I have no real idea what to write about, so I just picked an opening line (which has now become the first sentence of the headline) and then waited to see what would happen.  That led me to think of a series of lines from a movie showing men in boot camp or basic training.  It was not, I think, the chant from Full Metal Jacket that came to my mind; I think that one went, “This is my rifle, this is my gun.  This one’s for killing.  This one’s for fun.”  The latter is somewhat funny, but the one I recall was much more serious about the subject, i.e., “This is my rifle.  There are many others like it, but this one is mine.”

It was something like that, anyway.  If anyone reading recognizes the line (or the correct line, as the case may be) please do chime in in the comments below.  Or, if you can recall any related, interesting, and similar quotes, that would be welcome, too.  Heck, just feel free to make a comment about whatever.

Parenthetical:  the thing that bothered me most about Full Metal Jacket was probably that they called their drill sergeant “sir”.  You don’t call NCOs “sir”, they work for a living!  Forrest Gump got that right.

As you can probably tell, this post is very much stream of consciousness style, probably more so than most.  Of course, that’s the way my blog posts almost always manifest themselves.  In fact “stream of consciousness” sometimes seems entirely too tame a term in general.  I think it’s usually much more of a serious river of consciousness, one that runs deep, and which is cloudy with silt and other contaminants, with way more going on below the surface than can be discerned from above and outside‒or even from the privileged place of being that surface layer consciousness.

I was tempted just now to refer to someone swimming on the surface as representing the person whose consciousness is described by the river.  But that’s not a good metaphor for consciousness, because it implies that consciousness is somehow separate from the flow of the rest of the mind‒only watching the game, controlling it*, as it were‒when in fact a person’s consciousness is that surface, that visible, barely more than two-dimensional, portion of the top of a river that dwarfs the Mississippi or the Nile or the Amazon or the River effing Styx.

Or, to use Sam Harris’s storm metaphor from his excellent book Free Will, “You are not controlling the storm, and you are you lost in it.  You are the storm.” (Emphasis added).

Back to the river analogy.

The river of consciousness is not always smoothly flowing, as I think you would agree. There are places where it goes into one of those river-lakes where the flow can be very slow.  But then there are also terrifying rapids, where all is turbulent and chaotic and perilous for anyone trying to ride it out (my readers may be able to sympathize) as well as for the mind itself.  There may even be waterfalls, though I’m not sure what situation that would metaphorically describe‒perhaps a mental breakdown?  Oh, well, metaphors (like similes) are always imperfect.  The only thing exactly like a thing is the thing itself.

I guess that’s pretty obvious.

Drat!  I realized while writing this that I forgot to share audio that I mentioned earlier this week.  I’ve set it to auto-publish today, so I don’t have to worry about that same thing happening again, but I am not going to do it at the same time as this post.  I don’t want to oversaturate the “market” for my thoughts, such as it is.

I just now erased a pointless digression about floods and a river again, relating to the immediately preceding sentence.  I really do seem to go all over the place, don’t I?  I guess that’s just one of those things that happens with some people.

I don’t mean to imply thereby that it is an unsolvable mystery.  There is an underlying causality, a system of interactions, that properly explains everything that happens regarding such streams of consciousness, but it is so involved that‒even if we can ignore quantum mechanics at the level of neural interactions, which we probably can do‒we are a loooong way from understanding it fully.

And, of course, a mind can never fully “understand” itself, because it cannot perfectly model itself within itself (see Elessar’s Conjecture) except to the extent of simply being itself.  And simply being a mind clearly does not imply that one understands oneself.  In fact, it is, I suspect, an absolute, mathematical law that no mind can ever fully and completely understand itself.  Again, see Elessar’s Conjecture.

Okay, that’s enough of this for now.  I’m sure I could gabble on and on and on for hours‒and it’s not as though my thoughts stop meandering, like that restless wind inside a letterbox, after I stop writing.  But you all don’t need to deal with that.  How nice for you.

Seriously, though, I hope you all have a good day.

*To quote One Night in Bangkok, one of the most unpredictable hit songs ever, in my opinion.  I mean it’s a white guy rapping about a chess tournament in Thailand in a musical about chess, called…Chess.

[I thought of a very stupid and sophomoric joke, inspired by a typo I made while editing.  Mamifestation:  when breasts are suddenly and unexpectedly revealed.]