Deleuze & Guattari Quote #2

“A plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency. The BwO is a component of passage.” (ATP 158)

Meditations on the Mind-in-a-Vat

I don’t exactly remember where I heard about it first, but I am thinking of the “mind-in-a-vat” thought experiment. I want to play with it a little.

So there’s this mind in a vat, not a brain mind you, but a mind in a vat. Oh, lets just say that a mind is an instance of Substance concieved under the attribute of thought. Ok. So I guess we have a thinking thing in a ”thought vat.” What is a thought vat? Obviously it’s a container. What sort of container? It is a container of thoughts made of thought itself. How is this possible? I don’t really know. This is just a thought experiment, and I am speculating wildly . Let’s just say that thoughts themselves are quasi-atomic and generally rhizomatic in their behavior. Thoughts, hmm, just like braincells (the extended version of thought?), link up, sync, and connect to each other in a multitude of ways. A mind would be a unity of many thoughts. A mind vat would also be a unity of many thoughts. Their borders may interweave. The mind and vat may become a mind-vat (as opposed to a mind and/in a thought vat). As the mind thinks, and I guess the vat would in some way think, too, new textures emerge that were there only as possibilities or as possibilities of possibilities, etc. Then the question is “what is thinking”? Do thoughts make noise? Is their “flow” smooth or turbulent? They come in all sorts of varieties. Morbid thoughts, happy thoughts, thoughts about sunny days. They morph into each other. Does a thought ever stay the same except for only an instant? Or is it the case that thoughts have a more substantial existence with attributes that change sometimes and stay the same at other times? The relationship between thought and meaning is  a tricky one! It’s kind of like the slippery relationship beween signifier and signified. If thoughts “link up” and “sync” with each other, then it would seem that there is a constant process of meaning creation. New meaning emerges as time goes by. The question still remains, perhaps it will always remain…, just exactly how does time go by? And so I shall end this meditation with a quote from Saint Augustine.

 What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, therer would be no present time. – Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, CH XIV.

Thus, there’s always something…