Minds

Gazing out over my students, I lecture about morality, or God, or knowledge, or politics, or whatever the philosophical topic is for that day. I struggle, because I can’t yet seem to engage these students with the degree that I want to. How many times have I gone over the differences between inductive and deductive logic? And yet, when I ask them for some distinction, I am met with silence and blank stares. After a few moments, they begin frantically shuffling through their notebooks, looking for a crumb of information. Someone raises their hand. I acknowledge them, and they read something from the notebook that doesn’t make any sense. Yes, I recall saying that, but they say it in a fragment, or they answer the wrong question. Essentially, after months of telling them that the goal is to understand, not to repeat, the greatest reaction I summon at this moment is replay, and poor replay at that. They do not comprehend.

I look out over the classroom, a collective of inactive, simple minds. A thing within their skulls that works to stay awake, look at me, occasionally nod, and occasionally copy down some collection of words that I have stated in succession with emphasis. These recorded words are not reviewed, not pondered; they are left to sit in the notebook, as though all that learning requires to place ink in various shapes on a page and nothing else.

No, no, no. I know better than this. This conception of their minds is flawed, and not because I’m being pesimistic or that I’m now being optimistic that their minds are better developed than this. I know this.

In 1998, my occupation was to stand guard duty in the towers surrounding Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During our twelve and twenty-four hour posts, my job required me to stay awake and write down in our logbooks anytime we saw a truck drive from behind one hill and disappear behind another. The point of this, we were told, was to track Cuban movement so that we would know when they would attack. Of course, the Cubans are not about to attack Guantanamo Bay in 1998.

You can’t put a Marine in one place for too long with nothing to do before he does something that amuses him. There is an old joke: put a Marine in a completely sealed, padded room and give him three steal balls. Leave him in there for an hour. When you open the door, you will find that the Marine has either lost, eaten, or broken the three balls. This is not absolutely true, of course. But you would be astonished to find out how closely this actually approaches truth.

If I were in that sealed room, I probably would not break them or eat them. I might lose them. More likely, I would stare at these balls and wonder why they’re here, what their purpose is.

So when I’m on these posts, in addition to losing things, I stare at everything and wonder what it’s for, why we’re here, and what the other Marine on post thinks of it all.

Grunts, it is often true, are stupid and narrow-minded on many topics. But often, they are quite clever. And forced into this position, with me staring at them and asking bizarre questions, I learned a valuable lesson that has shaped everything I think about philosophy: everyone is interested in philosophical matters, even if they don’t know it yet.

No mind is simple. If someone is capable enough of ending up in the Marine Corps infantry or a community college class, the mind is not simple. Each mind is a massive conglomeration of ideas, beliefs, feelings, and memories. Each mind is a citadel of thought-parts and feeling-parts, arranged together in a massively complex and unique way: a mental fingerprint that determines everything about how that individual operates in the world.

When conversation and thoughts are not engaging, the responses that a complex mind produces are not complex or interesting. They are predictable and repetitive. When introduced to the common notions of a society, the uncritical mind does not evaluate the immigrant idea, but incorporates it into their own mind. The result is a hodge-podge, unpurposeful mound of ideas that cannot put forth strong, critical thoughts.

With no structure, all new ideas that induce attraction, joy, or confidence are defacto compatible: with no logic behind what is accepted and what is rejected, then emotion determines everything.

With this “structure” in place, many people will have the same ideas concerning those issues that occur frequently, even if the hidden, undiscussed issues are relevant and in contention. And so it will appear, that in a great group of people, all minds are often the same.

But with this new view, I gaze at my students and I see something new, and something beautiful: each mind an unorganized collage of thoughts and beliefs, unknown to even the owner. My task is not to make them respond to my questions: my mind is to peel one idea from another and show them what connections exist between one mind and another, and show their neighbor, and force them to see their own thoughts. Let them judge for themselves whether their beliefs are worth holding or not.  

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