Parahippocampus: a key to empathy and PSI?

Any serious neuroscientist should know that humans (and at a lesser level monkeys) possess "mirror neurons." Karl Pribram once told me the story of a neuroscientist recording from the  brain of a monkey; he was startled when the monkey responded to the scientist reaching for nuts in the same cells which had fired when the monkey himself was reaching for them! (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19760408/).  

But I was astounded when the last science fiction novel I read, https://www.davidzindell.com/the-idiot-gods/, included a thorough review of the brain of the orca, with scientific citations! (The striped dolphin may be even better, I later found.) That brain -- and SOME humans -- possesses a unique structure, a parahippocampus and paralimbic region, which may be of very fundamental importance in understanding the foundations of the highest level of empathy, which is important not only to ethics and values but to intelligence and understanding as well.

By the way, empathy and HUMAN values are discussed in an advanced way in Pribram's book:

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7937292M/Brain_and_Values

Here is part of a recent email discussion on that (thanks to Yeshua Ben David's list);

On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 5:12 PM Nancy du Tertre <nancy@dutertre.com> wrote:

Paul,

“Parahippocampus and paralimbic lobes may be important to PSI!!”

Why? Spatial memory ? Emotion identification? Motivation or goals? 

Just curious.

No need to apologize for such an important issue. One advantage of the word "paralimbic" is that it's a great search term, which could get you to RELATED things I have posted here before, which connect to the basic issues. 

WHEN noosphere (soul) tries to connect, even in two-way connection, it depends on how good the possible connection is, for rich "conscious" thought. Noosphere can even connect strongly to just plain water, but not to exchange ideas much. Much better to mammal brains than reptile, because mammal brains have structures intended to represent certain kinds of ideas, actions and such. ALL MAMMALS possess a kind of "verb-object" memory, supporting basal ganglia, which represent "VERBS" (action schemata or "options" or "skills") AND OBJECTS.

(When a mouse open a door, the option is "open" AND "door.") With the mouse, the subject of the sentence is implicitly just "I", memory of what IT did.

A key hypothesis: some mammal brains with strong parahippocampus can encode actor-verb-object memory to a high refined degree,

allowing them to learn from memory of what OTHER actors experienced. All mammals with mirror neurons have SOME of that capability. Human language skills are rooted in having more of the required machinery than monkeys do, BUT COULD IT BE THAT ORCAS HAVE MORE, and that there is diversity even among humans? Brain machinery which strengthens the mirror neuron, empathy capability gives the noosphere a chance to expand the capability of hybrid organisms (body/soul) like us to develop capabilities like "assumption", the PSI of seeing through the eyes of others.

In fact -- in 1963-64, I focused deeply on the Upanishads in the famous Hume collection. I was totally against belief in PSI until 1967, but   the abstract THEORETICAL concepts of seeing through many eyes made a deep impression on me, and might have been a major factor in preparing me for the experiences which stunned me in 1967 and 1972. (Of course, the connection  between my abstract thinking and full first person experience, cultivated by "sanity", helpd make that work.) I cc a former colleague who understood that aspect of Vedas more than

anything I have seen on  these discussion lists. 

Best regards, Paul 

Afterlife and reincarnation -- neither yes nor no but the middle way

 We have had many debates all over the earth about whether reincarnation is real or not. 

Human brains have a natural tendency (temptation? illusion?) biasing them towards extreme, yes or no, black or white positions. In fact, whole books have been written in psychology about "tolerance of cognitive dissonance." Some of us (like me) are actually born with a strong natural tendency to reject dissonance; for us, the path of sanity demands we learn to control and discipline that tendency.

So could it be that the reality of afterlife and reincarnation is NOT a matter of yes and no, but in-between?

That is what all the evidence I see supports -- including third person, first person AND second person!

Re second person: if any of you really wonders whether you know the truth of this yet, with any doubt, I urge you to read the light easy but serious novel by Jane Roberts: https://archive.org/details/oversoulseventri0000robe . It depicts an INTERMEDIATE position. 

OR: have you ever thought deeply about "avatars" or "assumption" (reflected in that novel, and in many other places)? 

Could it be that ONE soul, located in the "astral plane" or in our local noosphere, STAYS there (for a long time), BUT CONNECTS to a living human brain or to another soul connected to that brain? I call this kind of relationship "partial gating."

