28 June 2013: Knowledge, Experience and Pain

20 mn workout at dawn: walking, three flights of stairs, one later on. Very tired-out, rested twice. The aerobic “step” was taken back by physio and they forgot to return it so I was unable to do my usual 150 steps. Note to self. No need for this if physio doesn’t want me to have it in the room. Just walk to stairwell and do 100 steps at first, alternating L/R at fifty, to simulate the lower rise of the step device. Then gradually increase. Watch exhaustion note cannot crash on the bed (thinking of oneself as Eric Liddell winning the race despite being tripped) may start at a lover step count owing to this.

Or, do the steps after the walk and stagger back to bed.

I always like to plan and scheme about workouts. It makes me so sad at times to no longer be able to run, and if I could, I’d feel like the guy in the film Avatar who without “real” legs, is able to run in a virtual body. Catholics believe in the literal resurrection of the body because they don’t hate the body, they don’t want it chained to a desk.

Kant: continue to read the final chapters of the Critique and the Prolegomena. Neat sound byte in the Prolegomena is: Hume bases Knowledge on Expreience: Kant bases Experience on a (small amount of) (built in) Knowledge. Given what we know about computers, whose architects design-in word lengths and instruction sets, Hume’s tabula rasa is wrong altho preferred by the many, who find it rather queer that when they bark their shins, as did Samuel Johnson and Thomas Reid, this is not an unmediated perception.

Rather strange since many doctors of the time of Reid and Johnson did not think children felt pain, and, perhaps, owing to this, children were enthusiastically savaged in their era. It may be that lower phyla do not feel pain, having only those physical organs needed to register the sensation, but not enough “brain” for the apperception that “this hurts” which seems (to the practical palliative doctor concerned with eliminating pain) to be worse the more self-aware (sensitive) the patient is.

The highly refined, highly self-aware patient like me (ha!) may just have more brain devoted to apperception. We see ourselves contemplating Poussin: we feel ourselves in pain. In the latter case we have to develop ways of feeling yet somehow not feeling pain as in the case of the even more refined apperception of the monk, or for that matter the fantastical duke of dark corners.