psychic sludge

[whitcomb@aurxc3.aur.alcatel.com (Jonathan Whitcomb)]

Ah, so here we have an epic battle brewing between the "thinkers" and
the "feelers".  Entertaining stuff.  The feeler expounds "I'd feel that
this ought to be true, so therefore it must be true."  The thinker
retorts "you cannot prove that this is true, therefore it cannot be
true."  

The feeler cannot prove any of his theories, of course, and the thinker
scorns him as a nincompoop.  The feeler replies that the thinker is not
receptive to anything that cannot be expressed as a mathematical formula
and condemns him as an unfeeling robot.

There ain't a pretty solution here, folks.  Feelers are not receptive to
scientific method and feel frustrated that they cannot relate to it in a
non intellectual way.  "Hey, that equation doesn't give me any vibes at
all!"  Thinkers have been conditioned to reject their own experiences
and intuition in favor of scientific mothods.  They have to.  There is
nothing in a human's day to day experience that helps him intuitively
relate to relativity or quantum mechanics.  So the thinker learns that
in order to be able to sanely work with models of the world that yield
consistant experimental results but scream against anything that makes
sense to him in his every day experience that he must put aside his
intuition and accept the model that best fits the experimental data.

Neither of these world views is going to answer every question.  If we
were purely a race of thinkers we'd never have been able to model the
behaviour of a transistor, because objects in the physical world don't
tunnel.  However if we were purely a race of thinkers we would be an
unimaginative and unartistic people.

Strangely enough, music is a medium that can satisfy the thinker and the
feeler alike.  The feeler can relate to the emotions that were part of
the creation of the song, and also emotions a song evokes that the
song's creator never intended.  The thinker can relate to music in that
it is a very linear, ordered mathematical system with strongly defined
structures.  

But don't try to get a feeler to build you a bridge or a thinker to
contact dead relatives with your crystals.

There is a middle ground here, but I fear neither of the major
combatants in this broohahah are near it.  So please, carry on.  This is
a mighty entertaining (if futile) excersize.

-Jonathan