Did some Thinking (no spell check - all my apologies)
Society, History, Science, and how our Brain could hint a way to produce Advances in all Facets of our human Existence.
Author: Martin Kink, 2008
Well first of all i would like to mention that i am a quite strong approver of consensus on all levels.
Integrating extreme points of view into a whole where each way of thinking has it's place while others aren't necessarily suppressed is the right direction. Of course this demands to be to some extend free of judgment and certainly no0t stuck on a single point of view. It foremost requires one to listen to one another.
There are so many times when we get into arguments about little details, especially with people who happen to have an opposing view to our very own. This could be a reason that we never grasp the true intentions of the other individual, or the higher order picture and never really put any thought to it since it would be hard to integrate with our way of thinking.
To wrap this up: we often miss out on listening when we should and giving people the respect they deserve when they are reflecting on their “beliefs”.
Further more I do believe that extreme points of view and hard liners are people are a part of mankind's progress (if there is such a thing) just like controlled and reflexive individuals who try to integrate the concepts of hard liners into a more complex whole evaluating “pros and cons” or capabilities and limitations of each concept.
In the science of psychology one can observe this phenomenon quite well since it presents a rather young scientific subject. Just think about people like Freud, Skinner and Kandell. Three individuals who across the course of time had completely different foci of research (Psycho dynamics, behaviorism, neurobiology). One can easily, already in the beginning of the studies of psychology, conclude that the truth must be hidden somewhere in between. Not one of the different approaches can explain humanity and humans in all possible aspects. Yet all of them present useful tools that need to be accepted, improved, and integrated. This is where a multi level view comes in. Looking at certain behavior from a little bit further away.
Avoid looking at a phenomenon only on the neural basis for example. Keep in mind that there are social and environmental factors that come in as well (a vast number to be precise). The whole picture is just more than a single point of view.
Now I would like to get back to the real subject which would be to draw parallels between society, history, science, and the brain.
During the last hundred years one was able to observe 3 great directions or concepts for human societies in Europe. Marxism, Capitalism, and Fascism. However I am aware that I am not selling the truth here. I do not know enough about these concepts to really state anything “real”. I'll just play with a few thoughts to draw a different conclusion.
In my opinion Marxism and Capitalism were integrated quite well in the concepts which we know as our European constitutional democracies with a background called “social economics”.
So those two concepts must have been discussed and integrated where it was possible (I.e. in creating a free market while maintaining a rather well working social security plan or system).
We did learn from the past that the extreme pronunciation of a single concept has failed horribly and each of those two has dispensed great misery upon our race up till this day.
What about fascism? Having a leader? Monarchy? Those things seem to be a part of our thinking and a part of ourselves as well. Yet we discarded of them entirely. With a good reason one must say. The death toll of the second World War was all the proof we needed to conclude that charismatic leaders and totalitarianism were the wrong choices for us.
The thing that jumps to my mind is that people were afraid of those human tendencies since they have experienced first hand what it can reveal. They were right in there way and left with a quite promising future.
Back to the subject, though. I would like to point out that it might have been wrong to simply eliminate this way of a social system. I am sure that World War II survivors and the following generation were immune to this way of thinking (but what about younger generations?). Nowadays we can see a concerning tendency all across Europe. Charismatic right wing politicians are rising and receive a disturbing amount of acceptance.
So what could have happened? An extreme point of view was discarded and pronounced entirely evil. There was no attempt to integrate it in our society (personally I do not know what our society would look like if we had attempted to integrate such an element and I do not even want to know).
I just say that we might have wanted to talk about it and find a solution for the problem that nowadays surfaces once more.
The scientific directions mentioned earlier (though they entirely oppose each other by principal) can and have to be discussed and integrated allowing each of them to prosper and contribute to a more complete whole.
During my studies of the human brain (though our true advances on that matter are everything but detailed and complete) I encountered a mechanism that seems to work similarly and could actually postulate a useful guideline for creating a “maybe better” better society.
Basically our brain works on the basis of low level and higher order processes. Low level processes could be best described as hard liners or extreme points of view. They are pure and only deal with a single aspect. They do struggle for being noticed and most importantly they are part of the whole healthy human being.
