How do you reconcile the GA notion that 'there is always someone directing discourse', i.e. the NRX notion that 'sovereignty is indivisible', with the fact that we see competing power structures in the real world (which is also discussed in your model). Does the indivisibility notion only apply locally to individual decisions? As in, in every circumstance where a decision is made, some 'sovereign' is locally responsible for that decision? In my view, that does not scale up to implying that sovereignty is indivisible nationally. Or is there some broader point I'm missing? How would you explain something like a revolution in an autocratic country? Hasn't sovereignty been 'divided' in that case?
Here's the way I think about it. There is always a center in any human interaction. In hierarchical social orders there is a social center and this position is always occupied by a central authority. All social activity takes place under the "sign" of the central authority, and all social actors try to make their actions conform to the terms set by the central authority--that's the only way they can make sense. There is always a difference between the social center and the central authority occupying it--the central authority is never a perfect fit. There is no guarantee that the central authority will exercise power commensurate to the size of the "circumference" of the circle he is the center of. In fact, he never really will without the governed "supplementing" his power by rising up to meet, so to speak, his commands. Rather than saying that sovereignty is indivisible, I would say there is nothing outside of the sovereign, or the central authority. If the power exercised from the center is not commensurate to the circumference, then it is not as if those on the circumference, or the margins, are authorities over themselves, or free of authorities--what it means is that they will try to make the center "work," or act as if it does work, or get mobilized by someone who promises to make it work.
Thanks, this makes sense. But I think I would need further convincing on the idea that: “All social activity takes place under the "sign" of the central authority, and all social actors try to make their actions conform to the terms set by the central authority--that's the only way they can make sense.” In our lives I feel like, while much of what we do is governed by a central ideology, can we really discount the role of just base instinct? (Some people are kind, some are sociopaths, some sex addicts, some infertile, etc; don’t these things drive behavior at an individual level?) And what about free will? How do we explain people who are dissidents of a system? Thanks!
What it means to be kind, what it means to be sociopathic, etc., will depend upon existing social structures--"sociopath" is in particular a uniquely modern concept (so is "addict"). Not everything we notice about human bodies needs to have a direct correspondence to something in the power structure--how we respond to and make sense of such things always will, though. Even more fundamentally, though, we are members of a community before, and in order to see ourselves as, any of those things.
"Free will" is a very specific (Western) philosophical concept. As a concept it is a product of debates within a particular discipline and a particular social order. These debates are in turn parts of larger power structures and struggles. It has a history, in other words. That doesn't necessarily mean it has no reality: where there is is a concept imbued with power, people will live it, and make it real, for good or ill. But there are lots of other ways of speaking about how people make intelligent and responsible decisions.
Dissidents of a system of dissident *of that system*\--their actions only have meaning insofar as they align with and supported by others seeking to "supplement" the center.
But we can actually observe a lot of this stuff in the brain though; the neurons are firing differently with people who fall into these clinical categories. Perhaps different societies would _call_ these people different things, but wouldn’t their behavior be inflected by their ‘sociopathic’ tendencies in _any_ society? Are you saying that our entire identity is socially constructed? Thats a bold pill for me to swallow, tbh, but I can see why that would have interesting implications.
You could track the relations between brain activity and behavior, but since behaviors are different in different societies how could you actually say, in a transcultural way, "x configuration of neurons firing corresponds to y behavior," when there are societies that don't have y behavior. You could do cross-cultural studies, always from within a specific cultural space, and you could observe--very indirectly, of course--some common Medieval behavior and say "this looks like what we call sociopathy." (Of course we'd know nothing about their neurons.) We'd also then have to not that they call it something else, and may value it differently. We can keep learning more about relations, and possible relations, between biology and culture, without assuming some final, comprehensive, transhistorical mapping of one onto the other.
I don’t think behaviors are different in different societies, the way we refer to them is different. Physical differences like T-levels make people more likely to ‘fight’ each other. Each society may have a different cultural conception of fighting, but isn’t that link (hormone level to aggressive behavior) embedded in physical reality, outside of language?
I think your biological determinism is going to be very limiting. Do high T-levels make a couple of unintelligent guys more likely to duke it out over a stray insult? Maybe. Do high T-levels help to account for medieval Japanese samurai warriors spending years of training and discipline so as to engage in a highly ritualized form of battle? Maybe in a broad sense--maybe the low T Japanese became priests and the high-T became samurai, if they could. But being a samurai also involves exercising a great deal of self-restraint. Is that also a result of high-T? Is it high-T channeled in a particular way? High-T balanced by something else? Is there a qualitative distinction between different kinds or expressions of T that we haven't recognized yet? We could call the bar brawl and a samurai duel "fighting," but the people involved won't necessarily recognize the two activities as the same. How do we decide whether the differences are more important than the similarities (let alone what we count as differences and similarities)? In the end there's going to be pretty low ceiling on what you can explain by "high-T."
I can definitely get more on board when you say it like that. But even there I have some questions, like often in school I would understand a concept visually or intuitively before I got it formally in words. When I think of my car, a clear visual picture comes into my mind, not any words...is this kind of stuff considered in your model? Are you using language to mean ‘any means representation of a real thing in a human brain’?
Yes this is all language as well--even memories are social. We haven't addressed the specific kinds of examples you give here, but I'm sure some GA-informed cognitive psychologist could. Language is always scenic, so we always have a sense or memory of the scenes on which we heard and saw things that couldn't be put into words very easily. It would actually be an interesting thing to work on--there must be a kind of scenic "aura" to words that can't be put into words and would include images and models.