Philosophy class earlier…still having a great time but it bugs me that so many philosophers treat the mind as if it were something that could be considered apart from the body, as if mind were cool little bubbles of thought and word, connecting, separating and reconnecting in some immaterial linguistic hyperspace.

Not me I ‘m afraid.

Imagine a vast machine, one that takes up building after building, all connected by some enormous network of pipe, cable and wire. Imagine that each of these buildings is connected to the world by its own sensors; these sensors are set at various heights, with different directional orientations, collecting different information about the world by different methods. Imagine that the vast majority of the machine’s work is done in-house in the different various buildings, its products made, decisions about future manufacturing, about the activity of the sensors, about work pace, etc. are all made in-building before a summary of activity is sent along the network to proximate buildings and (recently) to the assessment team.  Now imagine the assessment team has been assembled to help the buildings coordinate their efforts. The idea is that the team will help the overall functioning in the few cases where some modulation of productivity might help the vast machine adjust to its changing market place.  The team has a place for itself at the edge of some of the buildings – this place added on after the rest of the buildings were already in place and fully functioning. The team is wired in to the system so it can receive summary reports from the buildings, but the team doesn’t know about the vast majority of the day-to-day activity, processes or decisions of the various buildings in the vast machine. The team doesn’t need to know about the day-to-day because that’s not why the team was assembled.  In fact knowing the day-to-day would interfere with the team’s job. The team was assembled to be able to assess things like ‘building T is making stuff that is going to undermine the ability of building E to function at all, so despite the fact that T really likes what it is doing, it needs to pull back because without E, T can’t keep going.’  Now imagine that in order for the team to come to that conclusion and send its message/suggestion back to building T, the message tube produces blue and pink iridescent bubbles that float out the window and up into the sky above the vast machine.  Aware reason: those bubbles, that’s what most philosophers think make us human.

Not a bubble person, me.