Thot (Feeling/Sensation) Girl Summer

Week 21: Experimenting with Absurdism and Integrating shit

TLDR: We’ll never fully understand ourselves enough to make perfectly confident choices. We’re a bundle of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and processes that always inch closer to knowing ourselves, and paradoxically farther away from whatever it is that we are towards something new. Overthinkers have been trying to make sense of the constant stream of events using all the tools we have since we realized we had tools. There are some universals, but there are a lot of particulars. One of those particulars is that it isn’t necessarily un-intellectual to explore feelings and sensations. I’ve avoided feelings for most of my adult life (and childhood), trying to deal in reason without feelings and sensation, but I’m starting to feel like Big Girls Do Cry. I’m too fuckin’ grown to keep isolating parts of myself.

The Virtue of Feeling Feelings

I been in my feelings and sensations all summer. If you follow my Instagram, you’d probably say this is an understatement, but I needed to take a few selfies to materialize my feelings. So sue me. Maybe if I hadn’t blunted my feelings and connection to my body at a young age I’d be able to reason through shit that’s happening. Sometimes you have to feel, sense, and reason all at the same time. A friend sent me a draft of a piece lamenting the appetitive nature of algorithm brain and how tech just serves to feed your beastly appetite. Plato and others argue that to be human is to allow the head to rule the belly through the chest, but I suspect it’s really a problem of not integrating Plato’s logistikon, thumoeides, and epithumetikon (rational/head/thought, spirit/chest/feeling, appetite/belly/sensation). My friend argued that technology gives into the appetite, but my issue is that Plato thought things should be unchanging to preserve them in a crystalized ideal. Maybe I’ve never experienced the ideal, but even if I’ve been at the edge of chaos it seems impossible to preserve a near-perfect state indefinitely - especially as a dynamic being who has to move through things as they arise. Our appetite, spirit, and reason move with us in one body, and to be human we should probably think thoughts, sense sensations, and feel feelings.

The particulars of my situation this summer, without getting too specific, have left me in a place where I could make a shirt that says “I survived Summer 2024 and all I got was 2 dead dads and a couple surrogate daddies”. I will not elaborate but just know I’m trying to be very “in my body” for clues about how to feel and what to think. Cuz, I am lost.

I’ve got to do this now because at a young age I cut my feelings and sensations off from my thoughts. As a little girl I experienced sensations with an intensity that presented as pathological. Had to wear my socks inside out, hated brushing my hair, having my mouth covered, I was wrecked by loud noises, sensitive to smell - normal shit everyone is calling “sensory processing disorders” now. I’m still physically sensitive, but I’ve learned to tell my perceiving software to shut the fuck up when something physical bothers me. The system isn’t working well because I feel inhuman. Not ruled by myself at all, just running on impulse and computation.

There are a lot of us that don’t know how to feel shit unless we feel it in our bodies, and then when we do either stoically reject our sensations and feelings, (”maybe I’m just too sensitive”), or we fully lean into AuDHD to explain everything we had to mask. Whatever we call it, humans have sensations (and feelings), and they’re features, not pathologies. Not even when you can’t focus on Sieur de La Salle establishing a fur trade at Fort Miami in fourth grade because the seam of your sock was rubbing on your pinkie toe. Arguably, Indiana’s history is boring as fuck, I mean who could reasonably connect with being a fucking Hoosier? They told us we were called Hoosiers because Indiana was infamous for barroom brawls and one morning a barkeep asked ‘Whose ear?’ after finding a stray auricle on the floor. I mean shut the fuck up. The shit makes me angry - you expect to build a culture around that? As a transplant and general oddball, I didn’t feel connected to the story. Sounded sus (and was), so it makes sense that my mind was on a bundle of threads connecting the flesh in my shoe to a feeling of rage. What can I say, we all crave something closer to the truth, and sensation whether it’s bullshit or not it feels infinitely closer to us than everyday abstractions. We shouldn’t reject sensation nor feeling as much as we do. We also shouldn’t lean into it exclusively.

