Antistructure and Homeostasis?

[Papus79]

This isn't something I was able track much down on while looking around on Google, ie. the relationship of antistructure and homeostasis, but this really got me thinking about what it might imply if the two could be directly connected - which I'll explain further down.

First a basic street-level definition of antistructure (Wiktionary via Victor Turner):
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/antistructure

A sociocultural structure that intentionally counteracts the mainstream.

This shows up in an nih.gov publication abstract related to social contagion:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7318487/

In particular where the concept first caught my attention was George P Hansen's 'The Trickster and the Paranormal' where he talked about, throughout the course of the book, fraud going hand in hand not only with psychic and paranormal phenomena (I'm sure that'll shock the pants off of the devoted reductive materialists) but also the same strange patterns hitting not just cases where the mysteries couldn't be solved but also the cases where you have broader phenomena such as UFO sightings (something that's also captured Eric Weinstein's fascination in that the preponderance of circumstantial evidence and no hard evidence, and lack of top down incompetence to make this a cover for military experimental aircraft, is like nothing he's seen), things like the Mothman events related to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, Hansen gets into some of what Jacques Vallee was getting at with Messengers of Deception in that these are very coy phenomena that seem in one sense unreal in that they violate everything that we'd think we know about reality from physics but at the same time if they're a kind of hallucination it's a hallucination that often enough leaves physical traces even if the causal agent is nowhere to be seen.

In that book the term 'antistructure' actually does the lifting and he clusters subcategories in such as communitas, liminality and perhaps a third that I can't remember offhand.

All of this came to mind because I was reading, of all the bizarre places to find it..... red-pill stuff (Rollo) as I was trying to figure out how much of what he's seeing (at least outside of dual mate theory which is now considered either controversial or even debunked) in male and female behavior is either composite cultural problems (cluster B epidemic vs. avoidant attachment) vs. something that you had to more properly call direct evidence of evolutionary psychology not better explained by immediate sociological factors (ie. hard-coded human instinct).

This is where I was really forced to ask..... sexuality itself..... by all accounts it seems to rely on a lot of cloak and dagger, deception, etc.... is sex and sexuality itself antistructural?



If I do something typically hatterish and line up a bunch of dials across these different domains..... the implication would be that antistructure would be an inverse reaction that shows up in complex systems as part of a homeostatic loop to maintain the stability of surface behavior?

I either need to pop a Haldol or, if I'm seeing something that lines up, it really looks like antistructure as an actual element of reality rather than just a metaphor (if all of these cases fit that container) vets consciousness models like functionalism with multiple realizability and openly vets the existence of such strange homeostatic systems as 'China Brains' (eg. Ned Block objection to functionalism of this kind).

I say this as someone whose taken the egregore hypothesis seriously for a long time, or considered that mystical experiences people have (or even spontaneous healings of various kinds) are like downloads or transfers down the layers of a conscious stack that aggregates in a functionalist manner, and this piece - antistructure - seems to vet that the obverse gets balanced by an inverse rather automatically.

This is also a big part of why Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash's Conscious Realism has appealed to me for so long, ie. that seems like a very structural Markovian map of what functionalism with multiple realizability actually *is* and the way Hoffman explains it it's these T-intersections where two conscious agents establish a relationship via the use of a third conscious agent, thus communication between nerves creates higher level facilitation (at the top level - us) and communication between us, such as on this forum, creates a kind of onlinephilosophyclub.com egregore that's as real as we individually are (not just metaphorically but in the Nagel sense that there's something that it's like to be that network).


So yeah... trippy AF (one of those 'me and Sy Borg' type topics) but that's what I'm chewing on with this.

[Papus79]

Something I kind of botched / left out of the Hansen paragraph above: fraud was seen on both the side of the psychics and on the side of the skeptics. Heated passions both ways? Sure, but it seemed reliable enough to almost suggest that there was a confound hitting both parties.