Having identified the components of the mental model I am advocating, I would now like to turn this discussion to how these components interact with each other. While probably not exhaustive, I think the following list touches upon the major modes of human mental functionality.
Although I have touched on it briefly before this, the basic mental process of obsession needs to be emphasized. I would like to identify obsession as the basic mechanism involved in the translation of human neurological activity into human behavior. I understand that the term obsession has a basically negative connotation, but my intention here is to treat it as a neutral concept that can be either constructive or destructive of human goals depending upon circumstances.
Obsession is a mental process in which one node of the human mental tetrahedron originates a piece of network traffic. If that traffic is at least re-transmitted, possibly amplified, and possibly transformed, it can become a sustained mental state. I propose to identify any example of focused and sustained mental activity as an obsessive mental state.
Obsessive mental states can be very constructive things. Intellectual accomplishments of all kinds are the result of keeping one's mind in focus for a long enough period to produce results. Certainly every scientist, engineer and teacher is obsessed with his field.
Likewise obsessive mental states can be very destructive things. People who start and pursue wars or organize and execute genocides are operating under the influence of highly destructive obsessive mental states.
I am now convinced that certain kinds of obsessive mental states are more common than others. Essentially any instinct that can produce Fear as a by-product is capable of producing very strong obsessive mental states. I would like to call this phenomenon the Chronic Fear Syndrome or by just the acronym CFS. The basic human capacity to feel Fear is of course inherited from our simian ancestors, but humans differ in that they have a vivid and especially powerful MemFac that can retrieve and load a Fear-producing event from memory. Humans do not have to be in immediate danger to feel Fear. The things that cause Fear can be identified with concepts and the concepts stored in memory. The more often a Fear-producing topic circulates about the human mental tetrahedron, the higher a priority it is assigned by the MemFac, the more likely it is to be retrieved and set loose on the network in the future. Thus the LogFac can find itself dealing with a chronic situation. The LogFac is after all a phenomenon associated with a physical organ. That organ can get fatigued or it can simply be busy with other business and when it does, the policeman of the tetrahedral network starts to falter in his duty. At this point, the CiFac comes to the rescue. The CiFac can operate in as undisciplined manner as it needs to. When the pressure is on, it can produce notions that are sheer fantasy but which can seem, following a superficial inspection, to be plausible. With a few cycles through the network, these fantasies can be amplified so that they cause the EmoFac to react in a calming, comforting Fear-reducing way. Thus CFS, the Chronic Fear Syndrome can become CFS the Chronic Fantasy Syndrome. Later in the chapters on history and futurism, I will have occasion to refer back to this paradigm.
The CFS paradigm is not really as strange and foreign as it may sound. In a crisis situation where the danger is not simply remembered but real and immediate, the CiFac can jump in and propose a well recognized plan of action... run for it. In the vernacular this behavior is sometimes tagged with the familiar concept: cowardice. CFS as the Chronic Fantasy Syndrome amounts to a more leisurely implementation of cowardice.
I have touched briefly before on repression but, it needs to be emphasized as another basic human mental process. I would like to identify repression as the basic mechanism that is involved in stopping human neurological activity from being translated into behavior. I understand that repression has a generally negative connotation, especially among people with an awareness of human psychological processes. However, it is my intention to treat it as a neutral concept that can be either constructive or destructive of human goals depending upon circumstances.
Repression is a mental process in which one or more nodes of the human mental tetrahedron attenuates a piece of network traffic. I will not argue that the effect of repression is immediate and total but only that repression results in a reduction in the intensity and frequency of a piece of network traffic such that the traffic loses some or all of its ability to drive human behavior.
Repression, as I am trying to identify it, includes the traditional concept of a squelched emotion, but it also includes the rejection of a concept as a target for the LogFac, the forgetting of an item of information by the MemFac and, the rejection of a subject as a target for the CiFac. Simply put, I am advancing the notion that any node of the tetrahedron can contribute to a repressive effort.
