What<scp>COVID</scp>‐19 tells us about the self: The deep intersubjective and cultural layers of our brain
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 crisis is affecting our sense of self and touches upon our existential fears. This extends to the self-other relationship, as there is both being infected and infecting the other. What does this pandemic crisis tell us about our self and relatedness, its cultural differences, and how these are rooted in the brain's relation to the world? First, we discuss the psychological and neuronal features of self and self-other relation and how they are rooted in a deeper layer of the brain's neural activity complementing its cognitive surface layer. Second, we demonstrate cultural differences of Eastern and Western concepts of the self (i.e., independency and interdependency) and how these reflect the manifestation of the brain's neuro-social and neuro-ecological alignment. Finally, we highlight the intersubjective and cultural nature of the self and its surface in the COVID-19 crisis. Discussing various lines of empirical data showing the brain's intimate alignment to both social and ecological environmental contexts, our results support the assumption of the brain's deep layer features by laying bare a continuum of different degrees of neuro-social and neuro-ecological alignment. This entails a two-stage model of self with neuro-social-ecological and psychological levels that extends the previously suggested basis model of self-specificity. We conclude that the current pandemic shows the importance of the deeper intersubjective and cultural layers of both the self and brain; their neglect can be life-threatening for the self and others and, paradoxically, might reduce, rather than enlarge, the self's sense of freedom and independence.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it