Sealchan, Modok's recent post alerted me to the fact that I seem to have forgotten to reply to you two years ago (as I was out of town and didn't remember when I returned). Sorry about that!
Some thoughts now (hopefully better late than never):
. . . mirror neurons are probably not biologically distinct cells but merely cells whose firing was trained in the course of the life of an individual to be neutral to self-other distinctions.
I don't remember coming across this hypothesis about mirror neurons (nor do I recall hearing anything that contradicted this). It's interesting. Is there a theory on this somewhere you can point me to? Or is this your own theory?
In this sense, our sociality could be a fall out of the complex adaptive system that is the brain, but is, itself, only indirectly a matter of genetic evolution.
Not unreasonable, but I am in the (more or less EP) camp that find's it very difficult to imagine that the evolution of a species would rely so heavily on environmental determination of essential behavioral traits like sociality. Also, sociality is common to a great many species including all(?) apes and monkeys. Your suggestion here reminds me off Stephen Jay Gould and evolutionary spandrels. I'm not convinced his spandrels can account for many significant aspects of the evolution of species . . . at least not for many traits that are essential to the survival of a species.
Human sociality being a spandrel would be like the human brain being a spandrel . . . well, maybe more like the whole human head being a spandrel. Because heads are of course not unique to homo sapiens sapiens. I'm not opposed to the idea of important traits beginning as spandrels, but I find it hard to imagine that any spandrels that become essential to a species' survival would not be subsequently selected for.
And the idea of persistent spandrels across species and immense evolutionary time seems improbable. Maybe, but I would go the Occam's razor direction on this.
But at the highest, most individualistic, levels of organization in the brain is there a central, distinct homeostatic system? I suspect not. Ironically, it may be the case that at the very top, the overall sense of homeostasis may derive from the homeostasis of the parts in a non-systemic sense.
Here, I'm inclined to turn to complex dynamic/adaptive systems theory rather than biology. I don't believe there is a "homeostasis machine/organ" built into the brain, body, or psyche. Not even something simple like a "homeostatic metronome".
I suspect this homeostasis (and Self system principle of organization) is a function of self-organizing complex dynamic systems. It is like a law of physics, the way that these complex systems self-organize. In this sense I guess I would agree with Jung's efforts to locate aspects of psyche "outside" the individual (although I generally oppose that notion and find it inflated and counterproductive).
Of course, the nature of complex systems is not "outside", but actually a fundamental aspect of the universe, and therefore just as much "in" every subatomic particle. Homeostatic self-organization is never a top-down mechanism. It's always emergent.
It does appear that many of the subsystems of the human organism could have begun their evolutionary lives as organisms in themselves . . . making homo sapiens (and other animal species) a kind of "super-organism". But as these subsystems evolve together into this kind of "super-organism", a principle of system organization is needed to help coordinate the functioning of these subsystems.
Of course, brains do a lot of this. But perhaps brains are the emergent, material expression of complex, dynamic self-organization among the disparate subsystems. If we look at natural ecosystems, there is obviously no top-down principle that organizes them, but where enough equilibrium exists for many species to coevolve and coexist for long periods of time, we can imagine a kind of ideal point of balance. It would be a shifting point, because species are evolving, some are dying out, others are coming into being . . . environment is changing, etc.
Ecosystems have no particular identity or sense of self-preservation. Equilibrium has no one ideal state. Homeostasis is connected to a singular survival principle . . . and to singular identity. Homeostatic systems seek to continue on at or near their ideal state . . . so I think there can be said to be a kind of singular organizing principle in homeostatic systems. There is an ideal state or range for this system, and as it gets far enough away from functioning in that ideal state, it begins to break down.
The Self principle is largely a function of psychic homeostasis, and it underlies a functional sense of identity. Other biological organs or subsystems might break down, but this does not (until death) have to destroy or even disrupt the maintenance of identity. Identity functions as a bridge between the individual and others. It can seem to exist independently from our bodies. It can seem as though it will live on even after death, that it has its own sustaining essence unrelated to the body.
In essence, it can . . . so long as their are other people to remember and think about the deceased. I would suspect notions of soul and afterlife to be natural, predictable expressions of this.
But I would be more inclined to see the animating and organizing principle of the Self as an emergent function of complex dynamic systems in general. This principle coupled with self-sustaining and regulatory systems of the body found the Self representation as (sometimes divine) Other . . . the Other that is personally involved in an individual's sense of identity and being. But there is no ghost in this machine. There is no "mind" to this Self. That is the anthropomorphizing projection we tend to make, our intuitive interpretation of the data we perceive.
