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THE INTUITIVE SELF TVUUC Forum Sunday, April 10, 2005

THE INTUITIVE SELF TVUUC Forum Sunday, April 10, 2005. Neil Greenberg Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Tennessee. THE INTUITIVE SELF. KNOWLEDGE of the SELF is largely INTUITIVE SEEKING the SELF is also an important NEED that serves one’s BIOLOGICAL FITNESS

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THE INTUITIVE SELF TVUUC Forum Sunday, April 10, 2005

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  1. THE INTUITIVE SELF TVUUC Forum Sunday, April 10, 2005 Neil Greenberg Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Tennessee

  2. THE INTUITIVE SELF • KNOWLEDGE of the SELF is largely INTUITIVE • SEEKING the SELF is also an important NEED that serves one’s BIOLOGICAL FITNESS • The processes of DISCOVERY and INVENTION of the SELF involve two main SYNERGIES of NEUROBEHAVIORAL FUNCTIONS: • CONSCIOUS and NONCONSCIOUS • CORRESPONDENCE and COHERENCE

  3. MEETING NEEDS • Meeting NEEDS is the basic business of life. When real (or perceived) needs are not met, stress is created. • ALL our biological adaptations have been preserved by natural selection because of their ability to help us meet our needs more effectively and efficiently. • We know we are on the right track when stress is relieved

  4. NEEDS exist in a hierarchy of urgencies. When the most urgent need is met, the organism’s energy is focused on the next need. • Physiology(homeostasis, health) • Safety(security, order, protection) • Belonging( sociability, acceptance, love) • Esteem(prestige, respect, acknowledgment) • Self-Actualization(personal fulfillment)

  5. Self-Actualization • In biological terms, SELF-ACTUALIZATION can be viewed as maximizing one’s BIOLOGICAL FITNESS. • Having a “sense of one’s SELF” serves FITNESS and is manifest in all organisms • The SELF is unaware of its vast repository of experiences and abilities awaiting discovery

  6. Γνωθηι σεαυτονGNOTHI se AUTON To be an effective, competitive organism, we would be wise to follow the advice of the Oracle at Delphi: “Gnothi se auton” (Know thyself) Is this the primal function of art? Of science? the ancient ruins of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. is spread out over the southern slopes of Mount Parnassos, beneath the Phaidriad rocks.

  7. DISCOVERING the SELF Driven by CURIOSITY . . . we determine, we experience, our abilities and their boundaries – our potential

  8. Experience is never limited, and it is never complete . . . it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. -Henry James 1888

  9. The NEED to know your LIMITS KNOWING who you “are” is an artifact of cerebral mechanisms for helping you maximizing your fitness . . . . for being “all you can be!” Emotions and cognition, ART and SCIENCE, intuition and rationality, senses and reason, are ways our minds tell us who we are and exercise and extend our boundaries and potential “Vitruvian Man” by Leonardo – reflects his conviction that all things can be measured

  10. INVENTING the SELF Driven by the urge to CREATE . . . We reconfigure our abilities to cope with new challenges in a changing world.

  11. The NEED to sense your POTENTIAL CREATIVITY involves changes in behavior in which variables not ordinarily associated with each other are related and integrated. It is adaptive (and thus subject to natural selection) because it can facilitate regulatory or advantageous responses to real or perceived challenges “Vitruvian Man” by Leonardo – reflects his conviction that all things can be measured

  12. the “SELF” DESCRIBED? • “An assemblage of more-or-less LATENT and MANIFEST TRAITS that can be focused on the selection and expression of behavioral patterns that help the organism meet its BIOLOGICAL NEEDS.” • Identifying these traits, determining their boundaries, and arranging them in various ways to meet needs of varying urgency is one of the main occupations of human beings.

  13. the “SELF” DESCRIBED? • there are multiple attributes of SELF –including competing attributes, any one of which may dominate. • These ordinarily converge in varying proportion on what we recognize as who we are. • As in other aspects of behavior, each of these has a distinctive development, context, evolutionary history and mechanism of expression.

  14. the “SELF” DESCRIBED? there are several NEUROBEHAVIORAL functions that advance our mission: • DISCOVERY and INVENTION (driven by curiosity) helps us identify traits and assemble them into effective beliefs and actions • “TRUTH” – represents CONFIDENCE that beliefs are valid and is based on neurobiological tests of CORRESPONDENCE and COHERENCE • INTUITION: conscious belief based on NONCONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE

  15. THE TRIUNE BRAIN Paul D. MacLean

  16. Distributed but integrated systems for motivation, affect, and cognition, mediate behavior from reflex to reflection Homeostatic functions and archaic reflexes of motivation are energized by the systems of affect and modulated by more recent systems employing cognition The ensemble represents the self as well as the outside world.

  17. SELF in the BRAIN? Knowledge of “who we are” is distributed throughout the brain LEFT HEMISPHERE Establishes coherence: creates a “stable and internally consistent belief system” (Ramachandran 1998) RIGHT HEMISPHERE frontal lobe appears to contain the "activator" for using and maintaining that knowledge.” (Miller et al 2001) Kant: The senses cannot think, the understanding cannot see.

