least action

there was an amazing passage in stein's book. he has kind of an interesting argument for why the incest taboo is psychically "necessary" - if i'm understanding, it's roughly that the default or symmetric case would be full realization of intimacy with parents and siblings, including sexually. (this is like what clark calls a psychic energy sink.)

he argues that imaginal forms are created when an instinctual drive can't be immediately realized. if there's a potentiality (a divergence between generalized expectation and observation), it essentially follows the path of least action to return to satisfaction/zero. this is kind of like general relativity. because of the "warping" or shape of functional topology of Kosmos/holarchical space (which is simply the truth of all other potentiality), the path of least action can actually involve the apparent creation of new forms.

in his view, imaginal forms are created to find other ways to discharge this potentiality. (and he says this is part of what sets humans apart from other animals; we can rest with some unresolved potentiality over much deeper and more elaborated scales/structures.) so in this case, the incest taboo is strangely like meditation: it induces the path of least action to follow a deepening and spiritualization of male-female polarity. (there are obvious teleological problems with this argument as it's presented here, but let's forget about that for the moment.)

the nice thing is, this fits perfectly with marc's dopamine story. roughly at the human decision making level, dopamine energizes *action* (and i think especially relevantly and perniciously, internal or mental action) to resolve some potentiality. the immediate resolution is benoit's arcing (aka clark's psychic energy sink). at a very motoric level this can be like restless legs syndrome, or slightly more abstract into tourette's or drug addiction.

there feel like vague parallels to hierarchical bayesian stuff - when is there enough evidence to justify another level or meta-parameter. failures of a given model to capture the structure of the world keep increasing the effective temperature until the model complexity of a new level is justified. haven't thought that through yet... but the gist of it is involution -- the impinging of everything is all potentiality.