Self is a simple (intangible) systemic mechanism with extremely complex and all-pervasive influence on the individual. It can be, in a sense, a created God that is unified in its ideal goal while being various in its specific effects and influences. Where we perceive this goal, we project oneness and "self-ness" and some form of will and mind onto it. But we mostly experience the Self in smaller forms, in its instances of influence. The Self as god image is less common (and perhaps a bit more cerebral and interpretive) than the Self of small things, the Self of impulses and compensations, and various movements of affecting organization.
Often similar things are said of God or Tao, etc. Yet it is all of a singular process or principle defined by its goal/ideal: homeostasis. Characterizations of Tao are typically very homeostatic.
However, I might qualify this idea with my other idea that the total amount of libido available in the psyche during a dream is much less than what is available when the dreamer is awake. This allows archetypal patterns to emerge into consciousness much more readily since the deluge that is the sensory world is not sending its flood of information through the brain as it does during the waking state. In other words, while the brain is in conscious-waking mode the homeostatic systems are been trained the hardest. When asleep, the "backroom/background" processes get to direct the libido and the same homeostatic systems get trained with less fervor in an alternate direction. That would correlate with the relative rarity of long term memory storage of dream experiences when compared to waking experiences.
I'm not sure I agree. I might be misremembering what I've read about the dreaming brain, but my recollection is that the dreaming brain is every bit as active as the waking brain and that the activity is quite similar in kind. To simplify drastically, dreaming is like waking but with the body's "switch" switched off.
Libido theories are difficult for me to cozy up with in general. I accept libido as a metaphor for an aspect of psychic process, but as a quantifiable substance, it's hard to substantiate.
Still, an interesting factor to consider in this regard is the huge information barrage that is received while awake and not while asleep. Is the barrage actually more while awake (I don't know)? That barrage has to come through the brain anyway. Sleep is well know (both anecdotally and scientifically) as reparative for both the body and the mind/ability to think well. I have suspected that dreaming can be at times (perhaps not all times) a reflection of this reparative process. I have seen dreams as dynamic memory organizing "experiments" or proposals (and dream work as reinforcements of some of these proposals).
I am not sure it is known (or even hypothesized) how sleep repairs the coherence of thought. In any case, I may be misremembering, but I thought it was kind of a mystery that, since we know the brain (and particularly the neocortex) consumes a massive amount of energy and is very "expensive", the sleeping brain is not "dormant". For quite some time, the prevailing idea was that this energy consumption must be stopped or greatly slowed during sleep to allow a regeneration of mental energy. But I swear I have read that more recent research has shown that the brain keeps gobbling up energy during sleep, that it keeps working away much as it did while awake. The brain doesn't "sleep".
If that is correct, the whole process is all the more fascinating. I'll have to revisit the research to jog or update my memory.
Also, I'm not sure that long-term memory retention of dream experience is less than waking experience retention. Short-term, yes, but I see it as perfectly feasible that a powerful dream would lodge itself in long-term memory just like any other powerful waking experience. Think of Jung's detailed memories of his childhood dreams in MDR. My guess is that any memory that is potent and gets frequently reinforced over time is likely to maintain long term memory presence.
The fact that in dreams, when the general libidic levels are diminished, we see a diverse array of dream characters modelled in part on people from all stages of our life and in part on internal responses to those dream characters shows that our psyche is itself a kind of tribe. Dream characters may orient more or less in line with the goals of the dream character and the dream character can undertake radical metamorpheses during the course of a dream, even changing sex or level of power over other dream characters. Certainly across dreams in a given night one's dream character can take on a diversity of roles and experiences that belie the waking sense that one is a consolidated person.
I agree. The "society" of characters in our dreams can be very tribe-like. We are tribes unto ourselves . . . which is why we can be poly-tribal and exist in the modern world where monotribes are not functional. My sense is that the tribe is really the most common "imprint" for the Self. Disparate single functions interacting with one another and giving rise to a unifying, organizing principle.
I suspect it is the path of the tribal shaman to experience the tribe from within her or himself. In other words, whereas the typical member of a tribe experiences Self mostly or only through the tribe, the shaman of a tribe experiences the tribe mostly through the Self.