Father’s request that mid 30s Daughter get a job contributed to another emotional Conflagration. Was he justified? Yes. Culture-driven evolution has hardwired humans to contribute to the greater good. Parents are hardwired to encourage their offspring to contribute. Rather than go it alone, Father joined Auras with Wife. The collective power of their united Auras impelled Daughter to finally get a job. Hard love is a stressor that increases the anti-fragility of Behavioral Models that are generated by Life’s ID system. Anti-fragility only makes sense in time’s vertical dimension, which enables a holistic sense.
Parents Hard-wired to Encourage Child to Contribute to Culture
United Parent Aura Greater than Individual Father Aura
Dad’s concern for Daughter: Neurotic or Innate?
Stress increases Aura’s Anti-Fragility
Holistic Anti-Fragility & Life’s ID System
I’m analyzing this powerful emotional experience via my ID Model, Auras and Feelings. Why not stick with the tried and true explanations from psychology, religion or philosophy? In contrast with these idea-based modes of understanding, my model with its Auras derives from and is limited by a physiological substrate – the IMPs on the cell membrane.
Does this form of analysis add anything to the mix? Or is it merely another way of saying the same thing? An unnecessary redundancy or a new and valuable insight into human behavior?
Let’s see by stripping off the Layers of Conflagration #2.
Several nights ago, words were exchanged that eventually led to Daughter M experiencing emotional pain. The details, while interesting, aren’t really relevant to this discussion.
Daughter demanded apology from the offending party - me her Father. Boyfriend and Wife immediately and sympathetically sided with Daughter.
But I refused to apologize. Why? 1) My Person felt unjustly accused. More importantly, 2) I felt that this pain would be good for my Daughter.
Why is pain good?
Don’t we want to protect our children from harm? We guard them from sharp objects and bruised knees. Why would I want my Daughter to experience pain?
According to my ID Model, every organism, including the single cell, has a Life Force containing Feelings that motivate the organism to both survive and thrive. These Feelings come in two general forms, protection and growth. These two modes are reflected in our physiological systems.
Protection is but one half of the Feeling polarity; the other being Growth. Frequently pain is associated with Growth.
What growth is hoped for from the pain?
1) Detach from isolating Mental Constructs so that she can align more fully with Direct Experience.
2) Community service.
Let’s examine the second of these under the light of Auras.
My article on Galileo’s Relics developed the notion that humans revere individuals who make a significant contribution to human culture – for instance saints, artists, reformers, entertainers, scientists and political leaders. This reverence extends to any material object that was close to them, e.g. their possessions and bones in the case of Galileo. As Wife Laurie stated reverently regarding a Jimi Hendrix artifact exhibit: “His atoms and molecules might still be there.”
This reverence for relics dovetails with the culture-based evolution thesis. Namely: humans are the dominant life form on our planet because of our ability to pass on cultural technology from generation to generation. The increasing complexity of these survival technologies over the ages has resulted in a larger brain and weaker body. Ultimately our social intelligence has far surpassed our individual intelligence.
Our reverence for relics is a reflection and recognition of the importance of cultural technology. We revere and almost worship those who have contributed the most. Due to the widespread collection of relics and relic-type objects, e.g. Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and guitars made from the home he lived in, it seems that our respect for cultural contributors is hardwired into our human gene pool. This gene collection associated with the admiration and worship of significant contributors to human success would have a later evolutionary accretion, i.e. unique to our species and responsible for our ecological success.
If we are hardwired to admire individuals who assist the collective species, it seems likely that parents are also hardwired to want their children to contribute to culture in some way. We feel that it is our responsibility to ensure that they contribute to the level of their ability.
Indeed, this urge is not necessarily even associated with the good of the child, but rather for the good of the culture. In fact, the child’s happiness, while probably linked to social contribution, is probably secondary to cultural contribution. Witness parents encouraging, even pressuring, their sons to risk their lives by going to war as soldiers. This seemingly innate urge also explains the long arduous hours of study and practice that individuals are willing to go through to become doctors, lawyers and professors. It also explains my solitary pursuit over my lifetime of a paradigm shift that will revolutionize human thought. Not the money, not the fame, not the power (too old for these things to matter anymore).
These are primordial Feelings, in that they not culturally induced. We don’t learn them after birth. Rather the admiration for contributors and the urge to contribute is already there as we pop out of our mother’s birth canal. Similarly, we parents are likewise hardwired to want success for our children, in the sense that we want them to be social contributors to the level of their ability.
I have a personal example that is relevant to these constructs.
Recall that Feelings drives our Aura’s interaction with environmental Information. Indeed our ID system revolves around Feelings. Attention is the sensory/motor apparatus that fuels the system with information. Mind analyzes the incoming image streams to both decide between competing Feelings determine how best to satisfy these Desires. Intention is the tool for execution.
