I think I'll probably be around until the 28th. Since you mention sending a second letter, I might as well mention that I haven't yet gotten the first one. But mail's kind of like that here. It might show up eventually. I'll keep an eye out for it.

I expect I'll be back to town sometime between the 1st and 3rd. (I'm targeting first, though, a combination of things here, along them trying to figure out what the weather will be this weekend tells me that is unlikely to happen). I can pretty much guarantee I'll be back by the 5th as I left some stuff in Manhattan that is needed for an application that has to be mailed the 5th.

Alright, I'm gonna try to comment on your post, but bear with me, as I've been interrupted several times in trying to read it and I would expect several more before I can get done with the comment.

As to your second paragraph. Is understanding both the physical how it works "the real level" and understanding the "perceptual level" really impossible or is that just what society tells us? Many of the people that we highlight as the greatest minds of history, people like Aristotle, Archimedes, and even Einstein, among others, tend to be the ones that not only thought about science "the real level" but also philosophy religion, politics and everything else thus true they may have never found answers, but they did at least wrestle with both levels. Furthermore, they were all able to figure out more about the "real" part by stopping to examine some of the "perceptual" part. Whereas now it seems like science goes about almost explicitly stating that it will study the "real", but makes not claims and wishes to have no effect on the "perceptual level". Though this can't really be done, simply look at the way Einstein's "purely scientific" theories were grabbed by philosophers and have no become a part of society. Thus, maybe the problem isn't so much that an individual can't understand both, but that society has said it is impossible because it almost makes fun of anyone working on one side that tries to even think about the other.

As to your third, yeah to me its kinda a lot of what I was saying in that society feels like it tells us you can't really live if you are really thinking about those things. Thus you either have to be genius or insane so they will leave you alone to think about them. Though is this claim really true or not. As after all we all have both some sane and insane in us. So maybe the real fact is that anyone can examine both they must just be willing to accept that they may end up with either genius or insane as a label.



Overall, this post kept reminding me of some stories I had read long ago and had been thinking of a lot again recently. That being that the two nations where people pay the least attention to politics and where they pay the most attention to western popular culture are the US and Iran. In some of them they discussed how this was actually an active plan of the Iranian government as by keeping all the people, especially the youth, engrossed in American culture, from music to movies to technology, it kept the people distracted and allowed a regime that had been undergoing forced liberalization to avoid revolution to instead become incredibly neo-conservative. The specific thoughts being of wondering much this really goes on in America. As after all it is very true for Americans that they are more likely to know about the big celebrity news, or the new type of ipod than they are to know about any of their political leaders, let alone the path their leaders are taking them down. (For example actually make someone read some of what the patriot act did the usual response is "quit making that up, there is no way out government would ever even consider that", yet it passed with little if any thought and no complaints). Thus how much of our complaints on Iran are based on what they do, and how much on being mad that they might divulge our pacifying secrets?