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Change.
Ayele Teklemariam

If any thin history testifies and had done so for millennia the fact that in everything that come to being had and will have morbidity ingrained in its birth and growth. Even a way of life and conducting everyday tasks go through metamorphosis in time’s ever moving wheel of progress and in no time has the an established way of thinking and doing been a willful party to these progress for the idea of change often precedes the change itself. Objective change happens independently of our realization and our will and then change is perceived and understood then finally we change along with change or adapt to the change and effect change and complete the cycle. In these cycle of change to change and be changed some of our modern day politicians seems to have been in that confused state where it is hard to figure out whether to change, what to change to and how to change and be changed. It is clear to any one who have had the opportunity to gloss over the world news lately to have had observed glittery cosmetic changes yet fall with in the old tradition when unwrapped and when the glittery coating of politicking and diplomacy fades past the initial broad smiles and seemingly warm hand shakes. It has become a daily news and scene for those who had their thrust in their people’s ballots and in the fad like global swipe of renewal and democratization proclaimed by despots of all sorts and creed to have an effort at securing international recognition and support to have ended in jails after their ballots are thrown to the garbage. It is even ironic that the people who have given their consent and support when denied of their leadership and a lateral communication like all time under any dictatorship first fail to complacency and as time passes to ignorance and dismissive ness till such time they simply care no more and relent for no less than their total and absolute freedom from their paternalistic or other masters. That often collides head on with those paternalistic despotic leaders who think they can effect change and be not affected by it should more than any one realize that change intrinsically contradicts the statuesque and come out of the self deceit that they will remain masters and keepers of the statuesque in the face of their own proclamation of change. It is rather the realization, understanding and readiness to change and give up privilege power and status the beginning of change the maker and breaker of the on set of the so desired new order in a new day. Today will certainly pass and tomorrow will as well surely come, in this passing today many great people prided so much and forgot the coming of tomorrow and failed victim to their own resistance and arrogance and suffered deadly blows by the inevitable and the ever coming tomorrow’s rising stars. Such has been the history of many of the world’s greats and it still has not been refuted. As humans who have learned from our past and who are keenly interested in our future what good is it to learn what has been and make an effort in understanding what will be if we can not pull the past and the future together and live them now. As humans we want to be what was the best of our past and the best of what we could be that is the essence of our daily living that should keep us in balance and at equilibrium. As yesterday reminds us of our pride in our accomplishment tomorrow demands of us change and the recognition of the new and emergent which is often favored by the laws of natural growth and development or else.

Cybernat@cybernatian.biz

“The Neurobiology of the SELF.”

