The Mind is Flat

Prologue: Literary Depth, Mental Shallows

• The inner, mental world, and the beliefs, motives, and fears it is supposed to contain is, itself, a work of the imagination. We invent interpretations of ourselves and other people in the flow of experience, just as we conjure up interpretations of fictional characters from a flow of written text.
• There is no pre-existing "inner world of thought" from which our thoughts issue. Thoughts, like fiction, come into existence in the instant that they are invented, and not a moment before.
• Introspection is a process not of perception but of invention: the real-time generation of interpretations and explanations to make sense of our own words and actions. The inner world is a mirage.
• The very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behavior as coherent as possible - to stay "in character" as well as we are able. To do so, our brains must strive continually to think and act in the current moment in a way that aligns as well as possible with our prior thoughts and actions. We are like judges deciding each new legal case by referring to, and reinterpreting, an ever-growing body of previous cases. So the secret of our minds lies not in supposed hidden depths, but in our remarkable ability to creatively improvise our present, on the theme of our past.
• There is no inner world. Our flow of momentary conscious experience is not the sparkling surface of a vast sea of thought - it is all there is.
• Our brain creates new momentary thoughts and experiences by drawing not on a hidden inner world of knowledge, beliefs, and motives, but on memory traces of previous momentary thoughts and experiences.
• Our brain is an engine that creates momentary conscious interpretations not be drawing on hidden inner depths, but by linking the present with the past, just as writing a novel involves linking its sentences together coherently, rather than creating an entire world.
• The whole of thought, whether chess-playing, abstract mathematical reasoning, or artistic and literary creation, is really no more than an extension of perception.
• Our freedom consists not in the ability magically to transform ourselves in a single jump, but to reshape our thoughts and behaviors, one step at a time: our current thoughts and actions are continually, if slowly, reprogramming our minds.
• Common-sense psychology sees our thought and behavior as rooted in reasoning, but a lot of human intelligence seems to be a matter of finding complex patterns.