That's what I'm saying. Put another way, both Si and Se is the experiencing of real stimulation (not abstraction). Se is real-time, the stimulation is direct, and emotions raised come through body responses either inborn involuntary responses or behaviorally modified to respond instinctively a certain way -- but in any case the emotions are spawned right off the sense impression.
(Example: You get hit in the head by a baseball -> It hurts -> You cry or get angry or respond in some other way.)
Si is remembrance of PAST experience and stimulation. This can be just the data itself, as WELL as the person's response at THAT time to the data -- i.e., the emotional and response states also would get stored in the databanks and called up as part of the memory feed.
(Example: You hear the crack of a bat. You recall getting hit in the head with the ball before and reexperience the memory of that emotion... albeit a little "muted" because it's not direct. The current emotion: You become frightened/wary looking for the incoming ball, along with any residual emotion coming from the memory.)
So I don't really equate Se/Si with emotions per se, but they are closely tied because emotional states are perceived right alongside the data causing them.
A couple points, then I really should drop it.
I agree with you and Mempy about sensations being the building blocks of pretty much all thought. I made the same points in my first two posts in this thread: Sensation is one of the first ways we process the world as infants. So Sensation becomes kind of a main highway along which many things travel in our mind. But it doesn't mean that a thought process initially triggered by a sensation or associated with a sensation thereby becomes an Si process.
In its purest form, an Si process is a one-to-one comparison. For example, you're eating in a restaurant and you notice the flavor of an unusual spice in the food. So you run through the memory of similar flavors and foods in your memory until you recall a match for the flavor and can identify the spice. In the example of recalling a spice, Si is a deliberative process, and it reaches into the past in order to compare like to like. But it doesn't involve a lot of introspection and/or exploring of associative "wormholes" leading from one memory to the next. It's just a deliberative one-to-one process. You don't know how to decorate your home? Rummage around in your memory until you can find an appropriate example from your recollections of friends' homes.
To me, the following would
not be an Si process:
I'm eating in a restaurant and I notice the flavor of an unusual spice in the food. Suddenly I'm brought back to my childhood when my mother used to serve me the same dish for dinner. And I recall that I would then finish dinner just as dusk was setting in, and my mother would allow me to go play with the other kids until dark. And we would run around and catch fireflies in the summer dusk. And I recall how simple and fun life was back then, and I wonder if I've still managed to retain the fun and magic in my life since then. I recall the simple values I held in common with my childhood friends--our clubs, our loyalties, our common experiences--and I ask myself if they're still at the core of how I conduct myself. And so on and so on.
To me, the latter experience is more of a state of "flow," perhaps Ni or Ne in nature. It goes far beyond the process of rummaging around in one's memory in order to compare an experience in the present to one in the past. In Ivy's case, she pursues a number of associations like thought wormholes. When one wormhole turns into a dead end, she returns to the song on the radio and it launches her down a new wormhole (she provides a bulleted list of four separate trains of thought or wormholes initiated by the song).
Also, there's associative theme linking Ivy's thoughts, some sort of mother-daughter conflict. She is driving to her mother, with her kids in the car. A song comes on the radio: it's a lullaby her mother once sang to her as a child, and that Ivy now sings to her own children. It makes her think of her mother's mortality in the first train of thought or wormhole, and maybe gets her feeling vulnerable that she will one day be an orphan. So in the subsequent wormholes she revisits her childhood and finds reassurance by remembering the Quaker school where she was accorded a new adult-like independence and respect (i.e., ability to grow into adult roles); she thinks of the lyrics of the song and uses them to revisit her own ideals--and she finds them strong and steady enough to sustain her (presumably when her mother passes on). Finally she recalls that she has her own unique connection to the lullaby via a class at UNC--in essence she claims the lullaby as fully her own (presumably a symbolic reassurance that she can survive the death of her own mother and be a mother herself).
Naturally I'm guessing at her associative thought processes. To get a firm read-out on what she was actually thinking, I would need to know her general relations with her mother, her mood that day, what she was thinking before the song came on the radio, etc. But it's all typical of an associative moment: Ivy's driving in a car to her mother's house with her kids in the car, perhaps thinking about her relations with her mother, then a song comes on the radio that has special meaning to Ivy, both as a vulnerable child being tended by her mother and as a mother tending her own children. So she goes into a series of associations about her dichotomous roles as child and mother and how they relate to her identity and values.
But given this state of "flow," these freewheeling associations, and the Ni or Ne problem-solving quality of the associative process (using associations to reassure herself over some conflict in her relationship with her mother), it's hard to equate all this to a mere Si process--hearing the crack of a baseball bat and cringing because you were once hit on the head with a baseball. The associative process is not a one-to-one process. The associative process is about bringing an unconscious conflict to the surface, establishing some creative flow, and then massaging the problem with seemingly unrelated thoughts until the conflict is addressed in some manner.
Okay, now that I've gone Freudian on you, I'll drop it. I'm really putting too much time and effort into this.
(Ivy: My apologies for dissecting your thought processes. The scenario I described is all quite hypothetical. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there's more going on there than just a garden-variety Si process.)