I think the field of traumatology, and in particular, the neurobiological study of the vagus system, known as the Polyvagal Theory (developed by Stephen Porges) has the ability to eliminate from the human species philosophies which operate from premises which rely on feeling states that exist purely as emergent effects of negative self-other interactions during the process of development.

All of the philosophy which works from the premise of what Popper calls "oracular philosophy", needs to be reassessed in light of these essential facts about the neurobiology of the way we evolved.

As Antonio Damasio's 5th book shows so well (and he does reference Porges very important theory) the body is built like a pyramid. At the bottom, you have all the processes of the various organs which make up the body; each of these systems are composed of cells; which are themselves emergent properties of molecular interactions. The human body has on average 50-100 trillion cells, and some cells, like cortical neurons, are made up of 100 or so billion molecules. Numbers wise, the system of the body is enormously complex, and so, we must account for this complexity with a very general idea: homeostasis.

Homeostasis is best thought of as a sort of "inner symmetry" which constitutes the organisms "purpose", or teleodynamism (i.e. the "final end" which dissipative processes move to). But as Maturana and Varela have shown, this inner symmetry dynamic, and its kinetic time-table of self-recreation (or "autopoiesis"), is dynamically tethered to nutrients in the environment. They call this a "structural coupling" between organism and world.

The biophysicist Harold Morowitz considered the TCA cycle (citrus acid cycle, or krebs cycle) to be the core metabolism of almost every single cell that exists on Earth, and therefore, is something like an "ecosystem property", as he termed it. The TCA cycle is both catabolic (loss of energy) and anabolic (releasing energy), and its precursors so basic, and its presence so pervasive, that it is treated by many biophysicists today as a probable precusor around which nucleic acids emerged as functioal "constraints" on the metabolic proceses (such as the TCA cycle) themselves. Autocatalytic feedbacks loops like phosolipid formation and the TCA cycle provide examples of how circular dynamics in the cell constitute a more basic feature than genes.

The TCA cycle in cells are kinetically very actve and constantly 'turning over'. Conversely, genes are far longer lasting, implying a relationship somewhat akin to the phenomeological neuroscientists classification of consciousness as occurring at around 200-300 milliseconds, whereas feeling, or the background 'bottom-up' affective dynamics, are arising every few milliseconds, as recorded by EEGs placed deep in the frontal cortex.

In other words, TCA cycle and Affect are dynamically identical process. Genes emerge later and persist longer because they are the functional 'coordinates' or controls on metabolic dynamics (see Andreas Wagners Arrival of the Fittest for elaboration on this idea), and thus, very important elements to be passed on. Nevertheless, they are merely after-effects or emergent properties of the way the environment 'selects', or acts upon, the dynamics of the organism's teleodynamic coherency, or, homeostasis.

So homeostasis is a very big idea, and its significance as a control parameter on affective processes effectively unchallengable.

That said, what is the relationship between homeostasis and the mind? Here lies the importance of Porges Polyvagal theory for anyone who is seriously interested in studying the nature of the human mind.

Homeostasis controls consciousness through affect; so what is affect, and what is its signficance for the organism? As Damasio writes, and as the field of Biosemiotics emphatically insists as essential, is the process of semiosis - or 'meaningful representation'. Good and bad feelings are feedback from vagal afferents coming from the viscera to the brainstem, which conveys this dynamical activity into a feeling tone in the higher brain areas, finally to reach consciousness in the forebrain areas like the insula and OFC.

Again: homeostasis is the underlying 'current' which 'selects' what can and cannot be felt. So the next question becomes: what are the dimensions of feeling? I mentioned bottom-up processes, which would be states of physiological functioning like hunger, thirst, needing to pee, poo, to sleep etc. But grafted or superimposed on these is a general 'horizontal' dimension with a shame-pride continuum of affects whicg more or less set the background tone for our thinking processes.

And so, we get to shame and pride - the control parameters of interpersonal communication. The polyvagal theory studies the two tracts of the vagus nerve: an older, dorsal tract which originated in reptiles, and is expressed in the low metabolic states of 'freeze' that reptiles often persist in (many can go hours without a breath: speaking to their low oxygen needs). This dorsal tract more or less communicates the 'needs' of the bodily system to the brainstem.

80% of vagal tracts are sensory, and so, are involuntary. This is not something that can be disputed, which is why a deep study of biology and anatomy truly is the final frontier for philosophy.

A new tract emerged with the emergence of mammals. This tract originates in the nucleus ambiguus, is myelinated, and also ennervates all those organs related to social-cuing: the larynx, the pharnyx, 5 cranial nerves that control facial muscles, the heart, and the bronchi. In short, the ventral vagal tract emerged as a way of synergizing some of the capacities of the sympathetic nervous system (such as arousal) as well as the calming and relaxing affects of the parasympathetic nervous system.

Before the ventral vagal system evolved, there is a profound stereotypy in behavior: either good (safe) or bad (threatening) and if the former, there would be little or no exploration (parasympathetic reptiles) and if the latter, there would be fight-flight (sympathetic) or in extreme situations, a parasympathetic "collapse" state of death-feigning, which is not a voluntary action of the organism seeking to "trick" the prey, but rather a state of intense arousal which is "nubbed" by a dissociation process that releases the higher parts of the brain from struggling against what amounts to an existential threat to the systems continuity. Evolutionarily speaking, its likely that this homeostatic response became "selected" in situations of intense threat because predators may confuse a non-moving animal for a dead animal, and so, the 'death-feigning' behavior emerged as a genuine adaptation to predation.

