Reactions #

Our semi-autonomic states that impact thinking #

I’ve put emotions and trust in this first nested space because they are our semi-autonomic states. Emotions and trust tend to kick in before a single conscious thought has sparked. Emotions start as an entirely internal state; trust starts as an acceptance of an entirely external source.

What they both do, though, is set the groundwork for thinking. They are the first lenses through which we assimilate our environment. They run automatically, but can be regulated by our conscious minds. They are still happening first, then regulated predicated on when and if the conscious mind decided to modulate them, to the extent that they can be modulated.

They are a reaction to environment. An emotional reaction will still happen in an unsafe environment regardless of how much an individual can ‘manage their psychological state’.

Even when it comes to emotions and trust, we cannot assume the nuances of one are the reflection of everyone. Nor can we assume that the mean of everyone is the only available state for one. A-son might feel primarily anticipatory as they approach a spider the size of a dinner plate, where B-son's reaction will be firmly seated in fear.

We won’t even react the same way to the same situation every single time. B-son, terrified the first time they see a spider the size of a dinner plate, might over time develop a sense of appreciation. 

We are a multiplicity. 

Emotions #

I glazed over environments, I really did. It was egregiously simplified to help show a point: that we all are just trying to muddle along, trying to attain of sense of health, safety, expression, and flow state, while navigating a complexity of systems.

As much as I glazed over environments, I think the most egregious glazing in this writing is emotions.

Emotions are incredibly complex. They are part of what neurotransmitters do, which are also part of the signals for what our bodies do: thinking, accessing memory, and all the movement that happens in our body, from the release of bile to dancing a jig. 

Neurotransmitters don’t do all this alone. They move along the pathways provided by our nerves, of which there are several types and somewhat differentiated between peripheral and central nervous system. They work in conjunction with ions — positively and negatively charged elemental chemicals — to spark transmission from one nerve to another to change states. Every nerve has a complex set of mechanics to store, move, and allow both neurotransmitters and ions in and out of the nerves’ cell walls, which is inceptive "how" of signals moving in our system.

We have a broad idea of how nerves and the supporting stew of neurotransmitters and ions work. We understand that neurotransmitters can be excitatory and inhibitory, that they create chemical cascades in our bodies with each part of that cascade affecting the systems — including offshoot chemicals that need to be cleaned out and can become toxic if our systems become overloaded.

Emotions are modulated by neurotransmitters, and supported more precisely by specialized mechanics in our brains…mostly, according to our current hypothesis. There are semi-autonomous reactions throughout our body, that sometimes are first and then post-incidentally attributed to emotions because emotions are the more common progenitor. 

In other words, a racing heart, butterfly cascades in your gut, a nervous twitch are primarily attributed to emotional change states, but are also very much an aspect of our mechanical biology. 

To date, over 100 neurotransmitters have been found, and scientists keep finding more. Some have relatively narrow use cases, but most of the ones we have a slightly better handle on are broadly used across the spectrum I already mentioned. 

They are intrinsic to our life. To stop having emotions, other signals in our body would also stop. The chemicals sparking emotional states are multitasking.

Because they are multitasking, we can affect them through the processes we have more control over — like semi-autonomous breathing, and the internal patter of our minds. They can be affected by changes to the environment, as well as changing the chemicals in our body: our food, vitamins, medication, and even the chemicals we sit in.

Emotions are often harbingers — pings of “focus here!”. 

Emotions are the harbingers to future-states as well. Fear and desire spark the same areas in our brains. From an informational point of view, both are taking current input, modulating through past experience, and saying: that. I want that, or Run from that, or Fight that.

Emotions can spark and get carried across groups of people — so mobs become angry, movie theaters gasp, a group of strangers will all start facing the back of an elevator. A group of strangers will look up at the sky, sparked by curiosity after seeing other someone(s) looking up.

Emotions are also a seriously loaded subject. Accepted and expected expression is culturally defined, and often what’s acceptable is also part of cultural hierarchy. “Culturally defined” means that what’s normal in one culture can be taboo in another; like the different expectations of the expression of grief. What emotions are acceptable to express can also be part of cultural standing; the alpha male can act angry, a slave can not, and between the two depends on the particular alpha male — assuming a male-dominated slave holding (super-hierarchical) culture, as an extreme state.

Emotions, however, are not well understood; neither is neurology. 

So, a reminder: this book is not about an exploration of ethics, morality, or a sense of right and wrong. It’s not qualifying anything. It’s level-setting. We are incredibly variable, and there are certain things that are simply a part of us. We need variations to survive, as a species, the multitudinous unknown of the universe.

As humans, we get angry. And sad, and happy, and fearful. As humans, we have a complex variable state of emotions that may or may not get expressed; based on everything that comes after the initial sparking; which itself is a complex, ongoing cascade. As humans, those emotions are bound up with our information biology and how we think.

Emotions are another facet of our data. We have them. They cannot go away, but they can be modulated. They are an intrinsic part of our living system, up to and including the gloriously abstract construct of our mind. 

Trust  #

Surprisingly, another reaction that happens along a preconfigured setting is trust. If we trust someone — regardless of whether or not it’s warranted — we’ll accept their input without much questioning. We’ll even transfer that trust to subject matters they have no expertise in, merely because we trust the person. 

We cannot each of us live independent of the whole of humanity; our world is complex and we can’t do everything. We can’t each of us spend our entire lives relitigating whether Newton understood gravity correctly, and redeveloping engineering from scratch, and building a new language, and feeding ourselves (from understanding what plants aren't poisonous, to cooking) and hygienically dealing with all the aftereffects of that feeding.

So we trust. We trust that someone else has figured something out well enough to not worry about that bit, and focus the bit that either I’m interested in or promised to deal with.

By trusting people we are believing they are a good source of information and will follow through on their corner of the world. We are saying to ourselves, “yay, I don’t have to deal with that, too.”

Trust is part of progress. This is part of having a toolset that is deeper than sharpened sticks.

We’ve all had our trust be misplaced. It can be as ultimately-moot as someone not following through on a simple promise that will take you all of five minutes to fix, or as grand as a  multi-level marketing game that enriched a few people at the expense of a multitude of others.  It can even be as potentially future-debilitating as being truly harmed by someone you not only trusted, but culture admonished you to trust. Think along the lines of a person holding access to money and granting it only to those that submit to their absolute authority. Or a teacher, parent or religious figure, leveraging their socialized authority to sexually predate.

I think we forget how much we trust every day. I know I do. I trust that the roof will stay over my head, and that if there’s something wrong with it structurally I’ll see it before it falls down. I trust the air I breathe will have the right balance of oxygen to sustain me.