The neuroexistentialism of social connectedness and loneliness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social isolation and loneliness have been subject to extensive investigation and discussion by both modern neuroscience and existentialist philosophy. Neuroexistentialism, though controversial, examines how neuroscientific findings inform human existential concerns. In the present discussion, we argue that (1) in the absence of meaningful attributes, typically provided by relationships with objects and others, social isolation and loneliness lead an individual to a pervasive fear of being or the perception of “ being-in-the-empty-world” which resembles an existential horror of loneliness; and (2) the pervasiveness of these influences justifies the ubiquity of cerebral responses to both objective and subjective prolonged social disengagement in humans. We also contend that current neuroscientific models of social behaviors, especially within social neuroscience, need to avoid self-affirmative and tautological notions to explain the originality of social connections in human life. By adopting a more integrative and critical approach, these models can better address the complex interplay between social disengagement and their neurological correlates known as the “ social brain .” This can be accomplished through the establishment of a novel conceptual framework in modern neuroscience to remodel the triad of brain, solitary mind, and society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".