20111231 (J)
Journal: December 31, 2011
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Language                Animal Souls                Thought Process

Universe: What is the universe? Well, I don’t know. But to me it is everything I can access physically and mentally. My accessible physical universe is quite small. I can see trees our my window and hear cars along the street and smell a neighbors barbeque; it is about limited to 100 paces. (noting of course that all sensations occur “right here”, in me, not “out there”) Some I attend to, most I don’t.

I can’t help but “attend to” the mental. My mental universe stretches from quarks to galaxies and beyond on each end and from the big bang to the infrared death. All my sensations and thoughts and feelings they generate are all tumbled together, filtered by time and imperfect memory, organized by genes and learned thought systems, filtered heuristically through organizations and systems, e.g., moral, scientific, family, career.

What’s left is my universe. Unique almost certainly. Unable to directly communicate with any other such universe, such as my therapist or a spider. Communication is confined to abstraction from a tiny bit of something or other into a general class represented by a word or other symbol such as "touch".

By the way, spiders are really good at “touch”, not so with sight. Sometimes I “yell” really loud at them by gently touching their webs, perhaps just blowing on them. They “hear”. They can also sit immobile for days, awaiting such calls to arouse them from their stupor. Oh that we could be so patient.