Attempts to weigh the soul before and after death (18th century)
Attempts to find the seat of the soul (18th century)
Phineas Gage frontal lobe damage (18th century)
The executive function in the brain runs on memes (bigthink.com, 2016)
The flow state occurs when the super ego shuts down (flowgenomeproject.com)
Hypo-frontality enables the flow state, causes attenuation of hippocampal-dendritic connections (Leigh, 2010)
The super-ego as a cultural metaphor for the “legal self”, legal-tribal programing (Freud)
Mental illness is a dys-balance between the self and the tribal self (Nygren)
Hysteria in women when males were the legal masters
Mental illness in homosexuals when straight people were legal masters
The “fight response” treatment as the optimal treatment for mental illness
Hoyle Leigh describes endemic mental illnesses, each originating from a specific legal system (2)
Marshal McLuhan defined two extensions of the organism: Bodily functions and cognitive functions. Making case for third extension: Social functions (Nygren)
Anatomy of the frontal lobe
During the development of the embryo, the telencephalon folds over the diencephalon, and the frontal lobe connects to the thalamus, which connects to the spinal cord.
The frontal lobe has connections both to the body and to the rest of the brain, and is therefore used as the executive function of the brain.
To explain why: If not for the fact that it has the best position to control, another part of the brain would be in control.
The frontal lobe connects to the temporal lobe, and to the amygdala, which connects to the hippocampus, which connects to the associational cortex.
Decision making is a product of emotion, sensory input from the body, and cognition. (Bigthink, 2016)
The third extension of the human organism
The third extension of the human organism, social functions, has been poorly described because we have lacked models for it.
The third extension comes in the form of memes, which is why it has been hard to define.
Law is a narrative, which is filtered through the attention system, facial recognition and tribal identity, and which is “live-ware” as it is continuously fed into the brain via tribal mimicry.
Robin Dunbar put forth The Social Brain Hypothesis (1998), and described how the brain was mainly social.
The reason this third extension has been overlooked is because it runs on memes, and we are not self-aware that our soul is memetic.
The brain swims in an ocean
“The fish is not aware that it swims in the ocean
“The brain is live-ware, it’s always re-wiring its circuitry”
The brain is in constant feedback with the world, where social forces shape it through the mirror system, the interface for legal-cultural programming.
The brain cannot distinguish from your body and the body of a loved one. The only thing separating you from the other person is your skin. (Ramachandran, 2010)
The hippocampus as a memory allocation system
The amygdala is a Read/Write switch, changes the brain from read-only to read+write. The flow-state is a state of re-writing.
Bodily functions and cognitive functions are hard-ware, social functions is software
The reason social functions in the brain have been hard to define is because they come in the form of software. They cannot be seen anatomically, and so have been overlooked.
Just like computer hardware is less big a part of a computer — the software is the important part, so too is the brain as hard-ware less important. The memetic software is where it becomes interesting.
The brain makes models of the world using memetic programming, and syncs these models with the rest of the tribe, achieving a distributed cognitive system through the use of memes.
The human face as a memory storage device, building emotional maps
The face as an organ is capable of encoding memories as it is densely innervated with a large cortical mass storing and processing it. There is a case to be made that the human face is a primary memory storage device, and also an automatic communicator of memories through meme spreading.
“Life is a series of bumping into each other” — Marshal McLuhan
Meme-pools are religions
Belief-systems, storyworlds, models of reality.
Incentives, genetic and memetic imperatives
Examples of genetic imperatives are food, sex, dominance, territory.
Examples of memetic imperatives are intelligence and knowledge and creativity and art and experience and novelty and technology.
Upgrading law to run on memetic imperatives
See Note on basic income and hyper-intelligence
Law which runs on memetic imperatives does not scale using human-based trust-systems (3), because validators were required to uphold the law, and they would have to sacrifice their memetic imperatives in favor of the social order, leading to top-down control through neurosis, working through genetic imperatives such as dominance and thereby inhibiting self-actualization.
With the advent of technology-based trust-systems, there are enough resources for a legal system which runs on memetic imperatives. (4)
Self-determination as a tool for self-authoring
The brain runs on law, narratives, and through self-determination, the brain can detach from mediation, and choose its own path and practice free will, choose which peers to connect with, and be more competitive in the marketplace.
Phineas Gage frontal lobe injury
Decreased frontal lobe functions in mental illness
During obedience, the executive control is moved from the brain onto another brain, which acts as an authority. This is apparent in all social mammals, and works through the serotonin system which regulates social position.
If the authority is coercive and not chosen voluntarily, the frontal lobe will not synchronize with it, but will succumb to be domesticated, leading to decreased function overall.
Results from functional magnetic resonance imaging and lesion studies indicate that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is essential for successful navigation through a complex social world inundated with intricate norms and moral values. Research into behavioral disorders such as Autism, Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Schizophrenia suggests impairment of executive-frontal lobe functioning, affecting the planning, initiation and regulation of goal-directed behavior.
Experiencing self vs. Remembering self
Remembering self is the internal narrative, which is memetic and where law is one form of narrative. Experiencing self is experience, sensory input.
The benefits of SSRIs
SSRIs work through heightening self-esteem. There is a case to be made that self-determination can do this more efficiently and with less side-effects.
References
http://psychiatrist.com/JCP/article/Pages/2011/v72n12/v72n1223.aspx
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Four-Pillars-of-a-Decentral
https://steemit.com/ethereum/@johan-nygren/decentralized-law-on-the-ethereum-state-machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_duplex
On Hoyle Leigh
Hoyle Leigh, psychiatrist and MD, co-created the Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic with Gary Schwartz in the 70s. Wrote the seminal work Genes, Memes, Culture and Mental Illness: Towards an Integrative Model in 2010.
The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry said about his work 5 years ago in 2011:
Dr Leigh’s book is a must-read for those who are fascinated by novel models in mental health.
Reference: J Clin Psychiatry/Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness: Toward an Integrative Model