Читать книгу Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind - Guy Claxton - Страница 9

Because we are creatures of belief, what we believe – without knowing that we believe it – about our minds determines the reality we inhabit. It determines what we allow ourselves to see. It determines the goals we must pursue. It determines the laws we pass and the motorways we build and the forests we fell and the restaurants we frequent. Even the countryside, throughout vast areas of the world, is a monument to mind: a representation not only of what generations have believed in and lived for, but of the view they have had of themselves – of their emotions, memories, thoughts and identities. Our ‘folk psychology’, woven out of landscape, language and a million subliminal events, forms the invisible filter through which we have to look as we look inward.

We do not see this filter because we see through it. It is the unacknowledged background against which our mental life stands out in relief. We say ‘You make me mad’, without ever pausing to inspect the theory of emotion which this dubious claim demands. We say ‘I’m sorry – I wasn’t myself’, without noticing what a curious view of personality is being implied. We say ‘I changed my mind’, without wondering who exactly it is that changed what (or what it was that changed whom). We try in our courts to decide whether a mass murderer is mad, only rarely doubting the sanity of the question itself.