If you saw a giant obelisk-looking stone that came from space, and it was covered in weird squiggles, what would you think?
Let’s say some of the squiggles are exactly the same, though they’re spread out in lines, and there are 40 unique types of squiggles in total.
You’d likely react the same way people who saw the Rosetta Stone reacted before its translation: “Hey! This is a language. Wonder what it means?”
So that’s a counterfactual. Cool.
How about a fact? When you sleep, your brain is full of squiggly objects. And you have no idea what they mean.
I’m talking about dreams of course, though even when we’re not dreaming and asleep, we do not understand the ideational paths that are happening.
I tried reading Freud’s book about dream interpretation. I really did. It wasn’t that good, sorry.
Sometimes famous intellectuals aren’t rigorous. They have interesting ideas, yes, but not interesting enough to survive criticism.
Ordinary people also don’t know what their dreams means. And this fact of ignorance about our own cognition, for 8/24 hours of the day, is astonishing to me.
Add another hour a day for daydreams. They are puzzling as well. And I suspect the average amount of daydreaming is larger than an hour.
Add another hour a day for nonsense. That is, thoughts that aren’t fantastical like daydreams but are similarly obscure in their meaning from a conscious point of view.
That’s 10/24 hours a day where you don’t know what your thoughts even mean.
Now consider that of the thoughts you do understand, you don’t even know how they came about. They sort of sprang up in your mind. You also don’t know where they’ll go, the future course of this or that ideational path.
What a thing to be, a sentient being like you and I.
You and I feel like drivers of a vehicle that basically doesn’t listen.
It’s a little bit like talking to a dog owner whose closest friend bites old ladies and kids, and when you confront them, they’re like, “But I tell Toothy not to do it and he doesn’t!”
At the same time, the car in this metaphor does do a lot of things you want. Like in my case, it’s helping me write this essay.
I had a rough idea of what I’d jot down, and then something really different poured out.
I’m the farthest thing from a power user of my brain, and I know it. The same is true for all of us, but I’m not sure we all know it.
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