To finish off this thread: trauma is a process which potentially begins in utero, and becomes more and more serious if the environment, or the salient objects in the environment (other humans) do not interpret the cues of the child in a way that supports the systems evolutionarily expected environment. More basically, symmetry is a basic process is nature, and the Golden Rule is most obviously an emergent property of symmetry dynamics at the level of quarks, and upwards (i.e. atoms, molecules, etc). We may even think of the dynamics of our mind in terms of the concept of tensegrity, or "tensional integrity". Tensional integrity operates at the level of cell walls, bones and muscles, and in all probability, social affects of safety and threat, and what sort of narrative dynamics those affects activate as emergent properties to navigate our day to day lives as sentient beings.

In other words, metabolism leads to affect, affect becomes conditioned by environmental processes around particular attractors - either competition or nurturing (or a combination of them in different contexts) - which in turn attracts certain social relationships, certain narratives, philosophies, etc.

All in all. My point is this: Nietzsche, Hegel, etc, have traumatological minds, with traumatological attitudes which assume states of consciousness that only exist in people who've suffered and been victimized so that they assume attitudes towards reality that serve to regulate their nihilistic and hedonistic feelings about things. I do not demonize Nietzsche, Hegel, etc, but I also cannot ignore that they are exaggerating and reifying a state of affairs that only applies to people who've been structurally damaged, so that their perceptual and cognitive processes are governed by affects based in fear, anxiety, dread, and alienation. The thoughts which result from such thinking are inevitably damaging to the body, self, relationships, and as climate change shows, the planet as well.

Trauma, or the discovery of the reality of developmental trauma, shows us that our minds are exaggerations. We always like to imagine what thingfs would be like in some far off future, without thinking about what our own experiences have down to us in terms of the affects we feel when we reflect; that is, we do not realize that our mentation in such situations is comparative and relational: its between WHAT IVE GONE THROUGH AND HAVE KNOWN, and what such a utopia - such a future - seems like to me from my very low, very difficult perspective.

It seems the more unresolved trauma you have, the more mourning you have yet to do; this "mourning" potential, or what is more or less the 'antidote' to unresolved feelings of agitation, irritability, and rage, if not given expression, will motivate the feelings of alienation from reality (and the construction of coarse myths, a return to Popper's "tribal unity"), and so, the more the human bemoans its life, existence, being, and begins to get carried away with nihilistic ideation.

In this way, the Real, as the "will" of biology - or symmetry processes, which constitute a stability within the lived context of the individual organism - persists in the background, generating the affects, the myths, the elaborate mystifications of functional processes like sexual desire (venus) aggression (mars) into something which they aren't, but can be made to seem as real or even ontologically final in their signfiicance.

Fields like genetics are being modified by fields like epigenetics and non-linear dynamical systems theories. Genetic conditions can be transmitted; but the underlying dynamic which reiforces the functional loop can be changed, and so, reversed. External conditions like socioeconomics are functional constraints on a persons feelings of safety - in other words, on their sense of control over their lives.

Where you live and where you stand in the class system determines the sorts of stresses, and so, quality of self-experience and clarity for thinking and reasoning, that can be carried out.

All these higher functions - and even more - exist along a continuum which a logical basis in the 'search for safety', as Porges puts it. But when safety is found, there are three basic forms it can assume in its existential relation: Play, which is self-focused. Care, which is Other Person focused; and Awe, which is World focus. Play, of course, can be play with another; but it is always controlled, or regulated, by an unconscious 'care factor' which functionally inhibits the organism from engaging in threat behaviors during play. Care, can be for the self as well; but it is primarily and originally oriented to the external other: the mother. And awe, can be towards the Self, but it is perhaps most naturally ignited by external realities in the natural world, and so, perhaps, the idea of the natural world as an extension of Self, or the Otherness of nature, symbolically represented as some 'ultimate scalar object', is the ultimate truth.

However the self evolves once basic conditions of safety are met probably doesn't involve that much imagination. Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity provide interesting ideas on the matter.

But that 'ultimate' reality is besides the point. The idea that one can 'know what ones thinking', under conditions of stress and constraint and fear, is profoundly illogical. Natural processes of self-organization in nature are far too prevalent to be ignored as simulacra of processes operating in our own brain-minds scanning a relational field sensing and looking for other humans which act upon its feelings in subtle and exquisitely meaningful ways.

That said, the science of the body and the mind which emerges from it is a science which can guide social sciences and political sciences in the policies we take towards the world around us. For instance, Popper's emphasis on tolerance and acceptance would seem to be the most rational approach to helping people lower their guards, feel safe, and not criticized or mentally held by another person in a negative - and so threatening - way. The face reflexively communicates these meanings; and the observing mind watching such a face reflexively represents the other's intentionality by the affects that arise within its consciousness. The ethic of unconditional love is also eminently logical: if people are determined by their conditions, then they are more or less a plinko chip being probabilistically guided by the input of external environments upon their processing. We look upon one another with cleavers: we cut out the iterations of facts which govern the way humans interpret the world around them. We judge when we have no logical basis in doing so.

Why? This is the metaphysical bit of this piece: We treat the external world as 'other' when it is actually, and in fact, a continuum with us 'emerging', each in our own place, as logical 'sets' processing events in ways that are always non-random in that they are logically related to conditions of homeostasis and 'environmental fittedness' between organism and world.

Homeostasis within this larger geometrodynamism is about syncrony and synchronization of cycles between self and others, and between self and the objective world around us. Perceptual events in consciousness are emergent from the bottom up, but the observing self always "knows" when it is seeing something coherent, and so, is able to bias the input of information from its inhibition and selection of objects. When the self 'moves through' these metaphysical objects, this is simultaneously, and in all probability, a synchronization of the material brain with the material brains of others whom one is affectively close with. Higher level functions - such as psychic powers - emerge at this plane, which reveals just how 'close' and 'tight-knitted' the human mind can become if it is allowed to explore reality without the constraint of threat.