Re: virus: If you're watchin' IT ya' ain't a part of IT

Tim Rhodes (proftim@speakeasy.org)
Wed, 14 Oct 1998 16:10:05 -0700


Bill wrote:

>I spent a lot of time thinking about you yesterday during my evening lunch.
I
>decided that your purpose is to make me - and some others - be sure that we
>dont use always or never.

>Minor aberations are irrelevant - that is what I
>am telling you. Even a 3 armed - 1 eyed, eunich would be much more
>like us than different. Most of how they functioned would still be similar
>or the same.
>
>If you want to show me people thinking, acting and working differently -
>you need to get a lot further than unlikely and random mutations.

I'm glad you feel this way. But be prepared, you'll see these same words
thrown back at you next time you poist that religious fundamentalists hold
their beliefs for different reason than the ones you have for holding
your's.
:-) You can't have it both ways, after all.

>Show me a group of
>very different people if you need this point to make sense.

I think you misunderstood as well. While I'm glad you thought about me all
through your lunch the other day, it would have been more useful for you to
have used that time to do some research on the topics we're talking about
rather than just going with your instinct. (Not very objective of you,
really. ;-) I'm disapointed.)

The point about synethesia was not that it is common, but that reveals
something about the our way brains work. Most of our present knowledge of
brain function comes from observing what happens differently in the rare
unusual cases. (Split brain theory, for instance.)

As Cytowic concludes of synethesia, "[A]fter studying this marvelous
phenomenon for over a decade, I have come to the opinion that synesthesia is
a very fundamental mammalian attribute. _I believe that synesthesia is
actually a normal brain function in every one of us, but its workings reach
conscious awareness in only a handful._ This has nothing to do with the
intensity or degree of synesthesia in some people. Rather, it is that most
brain processes operate at a level below consciousness. In synesthesia, a
brain process that is normally unconscious becomes bared to consciousness so
that synethetes know they are synesthetic while the rest of us do not."

And he goes on to say, "Synesthesia is a conscious peek at a neural process
that happens all the time in everyone. What converges in the limbic,
especially the hippocampus, is the highly processed information from sensory
receptors about the world, a /multisensory evaluation of it./"
[...] "We know more than we think we know. The multisensory, synesthetic
view of reality is only one thing that we are sure has been lost from
consciousness. There could be a lot more. If you want to try to reclaim
some of this deeper knowledge, I suggest that you start with emotion, which
to me seems to reside at the interface between that part of our self which
is accessible to awareness and that part which is not."
[...] "Dispite evolutionary changes in itself and other brain conponents,
the limbic brain remains the terminal stage of information processing, that
stage for suppressing automatic, habitual responses in favor of new
alternatives when the unexpected happens. The limbic system gives salience
to events so that we either ignore them as mundane and unimportant, or take
notice and act. It is also the place where value, purpose, and desire are
evaluated, a process referred to as assigning negative or positive
"valence."
" The function of calculating valence could have had one of two
evolutionary fates. It could have been assumed by the cortex so that
questions of meaning and purpose are evaluated by a more analytic and
presumably detached organ (what people call "objective"). The other way the
function for valence could have evolved is the way it did, which is often
misunderstood. The limbic brain has retained its function as the decider of
valence. What the cortex does is provide more detailed analysis about what
is going on in the world so that the limbic brain can decide what is
important and what to do. The choices boil down to fundamental ones about
what it means to be a living organism.
" I am not suggesting that individuals who make their choices "emotionally"
are more human than those who claim to be rational. Since we happen to have
the best integration between the motivating force of the limbic brain and
the analyitical one of the cortex, it makes sense to say that persons who
balance reason and emotion are the most human, since they are using /both/
systems which define human neurology the fullest."
" For most people, I suspect that the best advice is to permit the
intellect to only inform your choices, not override your fundamentally
emotional ones. My claim is that we have grossly neglected the importance
of emotion in our lives. Through reason, you may deduce that there is a
logic of emotion and accept the conclusion that it is the major force that
guides your thinking and action.
" For those who demand "objective" proof of the illusive nature of analytic
awareness and my assertion that something other than that entity we call out
"self" is in charge of our minds, I point to the work of Kornhuber."
" It may be difficult to bring yourself to believe that you are more
emotional than logical, let alone accept the assertion that the entity you
know of as your self is not really in charge of your mind and the direction
of your life."
--Richard E. Cytowic, M.D.

-Prof. Tim