A Line on an Infinite Scroll

Originally written July 15, 2018

We are tempted to think that the thoughts of ours that emerge are the entirety of who we are. This is the positivist idea - that the thoughts that come up are surfacing from a void. There is nothingness and we are spawned from it. What if it was the opposite? What if we are not sprung from a void, but rather all we see of ourselves is but a limited bit of what we could be?

There’s a scene in the Simpsons where Lisa attempts to convince the town that the aliens who are coming to visit are planning to eat them - the book they read from is titled How to Cook Humans. Brushing aside some of the dust, an addendum to the title is revealed How to Cook for Humans. The comedy continues when Lisa brushes some more dust away and reveals a grim title once again: How to Cook Forty Humans. And again, some dust is brushed away revealing a title How to Cook For Forty Humans.

Perhaps our mind is somewhat like this as well. I once imagined an endless monolithic rock, the scale of the rock hidden by the surrounding darkness. It seemed like my eyes could only make out a few etchings on the rock at a time, and those etchings became lively thoughts within my mindscape. With time, I hope to practice moving this eye from place to place on the rock, mapping out all of my thoughts on this infinite basalt.

Thinking in this manner makes me wonder about the nature of how we relate things. If we only have one categorization system, say good vs. bad, and we rate everything we encounter along this scale, we will have a flat, two-dimensional map of reality. Things that might be proximal to each other due to some other attribute are not seen as proximal because of the flat dimensionality of our thinking. Comedians are those who are able to see a little bit outside of the existing dimensionality, find a proximal connection that we perhaps subconsciously understand because after all, we do pick up on many attributes.