Landscape of my mind

A coherent set of physical metaphors for my mind, the conscious and subconscious, its compartments and processes. Basically, my own version of the movie Inside Out.

I find it funny that so many representations of the mind involve hordes of "little people" inside running around doing intelligent things; like would they too have "little little people" inside their brains? Perhaps the mind does not like being divided into simpler parts, a playful resistence to reductionism.

Nevertheless, I ended up with little people in my metaphoric world. They don't run the world that is my brain, merely part of it. Despite not being a people person, so much of my lived experience is social, so it only makes sense I'd use social phenomena as metaphors.

Main Body

Me & external reality: one inhabited planet & rest of the cosmos. This cosmos is filled with wonders and unknowns, and with planets hosting other intelligent life, though most of them isolated and out of reach from our singular planet. Only so much of the universe is presented to the planet; as an observer on the planet, the boundless cosmos becomes merely the night sky, not more or less relevant than the rest of the planet. This metaphorical setting echoes my own perception: the external world, as I perceive it and interact with, is just one player in my mind’s stage, not the other way around. External stimuli present themselves as moons, comets, auroras – some stable and familiar, some novel and serendipitous, sources of both wonders and horrors.

Conscious & subconscious mind: floating island observatory & surface nature ecosystem. The observatory collects and analyzes information about both the surface ecosystem and the deep sky. Since the conscious mind is by definition the rationally aware part of the brain, it is analogous to an observatory. By contrast, the natural ecosystem doesn’t think, but it reacts to stimuli (e.g. sunlight, radiation, asteroids) in profound and complex ways. It is in constant flux: temperature changes in cycles, humidity varies by region and climate.

The observatory observes with various scientific instruments pointing up and down. It makes models and form theories about the 1) planet it resides on, 2) the universe of which only a trickle is observable from the planet, and 3) the relationship between the two. The observatory is by no means independent from the flux of nature: telescopes distorted by the atmosphere, rulers expand and contract under temperature variations. The observatory evolves its understanding through constant debates amongst competing schools of thought in the observatory. Cosmologists focus on the wonderfully vast universe above them and simultaneously look down on the planet's surface as crude and uninteresting as subject, while environmentalists argue that understanding of the ecosystem can lead to instruments robust of atmospheric distortion and is a valuable source of knowledge in and of itself.

To translate the analogies above, there has been a tension between my rational conscious mind and my subconsciousness. For most of my life, I defined myself by my logical, unbiased, and scientific analysis of the world, and I brandished it as my strongest trait and the utmost ideal. On the flip side, I saw my emotions, and my primal instincts and fears, as biases to my rationality and hinderence to my pursuit. I (my conscious mind) feared the subconscious parts for their unpredictability, vastness, and profound influence on my state as a whole. As you can probably imagine, this mindset was not sustainable. More recently, my perspective have shifted from cosmologist to more environmentalist, prompting a wholistic understanding of my own brain and self, one without judgement or fear of the unseen. Who knew that staying in tune with one’s emotions helps emotional stability! Hence why I’m taking this class.

Our next analogies deviate from the earth planet we live on, but follow general physical principles.

Information, perception, memory: conductive sand, a ubiquitous material that falls consistently from space and accumulates abundantly on the planet. They exist in a range of colors due to variations in microstructure, modified by various cosmic radiations; in other words, they encode information about their journey through space. Furthermore, they form sediments on the planet's surface, and the geological layers reveal the history of the planet itself across space and time. The observatory collects and study the sand and rocks to uncover the planet’s past as well as cosmological environments and phenomena.

The analogy of the sand is raw sensory information, constantly collected and vast in amount, but most of which are unprocessed or compressed out of familiarity. Sediments are long-term memory, but melded together rather than granular and specific. (I personally have a terrible memory of past lived events, and I do often feel like the past is blended together for me with only themes recognizable across a span of years.) The conductive sand also represents factual information, and its conductivity forms the basis of the next analogy.

Reasoning, understanding, abstraction: artificial crystallization of sand, the art and science of glassmaking. A long cultural tradition and basis of technology of the observatory, glassmaking uses lightning to form glass crystals in a pile of conductive sand. The macroscopic crystals are themselves conductive and are used to form large conductive networks, forming circuitry that enable logical computation under the right arrangement. Lightning takes random but somewhat predictable paths, and part of the art of glassmaking is piling and molding sand into specific shapes to control lighting crystalization.

Lightning symbolizes the process of forming knowledge from raw information, a literal “flash of insight.” In my head, insights always take the form of a connection: an emerged pattern from a line of events, a new-found similarity between isolated concepts, a transfer of one domain’s principles to another. The process is instantaneous, spontaneous, yet controllable: lightning tends to strike the tallest pile of sand, and insights tend to form where we are most knowledgeable and experienced. Learning is then akin to piling sand in significant quantities and strategic locations. Lightning connects individual grains of information into a unified conductive path, forming the basis of fast intuition and higher-level reasoning. Leaning into the mind-computer analogy, the glass circuitry supports mental arithmetics and logical reasoning, since numbers and logical identities are highly abstract concepts.

Perspectives, introspection, tools of thought: prisms and sculptures made of glass and mirrors scattered across the observatory. They reflect, distort, and transform images in different ways, granting observers new perspectives into the world and the observatory itself. These precisely crafted artifacts embody the epitome of glassmaking in the observatory, a joint achievement of artistic craft and scientific technology.

The glass artifacts represents powerful perspectives of thinking and understanding the world, made out of the crystals of insight with creative design and perpetual polish. Linear algrebra for example is a general framework for understanding so many objects when modeled as vector spaces: real numbers, Euclidean vectors, continous functions, transformations (which themselves are tranformed). The visual metaphors of mind described here count as well. The abundance of glass artifacts in the observatory represents the pervasive self-reflection that I do, almost out of instinct. Thoughts about thoughts about thoughts.