User:John Bessa

Note for all
I am genuinely happy to see so many embracing Pre-Indo-European roots because, as you will probably agree, logos means both "meaning" and "language" and, hence, represents the evolution of thought--and perhaps neurology as well. As a reconstructed language, it is a wiki-structure that is deconstructed as new language meanings are discovered.

Dialectic
My most recent writing has been a critical inquiry of the Occupy phenomena in real time. The material is composed on FaceBook and is shared with "Occupiers" as it is written for critical response. It is written from the perspective that the very problems that the Occupy movement is attempting to change exist with in the Occupy movement, leaderless as it (supposedly) is. With FB provided time and material, this "copy of the problem" presented itself as a process (rather than a goal as Occupy is self-described as "rudderless"). I am presenting my dialect writing here, as I hope it can illuminate this, the most important influence on Western (if not all) Civilization in the context of the breadth of its influence: User:John Bessa/Dialectic.

Contact channel
Please contact me through email as I log-in only sporadically.

=Presently working on my masters in counseling psychology=

My focus of choice is "empathy," or emotional communication. Right now I am studying neuropsychology, which is taking up all my time. I left off my empathy learning with a comparison of reason and sensibility, where reason has its roots in calculation (from the Romans), and sense is much older, often meaning seeking or pathway in the various pre-Indo-European descendants.

My empathy experience started with a suggestion from my mentor/professor that I read de Waal's work on empathy in higher animals, specifically elephants. The underlying neurology of empathy is the "connecting" type of neuron: mirror and spindle cells. These are "bipolar" with long dendrites that, presumably, connect parts of the brain. As it happens, the nerurons that connect the sensory receptors with parts of the brain are "bipolar," and I am assuming that they have similar functions in the brain, or effects on thought!

It may be that "lower-level" sensing neurons are part of the "animal" responsibility that creates the offspring raising responsibilities that we see in all mammals, birds, and many reptiles. If so, we can easily explain empathy in animals. I, well, sense that this may be a good place to look for evidence to further support empathy concepts.

And perhaps even more interesting is a "layering" approach to the evolutions of both language and neurology. The two are on different time scales (by many factors), but, still, there is sophisticated communication in animals, such as songbirds use, where birds evolved along different path than we did.

"Sense" derives from menos, according to the PEI translator. Ironically the Romans used menos to mean "minus," a mathematical term, such as "rational" is. "Rational," in my view, describes the opposite aspect of thought, or its "flip side," deriving from Latin ratio: analysis.

A down-side to neurological research is that sensing technology is not able to measure conscious thought, and neurological electrical measurements may never be "granular" enough to detect morality. (Notice how I avoided using the word "sensitive" to describe sensing equipment.)