Entry 475 — My Brain Is Still Working
I say my brain is still working, although the rest of my body isn’t doing all that well, because last night I had one of the Brilliant Ideas I’ve been having more than once a year since I was around 25. Possibly earlier than that, too, I can’t remember. I remember the ones that were not only brilliant but turned out to lead to fairly decent understandings. For me. It’s still unknown whether they’ll ever be understandings for the world. Or so I perhaps alone in the world say. It seems to me that more and more certified scientists are confirming some of them from forty years ago. The latest issue of Scientific American, which I haven’t yet seen, may have. It’s being advertised as having an article about a new theory of dreams. The one set of my ideas I’m most confident are valid is the one of dreams. I think I have a “page” here on it. I’m curious enough about how close the theory described in Scientific American is to it to actually buy a copy if I can get myself to Books-a-Million, the only local place that would have copies, as far as I know.
I’m writing here of my verosophical ideas. I feel like the ideas I have for new poems (and I’ve come up with two new ones of those the past two nights, too!) are something else, although I don’t see why they should be. Anyway, my latest brilliant verosophical idea is that among the innate Jungian “urceptual others” that I posit neurophysiological exist in the brain, is one representative of the Tribe. “The Urceptual Judge,” I tentatively call it.
It is the most complicated of the urceptual others but could be beautifully explanatory of a lot of questions I’ve been trying to answer for quite a while, including exactly what a person’s internal “god” might be. I’ve always considered the urceptual authority figure to be the basis of that, but not see that it may be a combination of the authority figure and the Judge.
It will take me a while to get all this straight, but I came up with the Judge when thinking about psychopaths. The authorities go along with me in believing such people simply to be those lacking empathy–which for me would be those lacking urceptual others. That got me thinking about altruism, which the authorities again agree with me in taking to be based on empathy and biologically advantageous for the tribe, if not for the individual, not that it can’t be for the individual, as well.
I’ve always had trouble making altruism the sole way an individual can turn collectivist. For some reason, last night, it hit me that another way an individual can work for the good of his tribe in spite of its depriving him of many individual happinesses is the way I keep thinking I do, by working for a sense of making an important cultural contribution. That led fairly quickly to the question of how, neurophysiologically, would an individual experience such a sense of cultural accomplishment, a valid sense of it?
It took longer for me to sort that out, but not too long (if not yet with any thoroughness): his Judge tells him when he’s done good for the tribe. So, do psychopaths lack a urceptual judge, too? Or are there two kinds of psychopaths, each with a different deficit? I’m unsure. I sometimes think that almost no one has a urceptual judge, but that’s silly. I think that because so few have one as extreme as I feel mine is–i.e., while I need to have outdone Beethoven and Aristotle both, most people are satisfied with having raised a family, and helped a reasonably valuable business, or the equivalent, going for a reasonably length of time.
Let me say here, before I forget, that my theory of urceptual puppets, is not the clearest part of my overall theory of psychology. I’ve never worked out a description of it I’m even half-happy with. But I think it worth doing a bad job of describing than keeping to myself until I have a better grasp of it. So here goes try number one to delineate the Urceptual Judge.
He begins before birth as one of an individual’s many urceptual others, each of them a sort of stick-figure puppet with connections to the Primary Urceptual Other and (perhaps) to the Urceptual Self. I’m not sure what I’ve said about this before, so may well contradict myself. Probably have before.
I think I think that the Primary Urceptual Other divides into . . . three? urceptual others, one good, one neutral, one bad. The good one tends to imitate via one’s Urceptual Self’s neuroconnections to it. The bad one either attacks or flees from, unconnected to it. The neutral one, if it exists (I just added it to my crew now), connects to each of the other two Others, but is inhibited from using those connections until its stimulus (some real other in the external environment) proves itself good or bad, which will open the appropriate connections.
Seems to me I’m saying the neutral Urceptual Other is the Primary Urceptual Other.
Anyway, the Urceptual Judge will have neuroconnections to the Good Urceptual Other but not to the Urceptual Self. Damn, to get this right, I really need to establish just about all the members of the urceptual populace, and I’m not up to. But one important Other is the authority figure, which is a good other with neuroconnections to the Good Urceptual Other, but distinguished from it by the cues it picks up from its stimulus to the Self recognizes as authority cues, signals to obey. The Judge sort of secondarily rewards the Self when the Self does obey.
Meanwhile other drives interfere, other others demand attention and allegiance. The judge takes from them, too, emphasizing to the self that making other respect one is important. Eventually one learns what others in general will consider valuable contributions to society and develop a habit of trying to make them regardless of feedback. Through reading about others who made great contributions in spite of winning little or no positive feedback from contemporaries, or inspiring negative feedback, one may overpower the Judge and turn him into a second self. The danger, needless to say, is solipsism. But that seems to me no worse than the danger of respecting judges who call for deadbrained conformity. Better, to tell the truth. But one should be aware of it. And will be if one has the right genes.
Okay, someday I’ll do a better job on the urceptual populace. I hope what I’ve said is at least interesting to anyone capable of being interested.