jay_walk

So that poem praising romanticism which I was internally violently disagreeing with: it first asserts that people must not systemize and categorise but rather let thinking and I imagination mix. Which is all very well,but the next line states that only then will all that is wrong be cleared away.
It just frustrated me, that it suddenly turned around and called the thinking part of everything absolutely wrong, and asserted that there is a truth to be found. I think I'm too postmodern for this argument (although I'm still not sure I'm applying that word correctly). I am so bored of direct discussion in literature of emotional vs rational, it is so overused. And it is all the same to me:
Emotions are a much quicker and more generalising version of thinking, religion is protoscience, machines are very crude forms of organisms, cities are something like a fungus...
So I get bored of arguing religion vs logic, or computers vs brains, when they're all indistinguishable from a certain point of view and we should instead be thinking of what logic there is in religion or how we can make computers more like organisms.
That being said I have nothing against the romanticism, dream logic is just thinking that is too efficient and complex to follow, but apparently it spews out the right result in the end, because humans do stay alive and society stays alive. Whatever people's brains are doing when they're not making simple understandable sense works mostly, except we don't have the brainpower to understand it, which is too bad. I don't think like Freud that the subconsciousness is to disturbing and dangerous for us to know about it, I don't think it's stunningly complex either, I just think we don't have just a bit more metathinking and analysing power because we survive just fine without being aware what's going on there, in fact it's probably distracting to monitor one's own brain processing everything, and our reasoning skills didn't develop to help us monitor our mental maintenance systems for our entertainment and enlightenment, they developed so that we have another tool for figuring out how to not die and how to have our species not die. I suspect all the thinking were conscious of doing is the back-up tool, being the newest and not entirely essential.
Off-topic: can anyone mentally turn their skull inside out? That instead of the world being the outside and the brains being the inside, your thought mechanism are the general background while the world is a cavern within that which you look into and make adjustments to the inside of? It's not quite solipsism, since the perceived world is still separate and autonomous and mostly outside of one's control, just not as important. Since I can conceive of it it must be possible with just a little bit more mental flexibility. Ideally a person ought to be able to shift it like a reversible figure optical illusion, but a lifetime in "normal" mode probably makes it more difficult to switch one way than the other. Or maybe some people or most people are in the other mode and I don't know it. And of course a persons insides are objectively smaller than the world. Nothing that a lifetime of living in a culture where the assumption is that thoughts are more important and true reality wouldn't solve though.