The Two Mind Hypothesis
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
After drafting sections of an essay in the blog, it was finally published in the Montreal Review and can be seen by clicking here. This is the cover letter I sent: For many years the political right has implicitly drawn on the authority of Darwin’s paradigm of life as a struggle for fitness to support …
The boss of “Miracle Mover, Inc.” makes a deal with a client to move some furniture and then pays three employees to actually do the moving. These are two straightforward tit-for-tat transactions. But then, when the three guys actually get down to squeezing a large sofa through a small door, they shift into a behavior …
The social structure of humans was due to a decisive-and-then-stable shift in the level of selection: from the selection of individuals (for fitness) in apes to the selection associations between individuals (for fecundity & productivity) in humans.
This alternative view of human nature is a deeper, richer, and far more noble narrative of our exclusively human legacy: that of an indomitable spirit possessed of a will for justice and sustained through the millennia by the bounty that it fosters.
How the mentally ill tell us who we are
Although there are limitations on how much can be known scientifically about the evolution of emotional experience through deep time, other methods of knowing can penetrate the origin of our emotions and thus reveal the core of human nature.
A summery of the last chapter of book which chronicles the the deep evolution of the human spirit whose justice is in the process of reassuming the authority of human power.
Outline of Theory of Human Nature-1st of Series: Influences, Method, Feedback Reverberation, Emotional Fossils, Atypical Depression, Melancholia, Panic Disorder, Group & Hierarchy Formation
The 3 acts of human evolution are 1)from primates formed groups; 2) The 6 million year pre-human hominid period; 3) Homo sapiens
I came to an understanding that the secular progress in the history of our fallen species has been due the long evolved capacity for individuals to construct and subjugate themselves to rules of fairness in the form of secular law in ever expanding groups. Under the authority of law, political and economic competition has progressively …
Freud’s observation that humans are hypersexual has become such a cultural staple to have settled in as the sitcom-with-canned-laughter cash-cow. Although I had long been steeped in Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and sexual display, I hadn’t put the two together until I read Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind (2000), the thesis of which …
I concluded that, in order for the newly evolved hominid entity of group authority to coordinate group behavior, a new form of communication evolved in which all group members had to be constantly gesturing to each other in order to “stay on the same page,” similar to the mutual interactions with constant small adjustments of …
I had had glimmers of spiritual yearnings with a dreamy schoolboy’s love of Wordsworth and which returned when reading Kierkegaard and Jung that year in the World Trade Center when this all began; but all that had been dormant for years. However, concurrent with my purely intellectual ferment, there were several events that began to …
I was aware of the Russian study demonstrating the ease with which foxes could be domesticated. I began to think that somehow a process of self-domestication had taken place as a precursor to the selection inclusion of the dominance and submissive mentalities. So, when I examined the momentous publication of the Ardipithecus ramidus fossils in …
Schizophrenia is the most mysterious major illness in all of medicine, made all the more fascinating to me because my own family’s secret was an afflicted aunt who had been banished to a sanatorium for her entire life. In a small room in the mortuary, I spend a half hour with her corpse meditating upon …
The first mental illness that revealed a major component of human nature was the most common variety of severe depression, which, due to a quirk of history, is called “atypical depression.” It is officially recognized that a major ingredient of this kind of depression is separation anxiety, blown up into an illness by the pathological …
My second major insight also was seeded in my prison work. At first I feared that observing men selected for their aggression, then all jammed in there together, would give a grossly distorted view of human nature. I was wrong. I found that viewing interactions in such a setting had the effect of placing one …
The central insight of my life seeped in slowly during the decade after I left prison work for private practice. A dimorphism is the division of a species into two different types, like male and female. I was focused on the other dimorphism so prominent in primates, and in the prison: dominance and submission. The …
I observed that prison society is arranged vertically and that the core interaction is dominance and submission. I clearly remember when my first major insight struck me. I was at a routine meeting with a group of inmates, heatedly discussing a recent incident. I suddenly recognized that it was as if I was sitting inside …
