Psychofauna Integration

from here

I haven’t posted for a while because I have been in self-hating Jew mode. That is, I am an intellectual that occasionally gets very skeptical of intellectual masturbation. What’s the point of all this writing?

Then I read this post by

Kahlil Corazo

about the concept of psychofauna, which are basically self-perpetuating/evolving entities made out of human (or animal?) psychological states. So kind of like memes or memeplexes.

Aristotle said that “Man is by nature a social animal.” To me this means the self is defined in large part by its relationship to other psychofauna. The most famous of these are God, Family, and Country.

The “self” is at once the simplest psychofuana and one of the most complicated. In a sense it is a meta-psychofauna because it mediates (or consists of) our relationship to other psychofauna. All psychic experiences of a particular human brain contribute to the self, but some psychological experiences are central to the self and some are less so.

“God” is, like the self, a pretty complicated phenomenon. You could argue that it represents the idea of, well, everything. One way of defining God is as the superset of all other psychofauana, or at least our perception of it.

“Family” is another important category of psychofauna. Of course, there is a physical family whose substrate is a set of human bodies related by genetics or law. But the psychological phenomenon has more to do with whether those people experience being in a family.

“Country”, like God, is a pretty complicated one. The original post has some things to say about nation-states, but here I’ll just point out that they exist.

I have recently written about how we are composed of different “replicators”, which are kind of like psychofauana. Specifically, psychofauna are a subset of replicators—namely, replicators composed of a psychological substrate. But they are not the only kind. For example, humans have physical bodies that replicate based on DNA, but we also have a “self” and other psychological experiences. Many but not all psychofauna have a physical incorporation. The self has a body, the family has a succession of bodies, a nation has a bunch of bodies and some land, etc.

So here is my thesis about psychofauna:

The self does not exist outside of its relation to other psychofauna.

Kahlil Corazo

suggests that he could create a “a Psychofauna Defense Manual” which I understand, because these entities are not us and do not necessarily have our best interests in mind. But I think defense is the wrong approach because they are too integral to the self.

Ok, here comes the part that is hard for me to express. One of the dangers of psychofauna is that they supposedly can possess us and get us to do things that aren’t in our interest (or in the interests of our neighbors), like how Jordan Peterson and other have argued that “ideology” can get normal people to do great evil.

So there can be a conflict between psychofauna but a strong form of my argument is that there is not any internal conflict between psychofauna and the self. I mean this in the tautological sense that if we feel a conflict, it is an experience of, and thus a part of, the self — not a conflict against the self. In other words if we are “possessed” by some ideology, we are not really acting against our own interest. That ideology becomes our self-interest.

Of course, I recognize there is a different sense of self — one that corresponds to the word “selfish”. But this is concept of self is not a complete being. It is a subsystem of our complete self that really cannot exist on its own. I believed that our ability to conceptualize this “selfish” part of ourselves evolved together with (and dependent on) our ability to participate in communal psychofauna. It cannot be separated from the communal psychofauna just as the respiratory system can’t really be separated from the circulatory system. In other words, the “selfish” part of the self is really just a pseudo-psychofauna, not a real/complete entity.

However, we definitely feel conflict between the demands of psychofauna we participate in. The demands of God might contradict the demands of Family or Country. But let’s set aside God for a minute, too, because like the self, God is more of a meta-psychofauna (i.e., an arrangement of psychofauna) than actual psychofauna.

Consider the following questions:

1. Is it good for a man to sacrifice himself on behalf of his family?

2. Is it good for a man to sacrifice his family on behalf of his country?

3. Is it good for a man to sacrifice his country on behalf of God (or another ideology)?

Let’s set aside situations where a tiny sacrifice in one context has an outsized benefit in another. Of course we are all well-adjusted beings that weigh many considerations.

Perhaps in low trust societies, people cannot generally be relied upon to take significant actions on principle against their self-interest. And you could tell an evolutionary psychology story where societies that didn’t evolve the ability to effectively host different psychofauna (and therefore experience the conflict of #2 and #3) didn’t thrive. Maybe this is one of the advantages that homo sapiens had over neanderthals (that is, perhaps neanderthals could only make level 1 sacrifices).

Now, this isn’t to say that the answer to questions 2 and 3 should always be yes. But it might be the case that it takes a lot of evolutionary development to enable us to even contemplate answering yes to those ones.

Because we are all going to die, I think it is unhealthy to become too concerned with the self over all other entities. However, I do think it is reasonable to adopt a family or nation-centered self. That is, by centering on the family/nation you can live what I call an eternal life (i.e., a life where each moment is embedded in an eternal narrative). As long as my family/nation survives, there is hope for the universe. And if my family/nation can outcompete others, it is better for us to do so.

Here, “family” is used as the smallest potentially eternal psychofauna, and “nation” is used as the largest psychofauna we can effectively participate in. Maybe you could replace the “nation” with the human race. In any case, should you prioritize from the bottom up or from the top down? Do the needs of the family justify participation in the nation or the other way around?

Perhaps Family and Country are like the Yin and Yang of psychofauna. If that is the case, it may be appropriate to facilitate both a masculine role (emphasizing participation in the nation) and a feminine role (emphasizing participation the family).

Once again I am reminded of the scripture:

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children…

- Malachi 4:6

One way of interpreting this is that the heart of a man (i.e., the prioritization of their engagement with different psychofauna) should transition from nation to family at some point in their life —which assumes it will start the other way around.