The Biological Experience

Apropos of the addiction experience (though quite aside from lumping “uncommited sex” and “one-night stands” in with ‘transgressive infidelity’), this report about a specific variant of the DRD4 dopamine receptor biochemically links addictive behaviors with ‘sexual thrills’.

“What we found was that individuals with a certain variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to have a history of uncommitted sex, including one-night stands and acts of infidelity.

The motivation seems to stem from a system of pleasure and reward, which is where the release of dopamine comes in. In cases of uncommitted sex, the risks are high, the rewards substantial and the motivation variable — all elements that ensure a dopamine ‘rush.’” (Original Research Report)

People with the thrill-seeking gene variant were about twice as likely to report a history of one-night stands as those without the gene variant. Half of those with a love of risk imprinted in their DNA reported committing infidelity in the past, compared with 22 percent of those without the variant.

It also states fairly well why (fascinating though they are) these sorts of biochemical science bits have never had much experiential explanatory power with me:

“The study doesn’t let transgressors off the hook. These relationships are associative, which means that not everyone with this genotype will have one-night stands or commit infidelity. Indeed, many people without this genotype still have one-night stands and commit infidelity. The study merely suggests that a much higher proportion of those with this genetic type are likely to engage in these behaviors.”

The interesting aspect to me (whether one is submissive, uxorious, prudish, promiscuous or anything else)  is that there are so many ways in which we are ‘predispositionally programmed’ (for lack of a better phrase) –even biochemically– to look for ‘the good things’ in life (‘feeling alive’: fire, zest) yet there are no guarantees about our path choices for getting there (meaning, significance). It’s all part of why I think of life and living life as a “game” we “play” within a “biological meaning matrix“.

~ ~ ~

When consequences overwhelm,
when futility looms ‘neath the edge
of inevitable end of all,

I remember:
We want things, make choices.
(And whether we get what we want or not,)
Life, consequences, continue, happen.
(And whether we cope well or not at all,)
Life always goes on (until it doesn’t).

We’re always who (biologically ‘what’)
we are; the experiences (and too
the symbolizations) of fate, free will,
decision, destiny, choice, desire,
love, drive, want, passion, the will to power,
ambition, transcendence, significance,
meaning, numinous, sacred and mundane –

all, each and every one, remain, persist,
and often, confusingly, coexist.

The Mystery of Bodies

My body, I usually don’t give it a second thought – or as my wife will attest, often not even a first thought. I sometimes feel like an alien in my body, but sometimes I feel completely at home here, sometimes I’m awed by its complexity or amazed by its ability, sometimes I have wonderful fun because of it and even the occasional transcendent experience in it –sometimes many or all of these things at the same time or more.

But I wonder, as has I think probably every one of us with a body: Am I only this flesh?

Well, judging by how affected we are by its illnesses and injury, I have to say we certainly are our flesh in some very important ways. And because we perceive our bodies as both sacred (design, complexity, ability) and mundane (composition, excrement), it’s no surprise we wonder whether there’ll be anything ‘here’ after our flesh, whether there’s an ’afterlife’ for our ‘soul’ or a (D)ivinity to ‘shepherd’ that ‘soul’.

We’ve all had experience with religion’s absolute claims, claims increasingly difficult in a pluralistic society, but one ‘argument’ religion has going for it (as far as the ‘imperishable soul’) is the individual experience of the mind/body duality. Although I’ve heard even this seemingly basic experiential duality hasn’t always been so prevalent in western civilization.

I myself have suggested more than once (though pluralistic as I am, I too shy far from absolute claims of truth), that the search for and making of meaning is one of the most important motivations for all human life. And because meaning and its making seems to mean very little to the biology of bodies, I tend towards thinking of our time on earth as the playing of a very complex yet educational game matrix, where billions of souls (of all kinds and stripes) have a bodies (of all kinds and stripes) to interact with other incorporated souls (of all kinds and stripes) while we search for and make up our own meaning for the living of our game-matrix lives.

And yet even so, though I have this theoretical framework with great explanatory power for me – the mystery of bodies persists.