If this sounds like you, no shade, but we need to grow up. Our child-like observations of sensations are an essential first step for understanding feelings, and we probably need some remedial sensitization therapy. Regardless of family trauma or genetic sensitivities, socially we were sat in chairs for 8 hours a day and told to shut up and don’t move. Karl Popper would blame this on Plato, but his successor, Aristotle didn’t think young people had the potential for good judgment or that they should be sitting in lectures. Yet here we are ~2500 years later. It’s not our fault we never learned to integrate wisdom, but

I’m just saying maybe it’s time we start trying to get thoughts, sensations, and feelings to work together.

Since the current 13 issues of Experimenting with Absurdism (13-26) are dedicated to rules, morality, and ethics, and if being human is part of my morality (it is), maybe we should engage with all the facets of being human in an attempt to understand and integrate them for a better human experience.

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Aight: first of all -

I don’t care whether theory (feeling/thinking) or action (sensation) comes first, but we do think, sense, feel, and act in some varying order. Every human, Aristotle, Descartes, me and you all integrate sensation and feeling to a certain extent. Modern humans seem to have subscribed to some reductionist scientific approach that operates from the perspective that we can separate sensation, feeling, and thought - and maybe we can (ish), but I’m just saying I’m at a point where I want more integration, and I think it’s a good idea for others too.

Ought We Understand Intuition?

Is it moral to seek more integration? Depends on your framing, but in our current quest to identify the morality of the absurd… the only thing we have to do to rebel against the absurd is live and experience the most, so then integrating things is oughted because it increases possible experiences and combinations. This is further supported if my hypothesis that integrating sensation, feeling, and thought is the basis for intuition because humans have intuited the greatest inventions and discoveries, increasing tools and frames of possible experience. Seeking integration is not just a selfish desire to understand and know oneself (which even by itself is an imperative) but maybe a key to knowing others, the world, and maybe even God.

From a scientific perspective the fucking around (Conjecture) part of finding out (Refutation), hinges on intuition. Michael Faraday intuited a relationship between magnetism and electricity. Hanging a wire over a magnet in a pool of mercury was a hunch. He couldn’t figure out the theory as to why the wire was spinning so he sent the setup to his frens to see if they understood what was happening. The most fun way to fuck around and find out if you ask me.

Michael Polanyi thinks intuition is knowledge we possess without being aware of it, and maybe that’s possible, but dissecting Faraday’s intuition would be a really fun and interesting project. Maybe I need to do another Ph.D, but I won’t so without actually doing the research, lemme cook a bit:

Allegedly he discovered electromagnetic rotation on October 28th, 1821. It was no doubt a chilly Sunday morning in London, and they had been experiencing storms and pressure changes for the past few weeks. Maybe he went down to his basement lab after attending his Sandemanian church. He had gotten married earlier in the year, so it could very well be that his relationship sparked (sorry) his return from chemistry to his interest in electricity. I’m just saying - we have no idea how the fuck he came up with this, but I suspect his passions converged. So you see why I want to sense things, feel them, think about them - all of it, and I want it to work like Faraday’s engine, with ease.

Dis-integrating for Intuition

I relate to Faraday’s impoverished childhood: He worked as a bookbinder at 13 which led him to a life of self-learning; I went to work as a file clerk at 14 to avoid my family and make money for college. I don’t know if he partitioned his emotions into books, but I sure did. No one told me I was too sensitive, I just had to intuit it. Whether it was getting cracked across the mouth for giving my feelings a voice, or being sent to my room for shyly refusing to perform the blessing before Thanksgiving dinner - I look back and see emotions being stifled in a feral Mowgli-looking child. So I marched my ass to my room and stuffed my diary full of feelings and questions about what the fuck people (my parents) were thinking. I trapped all my feelings, thoughts, my tears, and tiny threads from the carpet there. I can imagine Faraday binding his intensity in the spine of a book. I mean, fuck people - this is how you get Tom Riddle’s diary: teach a magical bundle of nerve endings to alchemize themselves into words! I have yet to do anything on par with Faraday, but does a viral meme of my mom and aunt count? They were putting a Faraday cage around their motorcycles to block a conspiratorial EMP last year, and it had the internet cracking up in seconds. I had to take it down because it had half a million views in a couple hours but I’ll pull it out of the archive now. Sorry, Mom.

