I would submit that the problem lies in a confusion of domains. There is one class of data which we all carry records of concerning operating in the spacer-time domain. We learn all about it before we walk -- mass, persistance, inertia, various impressions of time, the way space always leads in to more space, and the way stubbed toes hurt and walls prevent moving from one room to the next unless a door is provided. This domain is the basis for physics and the kind of repeatability that science values so highly in its methods.

But there is a totally separate domain of experience that has as its components the agreements that make up social awareness -- moral codes, the different ways of using sound to communicate, agreed-upon notions of good and bad, the love of certain kinds of emotion, agreements on how to react to events -- this is a common, but non-physical, set of agreements. Of course it is all mixed up with physical dynamics since most of our agreements strat with being in a commonly held physical frame of reference.

The domain of greatest interest to some folks is different still -- it is the domain of the unbounded individual personal perspective; it goes as far as the imagination, in any dimension that can be imagined, and is made up of those constructs the author has created therein, whether they be goals, wishes, dreams, decisions about existence, high metaphysical concepts, or low inversions or debased impulses.

An individual can reach agreements about how powerful a juju man is, in the domain of agreements; and he can decide in his own universe that he feels immortal and probably is, at least as a consciousness operating a point of view. But to mix up the physical universe with its authoritarian, unbending, pigheaded patterns of persistence with the social or individual realms -- where creativity plays a much larger part -- is, I would say, pretty naive. Or pretty confused.

Ya gotta correlate the data of a domain with its own set, not just mix 'em together.

A