Neurological Roots of Humani susceptibility to Non-Sentience

Neurological Roots of Humani susceptibility to Non-Sentience

From the Garudas Journal of Xeno-Neurobiology

(Written by Kumari-Emeritus Mirra Zanzibar)

Sentience hinges on the cognitive ability to alter one’s opinions and incorporate the new information into their thinking, this requires the ability to process this information based upon its relative merit and to freely choose to accept that information and its resultant conclusions.

Humani brain architecture is arranged such that when their personal identity related convictions are challenged by evidence, their erroneous beliefs become stronger.

Few things are as fundamental to progress as our ability to arrive at a shared understanding of the world. The advancement of science and the accumulation of cultural knowledge depends on this.

Collaboration, whether within the private bonds of a marriage or the formal alliance between nations, requires that the beliefs of those involved are mutual influenced through conversation.

Knowledge and cooperation depend upon cognitive and emotional flexibility.

The inability to change a person’s mind through evidence and reasoning, or to have one’s own mind changed in turn, is not just a personal inconvenience, or a social issue, but hinders progress of society as a whole.

Not all beliefs are treated by the Humani brain the same way. The humani brain reacts differently to evidence which contradicts certain beliefs.

Some beliefs are given up relatively easily upon presentation of evidence, while some other beliefs evoke a physical resistance response regardless of the evidence.

Exposure to counterevidence regarding beliefs are central to their personal identity can even increase that person’s confidence in the truth of said cherished albeit erroneous beliefs.

When employing deflection strategies to avoid processing such evidence against strong-yet-erroneous belief rooted in personal identity, the humani’s resolve regarding the erroneous belief grows even stronger, mostly in reaction to the temporary discomfort from the weakening of their convictions and softening of their certainty.

In an effort to reduce these negative emotions, humani have a strong tendency to think in ways that minimize the impact of the challenging evidence: discounting its source, forming counterarguments, socially validating their original attitude, or selectively avoiding the new information. The degree to which such rationalization occurs depends upon several factors, but the personal significance of the challenged belief appears to be crucial. Specifically, beliefs that relate to one’s social identity are likely to be more difficult to change.

This Backfire Effect is part of the root cause of the base tendency of Humani against volitional sentience. Humani have built in defences which prevents them from accepting certain facts and prevents their free will to choose.

The neurological response shows that when presented with evidence contradicting certain closely held but erroneous beliefs, humani react with the same brain regions as if they were responding to a physical threat, such as an attack by a feral predator, activating the automatic fight-or-flight response and causes the body prepares to protect itself. This neurochemical response dominates the experience, with unpleasant surges of adrenaline and cortisol.

Some values crucial to the Humani’s personal identity, that their brain treats those ideas as a threat as if they were a threat to their very existence.

The humani brain’s first and primary job is to protect itself. The humani brain is complicated sophisticated machine for self-protection that extends beyond the physical self to their psychological self. Once these values however erroneous become part of their psychological self, they are then afforded all the same protections that their brain gives to their body.

Challenges to personal identity beliefs produces increased activity in the default mode network—a set of interconnected structures associated with self-representation and disengagement from the external world. Trials with greater belief resistance showed increased response in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and decreased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex.

Humani test subjects who were capable of changing their minds showed less bold signals in the Insula and the Amygdale when evaluating the counterevidence. These results highlight the role of emotion in belief-change resistance and offer insight into the neural systems involved in belief maintenance, motivated reasoning, and related phenomena.

Resistance to evidence entail disengagement from external reality and increased inward focus. The humani brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), including posterior and anterior midline structures and the lateral inferior parietal lobes, appears to support these psychological processes. Identity-related beliefs invokes internal models of the self, a form of cognition that is associated with increased activity within the DMN.

If resistance to belief change is partly motivated by negative emotion, having one’s beliefs contradicted may produce activity in associated regions of the brain, such as the Amygdale, the Insular cortex, and other structures involved in emotion regulation.

Individual differences in resistance to belief change correlated with activity in the Insular cortex and in the Amygdale. The Insular cortex, which receives projections from interoceptive neural systems that monitor the internal state of the body, is believed to be important for the generation of emotions and feelings.

