Sunday, December 14, 2008

mental illness, interest, and exterest--a special case

Mentally ill people, and I speak from experience, have a terrible condition in omniterest. Their entire sphere of interest is equal to a giant median because the inner membrane is collapsed to the very center of the sphere, leaving a median whose thickness is equal to the radius of the sphere. As a result, whenever other people enter the details of the person's interest, no matter how close to the center they get, the nature of the space there is exactly a median, and has properties of the domain outside the sphere and properties of the domain inside the sphere. The inside, however, being contracted completely inside the collapsed inner membrane, is terribly pathological and even though it may be controlled by medication, the medications available only serve to relax this condition and do not resurrect the inner membrane. All throughout the volume of the mentally ill person's sphere of interest, outsiders, because this region is a median in nature, will involve themselves in analysis of the person and will decide whether to remain interested or to depart, just as happens in normal persons' medians, but in the mentally ill this is the dynamic throughout the entire region of interest. There is no real inside where others want to explore at liesure and in comfort, without any pressing urge to depart.

the formation of the two membranes of the boundary between interest and exterest

The formation of both the inner and outer membranes, of the boundary between interest and exterest, must be an organic process, since we are talking about people's acquired capacity to interest others and that happens as a natural consequence of our metabolisms. How does it happen that the boundary between ourselves and others, which we think of as our "identity" out of the accumulated paradigm of mankind, now superceded by this picture of omniterest which I am promoting here, takes a two membrane form rather than a one membrane form? Isn't identity of normal people unitary? Well, the answer would seem to me to be that, one, the two membranes act in concert and are not two identities, and, two, that it would seem reasonable to conjecture that the timing of the formation of the membranes is that the outer one begins to form at conception and is constructed blind to the world during the time of pregnancy, the universe being guessed at through the medium of the mother's experience as impressed upon the fetus's experience, then at birth the construction of this membrane, though it continues, undergoes a dramatic change in nature because the intermediary mother is gone. at the same time, at birth, the construction of the inner membrane begins, and that one is directly based on the perceptions of the person himself. from the moment of birth, the essential atom expands the size of the inner membrane, pushing the outer membrane to expand just outside it, so that the child tries to get the most out of the mother's nurturing nature which permeates the home and the universe outside it, as qualified by the participation of the father, however that happens to occur.