David M, There really is a distinction between the world inside of us and the world outside. Whether it is primary or secondary or epiphenomenal it's still there. Whatever the limits on our knowledge of the outside, we can say with confidence there is no unity inside. We have the five usual senses plus the kinesthetic sense of balance and the sense of heat. We are driven by hormones and neurotransmitters. We are not one, we are legion. We have multiple personalities in the masks we wear and the roles we play. And they are not always playing on the same team.
Paul said, "for the good that I will, I do not; but the evil that I do not will, this I practice." This has always disturbed me. Are we ruled by orderly thought or by passions? If we think about our behavior rationally, isn't it is irrational? It is hard to see how passions could feel slighted by their treatment in modern times. We have technologies devotes to creating them. Emotions can be rewound and replayed frame by frame. Far more resources are devoted to effecting how we feel about things than what we think about then. A television or radio commercial has 60 sec. or less to grab your attention and make you listen up. There is no reason a sane person endure this 30 or 40 times a day. Jung identified thinking and feeling as polar opposites in his personality theory. Many MoQers played a round of Myers-Briggs not long ago and know that emotions play a critical role in how we understand ourselves inside and outside. Emotions are instant. We have them long before we can say why. Rarely do we act strictly according to reason. Rather, we relate to the world primarily through emotion and we tend to see it as animate. We develop a personal relationships, emotional attachments and sentimental feelings for our friends and for our couches. Yesterday I was looking for a nail to fix something outside. I have a couple of those small cabinets full of plastic drawers to hold small things I would rather not lose. These drawers have been around a while and have been ordered, disordered and re-ordered many times. One drawer is filled with clips to join individual strands of phone wire. I found them beside a dirt road near the shore of a pond where I lived for a time. It seemed a telephone repair man had cleaned out of his truck. There were wall plates to hang wall phones and lots of screws and brass phone terminals. One drawer has a really old cheap single coil guitar pick up and another has a set of guitar tuners. Someday I plan to mach a slide guitar out of a two by four. But that plan has been kicking around for quit a while. There are knobs salvaged from stereos I threw away in the 80s. Drawers full of screws left over from sculptural projects like a swing set, a grill, several bicycles... You get the picture. In a drawer I opened looking for just the right nail, there was a baby's arm. Less than an inch long and crooked at the elbow; it has survive in one spot or another in my possession for more than 40 years. It used to be attached to a miniature baby doll. There were two of them at one time. I got them at a carnival when I was a cub scout. They got stashed away some place for years and when I found them as a teenager, they were cool because they were naked and could be unisexually positioned to get a better handle on the laws of physics obscured in the two dimensional renderings of the Kama Sutra. I am not sure exactly how the arm wound up in the drawer but plastic dolls are really not designed for Tantra. I bet I could find a one armed baby doll and its mate around here somewhere. It feels right to think of those satisfied bits of flesh colored plastic having grown up with me. Childhood, sex and child birth, attachment and loss they have been with me; tucked in a box or stashed in a drawer. Surely they have felt some of what I have felt. We have relationships with things as well as friends and family and people we pass in the store. We invest those relationships with emotion and empathy. It is hard to see how such an investment could fail to yield returns. Those drawers full of clips and stickers and nuts and bolts and nails and screws are invested with me and in me. A forensic psychologist could analyze the contents of those drawers see more of me in them than I would like to admit. I am recorded in the contents, the order and the things out of place of those drawers. My pattern is impressed there. My procrastination plays Statesboro blues through a pickup flaking chrome on strings of telephone wire. Hinges, rheostats, gears, magnets, hooks, pulleys and 30 year old box of 22 shorts bear witness to the clutter of my mind. Somewhere two naked babies arm wrestle. One of them lost the first round. Does this actually have anything to do with what we were talking about? Krimel moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