  18. The SELF in the BRAIN? “While knowledge of who we are is stored throughout the brain, the right frontal lobe appears to contain the "activator" for using and maintaining that knowledge.” (Miller et al 2001) • Of 72 patients studied, damage to the right frontal lobe led to profound personality and lifestyle changes in six out of seven patients.

  19. SO WHAT IS THE “SELF” • A graded integration of nested adaptive abilities that yield a more-or-less unified sense of who we are. • It begins in physiological homeostasis and culminates in “conscious awareness,” all in the service of “self-actualization” • In James’ view, the self consists of • The material Self • The social Self • The spiritual Self

  20. SO WHAT IS THE “SELF” • “internal self” – call it “centripetal,” in which one’s deepest core values are borne, nurtured, reside, and provide an overarching “personality” • “external self” – call it “centrifugal,” in which we test, discover. explore, and exercise our competencies , including our influences on our environments, those around us.These external expressions of inner meaning is sometimes termed the “extrasomatory” self – works of art and science

  21. SO WHAT IS THE “SELF” • the “internal self” is largely UNKNOWN, perhaps UNKNOWABLE • But it has profound affects upon our temperament, personality, choices …our SELVES • adapting Sir Isaac Newton’s famous comment,our conscious awareness is like a pebble on the seashore, whilst the great ocean of our selves lay all undiscovered within us.

  22. HAVE YOU FOUND YOUR SELF?? • The SELF is a CREATIVE WORK IN PROGRESS • Like all human creations, The SELF is a combination of DISCOVERY and INVENTION • The largest part of one’s self is NONCONSCIOUS but accessible

  23. HAVE YOU FOUND YOUR SELF?? • “a great poet . . . is a man who, in his waking state, is able to do what the rest of us do in our dreams” -Schopenhauer OR INVENTED YOUR SELF?? • CREATIVITY involves exercising the connections between primary cognitive processes(dreaming, reverie, psychosis -- unfocused attention associated with low levels of cortical arousal), to more focused secondary process(abstract “reality-oriented” thought involving higher levels of cortical arousal) (Kris 1952)

  24. “The Natural History of the Self" • So the self seems composed of seeming contradictions, paradoxes, in which alternative elements exist in a state of powerful tension • NATURE and NURTURE • FIXED latent GENES and FLEXIBLE manifest TRAITS

  25. “ESSENTIAL TENSION" • TRADITION and INNOVATION • NOMOS and PHYSIS • The world emerges from the fight, the agon, between rationalism and chaos, or between law and nature. The Greeks called these forces nomos (law, order, rationalism) and physis (chaotic nature) • the gods came to bring order to untamed nature’s chaos

  26. The BRIDGE between NATURE and NURTURE

  27. between WHAT IS and WHAT COULD BE

  28. between DISCOVERY and INVENTION

  29. between DREAMS and REALITY

  30. THE ESSENTIAL TENSION • Many behavioral patterns seem to be the outcome of conflicting urges – a kind of natural selection – but these are NOT alternatives – they are reciprocally engaged PARTS OF EACH OTHER . . . • CONSCIOUS & NONCONSCIOUS information converge in the SELF • CORRESPONDENCE (reality-testing) and COHERENCE (cognitive contextualizing) of PERCEPTS

  31. “mystical experiences” • Ineffable: defies expression, cannot be described in words. • Noetic: gives insight and knowledge into deep truths. • Transient: Brief and cannot be accurately remembered, though easily recognized if it recurs. • Passivity: facilitated by preparation, but once begun it seems out of one’s control as if controlled by a superior power William James 1918

  32. Spontaneity • In Zen, a spontaneous outpouring and then “going with the flow” (wu-wei) is indicative of authenticity – “an unmistakable tone of sincerity marking the action which is not studied and contrived (tzu-jan)

  33. Passivity • Robin Williams: "When it works it's like . . . freedom! Suddenly these things are coming out of you. You're in control, but you're not. The characters are coming through you. . . .” • Kurt Vonnegut: It's like watching a teletype machine in a newspaper office to see what comes out.

  34. Discovery • Denise Levertov: Writing poetry is a process of discovery. . . you can smell the poem before you see it. . . . Like some animal. • EM Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” • Robert Frost: “remembering something I didn’t know I knew. . .” • Keats had often "not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after I had composed and written it down"

  35. We see the world not as it is, But as we are . . . (Talmud)

  36. We see the world not as it is, But as we are . . .

  37. We see the world not as it is, But as we are . . .

  38. …and how are we? "A warp in the simian brain....made us insatiable for patterns--patterns of sequence, of behavior, of feeling-- connections, reasons, causes: stories."(Kathryn Morton, 1984) “. . . the need for a narrative is absolutely primal” (Oliver Sacks 1987)

  39. Connections The love of system, of interconnection, which is perhaps the inmost essence of the intellectual impulse . . .” (Bertrand Russell, 1917)

  40. Searching for truth . . . creating connections Se hace camino al andar

  41. Searching for truth . . . creating connections We make the road by walking

  42. "Our life is an appenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens" --Ralph Waldo Emerson

  43. "Our life is an appenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens" --Ralph Waldo Emerson

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