il senso comune del Tao

Max Bill, Endless Ribbon, 1953

La ricerca di una via di mezzo per la descrizione della coscienza nella prospettiva enazionista porta a riconsiderare la prospettiva del senso comune:

Enaction: Embodied Cognition

Recovering Common Sense

The tacit assumption behind the varieties of cognitive realism (cognitivism,emergence, and the society of mind) has been that the world can be divided into regions of discrete elements and tasks. Cognition consists in problem solving, which must, if it is to be successful, respect the elements, properties, and relations within these pregiven regions.
This approach to cognition as problem solving works to some degree for task domains in which it is relatively easy to specify all possible states. Consider for example the game of chess. It is relatively easy to define the constituents of the "space of chess": there are positions on the board, rules for movements, turns that are taken, and so on. The limits of this space are clearly defined; in fact, it is an almost crystalline world. It is not surprising, then, that chess playing by computer is an advanced art.
For less circumscribed or well-defined task domains, however, this approach has proved to be considerably less productive. Consider, for example, a mobile robot that is supposed to drive a car within a city. One can still single out in this "driving space" discrete items, such as wheels and windows, red lights, and other cars. But unlike the world of chess playing, movement among objects is not a space that can be said to end neatly at some point. Should the robot pay attention to pedestrians or not? Should it take weather conditions into account? Or the country in which the city is located and its unique driving customs? Such a list of questions could go on forever. The driving world does not end at some point; it has the structure of ever-receding levels of detail that blend into a nonspecific background. Indeed, successfully directed movement such as driving depends upon acquired motor skills and the continuous use of common sense or background know-how.
Such commonsense knowledge is difficult, perhaps impossible, to package into explicit, propositional knowledge - "knowledge that" in the philosopher's jargon-since it is largely a matter of readiness to hand or "knowledge how" based on the accumulation of experience in a vast number of cases. Recent examinations of how skills are acquired appear to confirm this point.1 Furthermore, when we enlarge the task domains from artificial microworlds to the world at large, it is not clear that we can even specify what is to count as an object independent of the type of action that is being performed. The individuation of objects, properties, and events appears to vary according to the task at hand.

These points are not new to the field of cognitive science, although their full import has only begun to be appreciated. Indeed, it is fair to say that by the 1970s, after two decades of humblingly slow progress, it dawned on many workers in cognitive science that even the simplest cognitive action requires a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge, which we take for granted (it is so obvious as to be invisible) but which must be spoon-fed to the computer. The early cognitivist hope for a general problem solver had to be abandoned in favor of programs that would run in local knowledge domains, where small-scale problems could be solved and where the programmer could put into the machine as much of her background knowledge as was necessary. Similarly, the current connectionist strategy depends either on restricting the space of possible attractors by means of assumptions about the known properties of the world, which are incorporated as additional constraints for regularization, or, in more recent models, on using backpropagation methods where learning resembles the imitation of an external model. Thus in both cognitivism and connectionism, the unmanageable ambiguity of background common sense is left largely at the periphery of the inquiry, with the hope that it will somehow eventually be clarified.
If, however, our lived world does not have predefined boundaries, then it seems unrealistic to expect to capture commonsense understanding in the form of a representation-where representation is understood in its strong sense as the re-presentation of a pregiven world. Indeed, if we wish to recover common sense, then we must invert the representationist attitude by treating context-dependent know-how not as a residual artifact that can be progressively eliminated by the discovery of more sophisticated rules but as, in fact, the very essence of creative cognition.
This attitude toward common sense has begun to affect the field of cognitive science, especially in artificial intelligence. We should note, however, that the philosophical source for this attitude is to be found largely in recent Continental philosophy, especially in the school of philosophical hermeneutics, which is based in the early work of Martin Heidegger and his student Hans Gadamer.





