But there are areas which we call associative areas. They are the very essence since they integrate and negotiate the information provided by single purpose low level processes. Institutions that filter out important details of a flood of informations and connect/combine them into a useful wider picture.
Of course this statement presents a raw simplification but there is still a core of quite useful information to this.
What if our association cortices have a defect? Due to a tumor or a neurological developmental disorder? Let's assume they just fail to integrate all the low level information or neglect just a single low level process. This would lead to great and severe impairments of our internal representation of our entire environment and limit of gravely in our capabilities.
Maybe our associative organs (in society) sometimes show selectivity for certain low-level processes and ignore others for whatever reasons. This could ultimately lead to imbalances eventually create great social “diseases”.
In Autism a theory was postulated linking the typical impairments to malfunctioning connections and over active low level functions that accumulate too much information while associative areas of the brain fail to integrate the excessive amount of information, and it's poor transportation into a meaningful whole.
Come to think about it? Wouldn't you agree that our society or humanity functions to some extend like the autistic brain?
Integrating institutions are confronted with to much information which is generally not very well transported. As a result we see it fail frequently during total over stimulation. It can't cope with it all.
To wrap it up in a nutshell: listening and actually thinking about points of view that one can't identify with might be of most importance for our progress or at least could supply us with a broader and better understanding of a too complex environment.
Integrating extreme points of view which sometimes does require us to swallow our pride and cast aside our differences might be a solution for many problems.
Accepting hardliners or the extremes and confronting them in a discussion (in a respectful manner that is); Hearing them out trying to pick out what's valuable and eventually integrating it into society constantly expanding our horizons maybe even better ourselves...
Well I didn't reinvent the wheel with this small essay. I generally postulated things that we all should know or at least should have heard of. What fascinated me myself was the approach that helped me to derive this from a (in my opinion) new point of view.
My functional neurological organization as a concept for understanding my surroundings... Irony in it's purest essence since the background is totally contradicting the meaning of the paper.
Author: Martin Kink (29.11.08)
Comments for later: Early version but I should consider to rethink this at some point since it's a complete mind fuck and I love it.
Author: Martin Kink, 2008
Well first of all i would like to mention that i am a quite strong approver of consensus on all levels.
Integrating extreme points of view into a whole where each way of thinking has it's place while others aren't necessarily suppressed is the right direction. Of course this demands to be to some extend free of judgment and certainly no0t stuck on a single point of view. It foremost requires one to listen to one another.
There are so many times when we get into arguments about little details, especially with people who happen to have an opposing view to our very own. This could be a reason that we never grasp the true intentions of the other individual, or the higher order picture and never really put any thought to it since it would be hard to integrate with our way of thinking.
To wrap this up: we often miss out on listening when we should and giving people the respect they deserve when they are reflecting on their “beliefs”.
Further more I do believe that extreme points of view and hard liners are people are a part of mankind's progress (if there is such a thing) just like controlled and reflexive individuals who try to integrate the concepts of hard liners into a more complex whole evaluating “pros and cons” or capabilities and limitations of each concept.
In the science of psychology one can observe this phenomenon quite well since it presents a rather young scientific subject. Just think about people like Freud, Skinner and Kandell. Three individuals who across the course of time had completely different foci of research (Psycho dynamics, behaviorism, neurobiology). One can easily, already in the beginning of the studies of psychology, conclude that the truth must be hidden somewhere in between. Not one of the different approaches can explain humanity and humans in all possible aspects. Yet all of them present useful tools that need to be accepted, improved, and integrated. This is where a multi level view comes in. Looking at certain behavior from a little bit further away.
Avoid looking at a phenomenon only on the neural basis for example. Keep in mind that there are social and environmental factors that come in as well (a vast number to be precise). The whole picture is just more than a single point of view.
Now I would like to get back to the real subject which would be to draw parallels between society, history, science, and the brain.
During the last hundred years one was able to observe 3 great directions or concepts for human societies in Europe. Marxism, Capitalism, and Fascism. However I am aware that I am not selling the truth here. I do not know enough about these concepts to really state anything “real”. I'll just play with a few thoughts to draw a different conclusion.
