Chapter 14: On the Thingy

In which we see a strange thingy inside the human head.

My first day on Earth. I appeared somewhere in the city of what must be Strasbourg. Everything is so confusing, especially humans. Good news is that they don't seem to see me - I can walk around, listen to their thoughts and whatch their minds without them noticing me. Bad news is that their minds are really, really strange.

Let me explain. When I heared about humans being both animals and spirits, I imagined something like this:
I thought the relation between the conscious part and the animal part of the brain would be somewhat like the relation between a driver and a vehicle: The driver drives the vehicle where he wants, and the vehicle sometimes make the driver want to go somewhere, for example to the gas station. I thought the mind would analyze the animal's needs - both the needs of the body (like eating) and the needs of the species (like reproducing), and then decide how to satisfy these needs with minimal costs.

Turns out that's not how the human mind works. There is a third part which links the conscious mind with the "animal": A strange tentacular subconsciousness thingy.

I don't know how to call it, let's stay with "thingy". The thingy isn't simply an interface between animal and mind: It seems to have its own will. It's both intelligent and mad. It lies to the conscious mind. It tampers with the mind's thoughts. Sometimes it transforms an information into something totally different. And, strangest thing of all, it seems to assume that humans are still living in caves.

Let me give you an example: I saw a male human which was getting hungry. One would assume that the human would notice the bodily need, that it would analize which chemicals are needed and then elaborate a plan how to get those with a minimum of effort - and maybe corresponding to some social convenience, I don't know. But that was not was happened. First of all, the male got hungry when the body was not yet in urgent need for food. In the age of cave men this would have been reasonable, as the male would have needed enough forces to hunt down a mammoth or something. But here the hunger alarm went off far too early - which seemed not to be an exception, according to the male's amount of body fat. But even stranger: Instead of simply submitting the need "I'm hungry" to the mind, the "thingy" started kind of an age old program, the program "Hunt down mammoth - roast it on open fire - divide it for the tribe". This seemed to correspond to a perceived "role" of the male human, something like "Me being strong tribe chieftain, ooga ooga".

Unfortunately, there was no mamooth available, besides I am not sure whether the authorities of Strasbourg allow hunting mammoths in the city. So the thingy modified the mammoth program into some contemporary approximation - it's called "Barbecue". So the male went into some building where they distribute what appeared to be pieces of dead mammoths (or other animals, I dunno). It's called "butchery". Some minutes later it came out with enough meat to nourish ten persons - that was the "Hunt down mammoth" part. I didn't observe the execution of the rest of the program, but according to the human's thoughts, it intended to roast the mammoth meat in the garden, to brag about it's exceptional mammoth roasting capacities, and to distribute the meat to it's family like the tribe chiefs did it ages ago. The male's thoughts about everything remotedly related to mammoth hunting and roasting were quite enthousiastic, whereas the thingy made it avoid thinking about other forms of preparing food, let alone clearing the bones away and stuff.

This is only one example from what I saw. For every human, the thingy translated needs (of the body, the species or the thingy itself) in different ways. The funniest part was when I observed some other distributing building, like the butchery but specialized into footwear for females. I saw many females whose feelings like anger / need for attention / frustration / joy /fear / hunger / whatever were translated into the same "need": "Buying shoes". (The males' thingies worked in a different way, they rather translated everything to "buying toys", whatever that means.) I'm not sure how the footwear or toys are related to the time when humans lived in caves, but I wouldn't be surprized if there were a connection.

Anyway, I have no idea how the humans manage to live with those strange thingies inside their head. Somehow I'm glad to be a pure spirit and not bound to needs of body or species - let alone chained to some tentaculous monster...