Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time. You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse conserve energy. We can call this a rejection response. I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good an
It's unclear why and how neurons firing in the brain produces subjective experience. This is the hard problem of consciousness. Why should there be something that it's like to, say, feel pain or see the color red? My opinion is that the subjectivity of consciousness is attributable to physical differences in neuroanatomy and to the closed nature of neural processes. Our synapses only fire in our own brains, and our interpretations of our experiences can only come from us, even if something outside us influences them. I suspect that neurotransmission produces subjective experience as a matter of course. That's one of the things our brains are adapted to do. Consciousness, in my opinion, is the ability to think about the extremely complex webs of associations that our minds naturally create. Qualia make these webs stronger. Furthermore, I submit that interpretation, sensory integration, and high-level cognitive processes are all dependent on neurotransmission. There'