Mental Floss

Woody Allen once said that the brain is the most overrated organ. We all trust our brains to do all kinds of things, even though we really have very little control over them. Nobody chooses to have "Umbrella" or the theme to Friends stuck in their head, but there they stick.

People have spent countless hours over the centuries (millenia, really) trying to understand the relationship between people and their minds. They've tried to divide up the functions physically and spiritually and functionally. Thousands and thousands of pages are devoted to mind and soul, id and ego, conscious and unconscious and subconscious and semiconscious (my personal favorite). I studied a lot of that stuff in college.

And what do I think about it now? I think it's a bunch of hooey (yes, that's actually a word). I firmly believe that the whole world of philosophy has been built trying to convince ourselves that we are somehow in control. If you dig into it, the logic of the argument in favor of all of our actions being predetermined is much, much simpler than the argument for our having free will, which is still a work in progress. Simplest explanations aren't always the best, but they're usually a good starting point as long as your specal (? what would be adjective form of species?) pride doesn't get in the way.

And of course, I have no idea why I was thinking about this.