Ok, one evil meme doesn’t quite make me Voldemort (yet), but my own alchemical tests showed that partitioning my feelings/emotions/thoughts reaped rewards. My parents made a lot of emotion-driven decisions, so I reasoned that the opposite of that would be best. My intellectualization of feelings and sensations went from writing to calculating and by the time I got to stoichiometry and the anatomical dissection of a pregnant cat, I thought ‘Well fuck, maybe we can just cut bad shit out” and decided I’d work towards being a surgeon, but by the end of college, I had read a book that showed an even more severely partitioned life for female physicians, so I turned to science for a more fulfilling path. Maybe Intern Blues saved the world. Could you imagine me with a license to cut people open and sew them back up?

In grad school, I almost fucked around and integrated shit by studying the molecular mechanics of pain, but the idea of intentionally injecting a mouse with a peptide that would cause them pain repelled me something fierce, so I resisted, joining a molecular biology lab. I think this kind of biology has physics envy, and it was a good option because I wanted to be into pure logic, levers and pulleys but deep down, I couldn’t totally blunt feelings, emotion and context enough to do it. I avoided cognition, the “soft” stuff in neuroscience - dangerous territory if I was going to keep my emotions partitioned from logic - but I was already failing.

My mentor had a stoic, disciplined demeanor keeping her mind from wandering - necessary for success as a woman in science, and I tried to emulate it, but she thought I was tougher than I am, telling me the best time to have a baby was the end of grad school. We both knew the effects of bathing brains in estrogen, but after that, I was primed to leave reductionist science - broaching more mushy, complex ideas like addiction, desire, sensation. I started my post-doc studies but felt isolated. After suppressing shit for so long I yearned for integration, not just of the sensations, emotions, and thoughts but with people with whom I could share the thrill and anguish of discovery - and time with my toddler.

A Hunch Double Plus (+)

Leaving science wasn’t an easy decision, and a lot of it was just a hunch that I wouldn’t be happy with the overall direction of my life. I was in the lab 12 hours a day and I didn’t want my daughter to feel isolated like I did, restarting the cycle of smart kids over-intellectualizing intense feelings. She could have ended up right where I was, which wasn’t the worst, I mean science is very useful - instrumental - one might say. Psychology, neuroscience, and biology have all helped me manage feeling and sensation, but I sensed that I needed to leave science to gain a more complete perspective. Maybe if academia allowed its practitioners a broad path, I’d have been able to explore, finding philosophy to integrate into my work instead of maintaining science at the top of an epistemic house of cards.

And the more I read, the more my intuitions are supported that science is at the top of a house of cards. By itself, it’s not enough of a guide to live life. It needs integration. Philosophy alone isn’t enough either, but philosophy doesn’t give the same promise that science does - to be the arbiter of truth, it only suggests that by examining the world, you might improve. So with science, plus my intuition (thoughts, feelings, sensations), and philosophy I’ve got a Hunch ++ on how to live in a way that might bring about satisfaction. In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes the argument that science is a derivative because it's laid on top of our experience. It relies on phenomenon to exist and then perception to make the observation

“To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country - side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.”

Maybe I once knew what a river was on some anamnetic shit, but I think I might be actually learning what it is now. When I looked into the microscope, it evaporated and all that was left were the components of a river. When I (foolishly) tried to isolate the river from my own perception of it (c’est impossible), I had fun, but eventually got lost in a place that felt very foreign. I’ve stepped in rivers as a scientist, as a mother, as a wife, as a woman, and if you never step in the same river twice, the only way to really understand a river is to accept that it is never the same moment to moment nor I in it. whether I’m on my paddleboard, with my sample collection tube. Completely ignoring Cratylus’ idea that maybe we never even step in a river once, this whole discussion is a scientist’s nightmare because tracking those changes?! C’est impossible! But maybe we don’t need to track it entirely to know what a river is. Maybe the best we can do is to experience it with as many parts of ourselves and it as we can. I’m a strong swimmer, but I’d be ignoring my senses and feelings if I didn’t say part of me is still afraid of drowning.

I’ll calculate the probability of drowning, but at some point, I have to just decide to risk it. I’ve done the scientific dissection of what a river is and how best to approach it to survive, which is useful and interesting, but at this point I just want to swim, and doing the rational analysis without emotion like a premature autopsy on a life improperly lived. The kind of science I’ve learned can only back-calculate life.