I once saw a documentary on TV that dealt with homosexuality. Two sisters who were identical twins were mentioned. The fact that they were identical twins meant that their genetic code was identical. Yet one sister was homosexual and the other was heterosexual. Since genetics could not have caused the difference, some human mental capacity that can influence and redirect the instinct of sexuality has to exist. The influence the EmoFac has over the rest of the human mental tetrahedron is not absolute. I would like to identify the human mental process that detaches and then reattaches a human emotional response from one circumstance to another as reattachment.
I recall that when I was a child, I used to watch cowboy movies on the then novelty of television. I recall watching and listening to Gene Autry and developing a taste for country and western music. This I lost promptly when my parents ridiculed this newly acquired preference. Eventually I developed a taste for rock and roll. In later years, having read Ayn Rand, I decided that I wanted to develop a taste for classical music. I found that I could not reattach my musical emotional response to classical music. To this day I enjoy heavy metal more than classical music. The point is that it seems to be easier to effect reattachment when one is young.
Growing up, all of my friends were interested in automobiles and desired to have one. Many considered a Corvette to be the ideal automobile and worked hard to get one. Since neither automobiles or Corvettes existed during the Pliocene and Pleistocene the question arises as to how an emotional response came to be associated with these things. Either the proclivity was a wholly new emotion or a derivative of some instinct. I am willing to argue that this emotional response was in fact a reattachment of the Territoriality instinct in response to a value judgment.
Humans are not limited to experiencing just one emotion at a time. It is possible for several simultaneously occurring emotions to combine into one compounded state. For example, the synthesis of fear, anxiety and hopelessness is commonly referred to as depression. The simultaneous gratification of several emotional drives is commonly referred to as happiness. Most human motivational states derive from the fact that multiple emotional drives can often be gratified and multiple goals can often be achieved by an action.
It seems probable to me that the human emotional faculty works exactly like the model I described for the simian emotional faculty. Given the genetic relationship between humans and chimps, it would be truly astounding if it did not. There are Interface emotions which are the contact points with the real world. There is an integration process that produces a cumulative emotional state expressed through the integrator emotions. And finally there is a Translation mechanism that prescribes action through the Translator emotions of Passivity and Aggresivity. Simply put, the more Interface emotions that are stimulated by an event, the more likely the event is to result in a behavior change. Hence behavior tends to be the result of emotions that have been compounded (i.e. integrated).
In discussing motivational states and in attributing behavior to motivational states, it is very common to see people focus on just one aspect and exclude others as irrelevant. An ardent socialist might attribute the misdeeds of Stalin to the male proclivity for domination run amok. An ardent individualist might attribute the misdeeds of Stalin to the acceptance of compassion as a justification for murder. The two points of view are not mutually exclusive. In reality, both can be true simultaneously because human motivational states are usually compound.
Often times when an adult is trying to dissuade a child from some odious form of behavior that the child has copied from another child, the adult will taunt the child with the words "Monkey see: monkey do." I have come to believe that these words are much more than a simple taunt but are a fully accurate description of an important aspect of human psychology.
The difference between humans and monkeys is that humans don't simply copy behavior. Rather, they tend to see any action taken by another individual as an exercise of an abstract principle. This is to say that they tend to see any action as being justifiable or not justifiable according to abstract principles of right and wrong. Any human who does a thing is saying (consciously or not) to all other humans "It is OK for me to do this thing." Other humans observing the action immediately conclude "If it is OK for you to do that thing, then it is OK for me to do the same thing or a similar thing." Or in the vernacular "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." The result is that human behavior and the abstract justifications for it tend to proliferate. There is a tendency for one individual's behavior to create a chain reaction effect as other people adopt the implied abstract principle.
Everyone is familar with the human capacity for habitual behavior. Once a neural pathway has been exercised, it becomes easier for it to be exercised again. I suspect that this phenomenon plays a large part in human learning experiences and helps to account for the tendency, of people who study and work at mental problems frequently, to score higher on IQ tests. This phenomenon also works for emotional states. People that dwell on certain emotions frequently can work themselves into an obsessive mental state that can endure for a lifetime. At any rate, I mention the subject here not to achieve any new great revelations, but simply to leave no human mental process unmentioned.