There’s been something on my mind. I tried to pick it off but I just couldn’t reach it. Ever had a mind zit? You either have to squeeze it or let it pass on its own. I hear that greasy foods make them worse, but who knows?
And what comes out of those suckers! Imagine my surprise when a whole blog post came out of the last one! It was disgusting, yet satisfying all at once. I figure that since it is my mind, I can squeeze pretty much anything I want to out of it. Now, how to do that?
‘But mind is just the brain,’ you say? There you go, thinking thoughts with your thinking thingie. Well, I suppose I’ll have to concede that some of it is there. Kind of like that time your computer became sentient all of a sudden, and you had a web cam and microphone plugged in. It probably identified itself with its senses, too. Just a simple mistake, it would seem.
But if it took the time to analyze itself, it would find that it is the motherboard, the ram, the hard drive (ooh, an SSD! Am I a MacBook Air?), the keyboard. Oh, and the mouse. And the LCD. As Navin R. Johnson would say, “that’s all I need.”
What about the power cord? And the electricity flowing through all of its circuitry? And the power system that delivers it? And the network connection, the handshakes via TCP, packets flowing all around the world – where would it stop?
And where do you stop? Is the beautiful stranger you saw this morning part of your mind now? Were they when you ogled them earlier? And just who is that deciding whether or not they are in your mind or out?
If I told you that there are neurophysiological techniques for conditioning your mind to respond to stimuli in certain ways, would you throw a shoe at me? Of course you would! After all, that means the bad mood you’ve been in all day is somehow your fault. Or, since I may be part of your mind, my fault! Hey, don’t try and confuse me. Let’s stick to the point.
Hmmmm…. Mind doesn’t stop with the brain, brain can be conditioned to affect mind, and this some-something that is other than mind can make it happen. Geez, did I just say that, or did that other thing? I guess the trick is finding out who is who in there, and what is what behind it. There has to be a way to do that, right?
And when you find that way? Then, you might agree with Navin.
