• for: self awareness of no-self, adjacency - evolution - no-self - Fransisco Verella, quote - Fransisco Verella, quote - evolution - solidified self, question - awakening to no-self

• quote: Fransisco Verella

  • Evolution has designed you so that you just want to hurry on with your solidified self. They is what the sense of being a separate organism is about.

• date: 1999

• comment

  • Verella claims evolution has designed us to have no self awareness of no-self, the origins of the self.
  • even this phrase seems like an oxymoron 'self awareness of no-self!'
• question
  • how would a less complex, more primitive life form even have self awareness? What does that mean biologically? At that most rudimentary level, I suppose it would mean sensory feedback signals,
• question
  • Does this imply that (emotionally or affectively) awakening to your origins of self leads to second guessing ourselves as well? From observation of the behaviour of awakened individuals, this does not seem to be the case. Rather, authentically awakens individuals appear to be associated with much higher levels of wisdom and compassion, which would seem to confer evolutionary fitness

• for: evolution - forgetting our non-self nature, adjacency - evolution - non-self - Fransisco Verella, adjacency - evolution - no-self - Fransisco Verella

• adjacency between

  • evolution
  • non-self
  • Francisco Verella
• adjacency statement
  • Verella makes the interesting claim that evolution designer is to be blind to our lack of self
  • in fact, major evolutionary transitions in individuality embed the creation of a new higher order individual at each major stage of transition.
  • More fundamentally, major evolutionary transitions to individuals at each level need to define a biological self through a new physiological boundary between what constitutes a new unitary individual "self" (our inner world) and the rest of the environment ( our new outer world)
  • It will be interesting to see how Verella's claim reconcile with that

• for: quote - Fransisco Verella, quote - evolution - no-self

• quote: Fransisco Verella

  • In some sense, a heightened degree of self-awareness is anti evolutionary
• date: 1999

source?

Is there a link to religion and the connection and potential conversation provided by it that provides an evolutionary advantage? Is there a psychological change in attention or self-consciousness?

Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

From Plessner's perspective, even a cell has a constitution of a self.

Salvador, C., Kraus, B., Ackerman, J., Gelfand, M., & Kitayama, S. (2020, April 10). Interdependent Self-Construal Predicts Complacency Under Pathogen Threat: An Electrocortical Investigation. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/t5pg6