I want to understand life as I live it, and maybe the best we can do is to live life forwards and understand it backwards, like Kierkegaard said. That means we’re going to make mistakes, slipping and falling in rivers, but the effort to understand from multiple angles has to count for something.

Universals and Particulars of Intuition

I’ve avoided formal philosophy, but thinking philosophically is a natural state for me - after all, science is just the application and practice of a particular set of philosophical axioms. I’ve tried to understand the universals of feelings in a scientific framework - and I could sit here and write about my particular feelings ad infinitim, but it feels like maybe somewhere between is where I belong.

Before I left science, one project I had in mind (of many) was looking at how intuition and sensation are transmitted and integrated quickly in a Bayesian inferential style (amongst other methods) to generate predictions. Looks like the field as survived without me but one model I considered was thermoreception in fruit flies. I suspected heat sensitivity was linked to anxiety-like behaviors and genes. I came up with this idea when I was in the shower. Ken had left the water on for me, which I found to be unbearably hot. I thought the fact that this man didn’t realize how hot he liked his shower is bizarre - his lack of thermosensitivity correlated with his lack of intuition about mine, and a general lack of anxiety on his part, but plenty on mine (I mean these thoughts felt hella anxious).

I wasn’t open to the idea that my feelings mattered in my intellectual pursuits. I ignored how I felt about the fact that after nearly a decade of cohabitation, he didn’t realize I liked my shower a little less scalding. And I ignored the feeling (because I didn’t know how to treat it) that my proclivity stuffing my feelings away made me view sensation purely as a stimulus - occluding any philosophical investigation of “intuition” I might have been able to incorporate. I just kept plugging along with the same tools.

Now after a few years of reading outside my depth, I’ve found a bunch of different frameworks for thinking about things, but currently, I’m making myself kinda like a Body without Organs (BwO). This goofy (albeit decent) framing from psychoanalysts Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze who thought about systems (i.e., bodies) as having a foreground and a background, like this document. The words/letters are in the foreground and difference between the black background and the foreground is what allows you to understand (or have a shot at understanding) what the fuck I’m saying. If I think of my life as the body, and all of the components (work, relationships, feelings, thoughts etc) as the foreground, I can pluck certain organs/elements out and study their function, recombining them, and rethinking the purpose of each in the context of the others. There’s a lot more to this philosophy, but I’m feeling and thinking about sensations, and using sensations to interrogate my thoughts and feelings that won’t come to the surface. For example, I hurt myself a couple days ago after having some pretty emotionally painful events transpire, and for some reason driving home, the sensation of physical pain, and trying to objectively recount the emotional events that had transpired, I finally let out a few tears.

Now I’ve got to sit with this physical pain and hold it up against everything to decide what’s next. I can’t go to the gym, or do too much physical stuff, so I’m sitting and thinking and feeling. Icing, and soaking. Writing and reading. I’m forcing myself to interrogate sensations like sweating - which makes think of Florida- a mostly negative experience, but since I’ve been skating pretty religiously 2x a week, I’m starting to like the feeling. I associate it with hard work that I want to do. Emotional expression. and as a result I’m slowly reorganizing the connections between the sensation of salt precipitating on my skin, and wet hair on my back, and my irritation towards it. I’m letting my physical discomfort take the wheel, but also listening to my thoughts and feelings.

I don’t have my master framework yet for when and how to listen to your feelings, sensations, or thoughts and integrate science and philosophy let alone others feelings and desires, but I can say that at times one may pull ahead, and you can’t sever the connection and shouldn’t lose faith in that connection. Our appetites, emotions, and reason are all parts of the whole - organs in the body, no singular part being the whole truth of our being. And while we can rearrange them- their weights and boundaries - the absurdist in me says we’ll never fully control them or understand them entirely, but we must keep moving towards. The towards is closest to the truth.

So while you and I may enter a resting period, one that seems unproductive or quiescent, it may just be that our thoughts are preceding sensation, or we’re processing sensation into feeling. It’s also ok to integrate people into your process. I didn’t say much about this, because it’s a whole separate thing, but getting outside perspective has been helping me a lot. Not everyone is good for this, but when you’ve got amazing people, you feel it, sense it, think it… it just clicks. So, if you’re one of them, you know it, and I hope you know how much I love you.

For the thought experiment (below) and to hear this read by me consider upgrading!