Ayele Teklemariam

Like always My eyes see, my ears listen, my nose smells, my fingers touch and I can not help cognizing and ask questions of my everyday experiences and experiences of others that reach me through one of my senses, some of them or all. So like then now it is my eye that caught some written material and threw my selfish self in to examining them in an effort to may be understand more than any thing my selfish self. As I read through the material I thought if I could only understand my selfish self and be able to see it from outside of it and from a neutral vantage point what else would there be that I won’t master at all. Nonetheless wherever I went and whatever I did and am able to do got me always wrapped up in my selfish self and it more and more proved to me that it is all there is in whatever ways and how it was said and done. ““The most obvious thing about yourself is your self.” “You look down at your body and know it is yours”.” Todd Heatherton. I thought of the statement and wanted to be certain of my knowledge of my self and wished if the self within me was only the physical self and wanted so bad to fully comprehend it and master it if I may and be certain of my knowledge, but hard reality hit me so hard that it was not meant to be. It turned out that the self was much more than the macroscopic physical. It also has what is called the spiritual psychological and more aspects to it. The certainty of the self by the self simply dissipates in to the thin air as I try to examine it even further and the self assurance about the knowledge of the self appealed to me as some what far fetched. The day to day discoveries and the new lights that are being shed about the inner and outer workings of our self tells a story of even more unknowns and what we know of our self is barely a scratch on the surface of a very large stack yet to be known and ever. “When you wakeup in the morning, you don’t have to interrogate yourself for a long time about who you are.” Todd Heatherton. The statement makes it as though we have never had a question or a doubt about who we are and why we are , but the fact remains that the overwhelming part of out every day activities are related and are about finding our self, making our self, changing our self sustaining our self and maintaining our self, all in all whether we say it in a single sentence or thousand paragraphs, whether we ask it directly or not the selfish self often and always takes precedence and primacy. In our daily all encompassing and comprehensive activities, actions, reactions, Cognitions and recognitions we do define and redefine our selves and I am afraid if we are so sure of why we do so with certainty. If there is any thing certain that we have asked enough times who we are and why we are, where we came from and where we want to go and are going, these are questions that are in every ones head with out being framed may be in an elitist word framing. And what every one does revolves around the same issues with varying probability of knowing the answers, but with certain truth of never certainty. Even the questions we ask of others come around often as question about our self and we can’t escape the fact that it is all about the selfish self. It often is about acquisition of a knowledge, material, position, notoriety or some thing of value here or in the here after. The complete knowledge of the self is the ultimate and as such remains always less than certain. As we go through life everyday we wakeup, I feel like, what we do is interrogate our selves of who we are, how our poison has changed and how to best react to it contrary to the statement quoted, in all and many things we do, think and imagine. Indeed we have the greatest interest in our selves and interest is dependent on the degree of exposure to the subject of interest, and the self more than anything else is exposed to the self itself .May be the root of selfishness lies in the exposure of the self to the self more than the not self and there is no way of exposing the not self to the self more the self itself to the self, thus instilling the selfishness permanently in the self and may be a falls sense of complete self awareness as well. ”” Heatherton himself shied away from direct study of it for years, even though---------------- “My interests were around the self but not around the philosophical issues of what is the self.” Things have changed today, Today Heatherton, along with a growing number of scientists, is tackling the question head on, seeking to figure out how the self emerges from the brain. In the past few years, they have begun to identify certain brain activities that may be essential for producing different aspects of self awareness. They are now trying to determine how these activities give rise to the unified feeling we each have of being a single entity. This research is yielding clues to how the self evolved in our hominid ancestors. It may even help scientists treat Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders that erode the knowledge of the self and in some cases destroy it altogether.” It is rather the philosophical self that interested me the most than the mechanical descript self, not that I understood it but I am intrigued by it. It raises questions more than I could speculate and ask of the readers of this article and knowledgeable people if I may and pose them directly. Is the self a collection of memories? Cognitive and reactive process?, Will the self cease to exist when the mind (brain )ceases?, When the subjective self (mind or brain, or consciousness and memory) ceases will the objective self turn in to an automaton and mechanical being?, Are other animals, plants and inanimate that go through motion purposeful, intentional, disciplined, ordered and unique motion self aware?, If not why not?, When the self that is self aware ceases will the self that is not self aware remain? Is the objective self a reality of the subjective self or is it the subjective self the reality of the objective self? Or does the objective self exist independently of the subjective self and the vise versa? Is the subjective self the extension of the objective self or is it the objective self the extension of the subjective self? As a matter of everyday practice it seems the subjective self to act as its sole purpose and intent to protect, preserve, sustain and propagate the objective self. If subjective reasoning alone were enough to answer it all, I would have had mine, but reason fails short and reality often times defy reason and it is often reality that has to be reasoned than reason define reality, there fore a dose of objective reality may be is in order and in time for a comprehensive understanding of the issues raised and points reiterated. “ Further clues have emerged from injuries that affect some of the brain rejoins involved in the self ……………..Gage, a 19th century railroad construction foreman who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when a dynamite blast sent a tamping iron through the air. It passed through Gage’s head, and yet, astonishingly, Gage survived. Gages friends though noticed something had changed. Before the accident he had been considered an efficient worker and shrewd businessman. Afterward he became profane, showed little respect for others and had a hard time settling plans for the future. His friends he was “no longer Gage.” Cases like Gage’s showed that the self is not the same as consciousness. People can have an impaired sense of themselves with out being unconscious.” As is indicated by the awareness of the amnesiac of all things about him self it rather seems as though the self