Social Consciousness Pedagogy

Charles Pidgeon, PhD

• Publisher: MainspringBooks
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781641336444
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Inklusive Bildung

Dr. Pidgeon is a UCSF graduate in pharmaceutical chemistry. He is most known in the pharmaceutical drug discovery process for immobilized artificial membrane (IAM) technology that was commercialized and is used today in big pharma thirty years after discovery. Currently, over a million discovery molecules have been evaluated using this technology, and some of the work can be found on the Regis IAM References website. This book represents his thinking on bridging commercial globalization with social globalization. The question pursued was, "Does there exist practical technology that will forge a bridge between social and commercial globalization?" Such a global bridge must apply to every social group (e.g., religions, addicts, alcoholics, abused women, and other groups). Stated differently, there is a social-commercial binding problem, metaphorically similar to the mind-brain binding problem. Dr. Pidgeon is attempting to bring awareness of this problem to the general public, and the book represents suggestions on how national and international groups may corroborate with each other's group missions.

Section 1 Opening Comments

1.1 Oxymoron

The common adage that “change is constant” is, in fact, a wise oxymoron that should include all traditional religious teachings being malleable to social changes over time. People need to accept unavoidable social changes. The lesser the need to change any form of global social wisdom, without the need for a religious, spiritual, or any social group to change, the better. The reader should not “let his/her belief system interfere with accepting and understanding facts” and think about the concept that “brains are the factories of belief systems.”

Social wisdom can exist without depending on a religious belief system, and there are forms of social wisdom that are independent of not only all belief systems but also gender, race, culture, country of origin, etc. Such wisdom is global social wisdom, which is the theme of the collection of topics in this book. Social navigation in a global society benefits from wisdom that is least likely to change with cultural diversity. We offer this book as a start for others attempting to develop, invent, or create global social wisdom. I wish I understood something that is undoubtedly true regarding people’s global sense of social justice for all. From this perspective, the American Constitution phrase “We the people” is ineffable and should be applied globally.

1.2 Problem and Implementation

Remoras are small fish following sharks that sharks don’t eat. The remoras use the shark’s skin as a food source; they eat any biological material on the shark’s skin. This helps both parties. The remoras are not eaten, and they get food, and the shark has cleaner skin with probably less fluid drag while navigating and less susceptibility to infections. Globalization is typically viewed as the commercialization of goods and services. It is the shark. The skin feeders off the backs of globalization are social groups feeding off the financial leftovers of the globalizing sharks. The ocean of business does not contain only sharks (i.e., corporate managers that ignore social consciousness). For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Warren Buffett are people using, at least partially, their wealth for global social causes.

Solving the problem of a virtual total commercial domination over social globalization is most likely to require international cooperation. Also, funding should be made available for academic universities to compete for funding to develop and test models for linking social globalization with commercial globalization. Asking scientists to propose solutions to social problems does not exist in any request for proposal (RFP) from government funding agencies.

Nevertheless, a start at making the link stronger between commercial globalization and social globalization can be found in the last section, Mind Money™ (sections 5.1 and 5.2), which presents a few suggestions for implementing social change. Previous sections discuss some of the issues among different religions (section 3) and labeled social groups (section 4) and the roots of embodied cognition and social wisdom (section 2.1).

However, simply stated, anyone who makes a mental decision about a person’s qualia based on any biological attribute is ignorant. Biology built a good machine (i.e., humans). An attitude or opinion based on biologically derived color, facial structure, gender, and anything else is a direct assault on the genuine value of the biological diversity of human evolution. It is not biology that created social predicament in today’s world. It is the people (commercial industry sector) striving for control, money, power, recognition, etc., and globalization created the modern-day social globalized hurdles and difficulties.

Worse are the judgments based primarily or solely on religious belief systems. The social belief systems in early hominids were quite minimal, in part because they did not form large groups. Albeit true that apes had kinship group sizes with multiple apes (maybe twenty or more), they did not have the population size and global distribution of today’s social groups using the internet. Today it is not uncommon for a person to know hundreds to thousands of people. Social navigation within outside groups (i.e., their non-kinship groups) required the brain to renovate the limbic system to have cortical regulation of the animal brain for social navigation among large groups (Barger 2012; Barger et al. 2014). This is because social navigation requires control of the basic (primordial or animal-like) emotions to survive (see section 2.7 and 2.8). Several non-animal emotions are uniquely human (section 2.8) and essential for the survival of both the individual and group in modern society.

