I was sitting in my Philosophy of Mind lecture the other day when a thought occurred to me. At least, I think it was a thought, and I think it occurred to me, but if the subject has taught me anything it’s that you can never really be sure with these things.
Over the previous seven weeks, I have learnt (or perhaps, I think I’ve learnt?) many theories concerning just what it is that goes on in our head, and how exactly it happens. Most philosophers these days think that consciousness is just a result of the arrangement of the physical stuff in our heads. A few think that there is something above and beyond the physical which gives us our thoughts. I think if we could just figure out what’s going on in Tom Cruise’s mind we wouldn’t have this problem. But I suppose we’d have to locate his mind first, because he seems to have well and truly lost it.
What’s clear is that thinking about thoughts is a tricky thing. I mean, think about it.
Ok stop.
You might be thinking about how you weren’t thinking about thoughts anyway. I mean, who does this guy think he is? Telling me to think things?
My point is, considering how inescapable the act of thinking is, it amazing how little we’re aware of how exactly we all do it.
To me it seems, at least so far, as though it makes sense that our conscious thoughts arise from our having the most complex arrangement of physical stuff in our heads. More synapses, more chemical reactions, more electric impulses zooming hither and thither at enormous speed, that sort of thing. I mean, we are talking about a system which is really, truly unimaginably complex. No really, I just tried to imagine how complex it is, and my brain almost imploded at the thought it thought it might be thinking.
However this week, everything changed.
It wasn’t so much that we made some fantastic breakthrough concerning theories of the mind. There was no moment which prompted the lecturer to suddenly stop, hysterically scribble the solution to all of our thoughts on the mind on the back of a dirty Hungry Jacks napkin, thrust it into the shaking hands of his most trusted post-graduate and have it whisked off on horseback to an underground lair known only to a secret society of bored academics.
No. That would be weird.
Instead, what I mean by “everything changed” is really that the subject changed, as it so often does in Philosophy. Our lecturer, perhaps noticing our confused, concerned and confounded faces as we attempted to grasp just what it was that that last famous dead gentleman was trying to say about Psychophysical Parallelism, decided to go in a new direction.
“Did you know,” he said, “That scientists aren’t exactly sure whether or not the universe is infinite?”
Admitting quickly that it was unlikely that it in fact was infinite, it was nonetheless true that it could be. What this means, he explained, is that anything in the entire universe which has even the slightest probability of ever happening, will in fact happen. If there is a possibility, no matter how small, that there could be a world out there where everything is the same as it is on earth except that you, yes you, have different coloured hair, then there will be such a world. If there’s a chance that there is a planet out there inhabited by millions of Bert Newtons, then there will be one. If there was a chance someone would go and see Mariah Carey in Glitter, it will happen somewhere in the universe.
At this point, my philosophy class let out an enormous collective gasp, and a first year boy who accidentally walked in at just that moment fainted in a heap with a girlish whimper. It was, it almost goes without saying, about as stimulating as things get for a bunch of philosophy nerds on a Thursday morning.
As much as I’d like to keep talking about the universe (what exactly is it supposed to be expanding into anyway?) I think that if there is to be any probability that you might read my blogs in the future, I should stop now.