Typing night
Seems tonight is typing night as my increasingly tenacious attempts to socialize, which resulted in a tentative appointment with some guys from the Philippines, have been sabotaged by flakiness without even a phone call to cancel.
Lonely traveler (I think it's traveler in US English and traveller in UK English, you used two Ls so you're from the UK?) : I meant that quite literally. A lot of people think... scratch that... have the impression that being intellectual means fondling one's genitalia with books. They do not get it. They need to SEE, HEAR and TOUCH to experience something. I (and maybe all NTs?) can get feelings using only my mind. One talks of geology. Blah blah boring old rocks. No... the feeling of being inside the time machine. The vertigo that comes from really trying to conceptualize billions of years. The tragedy of animal life on this planet, the endless dog-eat-dog chain due only to polypeptides sticking together irrationally... and only a fossile remains, of all the aspirations and tears of one life. If I think about the storm on Jupiter that's 3 times the size of the earth it's like being there in the gaseous clouds... I literally travel to virtual realities within my mind, and they're so mind blowing and spectacular that I *have* to grab people by the neck and snatch them away from their grey lives of trivial chatter and babbling and covert social manipulation and breeding and take them with me. Here, I shout in their ears as I shake them around, do you see the hydrogen, eh? Do you see the thunder? That's 5 million volts for you beitch. Now how important is your dinner with friends? Heh? HEH???
But they reply with a blank stare. They do not see. But... but... the hydrogen... H... you know, light element, formed early... no, nothing. Ok then. I swallow that and go on in solitary awe to my next destination.
I don't feel like I'm on the outside looking in. I feel like they're inside a cell and not wanting to look out. Human life is vulgar, short, violent, frightening and incoherent - but ideas are majestic, eternal. I remember briefly discussing this with an ISFP. Since that type so much likes sensations and feelings I thought it was my duty to show them how much stuff they can sense and feel if they can learn to use the mind - not the eye - as an "antenna". She seemed interested. When I showed some pictures, and explained what it is like for me to go places, she had a beginning of an intuition that she's missing out big time. But, we can't go there together. Just as I'm about to present a very important conclusion I just arrived at, to get to which I had been talking for the past 20 minutes giving her a background in that area, she interrupts me. LOOK! What? I say. What can possibly be more important than this tendency of human beings to fall for dictatorships which I am so precisely nailing here for you? She says, A BIG DOG! A dog, says I. You interrupt me for a dog? "But... it's so big!!!". Lonely traveler.
Now you say "why wouldn't you pay attention" to a scientific theory or an idea. That's a very important question which I have asked myself many many times so I've got plenty of answers.
First, people are interested in the here and now because our ancestral environment did not favor long term planning. It was too violent, dangerous and our existence precarious.
Second, you give for granted that other people have a background sufficient to see the content of your ideas as relevant. Most likely NTs cannot fathom the true depth of the ignorance of those who are around them. These are people who mostly do not know we're made of cells, do not know what DNA is, or how the solar system is laid out, or any of the basic scientific framework on which we base our model of reality. Look up "americans are not stupid" on youtube. Some people don't know which state kentucky fried chicken came from. They think triangles have no sides. The berlin wall... no idea where that was. Hiroshima and nagasaki were famous for sumo wrestling. Buddhist monks are muslim. To be fair, some other people made similar videos in other countries and it turns out most people everywhere have similar knowledge of the world (though Americans are just so spontaneous in making stuff up that they crack me up the most).
Third, the only reason we value ideas is that our type makes of ideas our primary mode of survival. Animals are generally uninterested in things that do not change the survival of their genes. Turtles don't care for fish food, zebras don't care about migratory seasons, feelers don't care about ideas. They rely on support and positioning within the social network to pass on their genes. The whole game for them is moving people, not moving ideas or machines. Their game works better than ours. The numbers talk.
Fourth, abstraction is a main prerogative of thinkers. Without a developed T, abstract thoughts cannot be processed by the brain. Most scientific theories, if not all, are abstract. NTs do not realize how poor the average person's capacity to understand or formulate abstract thoughts is. Just ask someone to tell you something abstract (a favorite test of mine). Chances are they can't define abstract or give you an example of something that is. One should also add since we talk about theories, that the common person knows not the meaning of "theory" - for them it's something made up which one may subscribe to on a voluntary basis depending on how comfortable that theory makes them feel. After all their convictions are based on total crap and politician doublespeak, why should they give a mere "theory" any credit, such as the personal opinions of Charles Darwin?
Fifth, relevance for most people is given by familiarity and frequency of occurrence in their lives. You can't convince people to prepare for earthquakes until they occur, or unless you can sensitize them with continuous media exposure, or show them images and music and give them SENSORY GROUNDING for this concept. Same way, you can't tell people the speed of light is important because even though it may affect their life directly (satellite communications latency) they don't feel familiar with it (can't see it, no sensory grounding).
Ok that's a lot of reasons. As INTPs age, the definition of "stupid" that we apply to other people gets more and more refined. And I don't know if I am talking about "them" in terms of non-INTPs, non INTxs, non NTs or non Polymaths. What I'm sure about is that there are "thems" out there and they are voracious and indestructible.
About prime numbers. Something's cheesy. Ulam's spiral plotted in black/white pixels looks like a bitmap opened in the wrong format in a paint program. Like some well behaved shape projected in the wrong way. And why can their frequency be predicted easily but not their position?
I daydream about finding some way to map them so that they will give a discernible shape. Or put the data into an audio program and play it back and hear "ah ah ah you you little f**kers!!!!"
Just imagine that!!!
Finally, this question of prime numbers opens up the possibility: could there be different kinds of math? Different distributions of primes? Could there be a technology by which we can manipulate existence at such a basic level that the laws of mathematics change? Could 2+1=5? What then?
Abstract mathematics has to relate to subjective consciousness at some point.
Alright, now my body informs me that it's been overheating for the past 20 minutes and it's in a bath of sweat and I need to turn on the aircon. Always punctual with these reminders...