Feelings drive my Aura to interact with my Daughter’s Aura – to push her to up her game. Partly for her good – health and mental stimulation; partly for the good of our culture. The Culture or Group Aura contains the habitual sensory motor responses that have developed and are developing ever since our homo species, with the capacity to pass on info (cultural technologies) over generations came on the scene. As a tolerant, compassionate, intelligent person, her Aura would exert a positive influence on any Group Aura that she belonged to.
In this regard, the pain that comes from words could encourage her to transcend her current status. Risking separation, my Aura seeks to push Daughter’s Aura to the Group Aura.
Instinctive Innate Feelings drive my Aura, not Mind. Emotions, Nature’s way of motivating action, emerge unbidden from the depths – perhaps ignited by a sensory experience, an image, or a thought.
What does the ID perspective add to the dialogue?
It is simpler as it is linked to the Matter/Attention synergy – the cell membrane’s IMPs and Life’s ID System. It is straightforward – neither convoluted brain terminology ala Damasio and his colleagues, the cognitive science community; nor esoteric psychology. The concepts are something anyone can understand, that is everyone but scientists who have myelin covered neural networks (no flexibility- all reflex) due to long term exposure to the same material.
Reviewing: our Aura has a physiological substrate. The Aura is the emanation of the Collective Attention that emerges from the collective firings of the IMPs, the cell’s sensory motor apparatus. Our Aura includes the Habit Patterns developed over our lifetime combined with our current Feelings-driven Passions. Rather than reactive, Attention-based Aura has an interactive relationship with information.
A previous section developed the notion that joining Auras magnifies power. Multicellular organisms like ourselves and disembodied organisms such as countries were offered as general examples of this power. Now let us present a personal example.
When a group of individuals presents a united front, (Auras united) their agenda is unstoppable, or at least very powerful. This analysis applies to those in charge: management, political leadership and parents. It also applies to the underclass when fighting against injustice: unions, women, slaves and indigenous people. When the Auras of the leadership or underclass aren’t united behind their common cause, this division severely impacts the strength of the collective Aura. ‘United we stand; divided we fall’ is a common expression of this sentiment. An individual has a hard time influencing cultural mores, while the power of the collective culture to influence our behavior is enormous. Now let us apply this analysis to the family.
Due to decades of self-involved creativity, I neglected my fatherly role regarding my daughter. After retirement, I decided to assert myself regarding jobs or lack thereof. I felt that it was time for self-sufficiency. I spoke up. Rather than achieving the intended effect, my words to said daughter just seemed to create tension between us.
As an individual, even though the father, I realized that I have very little influence over my daughter. My individual Aura simply doesn’t have enough power to change her adult Aura.
But then due to my fight with Laurie (recounted above), I had the insight. Rather than going it alone – expressing my individual Feelings, it was much more important to align with Wife/Mother Laurie – the source of my happiness. As a side benefit, we as a united couple have much more power.
By myself, I was fighting a losing battle. Rather than focus upon my daughter, I needed to get Laurie on my side. If not, abandon the struggle. While my personal power is not enough, the strength of our united Aura has the strength to pull Daughter’s Aura along in its wake. The Collective Power of our joined Auras has the potential to free Daughter from destructive habit patterns – that reinforce themselves with each repetition. It is imperative to take action now. Focus the power of our joined love (the merged mental energy of our united Attention) to change her course of action – before it’s too late. It’s never too late.
The illusion of personal individual power is misleading/deceptive. Individual Auras just aren’t that strong. However joining together with others has the power to change the world, or at least unite the family. Aligning with my Wife’s Aura strengthens the Power of our Parental Aura to influence my Daughter’s Aura – to alter her behavioral probabilities.
Major evolutionary principle: Humans have become the dominant Life Form on the planet primarily because of culture-based, not genetic, evolution. While cultural and genetic evolutionary factors interact, culture leads. Culture is casually defined as the collective social intelligence that is associated with the transmission of information across generations – from parents to children for eons. Our superior ability to transmit what we have learned to the next generation distinguishes us from other species and allows us to dominate Earth’s eco-sphere.
In fact, our bodies have evolved to become weaker and fatter to allow our social intelligence to grow. In order to better take advantage of increasingly complex cultural transmissions, our brains had to change physiologically in two major ways. First, the need to retain more information resulted in a larger brain size with greater connectivity between the dendrites and axons of our neural networks.
Second, the need for mental flexibility, i.e. less instinct and more choice, led to a smaller percentage of mycelinized neural networks. Mycelin coats neurons to generate rigid unchangeable habit patterns. The more evolutionarily primitive a life form the higher percentage of these instinct based reflex patterns. In order to take in new cultural, non-genetic, information, humans have the highest percentage of unrestrained neural networks.
