one thing i'm really confused about: why does trauma even exist in the first place? are we just so far out of the ancestral env that trauma is almost always bad now? if not, what trauma should we hold on to??
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so maybe instead of saying yes or no i'll try to elaborate on an example in more detail. let's say you had a stern conservative christian dad who beat you when you didn't obey him. your trauma system learns a trauma response to anything that feels like disobedience
the point of this response is to avoid beatings from your dad which is super super reasonable. but then, in the modern world, something funny happens: at some point you go to college and now nobody beats you anymore. unfortunately the trauma system does not update on this
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one way the trauma system might update, which might have happened all the time to premodern humans, is if one day you cried a lot about how much your dad beat you. but maybe your dad also beat you for crying, and now that healthy trauma processing is cut off
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so it's possible to not only have a primary trauma but to have secondary traumas that make it harder to clear the primary trauma. now factor in the fact that your stern dad was himself beaten by his dad, etc. etc. (plus the effect of e.g. wartime PTSD)
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@DougTataryn talks about the modern world having "cultural alexithymia" - a widespread lack of emotional awareness, of exactly the sort you would need to understand and process trauma-like stuff -
so now imagine that the trauma-optimized memetic payload is like - do these things and not these other things - punish people for not conforming - punish people for expressing negative emotions about these memes
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