Partial gating has a strong, deep, almost unavoidable role in the mathematics of intelligent systems. (I bcc a researcher who appreciates the importance of symmetry groups and partial symmetry groups in the mathematics of intelligent systems.) 

But it is also something I have seen often, and see every day. I am also bcc'ing a leading Western mystic who talks about a level of consciousness which works in that way. Partial gating is also visible in the later work of Escher, who actually studied symmetry groups. 

"Assumption" is a state where you see through the eyes of another person... TO SOME DEGREE. But you do not take over that other person, or vice-versa. It  is basically just an extension of EMPATHY, which is supported by mirror neurons and by parahippocampus to some degree in SOME mammals. Beyond the capability for assumption or empathy is the capability to see through SEVERAL or MANY eyes at once. (Yeshua and I long ago discussed a TV video series Sense8 which depicts this.

I bcc a vedantic mystic and physicist who has demonstrated understanding of this aspect of the Upanishads much more than most of the modern schools of sanskrit words do.) 

I now tend to believe that my own phenomenal learning of mathematics when I was young was due in great part to  my instinctive ability to see what a mathematics teacher or science author was actually thinking and seeing... at an age when I strongly disbelieved (intellectually) in any form of PSI. Beliefs in the ego (the part of the mind which performs symbolic reasoning) and actual beliefs in the full non verbal part of the brain and of the soul are usually NOT well integrated until one matures a bit, until one learns a level of sanity or zhengqi. (See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z.) Many people have a deep belief in soul, combined with "color blind" narcissism and solipsism so severe that they become destructive religious fanatics, while others (like me when young or myPhD adviser Karl Deutsch) disbelieve while exercising esoteric skills to an extreme degree. 

Beyond the "Sense8" level of PSI is partial gating to our entire noosphere. That is the state which I think of when I hear the words "cosmic consciousness". IF MORE US humans gate better with our local noosphere (as in the talk I gave last week to Nanjing, at the IEEE ISSDC international conference), it will improve our chances to survive as a species. The spiritual feedback or "qi" which energizes our soul reflects ... what Freud called "psychic energy""... in the noosphere, what drives adaptation and learning of all higher parts of any brain, mammal or noosphere (or well-designed AGI). IF we achieve a high level of zhenqi, we CARE about the life of this solar system,

not only humans but other life as well. We do not need personal vested interests to CARE.

HOWEVER: few people now seem to care as much as I do. When I see COP26 and US climate policy diverting efforts to prevent total extinction of humanity, to serve vested interests either corporate or ideological or ethnic, I worry deeply what will happen to us. Will all of our noosphere end up like a little fish in a big aquarium, most of which die before reaching adulthood? 

Most people DO care what may happen to them after death of the good old mundane body. That is why most ancient cultures have strong rituals of some kind to try to preserve connections to their ancestors and other friendly dead folks. They believe that the memories -- both factual and alive or episodic -- of their ancestors can raise the collective intelligence of their people and increase their chances of survival. WHAT IF THEY ARE RIGHT? What if the more rigid, black and white beliefs we see in more organized bureaucratic empires (biased by personal interests of people in power) are abominations and false, like what Constantine and Justinian did to Christianity? (I have SEEN that history in Ravenna! And Constantinople.) 

And so... what happens to YOU after YOUR death may depend a lot BOTH ON how you connect your soul within the larger noosphere which all us humans are part of (no matter how far we may see into the galaxy and beyond, as some of us do,d eveloping more advanced telescopes and PSI both) AND ON the health of the entire noosphere itself.Those of us who are soon to BECOME ancestors will have our fates shaped a lot by HOW WELL those who stay alive on earth CONNECT to the noosphere as a whole and ENERGIZE and FOCUS its own integrity. 

That is one of the reasons why I was so excited "in" Nanking this week to see hope we might strengthen this connection!!

Additional sources on this -- the Disney animation "Coco", depicting well what happens to PART and SOME of soul after death (the ancient "day of the dead" system), and Gurdjieff's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYhv0O0gUTk. And we have spoken to a major shaman by the shores of lake Titicacca, and to teachers of Sufism and refuges from Kurdistan who reported oppression by new authorities in Turkey exactly like Justinian.