[MD] What is SOM?

[David M]

Hi Krim

See comments

> [Krimel]
> I suspect few things in psychology have been studied cross-culturally as
> much as this. Infants in a variety of cultures go through this process and
> while cultures provide different contexts for the expression of these 
> givens
> they are nevertheless expressed. Babies, we have learned come into the 
> world
> possessing only what Jung might have called the collective unconscious. 
> This
> is not some mystical other. It is the genetic code,


DM: Really not sure how consciousness or unconsciousness gets coded
in proteins,so bit of an assumption for the time being.....

that shapes our form and
> function based on the collected experience of all of our ancestors. 
> Biology
> is the first great storehouse of memory. It is nature's record of the
> iterations and recursions of the past.

DM: Something is getting stored and is available for retrieve but
we're not too sure how.

>
> That memory we are born with interacts with the memory of our people, or 
> our
> culture as expressed by our parents, families and friends. Culture is 
> formed
> by the same interactions of the static and dynamic as shape species. But
> rather that being preserved as genetic code it is preserved as patterns of
> interaction.
>
> The intellectual level is even more ethereal and less tangible in that it 
> is
> patterns of individual thought encoded and preserved not static molecules 
> or
> static interactions but on pieces of paper or bits of code.

DM: Forms of memory at all levels,sure.

>
> [DM]
> Now as for levels, sure the inorganic must have a lower form of experience
> than life, but how low, how far reduced. Sure lots but all the way down to
> unconscious law abiding mechanisms? Who knows? Perhaps a good clue is that
> when we learn habits they seem to occur less consciously.
> But this places things round the other way: perhaps electrons have to 
> learn
> to love proton and only after years of repetitive relationship does this
> become an unconscious habit. But a reduced form of love of course, a love
> for vibrations we might imagine and even great big complex human beings 
> love
> good vibrations too! Are electrical bonds a sort of endless little death
> orgasm? And what are a billion interacting particles experiencing? I
> imagine, and I am only looking for better metaphors and poetry than laws 
> and
> mechanisms (I mean are reductionists bondage freaks? -confess!), that
> billions of interactions is a sort of pleasurable number crunching of 
> lights
> and vibrations, and would that not offer you more motivation to build a
> cosmos than following the bloody laws of some boring creator-dictator? Or 
> do
> you enjoy submission? See different concept-metaphors=different values and
> possibilities and sensibilities. It's all choice, its all built, Its all
> contingent, but you can only build on what's already been laid down and 
> you
> can only built in your own little space-time segment.
>
> [Krimel]
> I think this kind of talk works well for explaining things to children or 
> to
> older people who are a bit slow. Maimonides and Leo Strauss had this idea
> that the truth was just too much for the average Joe to swallow and so the
> very wise among us construct myths to help the simple folk get along in 
> the
> world. The realist in me sees this as probably true but the Pollyanna
> idealist within says people really aren't that dumb and that things really
> aren't that complicated. My inner Pollyanna has suffered much abuse and 
> yet
> the bitch refuses to be quiet...

DM: Ultimately it's a moral question. Charles Taylor discusses this. Seems 
that
SOM delivers a sense of freedom that is hard to forsake, but is it an
irresponsible freedom? An objectification without empathy?