~

Relatedly: I sometimes wonder if there’s a waiting room for unincorporated souls somewhere, a place where they look upon the world of physical form with anticipation and excitement saying things like, “Oh, I can’t wait to do that!” “Wow, that looks liek so much FUN!” If there were such a place I think  it would help explain children’s sheer delight in running nowhere as fast as they can while sending out those ear-piercing squeals of delight.

Postmodern Society and Pluralistic Ethics

The problem of course with postmodernism is that there are few (if any) absolute truths whereas modernism at least held out the promise of a knowable absolute truth, even if that truth as currently unknown. Not that there is any lack of truth options in a postmodern world, indeed it’s the plurality of often contradictory truths that’s the problem.

I recently suggested on a forum that passion was the real reason behind the worth of an individual’s expression, yet even as I wrote I knew pluralism makes the rules of how one person’s expression of passion effects another person a serious social problem.  In fact I recently thought seeking humanity’s absolute truth is akin to trying to find lowest common denominator for the entire number line – the only answer, one (1), is of no help as it pluralistically leaves every person a rule and absolute truth unto themselves.

Most people then turn to a denominator less than one (depending on your metaphor), turn to getting a truth that though not an absolute truth will still cover as large slice of situations and examples as possible, cover as much of humanity as possible. And though this is the essence of governance, it inevitably flails and must flail on the rocks that people are real and not numbers. We live, grow, learn, change and most of all love – passionately, and those decimal point partial truths must constantly take stock and measure, then shift wherever the mass of us leads if it is to continue its optimal coverage.

However I think the difference between passion and action has allowed the sneaking of practical modernism in the back door as it were, for we often respect, admire and appreciate outlaws for their passions and individuality, even as we hunt them down and lock them away for their infringements upon others. And the where, when and why of human legal systems remain grounded in modern (more like pre-modern) absolutist religious expressions.

Thus, because there are no pluralistic ethics with a common denominator higher than one, humanity remains an odd amalgam of modern and postmodern frameworks, mostly modern at the larger scale social levels with postmodern occasionally breaking out at the lower social and individual levels.

Yet in a very real sense the absence of absolute truth, or the substitution of absolute singular with a plurality of equals, wouldn’t matter were it not for the fact I occasionally have a Christ complex and want to save humanity from itself, were it not for the fact I mentally am still seeking the ‘progressive’ betterment of human-kind. This even though I frankly suspect such ‘betterment’ is either ultimately impossible, precisely because there is no single, universal, absolute, grand-scale schema available to ‘progress’ upon, or possibly just permanently stalled at the point wherever modern sensibilities end and postmodern relativity begins.

And though it’s unoriginal, I often think that the single greatest obstacle to large-scale, wide-spread, human happiness is that trait within us that overlooks what is best in the wide and large scale picture in favor of what is best in small and short term picture. But that trait has, I think, been proved unremovable (even occasionally advantageous) and so paradoxically though I want everyone to be happy I fear all proposed utopias, all utopian programs, all ideologies and frameworks – nevermind that aligning perceived self interest with perceived social interest is a problem outdating both the modern and postmodern frameworks.

~

Of course, as I recently pointed out and am painfully aware, though I just want everyone people to be happy and live in harmony, no one can make another person happy but that person alone, and the risks of living and playing in the biological meaning matrix (my own personal decimal point partial truth) include harm, hurt and pain.

And of course that there are no better answers short of systems that cause others more harm, hurt and pain I find extremely frustrating. So despite my being a pluralist, despite my believing in pluralism (may everyone find their passion as I found mine) I find postmodernism extremely frustrating (when will we all grow up?) it remains slightly less frustrating than anything else, and though it’s hard for me to swallow, I find postmodern social ethics mostly, almost entirely, ironically, an affair of the individual’s self education.

Passion’s Aim

Passion:
to pierce the veil,
gather all from within,
hurl it forth, seeking the mark –
for the target, for the desired,
we are fired and set aflame,
and aim only aligns
action with our
passion.

What is the aim of passion? What goal, what veil do we seek to pierce? Are we success-oriented Gnostics focused on hitting the target, or are we process-oriented Buddhists focused on the experience of passion? Or some other of the infinite available options? Obviously everyone with a passion sets their sights on something, but if we were to look at all people’s passion relative to their interior space what pattern would we see? Would we see a pattern?

