@Crazy Anglican:
That's sort of where I'm heading- if we have these emotions/feelings (hunger, thirst, anger, sorrow, etc.) and thought to go with it, THEN it may be assumed that all that follows is, in fact, our own constructs of the mind, soul, and the physical world.
Let's explore this with hunger.
We experience hunger, through thought we are able to identify that as a sensation we would rather be rid of, and from this we gather to seek a way to be rid of this feeling of hunger.
What do we do?
Well, to start, we've a feeling and we feel its unpleasant, but now we have to find the feeling... where is it coming from, and why?
And thus begins our first construction of the physical world.
Well, our mind has been established as having already contained the concepts of emotion and thought, and now we need to combine those two to construct a map of ourselves, so that we might find, label and solve the problem, and to do this, we have to first LINK the emotion to the thought.
This is the first instance of systems, that is, the mind working with something else that makes up our being.
So we experience hunger, a feeling, and have connected that to thought, which produces a link of systems between the two that in turn produces the first sensational data- empiricism is born.
So, as we feel hunger, "touch" is the closest we come to a first sense, and is really a sense that may be most vital in finding our way in the nothingness, for, as there is nothing yet, if we come across a Something, we'll be able to feel it sensually, and thus process it as an existing object; the other four senses can identify Somethings, too, but they generally depend on the idea of Reality of an Object, that is, if we were to see something now, as we are today as human beings, than we would associate properties with it, so if I see a soda can, I'm thinking of something silver, cylindrical, shiny, cold, and filled with fluid. However, if my hand passes right through this image and there is in fact no subastance to it, I would thus categorize it as a mirage, and so not real.
So we link the emotion hunger with the thought of how to be rid of this feeling, and from this we link the systems of emotion and thought together, which then work together to create a Reality for our feeling that we might be rid of it, and so we arrive at the closest thing to hunger, that being touch, or physical feeling, in addtion to the mental/emotional feeling we've been doing.
So we have touch, and now the sensation is localized in a part of our being... but what do we call it? What is this region? And, as it doesn't affect all our being, it certainly is not the only part of our being, as now that we have touch we become aware of the form of our anatomy to some extent... but we need more.
So thought kicks in again, and with the primary feeling to stop hunger, and the secondary feeling to figure out how to use this form we have to satisfy objective #1.
So now we need another sense, and now that we can feel things physically I posit that we then become aware next of sight, as it is next most vital to our cpnstruction and awareness of the self- we can now touch objects, and so now we need another way of experiencing them.
Now think for a moment- why sight this time, it doesn't follow from an emotional base feeling, as touch came from hunger and thought combining?
Well, consider two things. Firstly, we are still exploring and inventing this world we are creating, and as we have just created a new physical plane of existance (or at least the physical self) this now needs depth, for without depth there is no substance, and without that we have no way to cease the hunger, as that is a WANTING FOR substance. Secondly, as this is truly the retrospective thinking of an already constructed human being- consider the rest of the senses. We just have touch... will hearing anything help us quicker in defining our world and finding a solution to hunger through the creation/location of substance? What would we think to hear, after all, we're still in a sightless, mute world. Smell? This might help us to add a layer of depth to the world, but can we create/locate substance through smell; we CAN, but smelling is an act of tracking, and while sight does that as well, sight also gives us visual constructs of the physical world, and smell just adds a layer to that. Taste? This is the same as smell, it adds a layer to the world, but we cannot create merely through taste.
So sight it is- our thinking and emotions work together to build on the objective of finding a way to stop hunger and building/locating ways to do that in, and as we have the groundwork in touch, now we come up with the concept- if this thing is here and exists, and as do I, if I am able to locate it and give dimension ontop of dimension (sight ontop of sound) then this will work well.
And so now we can touch, and now we see.
Which raises a question before we go further- how, then do we assign shapes, textures, colors, etc. to things never before seen?
Again, we have emotion and thought to help us, and touch as well.
This can be most easily dealt with when constructing colors.
Think of blue- what EMOTIONAL reaction do you get from blue?
Generally calm? Peaceful? Smooth?
Now we feel something... it makes us feel calm, and peaceful... it feels not quite warm or cold, but just right... it's smooth, and, moreover, easy-going; it moves about with ease and is not rigid.