is a physiological and psychological construct of information that precedes it. As such as long as the physical construct of this precedent information is intact the self will retain its self awareness which is ingrained in its genes. This self awareness which is to serve in the fulfillment of the selfish needs of the self necessitates the awareness of the environment in which the self finds itself in. it is there fore this secondary awareness that is to be called consciousness. It is an awareness the helps the self act and react in ways and times that its interest are best served by. As every existence is a relativistic phenomenon, it would rather make the complication easier to understand if we have to conclusively argue whether the self is absolute relative to the not self or the self is yet a relative reality to the not self. If we claim the self is an absolute reality then the self exists independently of consciousness and if we claim the other way around then the self ceases upon cessation of consciousness. As indicated in the article , the retention of the information about the self while all memory is wiped out by amnesia seems to attest to the fact that the self does not exist because X or Y existed, but because of the information upon which it was constructed that determined its intent, shape, color, purpose and destiny and consciousness helped best accomplish these predeterminations in an environmental constraints. “At the university college of London, researchers have been using brain scans to decipher how we become aware of our own bodies.” This is the very basic law-level first point of the self “UCLA’s Sara Jayne Blakemore says. When our brains issue a command to move a part of our bodies, two signals are sent. One goes to the brain region that control the particular parts of the body that need to move, and the other goes to the region that monitor the movement. Our brains then use this copy to predict what kind of sensation the action will produce. If the actual sensation we receive does not closely match our prediction, our brains become aware of the difference. ------- But if the sensation does not match our prediction at all, our brains interpret them as being caused by something other than ourselves. Blakemore and her colleagues documented this shift by scanning the brains of subjects they had hypnotized. When the researchers told the subjects their arms were being lifted by a rope and pulley, the subjects lifted their arms. But their brains responded as if someone else were lifting their arms, not them selves.” As untenable as it seems it rather is a fact that the objective self is existent independently of the subjective self (the mind) but too mechanically. The subjective self does not only interpret coordinate and give meaning to the environment the objective self is in but also gives the essence of the self itself in relation to everything and any thing within its environmental constraints and how it reacts to and interacts with the elements of its environment. The brain that generates the subjective self seems rather an information in, information processing and information out center that where when and how it gets its imputes determine how it will react and what it puts out when it puts out what it does as its purpose and duty. “Heatherton and his colleagues at Dartmouth have been using the technology to probe the mystery of why people remember information about themselves better than details about other people. They imaged the brains of volunteers who viewed a series of adjectives. In some cases, the researchers asked the subjects whether a word applied to the subjects themselves. In others, they asked if a word applied to George W.Bush. In still other cases, they asked simply whether the word was shown in uppercase letters. They found that questions about the self activated some regions of the brain that questions about someone else did not their results bolstered the “self is special” hypothesis over “the self is familiar” view.” The special self and the familiar self are separate and in essence and are intertwined in purpose. While the special self is the information upon which the physical self and the psychological self is constructed on, the familiar self to me is the conscious self that determines the position of the special self in relation to its environment and helps act in the best interest of the special self. There is no time or space separation between the self and the information about the self. The information about anything else is separated from the self by distance and time. The self is constantly accumulating and accessing information about itself. The self and about the self are intertwined and inseparable unlike the self and about the not self. Information may be filled separately and in categories, yet the fire about the self may be the most important and may be the most significant of them all. “When we are in new circumstances, our sense of our self depends on thinking explicitly about our experiences. -----------------Soccer players know whether they are athletic, strong or swift without having to consult their memories.” It is rather indicative of the fact that the special self is very much dependent on its consciousness of the environment it find itself in to react in ways and manners its interests are best met. When the self knows and knows well and is familiar with the environment it finds it self in, thinking becomes un necessary, logical construction becomes redundant and the facts become self evident. “The primate ancestors of humans probably had the basic bodily self awareness that is studied by Blakemore and her associates.” I wondered if at all there is any living thing that is not self aware. How is this awareness expressed other than being active in the self preservation and primacy of the self? All living things are self reproductive, self preservative and self protective and knows its relative position in its environment and acts and reacts in ways and manners it is able to survive and thrive; what possibly be the so called self awareness if not all these and more? “The self requires time to develop fully. Psychologists have long recognized that it takes a while for children to acquire a stable sense of who they are. “They have conflicts in their self-concepts that don’t bother them at all.”Lieberman comments. ”little kids don’t try to tell themselves, ‘I’ am still the same person.’ They just don’t seem to connect up the little pieces of the self-concept.”” If I am spared of the possible label of some one playing in semantics and engaged in hair splitting I would like to not that there is nothing at all that had happened happens and will happen in no time and in no stages. Even instantaneity is a relative short period. I can not agree any less that self awareness takes time while the self is a physical construct of the information that preceded it, it does not only predate self awareness, but is there from the initial date of its complete construction when ever that may be. It seems the self goes through stages of cognition of its environment, compilation of the facts of its environment, understanding of its environment, determining the self’s position in the environment and acting in the best interest of the self with in the environmental constraints. While the last two of the process described are attributable to self awareness the former four stages are only precursors to self awareness. May be children’s conflict of self concept that don’t bother them are indicative of the developmental stage to self awareness than it is physiological (biological) (self) developmental stage.

cybernat@cybernatian.biz