My Brain is In My Skull. My Mind is Everywhere Else

The brain itself has no pain receptors.

A colleague of mine recently told me about a conversation he had with a doctor who is Indian. He was asking the doctor what he thought about identity, consciousness, and mind.

The Indian doctor said that people in the West have a different way of thinking of such things than people who have been brought up with Eastern philosophy.

If you believe that we are all a part of a larger MIND that extends beyond mere individuals – that MIND is really a property of the universe at large, or some larger system, then many of our more puzzling mysteries dissolve away.

New philosophies that bring together neuroscience, quantum physics, and theories of emergence are providing explanations for phenomena that scientists have traditionally considered to be imaginary, metaphysical, or unknowable.

Bucky Fuller once said: “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”

Up until recently, I thought of “my mind” as something non-physical that emerged only from my brain’s activities. But, after learning how intimately linked human brains are to each other, and to the culture that is evolving in the context of all the brains that exist and that have ever existed, I have started to see “my mind” as inseparable from the matrix.

Here the cool part: my mind is not only being created from my own brain: other brains are also creating it.

Unlike my brain, which has a container called “skull”, my mind has no boundaries – there is no membrane that separates “my mind” from the aggregate of all minds.

And why should there be a membrane? The mind is not physical.

The Indian doctor told something to my friend, who had been brought up with Western philosophy. My friend had an epiphany – a miniature jolt from a Western perspective to what he described as a Taoist moment.

Paint a picture in our mind of your brain inside of your skull. Now: outside of your skull, add some color patches, images, words, and connections. This represents something that has no physical place, no physical time. It can traverse space and time without effort. It is not “owned” by you or me or anyone else. It is the emergent information aggregate that got its real kick-start when Earth’s biosphere began to self-regulate, billions of years ago.

We are Nouning the Big Verb that is Mind.

Advertisement

Bucky Fuller, Where are You? (On the Boxiness of Corporate Employment)

“Okay, but…if you had to choose between calling yourself a designer or calling yourself an engineer, which would you choose?”

Specialists and Generalists

I have often needed a specialist to do a specific task for me. This is normal. Specialists have a role in the economy and one could argue (along with Adam Smith) that specialization is the very basis of economy.

But too much specialization comes at a cost to innovative tech companies…and to creative individuals. Especially now, and increasingly – into the future…

Here’s an article in the Harvard Business Review on that topic:

Nourishing My Inner Bucky

Interviewers have often asked me how I rank myself in terms of software engineering skill. As if there were a one-dimensional yardstick upon which all engineers can place themselves.

When one is evaluated with a one-dimensional yardstick, one usually ends up with a low grade.

For the same reason that there are multiple dimensions to intelligence, why not use more than one yardstick to evaluate an engineer?

The space that lies between all these one-dimensional yardsticks yields great connective knowledge. This is the domain of the COMPREHENSIVIST.

I lament the boxiness of the standard company recruiting process – even within companies that claim to employ people who think outside the box (like Google). Here’s a Google employee admitting to their deplorable interview process); “Pablo writes that his best skill is product design, but that his Google recruiters only showed interest in his ability to code.”

We hear of how generalists and right-brain thinkers are in such demand these days.

Bullshit. When it comes to finding employment in companies, we are still confronted with an array of boxes, and we are still expected to show how well we fit into (one) of them. Consider Linked-In.

My Linked-In profile has the following as my “industry”:

SHIPBUILDING

Why did I choose Shipbuilding? LinkedIn REQUIRES that I choose ONLY ONE of the industries from its list, and it DOES NOT allow me to choose more than one industry. Shipbuilding was the furthest thing I could find from what I do. Instead of trying to use a single box to characterize myself, I prefer to go in the opposite direction.

Linked-In = Boxed-In

Now I want to say a few things about being an older person who has faced difficulty fitting into the workforce.

We Are All Multi-Dimensional – Increasingly as we Age

Experienced (i.e., older) programmer/innovator/designers should be contributing more of those intangibles to the tech industry that Google is so bad at seeking out.

The tech industry has a fundamental problem: software plays an increasing role in people’s lives. The world’s population is aging. Young engineers who know the latest buzzwords of the last five years are hired quickly and eagerly. An aging population tries to keep up with fast-changing software interfaces. And more and more of this aging population consists of software engineers who have something the young programmers don’t have: wisdom, experience, perspective.

We are exactly what Silicon Valley needs.

No one in particular is to blame for ageism in high-tech startups. The problem does not stem from any particular favoritism of young people: it is due to the short-sightedness of the tech industry, and the emphasis on the quick-thinking, risk-taking attributes associated with youth.

People who are professionally multi-dimensional should play a key role in human-centered software design. The cultural divide, identified by C. P. Snow in 1959, is still with us. Boxes breed boxes. That’s why we’re in the box we’re in.

-Jeffrey