Further this increased brain size with all its connectivity also required a greater percentage of the biological energy generated by the body. Human brains consume up to a third of the body’s energy, while the brains our closest competitors, the apes, only consume about an eighth of their body energy. In order to make this change, Nature reduced our muscles and increased our capacity to store fat.
Aside: Reasoning backwards. We assume that the original bacterium had most habit patterns firmly in place. Almost all behavior of this first life form was instinctual with little flexibility (probably less than a percent of a percent cubed or some such very small nearly infinitesimal number.) Over billions of years, Nature worked on this tiny percentage of freedom in this almost completely reflexive creature, gradually magnifying the mental flexibility that enables more sophisticated choices.
Eventually, the huge jump is made to the lightly mycenalized human brain. Rather than exclusively genetic factors as with most other life forms, it was this mental flexibility that was necessary to pass on an increasingly sophisticated cultural technology that transformed us from brawny apes to weak, fat creatures with big brains.
This is a fairly stable scientific factoid, resisted only by those scholars whose neural networks have been coated with mycelin – due to a singular focus upon an insulated topic surrounded by academic dogma for their entire careers. We take culture-based evolution and the concepts surrounding it to be a scientific fact.
Aforementioned Father daughter - Parent /Child sequence. It is natural and innate for parents to both want their children to advance culture and to attempt to motivate their children in this direction.
There is another factoid that also applies to all Life Forms, including Cells. Stress strengthens Life’s anti-fragility, both physically and mentally. Anti-fragility is the ability of living forms to get stronger, rather than weaker, from stress.
This property is unique to living systems. Stressing exclusively material systems does not make them stronger. Indeed they might break – an indication of their fragility.
Physical example: Placing periodic stress upon the heart and muscles through exercise makes them stronger. Life tends to overreact to stress. In other words, organisms tend to over-bolster the stressed systems – rendering them able to withstand an even larger strain.
This overreaction is probably an evolutionary development. Those organisms that overreacted survived because they had generated better defenses for the next extreme event. Those organisms that saved energy by not over-reacting were overwhelmed and perished when the next event was even more extreme than the last one.
This over-reaction process also occurs on a mental/psychological levels as well. Low levels of intermittent social pressure strengthen our techniques for dealing with stress. When a bigger stressor inevitably comes along due to the vicissitudes of time, we are more able to cope and handle this new attack, both physically and mentally.
Due to the importance of anti-fragility for any organism, it behooves parents to resist protecting their beloved offspring from all stress. Rather than always defend and protect, it is frequently appropriate for parents to actually put some stress on their children to move them into growth mode.
Increasing the anti-fragility of the Child's Aura (the sensory motor apparatus for dealing with environmental circumstances) via intentional stressors is a healthy strategy. Strengthening the Child's Aura strengthens the Family Aura. In turn, a stronger Family Aura is better equipped to withstand and survive the coming Ecological Apocalypse - that was created by the over-reaction of our cultural technology.
Or is this just a fancy rationalization for an over-reaction and-or neurotic behavior on my part?
How does anti-fragility relate to our ID system?
Anti-fragility is a holistic quality. Fragility only makes sense from the perspective of a complete whole. Living systems are holistic; material systems are atomistic. While we might dissemble atoms and molecules into their components, we don’t or can’t break them. Anti-fragility only applies to systems that can die or break. While transformable, Matter doesn’t die.
Life is the interaction of Body and Mind. Let us see how anti-fragility applies to each in turn.
Unless it dies or breaks, Body becomes stronger with stress – more anti-fragile. She strengthens her appropriate systems to deal with future stressors. In fact, Body overreacts, in the sense that she builds defenses that are able to withstand stresses that are stronger than the original stress. The more anti-fragile our Body is, the greater her ability to prolong life and stave off inevitable death.
Mind also becomes more anti-fragile with stress. What does this entail? As mentioned in another Notebook, Mind generates Behavioral Models from Experience. One of the functions of these Models is to enable him to better deal with environmental stresses. After the first stress, Mind generates a rudimentary Model; after the second stress he generates a more sophisticated Model; and so on and so forth. As each Model is refined, Mind become more anti-fragile.
Let us offer a bicycle example. The first time around a curve, the bicyclist might take it too wide. The second time, the bicyclist adjusts his angle to become safer. As his parameters narrow, he is able to go faster and faster while still being safe. The repeated stress of going around a curve increases the anti-fragility of Mind’s Behavioral Model.
Of course, the Models that become more anti-fragile are based in Experiences which derive from Life’s ID system. In such a way, antifragility is a quality that is unique to living systems and requires an ID system. Further it applies to both Body’s physiological systems and Mind’s Models.