The Bower Bird, Ch. I

You say you are
a nameless man. But
the counterintuitive reality
of multiple minds in a single person
is one most people resist

given that they feel themselves
a singular “me.” For instance,
patients whose brains have
been damaged so that their
two hemispheres cannot
communicate with one another
will consistently fabricate elaborate
explanations for why one isolated
hemisphere acted in a particular
way. And it's not because there’s anything
wrong with them, but because
they were conditioned

to believe that learning is about giving back
the right answer. The effect is especially powerful
if you blink your eyes. As a result,
we hear "dog" and think of nouns
that, in more sober circumstances, would
seem to have nothing in common. These
depressions just smother you. And yet,
students of bird song notice that
certain species at certain moments just go out
on a jazz musician's jam session, taking notes
from other bird songs
and incorporating them into their own,

singing much more beautifully
than when merely demarcating
a territory. This repetitive, cumulative, 'continuous
dynamic' painting process is strikingly similar to the way
patterns in Nature evolve. Common sense is nothing

but a collection of misconceptions acquired
by age eighteen. We don't need to 'stabilize' on
anything: the virtue of this medium is unfettered
diversity. Aristosthenes's only tools were sticks,
eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest
for experiment. The basic idea is to get two spheres
and put some electric charge on them.