Emotions, meaning and narrative actions

 

Vital actions are fixed in social memory as narrative actions, but this fixation goes beyond our species. Our social memory is the result of evolution, and therefore it is prior to the memory of any particular culture that we can think of, ours or our historical past. When we became aware that we have myths and rituals, we had been in that dynamic for a long time and lived with them, determining our vital actions based on strict emotional ritual protocols, which were passed from generation to generation if they proved their effectiveness to group survival. Our actions were given a meaning, in a continuous cycle of reinterpretation and readjustment of the life processes open to the present, before being human. The emotional structure establishes the interpretive semantics, without which the syntactic actions of life are nothing. Emotions link physiological actions, which follow the syntax of chemical reactions relevant to the organism, in complex units of interaction capable of an integrated synthetic functioning in which the relationships of the simplest rank structures are sustained from more complex structures, in turn, dependent on the former. Physiological processes differ or delay the action of the environment, so that life, from its first self- replication, interposes itself against the environment, creates a buffer of inertial processes or memories from which it approaches its environment. The world and human existence have only meaning as a symbol, as an interpretive narrative of identity.