mildly synesthetic napping and the trancendental derivation of causality
I've been taking a lot of naps lately.
I've been telling myself that they are therapeutic. I get to daydream, think about things, emote. A lot of times I think about the past and come to terms with it. Other times I find out new things about myself by looking at things at different, challenging angles. Sometimes I drift to sleep and dream.
It is very lazy but also very rewarding and cheaper than any other form of entertainment I can think of. It reminds me of my father and of my own childhood.
One strange thing that happens when I do this is that very often, when I have a new insight into something, I will involuntarily twitch in the neck. I've always had a bit of a tick but I had never been able to pinpoint its cause. Now, it seems to happen almost exclusively when I've figured out something new and surprising. Often, the discovery is subtle, but the presence of the tick is a signal to go back and explore what it was that I was just thinking about.
The other thing that happens, which I have come to realize is characteristic of how I think about things, is that sometimes when I come to a sort of visual or geometric solution to a problem, my motor system will kick in and I will suddenly move in the way that is the solution. It's like I'm dancing out the problem, in a tiny way.
My grandmother on my father's side was synesthetic, I've been told. Noises would look like colors to her. She would occasionally talk about how a sound was brown or mauve, but mostly didn't mention it because nobody knew what she was talking about. I think I may be mildly synesthetic as well, but with some connection between abstraction conception and the motor system. Does that count as synesthesia?
I used to have what I thought were pretty good theories about causality and its connection to embodiment. I thought that our understanding of causality was due to the affordances of objects, and so an interventionist theory of causality could be derived in a more or less foundationalist way from our phenomenological experience. In other words, the ready-at-hand was sufficient ground for our understanding of causation.
But maybe that theory, which don't think I ever convinced anybody of ever, was just based on peculiarities of my psychology. Maybe it's true that for me, causation is grounded in motion, because for me, those aspects of reality are linked.
I've been telling myself that they are therapeutic. I get to daydream, think about things, emote. A lot of times I think about the past and come to terms with it. Other times I find out new things about myself by looking at things at different, challenging angles. Sometimes I drift to sleep and dream.
It is very lazy but also very rewarding and cheaper than any other form of entertainment I can think of. It reminds me of my father and of my own childhood.
One strange thing that happens when I do this is that very often, when I have a new insight into something, I will involuntarily twitch in the neck. I've always had a bit of a tick but I had never been able to pinpoint its cause. Now, it seems to happen almost exclusively when I've figured out something new and surprising. Often, the discovery is subtle, but the presence of the tick is a signal to go back and explore what it was that I was just thinking about.
The other thing that happens, which I have come to realize is characteristic of how I think about things, is that sometimes when I come to a sort of visual or geometric solution to a problem, my motor system will kick in and I will suddenly move in the way that is the solution. It's like I'm dancing out the problem, in a tiny way.
My grandmother on my father's side was synesthetic, I've been told. Noises would look like colors to her. She would occasionally talk about how a sound was brown or mauve, but mostly didn't mention it because nobody knew what she was talking about. I think I may be mildly synesthetic as well, but with some connection between abstraction conception and the motor system. Does that count as synesthesia?
I used to have what I thought were pretty good theories about causality and its connection to embodiment. I thought that our understanding of causality was due to the affordances of objects, and so an interventionist theory of causality could be derived in a more or less foundationalist way from our phenomenological experience. In other words, the ready-at-hand was sufficient ground for our understanding of causation.
But maybe that theory, which don't think I ever convinced anybody of ever, was just based on peculiarities of my psychology. Maybe it's true that for me, causation is grounded in motion, because for me, those aspects of reality are linked.