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In The Self-Organizing Social Mind, John Bolender proposes a new explanation for the
forms of social relations. He argues that the core of social-relational cognition
exhibits beauty-in the physicist's sense of the word, associated with symmetry.
Bolender describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition, which
account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and
the breaking of those symmetries. He further describes the symmetries of the four
fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in
the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry breaking organizes the
neural activity generating the cognitive models that structure our social
relationships.
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