Relentless Inquiry

As soon as I could see that, it was obvious what I needed to do: pipe the output from the “intellectual” net into the “emotional” net, instead of trying to integrate the data downstream in the “consciousness” process. And literally, as soon as I imagined this, the two upstream networks integrated, and the need to feel bad went away. I still felt bad physically, in my body, so I “shook it out” and it went away. (It appears that shifts in glandular output and neurotransmitter states are used as a crude system-wide state machine to aid in sorting input and output, so even after you adjust an upstream source, you may retain some kinesthetic “pollution” downstream until you garbage collect it.)

Many Circuits, Loosely Joined

Now, before I go further, I want to explain that the “emotional” and “intellectual” networks I just mentioned were not my entire emotional or intellectual being. That's precisely the sort of large-scale behavioral integration that our brains do not have by default. I integrated two isolated “understandings”, each of which was a simple script to assign meaning to a certain class of events. In programming terms, each of these nets could be considered a “business rule”; just pattern recognizers that fired off to send “me” their analysis of the situation. It's just that one of those rules fired off a “knowing” and the other fired off a “feeling”.

So, the fact that I did this one particular edit of my brain's rule system does not now mean that intellectual understanding is now integrated with all my emotional impulses. During early life, we write a lot of scripts in our brains that are not abstracted or reused in any significant way. …