I have talked about passion quite a bit (OH tag: passion), my passion for my wife and my wife’s passion for being and existing as she does (see also here), not to mention passion’s general relationship to existence and being alive. This isn’t the first poem I’ve penned about passion either. But it seems to me I’m attuned to passion, and while I appreciate good artistry and even pleasant entertainment, when I sense passion really I sit up and take notice.

I came across a song title today, ‘How Can I Not Sing’, the comparatively recent version by Enya is the one I saw (though didn’t hear) but I recognized it as a Christian hymn – as I’ve said before I once was fairly religious. And I realized the very phrasing of the title, the poetry of the lyric, hit so very well the feeling I associate with passion. And I realized that this was the second religious song I’ve recently stopped to consider the passion I hear. And when I thought, ‘religion and music’, I remembered how my all time favorite Christian song is Amazing Grace, a song I have literally gotten chills from when listening to it sung by someone who really believes what they are singing.

And I thought, perhaps my interior response pathways, perhaps anyone’s interior response pathways, whether religious or otherwise, just do not easily die. And I thought of other musical examples from the letter writing scene in Tchaikovsky’s opera Onegin to John Coltrane’s a love supreme. But then I realize there’s ‘Sing oh muse the rage of Achilles‘ and that there must be a real connection between passion and belief, whether religious belief or Achilles’ (shall I say) ‘strong opinion’, there’s something there, a fire worth singing about, something that’s been with humanity for a long time for even Homer knew it.

It may seem odd to throw in ‘fire’, for of course this is what I say I see in my wife, and my wife wants nothing less than to be someone’s religion. But it might also be safe to say that in the way she is so powerfully alive, in the way having life be a certain way for her living of it, that living life is her ‘religion’, what she ‘believes’ in. And so it comes to me that perhaps in a way ‘living life’ is everyone’s religion when focused through their passion. 

Yet how odd that such diverse experiences have such similarities compacted within them; and so yes, I wonder if there is some sort of aim, some purpose of passion, that in the interior lives we live, within this biological matrix in which we ceaselessly search for meaning, there is some sort of clear connection between passion and meaning, that delivers that universally felt power of an individual human’s existential significance.

Mannequin-ed or Played-Play

I usually don’t add pictures but today the pictures are the point. I came across this in a link from Notes on an Unremarkable Life (a blog whose updates I always look forward to reading) I stumbled across the blog “Conscious Object” and the author’s flickr photostream.

At first I was mildly confused, likely because I am not very kinky - or at least I don’t consider myself kinky. But then I read the text on this cartoon (click for it) and I got it, felt it semi-electrically really: to be ’mannequin-ed’ – be ‘roboticized’ - is in a way the ultimate submission unto objectification, turned into another person’s pleasure object, to be a sex toy and be treated as an inanimate tool – to be used.

Yet semi- functional a symbol as this power (control, force, demand) concept is for me (and fantastic though it may be) such a complete surrender of power and individuality (Total Power Exchange – TPE) would violate my me, violate my life lessons, and I think possibly on some level violate the meaning part of being conscious in a biological meaning matrix. Note the mannequin-ed person is still conscious – still a conscious object, equally aware of the horror of such an existence (postmodernistic deconstruction of the individual self), equally aware of all the unpleasantry of being at another person’s pleasure, as aware of the erotic bliss.

Yet also in this blog author’s bag I found this picture – apparently a character from a graphic novel I have (unsurprisingly) never heard of (but will check out at the local library) - whose imagery resonated far more ‘electrically’ with me. Does she play the music, or does the music play her, or does she play the music that plays her, or is she played by the music she plays, or (as what immediately became luminously functional as a symbol for me) is there a compact, holistic loop interface of ‘music’ and ‘play’? - as with the roles we play becoming and already being part of who we are?

That there is no available answer suggests the same sort of ambiguity of teleology and causality found in examining the matrix of the conscious experience of meaning and the biological physics of incorporation and in examining the interface of her fiery self and my electric me. Perhaps in an intimate relationship, perhaps in any functional intimate relationship, playing while playing each other and playing at being played by each other is what makes it a relationship.