In my opinion Marxism and Capitalism were integrated quite well in the concepts which we know as our European constitutional democracies with a background called “social economics”.
So those two concepts must have been discussed and integrated where it was possible (I.e. in creating a free market while maintaining a rather well working social security plan or system).
We did learn from the past that the extreme pronunciation of a single concept has failed horribly and each of those two has dispensed great misery upon our race up till this day.
What about fascism? Having a leader? Monarchy? Those things seem to be a part of our thinking and a part of ourselves as well. Yet we discarded of them entirely. With a good reason one must say. The death toll of the second World War was all the proof we needed to conclude that charismatic leaders and totalitarianism were the wrong choices for us.
The thing that jumps to my mind is that people were afraid of those human tendencies since they have experienced first hand what it can reveal. They were right in there way and left with a quite promising future.
Back to the subject, though. I would like to point out that it might have been wrong to simply eliminate this way of a social system. I am sure that World War II survivors and the following generation were immune to this way of thinking (but what about younger generations?). Nowadays we can see a concerning tendency all across Europe. Charismatic right wing politicians are rising and receive a disturbing amount of acceptance.
So what could have happened? An extreme point of view was discarded and pronounced entirely evil. There was no attempt to integrate it in our society (personally I do not know what our society would look like if we had attempted to integrate such an element and I do not even want to know).
I just say that we might have wanted to talk about it and find a solution for the problem that nowadays surfaces once more.
The scientific directions mentioned earlier (though they entirely oppose each other by principal) can and have to be discussed and integrated allowing each of them to prosper and contribute to a more complete whole.
During my studies of the human brain (though our true advances on that matter are everything but detailed and complete) I encountered a mechanism that seems to work similarly and could actually postulate a useful guideline for creating a “maybe better” better society.
Basically our brain works on the basis of low level and higher order processes. Low level processes could be best described as hard liners or extreme points of view. They are pure and only deal with a single aspect. They do struggle for being noticed and most importantly they are part of the whole healthy human being.
But there are areas which we call associative areas. They are the very essence since they integrate and negotiate the information provided by single purpose low level processes. Institutions that filter out important details of a flood of informations and connect/combine them into a useful wider picture.
Of course this statement presents a raw simplification but there is still a core of quite useful information to this.
What if our association cortices have a defect? Due to a tumor or a neurological developmental disorder? Let's assume they just fail to integrate all the low level information or neglect just a single low level process. This would lead to great and severe impairments of our internal representation of our entire environment and limit of gravely in our capabilities.
Maybe our associative organs (in society) sometimes show selectivity for certain low-level processes and ignore others for whatever reasons. This could ultimately lead to imbalances eventually create great social “diseases”.
In Autism a theory was postulated linking the typical impairments to malfunctioning connections and over active low level functions that accumulate too much information while associative areas of the brain fail to integrate the excessive amount of information, and it's poor transportation into a meaningful whole.
Come to think about it? Wouldn't you agree that our society or humanity functions to some extend like the autistic brain?
Integrating institutions are confronted with to much information which is generally not very well transported. As a result we see it fail frequently during total over stimulation. It can't cope with it all.
To wrap it up in a nutshell: listening and actually thinking about points of view that one can't identify with might be of most importance for our progress or at least could supply us with a broader and better understanding of a too complex environment.
Integrating extreme points of view which sometimes does require us to swallow our pride and cast aside our differences might be a solution for many problems.
Accepting hardliners or the extremes and confronting them in a discussion (in a respectful manner that is); Hearing them out trying to pick out what's valuable and eventually integrating it into society constantly expanding our horizons maybe even better ourselves...
Well I didn't reinvent the wheel with this small essay. I generally postulated things that we all should know or at least should have heard of. What fascinated me myself was the approach that helped me to derive this from a (in my opinion) new point of view.
My functional neurological organization as a concept for understanding my surroundings... Irony in it's purest essence since the background is totally contradicting the meaning of the paper.
Author: Martin Kink (29.11.08)
Comments for later: Early version but I should consider to rethink this at some point since it's a complete mind fuck and I love it.