is said that the most obvious is at the same time the most difficult to see. The metaphor "a fish does not know of the water that surrounds it" is apt. Our symmetrical asymmetry of experience is so universal that its salience and peculiarity is easily overlooked and not explicitly discussed except by the philosophically inclined. It is more often subconsciously felt than made into an explicit subject of discourse. It is recognized as obvious and coming with the territory of being human.

Indeed, we might say that this common peculiarity of the private, subjective world is paradoxically one of the strangest and yet one of the most common at the same time. Its obviousness does not lessen its profound sense of magic.

The fact that we live in these two kinds of worlds, the private inner and the public outer, and that these terms "private inner" and "public outer" are themselves abstractions, also explains how our participation in collective reality may often not live up to expectations.

For example, in a time when the world needs to undergo a monumental whole system change, it is a challenge to mobilize sufficient number of people to drive the needed change. Part of the reason for this could be that the individual pole, the salience of the "private, inner" pole could prioritize it above even such collective action. The ideas and feelings in our own life as an individual, driven by our private inner lives may dominate our individual actions. Getting on with life often supersedes even threats to society.

This is the key to Major Evolutionary Transition - a population of free living individual creatures discover that in teaming up, there is a greater resultant evolutionary fitness, mutualism symbiotic relationship emerges. It becomes so strong over time that the many become a self-replicating one.

The biological self is always defined by a boundary between inner and outer, but in this act of mutualism, the many biological selves join to form a new higher order biological self.

In this way, a multi-cellular species like ours is somewhat like one of those nested Russian dolls.

Indeed, Amanda Robins hypothesizes

https://hyp.is/NyrixELGEeyYWN_d76UNMg/docdrop.org/video/6J-J72GoqhY/

that our species has undergone what she and Peter Nonacs calls Major System Transition (MST). The cultural artifact of inscribed language has made possible a superorganism / supraorganism that has spread across the globe.