Great to see you're well enough to reply, Fred.

Sure, I can be more prone to deliberation than instant decision, but much of what you call wishy washy, I would like to think of as reasonableness. Is it good to be reasonable to this degree? Maybe not, but it's part of my sense of how I think I'm supposed to interact with people, and I'm probably too old to give it up.

I don't know why the "intelligent spirit" kind of religion never "took" in me, but I don't begrudge people in whom it does take.

One interesting theory that I've recently been reading about is that maternal genes and paternal genes compete in producing mentalistic vs. mechnistic thinking tendencies to serve the unique selfish needs of each gamete.

According to this theory, the extreme paternal brain tends to be on the autistic side and has a deficit compared to others in interpreting minds and seeing minds in nature. The extreme maternal brain is "hypermentalistic" and tends toward paranoia rather than autism. It's a big theory and it seems like a stretch at first, but it would go a long way to explaining why people like me seem to be so insistent on thinking of mental things in mechanical terms, and some others are so much more tempted to see intentions all around them. Exceptional geniuses seem to be able to do both, growing up with Aspergers symptoms and later tending toward the psychotic, but somewhere in the middle having an exceptional amount of both.

See Christopher Badcock, "The Imprinted Brain." Badcock reminds me of Brody in some ways.

You and your wife are in my thoughts, Fred. Be well.

Todd