Mind Things

A Mind Thing is something you reach for in your mind as part of how you understand the world. If it’s all just a pile of Lego up there, (or urs) then Mind Things are pre-assembled chunks, whether they were deliberately created over painstaking study or just sort of glommed together coincidentally in the eddies of regular mental currents.

My idea of a Mind Thing is a less-romantic update of a well-loved mind thing I borrowed from Nabokov when I first read Ada when I was 16.

See Ada’s three kinds of things

Here’s how I translate that to Mind Things

Things: Songs that feel like old friends. All the sources cited in The Conceptual Labor Book

Real Things: Pika’s Place. [[ Corby’s Collages ]].

Ghost Things: The Mole Diagram. [[ The Three Kinds of Things ]]. Urs.

This is definitely somewhat of a departure from the original, far more romantic structure, but it’s a version I’ve worked with in my mind for a long time now.

Things

Things are more commodity-like, atoms of experience, pretty readily transmitted. The remembering is in the collecting of them. These seem to be pretty well-served by existing tools, analog or digital, and more in line with traditional means of archiving.

Real Things

Real Things don’t quite exist without the rememberer’s touch, without some interpretation. Possibly they require a production step – they must be gone out and got, encountered before they can be collected.

Ghost Things

Ghost Things are both the most real and unreal of things. I think they’re a bit like the back of your head – you need a mirror to see them and they never look quite right in the reflection, but without them your brain would fall out.

I don’t feel that confident in any other description of them yet, so I’m gonna keep trying to use this as a mirror and see if that gets us anywhere.