The term hermeneutics originally referred to the discipline of interpreting ancient texts, but it has been extended to denote the entire phenomenon of interpretation, understood as the enactment or bringing forth of meaning from a background of understanding. In general, Continental philosophers, even when they explicitly contest many of the assumptions underlying hermeneutics, have continued to produce detailed discussions that show how knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social history - in short, from our embodiment.
Although several cognitive scientists have recently turned to these discussions for inspiration, the spontaneous philosophy of cognitive science continues to resist such a nonobjectivist orientation. The varieties of cognitive realism are in particular strongly tied to analytic philosophy, which tends to view folk psychology as a tacit theory in need of either reduction or replacement. Indeed, it is fair to say that analytic philosophy in general resists this notion of cognition as embodied understanding.

Thus as Mark Johnson notes in a recent work,

The idea that understanding is an event in which one has a world, or, more properly, a series of ongoing related meaning events in which one's world stands forth, has long been recognized on the Continent, especially in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer. But Anglo-American analytic philosophy has steadfastly resisted this orientation in favor of meaning as a fixed relation between words and the world. It has been mistakenly assumed that only a viewpoint that transcends human embodiment, cultural embeddedness, imaginative understanding, and location within historically evolving traditions can guarantee the possibility of objectivity.

The central insight of this nonobjectivist orientation is the view that knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges from our capacities of understanding. These capacities are rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history.
They enable us to make sense of our world; or in more phenomenological language, they are the structures by which we exist in the manner of "having a world." To quote Johnson once more,

Meaning includes patterns of embodied experience and preconceptual structures of our sensibility (i.e., our mode of perception, or orienting ourselves, and of interacting with other objects, events, or persons). These embodied patterns do not remain private or peculiar to the person who experiences them. Our community helps us interpret and codify many of our felt patterns. They become shared cultural modes of experience and help to determine the nature of our meaningful, coherent understanding of our "world."

Although these themes are derived from Continental philosophy, most of the Continental discussions have proceeded without taking into consideration scientific research on cognition-the major exception being the early work of Merleau-Ponty. The challenge posed by cognitive science to the Continental discussions, then, is to link the study of human experience as culturally embodied with the study of human cognition in neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive psychology. In contrast, the challenge posed to cognitive science is to question one of the more entrenched assumptions of our scientific heritage-that the world is independent of the knower. If we are forced to admit that cognition cannot be properly understood without common sense, and that common sense is none other than our bodily and social history, then the inevitable conclusion is that knower and known, mind and world, stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent coorigination.
If this critique is valid, then scientific progress in understanding cognition will not be forthcoming unless we start from a different basis from the idea of a pregiven world that exists II out there" and is internally recovered in a representation. In recent years, a few researchers within cognitive science have taken this critique from the philosophical level into the laboratory and into specific work in AI. These researchers have put forth concrete proposals that involve a more radical departure from cognitivism than is found in the emergence approach, and yet they incorporate the ideas and methods developed within this context.

for unto us a Tao is born

Sir Colin Davis conducts the London Symphony Orchestra
Susan Gritton, Sara Mingardo, Mark Padmore, Alastair Miles and the Tenebrae choir
Recorded in December 2006.

il Libro Tao: dentro l'informazione - III

INSIDE INFORMATION

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be "I." The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized.
The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego. I am not thinking of Freud's barbarous Id or Unconscious as the actual reality behind the façade of personality. Freud, as we shall see, was under the influence of a nineteenth-century fashion called "reductionism," a curious need to put down human culture and intelligence by calling it a fluky by-product of blind and irrational forces. They worked very hard, then, to prove that grapes can grow on thornbushes.
As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.
The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or "ground" of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, "myth" is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, "myth" is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet "myth," in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.
Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: "Where did the world come from?" "Why did God make the world?" "Where was I before I was born?" "Where do people go when they die?" Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this:
"There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black."
"In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place."
"God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear."
"Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever."
"Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Möbius strip — a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive."

