Action and Thinking of Action

This story has by now been told often. How
on January 2, 2007, Wesley Autrey was waiting for a train at the 137th Street and Broadway station in Manhattan with his two very young daughters. Around 12:45 p.m., he noticed a man,
Cameron Hollopeter, having a seizure. Afterwards, the guy stumbled from the platform, falling onto the tracks. As Hollopeter lay on the tracks, Autrey saw the lights of an incoming
into a drainage ditchtrain. One of the women held Autrey's daughters back away from the edge of the platform and Autrey jumped down into the track area. After realizing he did not have time to get Hollopeter off the tracks before the oncming train, Wesley Autrey protected Hollopeter by pushing him between the tracks, and throwing himself over Hollopeter. The operator of the train saw them and tried to stop before reaching the two people, but two cars still passed over Autrey and Hollopeter. Autrey was not scratched.

Okay the point for our purposes is that there is no way this guy thought out what he was going to do. Autrey's story illustrates the fallacies of thinking that the brain controls our actions. In the words of Jan Cox, "the brain is the last to know." Picture what must have happened if you doubt this. There is a train, there is no way this guy could think, if I do this, then will my daughters see me die, is it worth my life for this poor fella. No, there was no time for any thought, the body just took over. If I cannot argue persuasively that this scenario is typical of human action, at least try and see how in this case, the brain did not decide to be a hero. This story still freaks me out, but it is not a story of rational activity, and that is why I include it here.

Emulate the Aristocrats

Ever notice how they wave at crowds--- Jan Cox once pointed this out--that wave that aristocrats and autocratic rulers give to the subjects. Any "Hello" magazine will show it, even the kids pick up this royal wave early. See them in their motorcades, raising their hand to recognise the people, and then slightly turning their hand.
Okay---this is the attitude we aim to have towards our----thoughts. They ain't going away (the thoughts, yes the aristocrats did go away, ignore that for now). In one of his final (and I say 'final' knowing that the idea of a boundary here, a frame, is very alien to what Jan was striving to convey to us.) Jan Cox repeated this---you never completely get rid of those thoughts, regardless of what most mystical texts advertise.
Anyway we can ape those aristocrats til we hit the genetic grand prize. Like, know yourself---all those books about and pictures of royalty---most folks do not have this family documentation, but the aristocrats do, only -- they forget it all----they can do this because the library has a lock on it. It is all there, just not cluttering up the moment.
And do not forget your goal. Yes, the aristocrats were overthrown on occasion. And what did they do? Again, a direct quote from Jan Cox. He said once that real aristocrats never gave up getting their kingdoms back. If removed from power they spent their time gathering troops on the border of their lost kingdom.
Also--notice the really rich (the kind who you will not see waving in a parade) they do not want you even knowing their name, an instance being the heirs that until recently controlled the Wall Street Journal. They have their reasons; so too does a different aristocracy, The really really rich (that'd be those who knew Jan Cox) do not speak of themselves, or give interviews. And they may not always even always know their OWN names.
....
And yeah, Jan did NOT put THIS into words but, hey, those royalty, they get to have as many animals as they want. That would however be the only advantage the rich really have.

Brotherhood and Motherhood

Hmm, distracted from my intended topic today (the difference between action and thinking of action as exemplied by the Wesley Autrey heroism) by thoughts growing out of yesterday's topic.
I need to rewrite yesterdays actually, easy to do in blogland, but right now let's notice, regarding the difference between men and women, the significance of the idea of sacrifice in human history.

Jan Cox never mentioned women in this regard and I often wondered, while he was alive, why he did not mention motherhood more, especially since to me motherhood seemed the perfect model for the idea of self sacrifice. After all mothers literally can lay down their lives for their children and this seemed to perhaps be the origin of human heroism. Now it is clearer why my thoughts here were off the mark.

The genetic basis for motherhood in people and other primates is so necessary for the survival of the species that flexibility is not useful at the level of primate mothering.

Whereas, with men, and that brotherhood feeling I mentioned yesterday, a group of men can have such intense interaction that they actually do form a unit, or perhaps remember the herd hunting instincts, and activate that layer of reality. Only this activation, critical also for the survival of the species, happened to a species with innate and undeveloped talents for mentation. Beside being a possible vision of the origin of thought, the closeness of this bond, (see yesterdays entry about men hunting, and the surrounding unknown milieu in which a sense of where your fellow hunter may actually be at that moment, in space, based on calculations that used what later was called spatial logic.) may also illuminate the idea of sacrifice and the development in history of this idea. (Jesus etc.)
After all, if a group is so tight as to become a singular unit, then loosing one member does not kill, the group. The idea of an afterlife too, might come from this group experience. This would probably have preceded the concept (and experience) of individuality. Perhaps.

And perhaps not---this whole analysis is suspiciously binary. Two hands--on one women are locked in a well known arena where success depended on repetitive tasks. On the other men are out in an environment of the unknown, hunting, and depending on help from other men.

But perhaps not. Something will fall out of this analysis.