The anterior Insula, in particular, is implicated in the process of integrating affective information into decision-making. In addition to reflecting the strength of subjective feeling states in general, the anterior Insula is activated by specific feelings that people are likely to encounter when their core beliefs are challenged, including perceptions of threat, uncertainty, and anxiety, and has been implicated in imaging studies of politics during motivated reasoning and viewing faces of opposing political candidates.

The Insula is closely connected anatomically and functionally to the Amygdale, whose role in responding to emotionally salient stimuli is well established.

The Amygdale signals the emotional value of a wide variety of experiences, and is especially sensitive to fearful and threatening stimuli.

These structures signal threats to deeply held beliefs in the same way they might signal threats to physical safety.

The Amygdale plays an important role in humani social judgments, particularly in assessing trustworthiness. Patients with Amygdale lesions show increased trust of strangers, and functional imaging has revealed greater activity in response to faces that are rated as untrustworthy.

The Amygdale is directly involved in detecting deceit. Increased Amygdale activity is associated with increased scepticism of the material and could be an important neural signal of the persuasive potential of information. The relationship between belief-change resistance and activity in the Insular cortex and the Amygdale supports the role of emotion in this process and aligns with behavioural studies that have found correlations between negative affect and resistance to changes in attitude. Insula activity while evaluating the truth of propositions correlated with increased certainty in the truth or falsity of those propositions.

Moderate cognitive inflexibility to protect one’s beliefs is necessarily maladaptive. There is benefit to be gained from providing a degree of protection to useful beliefs, such that changing one’s mental models without sufficient reason would cause problems of its own.

Extreme cognitive inflexibility however is maladaptive and causes individual and societal maladaptivity.

Once something is added to a humani’s collection of personal identity beliefs, its brain instinctively and unconsciously expends effort to protect that information from harm when confronted with contradictory evidence regardless of the compelling quality of said evidence.

Just as confirmation-bias shields humani when actively seeking information, the Backfire Effect defends these beliefs when the information seeks them, blindsiding them.

Humani are hard wired to stick to personal identity related beliefs instead of questioning them.

When someone tries to correct a humani about some personal identity related beliefs, thus potentially diluting the strength of the convictions of their misconceptions, it backfires and reinforces those erroneous beliefs instead. Over time, this Backfire Effect helps make the cognitively inflexible humani less sceptical of those things which allow them to continue seeing these erroneous beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.

Narrative scripts are stories (fictional or not) that confirm certain personal beliefs and somehow grants the humani the feeling they have permission to continue feeling as they already want to, accept the conclusions without critical analysis.

The same is true for any conspiracy theory or fringe belief. Contradictory evidence strengthens the position of the believer. It is seen as part of the conspiracy, and missing evidence is dismissed as part of the cover-up.

This Backfire Effect explains why so many humani are immune to rational discourse, the evidence actually causes the humani to feel as though they are even more sure of their position than before the discussion started.

Humani’s primordial ancestors paid more attention and spent more time thinking about negative stimuli than positive because bad things required a response. Those who failed to address negative stimuli failed to live or to reproduce.

The Backfire Effect shapes humani beliefs and memory, keeping them consistently leaning one way or the other through this biased assimilation.

Many humani societies have so much contradictory cognitive conditioning creating such excessive cognitive dissonance that it locks up the functioning of their mind until they deal with it. In the process the humani forms more neural connections, building new memories and puts out effort – once they finally move on with their original convictions are stronger than ever better able to resist assault.

This is not to say that humani are innately sub-sentient, non-sentient, or semi-sentient, the study and analysis of that topic continues.

The evidence strongly suggests is that humani have certain neurological mechanisms built-into their brain architecture which creates the tendency towards non-sentience by way of the inability to process information and the inability to freely make choices.

Certain societies, segments of societies, and individuals are under excessive pressure to be conditioned with certain erroneous beliefs which then become so ingrained as to impair the individual’s ability to process information accurately and even to freely make choices.