Aion mosaic, Glyptothek Munich

"God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding."
"You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world."
This story, obviously mythical in form, is not given as a scientific description of the way things are. Based on the analogies of games and the drama, and using that much worn-out word "God" for the Player, the story claims only to be like the way things are. I use it just as astronomers use the image of inflating a black balloon with white spots on it for the galaxies, to explain the expanding universe. But to most children, and many adults, the myth is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating. By contrast, so many other mythical explanations of the world are crude, tortuous, and unintelligible. But many people think that believing in the unintelligible propositions and symbols of their religions is the test of true faith. "I believe," said Tertullian of Christianity, "because it is absurd."

il Libro Tao: dentro l'informazione - II

layla Tao

Eric Clapton, David Sanborn, Joe Sample, Steve Gadd, Marcus Miller, Montreux Jazz Festival


Live Aid 1985


The Royal Albert Hall, 1988

binari meta-Tao

La successiva metastruttura discussa da Tyler Volk e Jeff Bloom sono i binari, la struttura più semplice per modellare una relazione complessa tra elementi e tra le parti e il tutto di un sistema:

Background

Binaries are the simplest form of complex relations. More complex relations involve increasing numbers of components (e.g., trinaries, quaternaries, and so forth). Such binary relations are the most economical (in a variety of senses) way to generate complex wholes with significant new properties. Binaries involve senses of separation and/or unity, duality, and tension. They also provide for a synergy between parts and wholes.

The Red Square Nebula (MWC 922) is a bipolar nebula appearing as an orange square in its center with red bowl-shaped gas and dust toward the top right and bottom left of the image. The infrared image was taken using the Mt. Palomar Hale telescope in California and the Keck II Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and released in April 2007. According to Sydney University astrophysicist Peter Tuthill, this nebula is one of the most symmetrical celestial objects ever discovered because of its unique shape. There is no clear explanation of how the central star could produce the nebula's shape, but one possible explanation is that these two outer faint radial spokes are shadows cast by periodic ripples or waves on the surface of an inner disk close to the central star.

Examples

• In science: bilateral symmetry (including two eyes, nostrils, ears, appendages, etc.); positive and negative particles, ions, electrodes, etc.; male and female; opposing forces; diurnal and nocturnal; dorsal and ventral; space and time; acid and base; DNA with component pairs and paired helices; inhale and exhale; respiration and photosynthesis; mass and volume; high pressure; low pressure; perception as the recognition of difference; form and function; acceleration and deceleration; etc.

• In architecture and design: inside and outside and the associated dynamics between them in buildings; entrance and exit; up and down passages; etc.

• In art: light and dark; monotone and multicolored; tensions between parts; attraction and repulsion (emotionally); etc.

• In social sciences: report talk and rapport talk; leader and follower; positive and negative attitudes; consumer and producer; active and passive; aggressive; trust and distrust; unity and disunity or separation; etc.

• In other senses: distal and proximal; all or nothing; night and day; open and closed; on and off; asleep and awake; old and young; love and hate; etc.

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

racconti del Tao

"Voi mi rimproverate l’obiettività, chiamandola indifferenza verso il bene e il male, mancanza di ideali, ecc. Vorreste che quando dipingo i ladri di cavalli dicessi: è male rubare i cavalli! Ma lo sanno tutti da molto tempo, senza che debbo dirlo io. Questo è affare dei giudici, il mio lavoro consiste nello spiegare che cosa essi sono… Nello scrivere mi affido al lettore, sperando che egli inserisca da solo gli elementi soggettivi”.
Anton Pavlovič Čechov - Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов

---

La morte dell’impiegato

Una magnifica sera un non meno magnifico usciere, Ivàn Dmitric' Cerviakòv, era seduto nella seconda fila di poltrone e seguiva col binoccolo "Le campane di Corneville". Guardava e si sentiva al colmo della beatitudine. Ma a un tratto... Nei racconti spesso s'incontra questo "a un tratto". Gli autori han ragione: la vita è così piena d'imprevisti! Ma a un tratto il suo viso fece una smorfia, gli occhi si stralunarono, il respiro gli si fermò... egli scostò dagli occhi il binoccolo, si china e... eccì!!! Aveva starnutito, come vedete.
Starnutire non è vietato ad alcuno e in nessun posto. Starnutiscono i contadini, e i capi di polizia, e a volte perfino i consiglieri segreti. Tutti starnutiscono. Cerviakòv non si confuse per nulla, s'asciugò col fazzolettino e, da persona garbata, guardò intorno a sé: non aveva disturbato qualcuno col suo starnuto? Ma qui, sì, gli toccò confondersi. Vide che un vecchietto, seduto davanti a lui, nella prima fila di poltrone, stava asciugandosi accuratamente la calvizie e il collo col guanto e borbottava qualcosa. Nel vecchietto Cerviakòv riconobbe il generale civile Brizzalov, in servizio al dicastero delle comunicazioni.
«L'ho spruzzato!», pensò Cerviakòv. «Non è il mio superiore, è un estraneo, ma tuttavia è seccante. Bisogna scusarsi».
Cerviakòv tossì, si sporse col busto in avanti e bisbigliò all'orecchio del generale:
- Scusate, eccellenza, vi ho spruzzato... io involontariamente...
- Non è nulla, non è nulla...
- Per amor di Dio, scusatemi. Io, vedete... non lo volevo!
- Ah, sedete, vi prego! Lasciatemi ascoltare!
Cerviakòv rimase impacciato, sorrise scioccamente e riprese a guardar la scena.
Guardava, ma ormai beatitudine non ne sentiva più. Cominciò a tormentarlo l'inquietudine. Nell'intervallo egli s'avvicinò a Brizzalov, passeggiò un poco accanto a lui e, vinta la timidezza, mormorò:
- Vi ho spruzzato, eccellenza... Perdonate... Io, vedete... non che volessi...
- Ah, smettetela... Io ho già dimenticato, e voi ci tornate sempre su! - disse il generale e mosse con impazienza il labbro inferiore.
«Ha dimenticato, e intanto ha la malignità negli occhi», pensò Cerviakòv, gettando occhiate sospettose al generale. «Non vuol nemmeno parlare. Bisognerebbe spiegargli che non desideravo affatto... che questa è una legge di natura, se no penserà ch'io volessi sputare. Se non lo penserà adesso, lo penserà poi!...».
Giunto a casa, Cerviakòv riferì alla moglie il suo atto incivile. La moglie, come a lui parve, prese l'accaduto con troppa leggerezza; ella si spaventò soltanto, ma poi, quando apprese che Brizzalov era un "estraneo", si tranquillò.
- Ma tuttavia passaci, scusati, - disse. - Penserà che tu non sappia comportarti in pubblico!
- Ecco, è proprio questo! Io mi sono scusato, ma lui in un certo modo strano... Una sola parola sensata non l'ha detta. E non c'era neppur tempo di discorrere.
Il giorno dopo Cerviakòv indossò la divisa di servizio nuova, si fece tagliare i capelli e andò da Brizzalov a spiegare... Entrato nella sala di ricevimento del generale, vide là numerosi postulanti, e in mezzo ai postulanti anche il generale in persona, che già aveva cominciato l'accettazione delle domande. Interrogati alcuni visitatori, il generale alzò gli occhi anche su Cerviakòv.
- Ieri, all'Arcadia, se rammentate, eccellenza, - prese a esporre l'usciere, - io starnutii e... involontariamente vi spruzzai... Scus...
- Che bazzecole... Dio sa che è! Voi che cosa desiderate? - si rivolse il generale al postulante successivo.
«Non vuol parlare!», pensò Cerviakav. impallidendo. «E' arrabbiato dunque... No, non posso lasciarla così... Gli spiegherò... ».
Quando il generale finì di conversare con l'ultimo postulante e si diresse verso gli appartamenti interni, Cerviakòv fece un passo dietro a lui e prese a mormorare: - Eccellenza! Se oso incomodare vostra eccellenza, è precisamente per un senso, posso dire, di pentimento!...Non lo feci apposta, voi stesso lo sapete!
Il generale fece una faccia piagnucolosa e agitò la mano.
- Ma voi vi burlate semplicemente, egregio signore! - diss'egli, scomparendo dietro la porta.
«Che burla c'è mai qui?», pensò Cerviakòv. «Qui non c'è proprio nessuna burla! E' generale, ma non può capire! Quand'è così, non starò più a scusarmi con questo fanfarone! Vada al diavolo! Gli scriverò una lettera e non ci andrò più! Com'è vero Dio, non ci andrò più!».
Così pensava Cerviakòv andando a casa. La lettera al generale non la scrisse. Pensò, pensò, ma in nessuna maniera poté concepir quella lettera. Gli toccò il giorno dopo andar in persona a spiegare.
- Ieri venni a incomodare vostra eccellenza, - si mise a borbottare, quando il generale alzò su di lui due occhi interrogativi, - non già per burlarmi, come vi piacque dire. Io mi scusavo perché, starnutendo, vi avevo spruzzato... e a burlarmi non pensavo nemmeno. Oserei io burlarmi? Se noi ci burlassimo, vorrebbe dire allora che non c'è più alcun rispetto... per le persone...
- Vattene! - garrì il generale, fattosi d'un tratto livido e tremante.
- Che cosa? - domandò con un bisbiglio Cerviakòv, venendo meno dallo sgomento.
- Vattene! - ripeté il generale, pestando i piedi.
Nel ventre di Cerviakòv qualcosa si lacerò. Senza veder nulla, senza udir nulla, egli indietreggiò verso la porta, uscì in strada e si trascinò via... Arrivato macchinalmente a casa, senza togliersi la divisa di servizio, si coricò sul divano e... morì.

Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow, Moscow Federal City, Russian Federation

sottosistemi del Tao - VI

Robert Plutchik, Wheel of Emotions

Dopo l'estero-interocezione, il processamento degli input, la memoria, il subconscio e i processi di valutazione e decisione Charles T. Tart introduce il sesto sottosistema del sistema della coscienza, le emozioni:

Subsystems

Emotions

The Emotions subsystem is one which I, as a typical overintellectualized Western academic, feel least qualified to write out. I share the intellectual's distrust of emotions as forces that distort my reasoning and are liable to lead me astray. And yet, like most people, my life and consciousness are strongly controlled by the pursuit of pleasant emotions and the avoidance of unpleasant ones.
Emotions are feelings that can be named but not easily defined. They are feelings that we call grief, fear, joy, surprise, yearning, anger, but that we define inadequately in terms of words: at best we use words to evoke memories of experiences that fit those names.
The Emotions subsystem is, in one sense, the most important subsystem, for it can exert tremendous influence. If you are experiencing the emotion of fear, it may very well control you evaluations and decisions, the memories you draw upon, how you see the world and how you act. Any strong emotion tends to constellate the rest of consciousness about it. Indeed, I think that while mild levels of any emotion can occur within the region of experiential space we call the ordinary d-SoC, most strong levels of feeling may actually constitute d-ASCs. If you talk about feeling mildly angry, somewhat angry, or extremely angry, you can imagine all these things occurring in your ordinary d-SoC. But if you speak of being enraged, the word evokes associations of changes of perception (such as "seeing red") and cognition that strongly suggest that somewhere in the anger continuum there was a quantum jump, and a d-ASC of rage developed. The same is true for other strong emotions. I shall not develop the idea further here, as strong emotional states have seldom been studied scientifically as they must be to determine if they actually constitute d-SoCs. The idea holds promise for future research.
Our culture is strongly characterized by poor volitional control over the Emotions subsystem in the ordinary d-SoC. Emotions can change with lightning rapidity; external events can induce them almost automatically. We have accepted this in a despairing way as part of the human condition, ambivalently regarding attempts to control emotions as either virtuous (since all emotions make us lose control, we should suppress them) or artificial (not "genuine"). Techniques from various spiritual disciplines indicate, however, that there can be emotional control that does not involve simple suppression or denial of content of the emotion. Don Juan, for example, stated that since becoming a "man of knowledge" he had transcended ordinary emotions, but could have any one he wished. In d-ASCs, people often report either greatly increased or decreased control over their emotions.
In addition to changes in the degree of control over emotions, the intensity of emotions themselves may also change in d-ASCs. Dissociation from or dis-identification with emotions also occurs: a person reports that an emotion is going on quite strongly within him, yet is not "his": he is not identified with it and so little affected by it.
In some d-ASCs new emotions appear, emotions that are never present in the ordinary d-SoC. These include feelings like serenity, tranquillity, and ecstasy. Because we use these words in our ordinary d-SoC we think we understand them, but those who have experienced such emotions in d-ASCs insist that we have only known the palest shadows of them.

sottosistemi del Tao - V