mind as OS
September 11th, 2005 by admin
I link to a site called 43Folders over there in the sidebar. They talk mainly about personal organization and “getting things done” (think hipster PDA), served up with a healthy helping of geekery; proprietor Merlin Mann describes it better than I could. Anyway. I don’t read them every day, but I drop in occasionally, and – once in a while – I run across something there that really makes me laugh.
A brief aside. (Open curly bracket.) Let me explain what I mean when I say “makes me laugh,” in the hopes that some of you might relate. I don’t mean that these things make me laugh because they are innately funny – most of them are not. They make me laugh – at least, the particular laugh that I am thinking of here – because they say something so unexpected – and yet so right – that I can’t help but just laugh in the sheer joy of the idea. You know the way you laugh when you see a really sweet hack for the first time? Or when you get a complex concept in a flash of intuition, like a whole network of understanding just drops into place and lights up across the board? Yeah, that laugh. It’s like a visceral blow – a punch in the gut, in the head – and the way my body responds is, I laugh. (And then I sit there with a goofy grin on my face for a while.) I live to experience that feeling, and if you know what I’m talking about, maybe you do too. Okay? Okay. Close bracket.
Here’s what made me laugh today. Phil Eby, proprietor of dirtSimple.org, talks about the difference between “you” and “yourself”, with shades of zen and taoism, but he frames the whole discussion in terms of OS – kernel, I/O streams and filters, subroutines and shell scripts. And the kicker is – once you read it, and then you go back and read it again, cause you’re probably going to need to read it twice – the whole mess makes perfect sense and opens up a whole slew of new ways of thinking about how and why we do things, and how we might get better at doing or not doing those things.
This is sparking all kinds of random thoughts in my head, but the one at the top of my brain right now is a sense of amazement and not a little sadness, thinking about the crud built up in my head – in everyone’s heads, really. Picture it – we get input, and based on god-only-knows what rules we devise for ourselves, from early childhood on, we process and tag that input and store it away. And the rules we devise, and the scripts that we teach ourselves, to process input in any one of a myriad different situations – they never really go away. Even once they’re deprecated – recognized by our current self as useless, wrong or even harmful – they’re still pretty much there for good. Instead of scrapping these thousands of useless scripts and filters, all we can do is pipe their output into new scripts and filters that we write every day as we go along. If we were coding in any other medium, we’d have wiped all that cruft and started from scratch years ago. But these are our perceptions we’re talking about, and there’s no way to start from scratch – nobody gets to recompile, or even reboot, in this lifetime – so all we can do is try to tweak the output of the spaghetti-code mess of processing we’ve already accumulated over the years, compensating as best we can for a lifetime of bad hard-coded perception filters with still more hard-coded perception filters.
How’s that for a mind fuck?
If that makes no sense, read the article and then try it again. If you’re not a geek, the OS paradigm will confuse you, but the general underlying ideas should come through.
I’m going to go sit over there and give this whole thing some more thought.
UPDATE: Someone over at Mefi has discovered and posted this and so far it’s being roundly dismissed. All I can say is, maybe everyone over there has played the implications of this whole idea out and dismissed it already, but it’s still awfully neat to me.