The Bond Between Men

The mechanical group feeling that men can develop with each other is actually amazing and the strength of this tie is not visible to women often. The first of the year is not a bad time to reflect on how this might have come about--- hunters are more successful hunting in groups, more eyes, more weapons, coordinated tactics. This is how lions hunt. Today they (men not lions though both may be napping at one level together), will be grouping to observe predatory play. It is possible that the origin of thought, (certainly not mechanical the first time a particular thought got thunk,) was in the psychic conditions that enhanced the success of hunting. The closeness of the bond between men, the intensity of the hunt (success or die of course was the game), may have fostered what we would today call psychic events. Some thousand years ago this psychic awareness may have developed into -- words. To communicate a picture of an event, one far away in space, this could be called a psychic event, and may have developed into an ability to share information about events far away in time, also. So useful for hunting, a ball, like cats today, or the origin of ball play, dinner.

Now women were, are, only slowly connected to this. We did not need that intense interest in what our fellows were doing, ("Is so and so close enough to help me if I take on this beast, now?").

Why, because our intensest interest had to be raising, protecting, a child, a young primate, and it was lonely. Not much intellectual problem solving needed in grabbing the young one away from the fire or the centipede. Pretty much how to do this was in our genetic primate code and did NOT get enhanced with group problem solving. What was the need for spatial logic when the arena for action was as far as an infant could crawl, NOT an unknown wild jungle, where the predator could become the prey instantly. The female genetic package worked pretty well by itself. And this was what was needed for the good of the species then. Now??? Still crucial. Who is spreading these silly stories about replacing sex?? Anyway evolution is evolving.

Zoo Nous

It is not that zoo keepers are cruel, I suspect rather that most of them come from the pet loving population that is such a substantial element of the US population. It is not that they are thoughtless or poorly trained and thus culpable for incidents like the tiger escaping from the SF zoo on December 25. No I was thinking about this, and how someone like Jan Cox felt so deeply the plight of the confined animal. His sense of raw connection to living creatures was something he did not reveal in his public emotional posture, just his actions, and I may at some point discuss more about his concern for animals and how he demonstrated it. But the gulf between the compassion of Jan Cox for anything trapped and ordinary pet lovers makes that gulf comprising the moat around the tigers enclosure mean and mere.

Which is by way of asking how the ordinary can continue to like PBS nature documentaries and train for zoo jobs and have no inkling of what an animal in a zoo goes through. Apparently hardly any whisper of compassion based on the communal nature of all creatures ruffles their actions.

How is this, and what I noticed was the similarity between zoos and ordinary thought. Control is maintained through a strict separation. A separation necessary for the existence of the zoo and safety of visitors, of course. In people this is called binary thought, things cannot get mixed up regardless of the violence this does to reality. This is for the safety of the sanity of the ordinary.

Here in Pinpoint Georgia we are near a big time zoo which has a history of dreadful cruelty. And ongoing and hardly disguised at all is the current cruelty to the huge mammals called whales. They keep dying at the Atlanta Aquarium and it is this excuse and that, and just get another one; the problem that these creatures must have a cage the size of the ocean to live happily cannot rise to the surface of anyone's awareness, at least not anyone on the tourist boards awareness. Reality surpasses conception as it must.

String of galaxies

Someone of whom I have always been very fond recently reminded us in another forum that Jan Cox had us study the maxim "There is nothing out there." Perhaps this person's riff on this was where I got the idea but I have myself always thought that if "there is nothing out there," there CANNOT BE anything in here. And as to where that might leave so-called reality, the picture I got from popularizations of string theory is of lines of galaxies, a so thin wall, between unimaginable voids. A line between what is not out there and what is not in here may be all there is.

Snake Skin and Snake Oil

To what extent could the use of words parallel the way animals roll in the smell of other species? I was going to say the dung,or carcasses, not smell, but the example that most recently came to my attention was squirrels which have been observed to eat shed snake skin and then lick their own fur. The zoologists surmise that this is a protective device, so I guess, that when the squirrels are asleep predators will think they are snakes and leave them alone.

Here is the Reuters article about the UC Davis research:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's scary being a little, tasty squirrel, but some species of the rodents have come up with an intimidating camouflage -- snake smells.
California ground squirrels and rock squirrels chew up rattlesnake skin and smear it on their fur to mask their scent, a team at the University of California Davis reported.
"They're turning the tables on the snake," Donald Owings, a professor of psychology who helped lead the research, said in a statement.
Barbara Clucas, a graduate student in animal behavior, watched ground squirrels and rock squirrels chewing up pieces of skin shed by snakes and then licking their fur.
The scent probably helps to mask the squirrel's own scent, especially when the animals are asleep in their burrows, they wrote in the journal Animal Behavior.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox: Editing by Julie Steenhuysen and David Wiessler)

If so, then men using words are warding off some realms (we surmise) they are aware are dangerous but at some level are also aware they are ignorant of. Perhaps words are meant to ward off the very real hazards of ignorance. Of course words have a legitimate function--
to, in the analysis of Jan Cox, break up the external world into rearrangeable pieces (hence what is called human progress). But regarding the unseen worlds---words are simply not designed to provide information or useful analysis. And yet we have philosophy, religion, psychology, et cet era, for thousands of years and no sense that this illusion is wearing out.... How to account for the persistence of the human belief that man's mental machinery can deal with whatever is beyond the obviously physical??? Aside from some cosmic late night commercial for a dice everything machine, how account for the human susceptibility to using his mental apparatus to chop up non physical reality. So my suggestion is this: perhaps part of the reason is that words have a reflected allure, a scent from another realm, that is comforting in view of a sensed void, an intimation of a different reality. Perhaps the illusion of control and insight has a protective function for the species. Hey, it is just a thought.