The line “an animal will gnaw off its own limb” seems a bit muddled. Such an animal would seem quite human to me, to have the resolve to be able to chew through its own bones to escape otherwise certain death. But it’s clarified afterwards.
Paul never seems to completely sublimate the false pain. His consciousness isn’t fully integrated, he’s resisting himself. Your goal as a rationalist should not be to overpower your instincts, you should learn to to convince them, you should earn their trust. He gets close enough to sublimating it, I think it would have worked if we’d turned up the equanimity all the way to 11.
You should heed instincts in their domains of passion, memory, heuristic, and they should heed reason in its domains; episteme, inference, strategy, planning. It’s a bit of a shame that we don’t really see much of a celebration of instinct, in Dune? We should think of instinct as dear old matriarch, frail, maybe a little bit senile, but she remembers precious recipes, she lived through more catastrophes, and more flourishing, than we can imagine, she saw nearly every face of humanity, and she knows something about the point of it. She can’t explain it to you. She doesn’t understand it in a precise way any more, and besides, it’s too big to be explained. But if you listen to her, keep her around, she can help you to figure some of it out.
Though it could be better, for our purposes.
The line “an animal will gnaw off its own limb” seems a bit muddled. Such an animal would seem quite human to me, to have the resolve to be able to chew through its own bones to escape otherwise certain death. But it’s clarified afterwards.
Paul never seems to completely sublimate the false pain. His consciousness isn’t fully integrated, he’s resisting himself. Your goal as a rationalist should not be to overpower your instincts, you should learn to to convince them, you should earn their trust. He gets close enough to sublimating it, I think it would have worked if we’d turned up the equanimity all the way to 11.
You should heed instincts in their domains of passion, memory, heuristic, and they should heed reason in its domains; episteme, inference, strategy, planning. It’s a bit of a shame that we don’t really see much of a celebration of instinct, in Dune? We should think of instinct as dear old matriarch, frail, maybe a little bit senile, but she remembers precious recipes, she lived through more catastrophes, and more flourishing, than we can imagine, she saw nearly every face of humanity, and she knows something about the point of it. She can’t explain it to you. She doesn’t understand it in a precise way any more, and besides, it’s too big to be explained. But if you listen to her, keep her around, she can help you to figure some of it out.