We've found water... and as we associate in the emotional part of our mind all the attributes we've already mentioned WE as constructed beings take as blue, the thinking part of the mind thus assigns this new substance that we have found the color blue.
This can work for any and all colors (we near a fire, and feel intense heat and an emotional passion, particularly if we are burned, and thus we have a shade of red for fire) and textures, as already explained with the water feeling a certain way.
But back to our central problem- hunger, solving it. Well, now that our object has depth and is easily detectable and recognizable by us, we can now see it, think it to be a substance, and touch it to be sure.
It's substance- maybe this will help us?
So think, and now, as we've seen our anatomy in the reflection, we now know what we look like; how we arrive at the human form is a mystery to me, and the best guess I can have is that if we have jsut constructed all the materials for a physical world, then things may be constructed, as could we have been, as we are adding to our emotional and mental awareness, but we did not CREATE IT.
So I must (for the moment) assume that this form is another material for construction, and that our minds and emotions were constructed by something else... perhaps Marvin, but we don't have an idea of what Marvin might be yet, we still only care about filling our emptiness.
So we see our anatomy, and now the thoughts kick in, and we put touch and sight together to give ourselves depth, and become aware, simultaneously, of our own depths. We can feel our heart beating, we see our reflection and, most importantly right now for us, we feel the rumbing coming from our tummy, and have a sense, constructed through touch and logical thought, that the mouth, that gagping whole on our face, is an opening into which substance might go, and from this we infer that if substance can go in there, it might just wind up in the spot we're trying to fill, the stomach.
So we graps the water, to try and bring it (as we know it to be substantial) to our mouths to put it in- and the water slips through our fingers. We observe the visual and sensual clues on how water works and make a cup with our hands, and this keeps some of the water.
We bring the water to our mouth and let it in and, and touch registers it there and senses it must be somewhere else, we swallow.
So, we've consumed our very first substance.
It didn't help- it's water, not food, so we're still hungry.
Well, at least now, however, our mouth feels a bit better, having been watered, and we note the sensation as pleasant- when our mouth is dry again from what we might later call thirst, we will know how to fix it, with water.
And now we know that THIS sensation, hunger, can't be cured by water. On we go.
So we continue our search, but we have, in advertantly, in our contact with the water being swallowed, come across some new sensations through emotion, feeling, and thought processing together, and they need explaining.
We swallowed water... let's say, just for the sake of argument, it was from a lake (even though our being doesn't know what a lake is yet, has not formed that word, or even language.) So we swallowed water, and a new sensation comes as the water from a lake hits our mouth and tongue.
We now discover, inadvertantly, taste, and categorize it according to emotional feeling; we felt a little better with water but it didn't help our main problem, and as taste generally tells us what we like and don't like, and thus what to consume and not consume, we assign water a mildly pleasant taste (had the water been poison it would have been a bad taste, and had it filled our need, had we been suffering from thirst, we would have assigned it a more positive taste.)
So we now have touch, sight, and taste.
We approached another body and made contact with it, and from contact of two bodies arises sound, which we again categorize as mildy OK for water.
4 senses.
As we now defer to our thought and physical feeling we find that taste is linked to another sensation altogether on reflection- smell. Water has a very mild smell, and on we go.
5 senses- we've got our tools, and now we've jsut got to use them.
On we go, assigning things colors and feelings as we pass; there's the grass below us, a mild and earthy green, not threatening, there's a fire a bit south of us, that's hot and red and sounds and smells unpleasant, so we stay away...
Here's something red, but not a threatening red, and its not flashing or smelling fouly like the fire, it actually smells sort of nice, sort of a funny shape, smooth, hanging from a bigger something, which is made up of earthy greens and browns all put together in a package that is visually, auditorilly, and otherwise unthreatening.
We grasp at the object, and pluck it from where it was... it's a substance let's try it... it can't fit in our mout all at once, we need smaller pieces, so those sharp things in our mouth are set in action by touch and thought and we bite off a chunk, chew until its tiny and easily swallowed like the water, swallow and-
Hey!
That helps... that helps our hunger... its filling the space!
It nworks! We've discored food... we've jsut bit the Apple, ladies and gentlemen! ;)
The Quibble With Christians
, Anon
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