"Beethoven's Anvil" (2)

「It is important that the individual's sense of self, represented by the ego node, be consistent with other people's sense of him or her, and that these various other senses be mutually coherent. Much of social interaction is about achieving coherence among the neurally distributed components of a single identity.」（p.62）「A social status is simply one's position in the social system. ... A role, by contrast, is the social "script" you use to enact your status in a praticular situation.」（p.62）→A socialized or generalized persona is a status.「We could in fact think of one's kinship status as a specialized aspect of one's persona, an aspect one shares with all other individuals of the same status.」（p.62）「We might think of a status as a constraint on the persona, but better perhaps to consider it the core of the persona, which determines the basic features of one's interactions with others. One's unique features and capacities are then "attached" to that core. As such, the status exists in the brains of everyone in the culture.」（p.63）→In fact, "a constraint" makes a role easy to enact. It's a stimulus.「In fact, the set of possible statuses exists in the brain of every adult member of the culture. This set of statuses is affirmed and elaborated in the culture's stories and rituals; it forms the core of social life.」（p.63）→In one sense, "the set of possible statuses" is a culture.「the fluctuating patterns of interpersonal conjunction that sustain our cultural life.」（p.66）→The culture has certain patterns of interpersonal conjunction to sustain itself. Or cultures differ from one another as what kinds of patterns it has, and how it has them.「a low level of activity is still a means of participating in the evolving mental state.」（p.72）「The overall state (of the brain: Kakuta)is not explicitly controlled, at least not at a high degree of precision. Rather, that overall atate reflects activities at various levels within the whole system. ... Yet no component of the brain regulates all of this activity in detail. The overall activity just happens. That overall activity is what I am calling the mindl.」（p.73）「self-organizing dynamical systems」（p.74）「self-organizing dynamics」（p.75）「Somewhere in the brain a small fluctuation takes hold and becomes amplified to the point where it takes over global brain dynamics. This is not something you can will to happen --- at least not directly --- but if you put yourself in the right frame of mind and do the right things, then the magic may happen.」（p.75）「The pleasure of sport ---at any rate, the pleasure that derives from the activity itself, rather than from beating aomeone else in competition --- is simply the subjective feeling of smooth fluid physical motion in which one's motive force exactly matches and counters any resistance.」（p.85）「our commonsense view of the self easily accommodates the notion of multiple inner agents, often at odds with one another, acting on our behalf」（p.96）→"the notion of multiple inner agents": The notion needs its name. To have a name or not to matters. Having, or commanding, its name gives you a power to control it.→"multiple inner agents, often at odds with one another"「To be sure, we can choose to supress emotional expression through firm self-control --- but htat is quite different from not generating the expression at all. The latter is not physically possible. When the appropriate subcortical mechanisms organize some emotional state, they will modulate the skeletal muscles with the appropriate essentic form. Whether one's body freely expresses that form depends on the neocortical motor systems: they may allow the expression or try in varying degrees to suppress it.」（p.100）