One of my fav quotes is the one about caterpillars becoming butterflies by going through a disassembly that takes them down to "molecular soup". Scientists are trying to do something like that in regard to human perception. They only mean "conscious" perception because they have a hard time remembering the UN conscious. If you remind them, they will admit this, but it will throw them off track since they are considering "perception" rather than the unperceived.
The other factor is that thinking about the unconscious presses them towards the idea of another world, which to some people is "religious", a matter of believing in something unbelievable on "real" terms. Then the scientific subject of consciousness is no longer "secular" a word meant to wall out religion, at least overtly. We know that early learned religious structure of thought will affect results, usually below consciousness, just as grammar structure does. One of my "goals" is to rule out "faith" or other hypothetical but unseen factors and stick to the facts of the new research, amazing as it may be. One of the methods is to cross-disciplines, to ignore traditional boxes. I'm not alone.
"Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine" He's on YouTube and has written books, as well as being on TED talks.
Let's go back to the caterpillar/butterfly thing: see it with your own eyes:
Now we have a new word/phrase. What is an imaginal disk? "An imaginal disc is a sac-like epithelial structure found inside the larva of insects that undergo metamorphosis. Once the larva turns into a pupa, almost all the larval tissues degenerate and the imaginal discs turn into the external structures of the head, thorax, limbs and genitalia." One of them somehow preserves memory so that a butterfly can remember what a caterpillar knew.
If there is such a thing as "imaginal discs" in humans, what would they be? This is a list of clue articles: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/comments/S0960-9822(10)00291-5#secd15506082e134 One idea is that they are like stem cells.
Here's a link to an audio discussion.
This is one single example.
Map of the imaginal discs in a bug.
Here's the entertaining Ted Talk.
If you're not a bug, what do you care?
You know that terrible old film about becoming a fly or the Kafka story about becoming a cockroach? They're crazy, untrue, just metaphors, but also "body-related transdiagnosis factors." That is, they give us clues to being mentally off-center, clues to what's "bugging you."
This is the self-description of the article above.
"Our main result is the identification of a distinct “Body” factor, alongside the previously identified Internalizing and Externalizing factors. We also report relevant cross-disorder associations, especially between body-related psychopathology and trait anger, as well as substantial sex and age differences in observed and latent means. The findings expand the meta-structure of psychopathology, with implications for empirical and clinical practice, and demonstrate shared mechanisms underlying attitudes towards nutrition, self-image, sexuality and anger, with gender- and age-specific features."
"Trait anger" is a new term for me, but what it refers to, esp when mixed with sexuality, everywhere and comes up as a problem over and over. It's often considered "evil." (A bug is not evil but it might be a weevil. Jokes.) This study is highly technical and more of a map towards further study than a definitive arrival at a conclusion.
Pouches of imaginal discs as seen in dissection.
I still want to know what a pouch of imaginal discs could look like, what it is. Is it like a precipitating crystal that causes a cascade of consequences? Is it like a metaphor that becomes a story? Is it the idea that causes someone to write a book? Is it the burning obsession, a question that won't let go and that dictates a lifelong quest? What's in your molecular soup, simmering along, persisting through all metamorphsis?
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