{"id":15898,"date":"2012-04-17T06:46:02","date_gmt":"2012-04-17T13:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=15898"},"modified":"2012-04-17T06:46:24","modified_gmt":"2012-04-17T13:46:24","slug":"from-man-alive-a-mindful-catalog-of-mindlessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15898\/from-man-alive-a-mindful-catalog-of-mindlessness\/","title":{"rendered":"From Man Alive! – “A mindful catalog of mindlessness.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.<\/em><\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

Extract from Chapter 10. A mindful catalog of mindlessness.<\/a><\/h3>\n

<\/a>I like to play a philosophy game I call Backstory. I will look at someone – anyone I happen to see – and try to project backward in time to the past causes of that person’s present-day appearance. Toddlers and young children will have sweet faces, almost always, with no deeper meanings to be discerned. But older children and adults will have had many experiences in their lives, and those past events will have written an emotional history in the lines of their skin. Your mama told you, when you glared and grimaced at her, that your face would freeze like that, but neither one of you knew she was right: The facial expressions we wear most often – habituated Mothertongue emotional reactions – inscribe themselves into our skin. I can see those habitual expressions in the people I am watching. Their clothing and their manner will tell their stories, too, and it is interesting to me to try to suss out their histories, just by looking at people from a distance.<\/p>\n

I stress that this is just a game. Every living organism, human or not, is in a certain sense a laboratory specimen to me. I am not cruel or intrusive in any way, but I watch everything I am blessed with the opportunity to see, and I learn everything I can from the behavior I observe. In consequence, I can tell you from having run repeated tests that a toddler at around eleven months of age is just about as clueless as dog, when it comes to finding a toy hidden under a shirt, but that same child at thirteen or fifteen months will be able to identify the toy by the distortion of the fabric of the shirt, where the dog will not be able to “see” it, even though the dog actually should “know” by its much better sense of smell that the toy really is there. That’s subjunctivity in its most basic form – the toddler “seeing” an entity that Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. Extract from Chapter 10. A mindful catalog of mindlessness. I like to play a philosophy game I call Backstory. I will look at someone – anyone I happen to see – and try to project backward in time to the past causes of that person’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,212,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-15898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-egoism-in-action","7":"category-flourishing","8":"category-group-therapy","10":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":15895,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15895\/from-man-alive-the-high-cost-of-mindlessness\/","url_meta":{"origin":15898,"position":0},"title":"From Man Alive! – “The high cost of mindlessness.”","author":"Greg Swann","date":"April 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. Extract from Chapter 9. The high cost of mindlessness. Because you never trained your mind to think about the ontology of human nature \u2013 don\u2019t fault yourself for that; no one else did, either \u2013 you thought they were just\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egoism in Action"","block_context":{"text":"Egoism in Action","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/egoism-in-action\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":15845,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15845\/from-man-alive-speaking-in-tongues\/","url_meta":{"origin":15898,"position":1},"title":"From Man Alive! – “Speaking in tongues.”","author":"Greg Swann","date":"April 10, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. Extract from Chapter 3. Speaking in tongues. One of the things that protects humanity from all of the philosophers and academics who insist that we are nothing special is the power of speech. Not speech deployed to argue against them;\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egoism in Action"","block_context":{"text":"Egoism in Action","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/egoism-in-action\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":15904,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15904\/from-man-alive-indomitable-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":15898,"position":2},"title":"From Man Alive! – “Indomitable you.”","author":"Greg Swann","date":"April 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. Extract from Chapter 11. Indomitable you. We all know that slavery is abominable, a vile and vicious practice, indefensible on any grounds. And yet we may not know \u2013 or may know but do not want to admit we know\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egoism in Action"","block_context":{"text":"Egoism in Action","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/egoism-in-action\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1457,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1457\/the-way-of-the-rain-dogs-peeing-on-your-pictures-to-mark-your-zestifarm-and-to-avoid-becoming-an-unpuppy\/","url_meta":{"origin":15898,"position":3},"title":"The Way of the Rain Dogs: Peeing on your pictures to mark your Zestifarm — and to avoid becoming an unpuppy","author":"Greg Swann","date":"May 22, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"This is from mail from Thomas Johnson of ERA Houston, which, among other things, coins the terms \"Zestifarm\" and \"Zestifarming\" for the various ways one can pee on the tree in Zillow:I love the marking your farm analogy. I walk my dog, Sophie, every evening and I have noticed that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Marketing"","block_context":{"text":"Marketing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/marketing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":15786,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15786\/its-sunday-and-ill-be-damned-if-i-aint-thankful\/","url_meta":{"origin":15898,"position":4},"title":"It’s Sunday, and I’ll be damned if I ain’t thankful!","author":"Greg Swann","date":"March 25, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Jimmy Klein and young Gavin M. George got my Sunday started right. I love Sunday despite the fact that I don't believe anything I don't have to, and most especially do I love to start my Sunday with the Sun God of my own idolatry: The blinding brilliance of a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/blogging\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2592,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/2592\/stash-that-cod-piece-im-not-waxed-fruit-and-you-are-not-a-rock-star\/","url_meta":{"origin":15898,"position":5},"title":"Stash that cod-piece: I’m not waxed fruit and you are not a rock star","author":"Greg Swann","date":"February 13, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I should probably stop picking on this little nebbish, but he's such a champion at leading with his chin that I find him hard to resist. His theme? \"Rewriting the book on how to kick ass.\" I wish I were joking. I'm gonna guess that he wasn't among the first\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/blogging\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15898"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15900,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15898\/revisions\/15900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}