Eating vs Thinking

After watching Daniel Kahneman's TED talk about the experiencing vs remembering selves, the following thing happened: previously unintelligible arguments which I observed occurring, with frequency of varying predictability, between the various voices in my head, suddenly became both plain, predictable and revealing. They usually go on like this.

EXPERIENCING SELF: Make me feel good
REMEMBERING SELF: I'm really trying, but some of the stuff you do..
ES: Like what?! Look how cute and lovable I am..
RS: You ate an entire box of Ferrero Rocher..
ES: Oh yeeaah... That was very delicious. But I've not had Ferrero Rocher in years!
RS: You ate one and a half Franco Manca pizzas yesterday!
ES: Mmmm Franco Manca.. Yum yum. Franco sounds like a great idea..
RS: YOU SEE?!
ES: See what? I'm hungry..
RS: You're driving me crazy
ES: Well, you're driving me crazy. Why are you even making me sit here and stare at these black marks in these bound stacks of..whatever these white things are. I mean they smell nice and everything but you can't even eat them (I tried)
RS: Because they make me happy.
ES: But eating makes me happy.. How about stew? Mmmm stew. I'm hungry!
RS: But, in the long run, that stuff never makes you happy!
ES: In the what?
RS: In the...ffs. Look. Reading gets you new ideas and new ideas make you feel good.
ES: But so does chocolate..
RS: Sure, but that's not sustainable.
ES: Explain..
RS: You're a hopeless idiot!
ES: YOU SAID YOU WOULDN'T CALL ME THAT ANYMORE!!!
RS: OK. OK. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Look. Let's just calm down. I know it hurts right now, this very minute, but if you lean into the pain and stay with it, after a while you forget all about it and you actually begin to enjoy it. Like.. like running! You remember running don't you?
ES: Not fondly..
RS: Sure, but you do like it sometimes, no? And if we don't do it for a while, you do miss it.
ES: I suppose..
RS: Well, there we go! It's like that. It's just like that. Right now it hurts when we try to keep all these ideas in our working memory, all at once, so we can build something higher-level out of them, but once the thing is built, then we can put it away and next time we can use that to build something bigger still. You see? And so on and on until one day we have something that we can show to other people. And then maybe they will find it useful. Maybe they'll even find it so useful that they'll pay us enough money for us to manage to carry on building things! Then in a few decades - I mean think of the possibilities!
ES: Right..I'm not hearing anything about either boys or chocolate in all of this. And didn't we say something about Franco? I told you I'm hungry. Are you slow or something? I. Am. Huuungryyyy. Food. Pa-pa. Here - I'll generate some images.
RS: No no no no. Don't do that! Yes, yes, alright, food, we're getting food. Let me see.
ES: Wait what?! Let you see?! You're joking, right? Last time we let you "see", we ended up having this yucky colourless goo. I mean what even was that?! I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anyone else eat that stuff.
RS: That stuff is better for you than whatever..
ES: OK, OK, calm down. Maybe we should let me decide what's "better" for me, alright cowboy? I think I know..
RS: No you don't!
ES: YES I DO! STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO.
RS: I'm only trying to make things better for you.
ES: By making me sit with books and computers all day long?! By painstakingly having me decipher the writings of some crazy old guy who thinks quantum physics has somehow something to do with the genealogy of morals? Are you actually mad?!
RS: I just..
ES: Right, Franco it is then..


Isn't consciousness fun..