a brief layer/tangle model of mind, "parts," personality, groups, and (global) culture:
Consider the mind to be made up of a large number of parallel (information) flows, or pipes, or tubes.
Countless numbers of these tubes all happening, all at once, is you.
Sensory information goes in one end of a tube (sensation) and immune system, hormonal, glandular, smooth muscle, and skeletal muscle activity goes out the other end of a tube (actuation).
Tubes can be short and long.
A short tube goes from input to output, sensation to actuation, in a small number of milliseconds.
A long tube goes from input to output, sensation to actuation, taking hundreds of milliseconds.
In addition to normal input (sensory information; sensation), some tubes can incorporate information from other tubes prior to termination (actuation). And, in addition to normal termination (skeletal muscle, etc.; actuation), some tubes pass information to other tubes. Information transfer happens at junctions. [Note that this theory doesn’t have any “fully internal tubes” or tubes that are “sensation+internal” or “internal+actuation.” A future theory might need to allow for this.]
When tubes pass information to other tubes, (internal) loops/cycles can form.
There is a shortest possible length of tube.
There is a shortest possible length of loop.
Below a particular tube length, there can’t be any loops.
Sensation alters tube lengths and junctures. (And actuation influences sensation.)
Some tubes pass through awareness. These are awareness tubes. If those tubes happen to have junctures with other tubes, then we can experience the sensations passing through those other tubes. (And, we can participate in our actuations via external loops.)
Tubes that happen to have junctures with awareness tubes are called junctured awareness tubes. Some tube lengths and junctures can only be modified or created when the relevant tubes are currently junctured awareness tubes.
When junctured awareness tubes are very short and contain no loops, then there is no self-experience, and “in the seeing there is just the seen,” “in the hearing there is just the heard,” “in the feeling there is just the felt,” “in the doing, just doing,” etc. There is just “what it feels like.”
When there are loops in or proximal to junctured awareness tubes then there is self-experience. There is, partially, “what it feels like to be you.”
Countless tubes at any given time are junctured awareness tubes, but most tubes at any given time are not junctured awareness tubes.
When loops are minimized there cannot be contention or compensation.
When loops are minimized there cannot be improperly reified concepts.
A state of minimal loops is primordial or natural (though not necessarily ordinary).
The minimization of loops correlates with but does not guarantee constructive, good behavior. The minimization of loops correlates with but does not guarantee the absence of destructive, bad, unskillful, and evil behavior.
Contention can cause ill-health, accelerated aging, excessive actuation, and suffering.
Contention in junctured awareness tubes is experienced as logical contradiction and (sometimes extremely subtle) muscle tension.
Compensation can be locally elegant but is globally inelegant.
If someone has a problem, a loopless solution to that problem will not have any compensation. A non-loopless solution will have compensation. Compensatory solutions are much easier to find than loopless solutions. Loopless solutions are minimally costly in the limit. Compensatory solutions are locally costly. The greater the accumulated cost, the harder it is to find additional solutions. The lower the accumulated cost, the easier it is to find additional solutions, though the solution-finding process may still be lengthy.
An example of compensation is “I’m doing X which is bad but if I also do Y then it will cancel the bad effects of X.”
Compensation is usually not perfect and so begets further compensation. An example of this is “I’m doing Y to compensate for X but Y creates a further problem Z so I must do R to compensate for Z but R also has a problem…”
Compensation is fractally self-similar. That is, micro-compensation produces larger-scale patterns of compensation. Examples of larger-scale patterns are tics, neuroses, hangups, blindspots, personality disorders, etc.
Compensation can produce occlusion. Occlusion is when tubes are not and cannot easily or quickly become junctured awareness tubes.
Large-scale compensation and occlusion produces personality layers. If experience happens too quickly, too surprisingly, or too traumatically than personality layers are more likely to form.
So, someone can have childhood confusions or uncertainties or inabilities and/or (by defintion unhealed) hurts and traumas, and, on top of those, have adult-style regulation. (That adult-style regulation will be crippled in many ways because of the excessive cost of compensation. That person might read lots of books on e.g. relationships, but, without delayering, their relating might remain laborious and “unnatural.”)
Because of mimesis, love, power, and technology, compensation and layering can extend to groups, cultures, and society. There are global-scale cultural layers, in part produced through famine, colonization, war, etc., as well as locally adaptive but global maladaptive traditions of child-rearing, etc.
Individual and group practice can de-layer and de-compensate, solving problems without the use of compensation, until individuals, and even communities, or larger, are relatively natural. Again, compensation is necessary and adaptive. And naturalization only guarantees a subset of good things, with opportunity costs. It is only better, all (other) things being equal.