Ay Eye
- Crone
- Sep 11
- 1 min read
That is a picture of a squirrel climbing down a tree. I grab hold of the real world with just such tenacity. And down I go.
But the virtual world, in which I sadly do not rise, does hold a certain fascination. IMcG writes in the Master:
But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings – so that the realm of actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering – not ‘the Other’, but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that truly was ‘Other’ than, beyond, the human mind.
That is the grip of the technological world. The world we made.
But I do wonder if even now there are inklings of mind in the machines. Truly non-human minds.
The rain falls so heavy and straight, stair rods I think they call it, that drips come disconcertingly down the chimney. I am wet from putting the rejected cat food out for the fox. Tiredness flows over me in waves and the pulled muscle behind my left shoulder twinges. The cats sleep heavy on my lap. And I stare at a screen.
I don't know about minds in the machines. I see (through a screen) what you have written on another screen about what you're physically observing and feeling -- the rain, a pain, the cats ... Without the screens, I'd not be able to share these moments with you like this. How much of our minds are in the machines? But Over There you are with the cats, the fox, listening to the rain hard as stair rods. And I'm Here wondering. And glad I saw the blue jay drink this evening from the water dish I keep full because there's been no rain.