the fact we cant have direct control over our brains is fucking stupid. yeah get anxious about something and be unable to directly shut it off, you have to go through like 7 hoops to manipulate and trick your own mind into calming down. this is bullshit
shel silverstein was always very good at writing poems that made me think. And one of the ones I remember thinking about, as a little kid, was the one that goes:
“if we had hinges on our heads there wouldn’t be no sin / cause we could take the bad stuff out and leave the good stuff in”
and it came with a drawing of a person’s head opening on hinges with all this weird-looking brain matter inside
and I remember thinking:
- okay, that would be really nice, if it actually worked that way.
- But… I am not sure the “bad stuff” in our heads that makes us “sin” is concentrated in little easily separated packets that we could just pull out if we wanted to. that doesn’t seem likely
- and wait. Even if we could…. wouldn’t the very presence of a “bad stuff/desire to sin” packet in my brain mean that I would not have a motivation to remove it in the first place. because then I’d want it to be there. I probably wouldn’t even believe it was bad
- unless it’s one of those bad temptations that get close to controlling you sometimes, but that most of the time you do want to overcome.
- then of course there would be another packet in you that contained the “remove the bad stuff” motivation.
- what if they each tried to remove the other, as their level of influence over your actions ebbed and flowed, and the power balance between them fluctuated?
- inner war. scary
- i do not want head hinges
(I was not, of course, usually thinking about it in such detailed language. my inner thoughts are usually more just abstract concepts than words. But all these concepts were certainly forming in there, and it definitely contributed to my current complicated and nuanced view of the idea of “free will”)
And Why did it take me UNTIL NOW to realize this could all be a joke about the word “unhinged”