concepts about concepts

11:41 AM 1/28/11

I got up around 11:10 this morning and started to get ready for work. But I couldn't get up out of bed. I was trying to move and thinking, 'I can't do it.' So I took half of a Vivarin. (I don't have any coffee or a coffeemaker at home right now, long story.) Since I withdrew from coffee for two days, the half a vivarin is having a stronger effect. (Good thing I only took half.)

I showered and got dressed in my uniform and was about to walk out the door around 11:35 when I realized that I don't have to be in to work until 12:30. I knew the number was 12:30, I was thinking 12:30 in my mind, but everything I was doing was getting me there at 12:00. I've done this before. I walked in half an hour early before and punched in and everyone basically said 'wth?' And I think, yeah, it was when I came in at 12 and 12:30 was when I was scheduled - same thing as today. So I caught myself and realized I have a few extra minutes till I have to leave.

I was thinking more about intuition and abstraction last night.

I started off at a child's level of abstraction, the very beginning. I thought about: what is time? when does time end? how long is a million years? how long is a million times a million years? that's nothing to eternity. that's the blink of an eye to eternity. a blink of an eye is the same as eternity. one second is the same as eternity. Eternity is an abstraction so unimaginable that we need a symbol to represent it. You can't imagine it and it's like nothing you've ever seen in your life.

Then I thought, what if somebody asked questions about time and eternity, from their childhood onwards, and that's all that they thought about, that kind of question, for their whole life. They spent most of their time thinking about those kinds of questions. Everything they wanted to think about would be something that was so abstract that you had to use some symbol or image or word to represent it, because it's like nothing you've ever seen in the real world.

Over the years they would learn more and more words and concepts and add them to their knowledge. They would learn concepts ABOUT those concepts. They would learn and remember relationships between the concepts. They would learn exceptions to the rules about the concepts.

But because they specialized in those abstract concepts, they would not learn much about things like 'How do I bake a cake?' And if they did bake a cake, they would be asking abstract questions about cakes while doing it. This is what it means to 'specialize' in something. You become so good at one particular thing that you aren't very good at other things, and it's physically impossible to specialize in everything at once. You might be able to dabble in some of those other things, but you'll always be rather weak in them. All of the Jungian functions are that way, all of them. Each function is something that you specialize in, while you neglect the other functions. You mostly use two of them together, one to 'perceive' the world and one to 'judge' the world.

Okay, NOW I can leave for work.