When you see someone stub their toe, you might wince a little. This is because your consciousness is taking in the information and synapsing it to a neural cluster referring to you, I call it self. Any time we imagine a scenario, we first put ourselves in it. We can’t help but synapse everything to self first!
Sometimes the scenario can release stress in the Organism, which is why someone might faint when watching something gruesome. Fainting turns off the conscious access to the eyes which removes the stressful stimulus; mission accomplished. The Organism pulled resources away from the consciousness in an attempt to fix any problem. The falling down part is just a way to return blood to the brain with gravity.
All organisms are selfish, it’s a trait that’s kept us alive over generations. After all, life is all about keeping yourself safe for long enough to reproduce and then keep them safe. Those that looked out for themselves were more likely to survive. However, remaining selfish after reproducing lowers the chance of survival of the offspring.
If life is a competition and you are only playing for yourself, your offspring is nothing more than a competitor. This is a problem, but one that can be fixed by a single synapse. If another individual can be synapsed to the idea of self, it will not be seen as competition.
They say your world changes when you have your first child. Of course it does, you’re fundamentally redefining the concept of you! As a parent, your child is now a part of you since it is made of your genetic code. You love that child because it is synapsed to yourself.
Love causes a powerful attraction to whatever is synapsed to self. We can love our families, our friends, and our communities because they can all be related back to self. We are genetically related to our families and usually spend a lot of time with them. Time spent with characters synapses that character to yourself as you record experiences into memory.
Time spent with our friends makes us love them but we also like similarities to ourselves. We make friends with people who have something in common with us. Whether you share a hobby or were wearing the same shirt the day you met, we like people who are similar to us.
To share a community, all you have to do is subscribe to the community. Any sports team can become your team if you synapse it to yourself. The same is true with your neighborhood, your business, your religion, or your species. Becoming a part of a group is nothing more than synapsing yourself to the idea of that group so it becomes your group.
Expectations about yourself are called your ideals and they are usually extreme versions of how we think we should be. Your ideals can be influenced by anything you’ve synapsed to yourself, including your friends, family, and community. Not only do we like those who are similar to us, we like those who represent what we think to be ideal.
Since everyone’s version of self is different, everyone’s ideals are different. Our ideals are influenced by our communities and those we consider family and friends. Our ideals can mirror those of another person or community once we synapse it to ourselves. This is why some people might fall in love, with a person or a group, and vastly change their ideology.
When it comes down to it, we are most interested in the things that are synapsed to us. In the event of a disaster we immediately think, “I hope my family is okay.” When you hear a group of your friends talking you wonder, “Are they talking about me?” The thought “How is this going to affect me?” is common in our society because our brains adapted that way!
Using dichotomies and competition, many people believe that those who are not part of their group must be against them. We want our group to be the best and any other group is standing in our group’s way. This is the type of thinking that has led to wars and strife throughout human history.
Right now, there seems to be a competition throughout our species over whose group is the best. This is a senseless competition since there is only one group that we all belong to: human. We are all on the same side. The more we create lines and definitions of who is what or who belongs with which group, the more fractured we become.
It is impossible to be truly selfless, our selfishness is too solidified in our brains. However, we can always redefine ourselves. We must see ourselves not as “me,” and not as a member of a group, but a single part of a global species. When you synapse the entire species to yourself, every human joins your family and all of us will selfishly want to make sure our family prospers. We are all in this together, why would we want it any other way?