Thus, modern belief systems are a human construct of Homo sapiens, and their human minds, usually for personal peace or specific social objectives.

Although some sections can be read without the need for other sections (e.g., section 5.1, Mind Money), this book is not intended to be read sequentially, section by section. Readers are encouraged to start with section 2, then choose a belief system, or topic, from the index, and navigate directly to their section of choice; however, understanding section 2 in its entirety is essential to appreciate that reality can be understood to be the following:

1. A movie (with no prewritten plot) produced by the brain.
2. A controlled hallucination because the brain is an inference generator.
3. Your social reality being in constant change throughout your life.
4. People have a personal reality, denoted as preality. Preality is personal intellectual property (IP) in contrast with public domain IP. It is discussed throughout the book.

1.3 Definitions: Social Wisdom, Social Global Wisdom, Social Navigation, Social Globalization, and Preality

The following definitions were used throughout the book and would be understood in the context described below.

Social wisdom: Refers to wisdom that is a guide for a particular group (e.g., Alcoholics Anonymous), country (e.g., We the people for America), and globally (e.g., the hSW described in section 2.5 and 2.6). It is aimed at procedures for people to live a better life (i.e., becoming a better human being in their own environment).

Global social wisdom: Refers to the wisdom that is independent of (1) any human attribute, (2) social group, (3) either religious or non-religious groups and (4) is not intrinsic to any specific geographic location on earth.

Social navigation: The behavior and thought processes used during social interactions based on a person’s preality (personal reality). Any beliefs and formal inferences used while socially navigating are left hemisphere and dopaminergic systems that required dopamine in modern brains (section 5, figure 5.1). In fact, there is an almost linear correlation between brain dopamine levels and evolution in modern society (figure 2.9.1.1).

Social globalization: This denotes the global integration of human beings, specifically involving people’s personal reality (i.e., preality) in a commercial world. Understanding other human beings requires knowledge of the family, cultural, socioeconomic status, gender attitudes, etc., within the country. It also involves understanding how people from other countries view their own country.

Preality: A person’s personal reality. It can be defined as “enduring, unquestioned ontological representations of the world and comprise primary convictions about events, causes, agency, and objects that subjects use and accept as veridical” (Connors and Halligan 2014).

References

Barger, N. L. 2012. “Social Behavior from a Comparative Neuroanatomical Perspective: The Amygdala in Human Evolution.” eScholarship: UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations.

Barger, N., K. L. Hanson, K. Teffer, N. M. Schenker-Ahmed, and K. Semen...

Table of contents

• Preface
• TED Talks and Google Scholar Talks Recommended Throughout the Book
• Section 1 Opening Comments
• Section 2 Introduction: Embodied Cognition (Mind) and Human Social Wisdom
• 2.2 Embodied Mind (EM) and Explaining Human Behavior
• 2.3 Brain Creates Consciousness as a Controlled Hallucination Because the Brain Is an Inference Generator
• 2.4 Theory of Mind (ToM)
• 2.5 Social Wisdom Based on Human Beings (Creation of the hSW)
• 2.6 Origin of Gods, Embodied Cognition, and hSW
• 2.7 Social Navigation and Social Wisdom
• 2.8 Evolution, Brain Growth, and Brain Reorganization
• 2.9 Religion and Globalization
• 2.10 Conclusions
• 2.11 Social Navigation in High School
• Section 3 Traditional Religions, Spirituality, and Social Wisdom
• 3.1 Christians
• 3.2 Buddhism and Social Wisdom
• 3.3 A Protestant Perspective
• 3.4 Sikh Spirituality and Social Wisdom
• 3.5 Chinese Confucianism and Social Wisdom
• 3.6 Atheism and Social Wisdom
• 3.7 Agnostics and Social Wisdom
• 3.8 Hindu Spirituality and Social Wisdom (hSW)
• 3.9 Secular Humanism
• Section 4 Labeled Social Groups
• 4.2 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
• Section 5 Suggestions for Approaching Social Globalization
• 5.2 Cognitive Anchors: Both Human Body-Brain Images and “We the People” on Credit Cards and Minds instead of God on American Currency
• Section 6 Summary and Conclusions
• Section 7 What’s Next?
• 7.1. Brain-Body-Environment and Mind