peter f

The "Evolutionary Patterning (and Pressure)
Totality" can be sorted into "Opportunities" and "Perils" (or
"Adversities").

To produce this didactic (but only fairly dialectic) dichotomy, simply sum
over all
individual lifetimes (or all reproductive cycles) whilst employing the
Principle of Tolerance#.

[# This is a principle that I parasitized from Bronowski's extrapolation
application of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. However, I think I have
put it to some unprecedented conceptual and cognitive-philosophical use.;->]

"Opportunities" and "Perils" are tools for explanatory thought. They do not
(of course) have a physical
existence beyond being discrete patterns in human brain-space-time, and the
fact they exist on electronic, and if printed wood-pulp based, paper.

I placed these (not quite dialectic nor diametrically opposite yet
sufficiently contrasting) categories in an order that reflects that
phylogenetic Opportunities [or opportunity type evolutionary pressures in
general] represent that the primary part of evolutionary potentials and
evolutionary emergence is not destructive but constructive patterning (in/of
this universe).

IF extrapolated to philosophically fit in with astrophysical evolution then
the ultimate primacy of evolutionary emergence can be described as the sheer
emergence TO something 'thingy' (e.g. the popping into existence of a first
fundamental subatomic particle, or the first - of an avalanche of - stringy
vibrations) FROM what is definitely not 'thingy' and accordingly
conventionally described
as "nothing". That is, "nothing" is usually meant with a convenient absence
of 'concept contemplation. In other words, etymological probing tends not to
take place or at least not to be a prominent part of relevant parlance;
such as, "everything came from nothing".

In context of rationally-philosophically analyzing biological evolution,
starting from approximately just
after the stage where cytochemical reproduction had taken hold, "Opportunity
type evolutionary pressures" can profitably be imagined as "niches for the
taking" on the presumption
that suitable intrinsic genetic changes, that allows the cellular "vehicles"
of plant and animal life to meet these extrinsic or environmental [including
the "milieu interior"] challenges, can and do arise.

Now go on to recognize that Nature produces entrapping climatic perils with
seasonal
regularity, and that it at no less significantly frequent but *irregular*
intervals gives rise to adverse and (at the same time) no less physically
inescapable lifetime incidents or situations.

Please note that the notion of "adverse (or perilous) lifetime situations
being
escapable or not", is relevant to living organisms only to the extent
motility and mobility is a characteristics of their clade. Thus, EPT is
mainly relevant to Kingdom Animalia and to the phylogeny of fauna.
Or, because they are useful for making a simplest and most prototypical
possible analytical and
easily instructively associated point, protists with flight and feeding
(rather than fight) type abilities - like those that amoebas have - can also
be
counted in.

Now, place the second (or fundamentally secondary) of the two topmost
categories of EPT [i.e. of the Evolutionary Patterning (and Pressure)
Totality] into separate septs, in the following way.

Connote and connect the former type of potentially self-defeatingly
distressful peril (adverse lifetime challenges that are seasonal and
climatic in character) with a requirement, and natural selection, for a
general form of self-inhibition; and label it (refer to it) with the
conventionally meant but not completely conventionally worded
expression "general hibernation" (or, for that matter, "general
aestivation" -
i.e. because what matters here is that it be conveyed that the crux of the
matter is a drastic
*metabolism dampening* function).

Now consequently refer to the type of adaptation that is required to met the
selective
challenge from *irregularly occurring and physically inescapable adversity
(perils)*, as
"specific hibernation".
["Selective hibernation", or "synaptic hibernation", might also do the
job.%-)]

This type of naturally inevitable predicaments, i.e. those frequently
occurring situations that demand or "implore" (so
to speak) specific hibernation, have (since they can also be seen to have
been a pervasive Darwinian selection pressure in the phylogeny of fauna)
tended to naturally "prune out"
(within populations) by provoking automatically self-defeating/maladaptive
responses by individuals; AND to "prune in" by tending to "exempt from
individual extinction" those 'individual candidates for ancestorhood' within
whom genetic variability had generated a heritable capacity for
automatically superimposing a highly specific (not general) "hibernatory"
(most typically
synaptic, and, crucially, LTD-involving) - not just selectively behavior
canceling but *selectively consciousness canceling*) function.

[LTD is conventional shorthand for Long Term Depression specifically in
reference to synaptic sites and a muting effect on the firing frequency of
synaptically depressed neuron.]

------------------------
Not that our capacity to self-regulate so that we become selectively
unconscious is distinct and neurologically separate from how we ordinarily
focus attention (on trivial as well as pleasurable and painful tasks and
important or just novel features of each our ongoing and of course often
significantly changing "overall life-situation").

IOW, the functions behind our innate capacity to synaptically hibernate with
great specificity (or precision) is integral to how we "pay and focus
actention" (~ maintain a particular pattern of muscular and/or mental
activity) as if by an environmentally codetermined process of realtime
selection from our innate and acquired repertoire of partly hierarchically
arranged, partly overlapping, and partly organized in parallel, and if
functionally and adaptively incompatible competing (by means of both
descending and lateral inhibition), "actention modules".

---------------------
Although actention modules are not neatly modular neuropsychological facts
nevertheless indicate that this concept is an appropriate one. E.g. the
basal ganglia clearly function like a central actention switching station;
this due to this area's rich interconnections with sensory
feature-detecting, emotion and feeling producing/motivating, and advanced
language and motor coordinating and planning, regions of a sufficiently
intact and mature human brain.


I should probably stop here! %-}

P