This is a Picture of a Chair

...

It's just sitting there.

And I keep thinking about consciousness and zombie toasters (zombie's according to Chalmers, that is) and the fact that we don't believe that inanimate objects have "consciousness" or individual identities or selves or an expressable "I."

And I think how unfair that is.

And I think of the book Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls, where the main character can hear things like stuffed animals and doors and walls and people thinks she's crazy but she's not. Because she really can hear doors and walls and inanimate objects that we say do not have identities or any abilities to communicate.

And I want to know why.

And I want to push at philosophers and make them explain to me why this assumption is in place. Is it only because you cannot conceive of it? Cannot imagine it? Because I can. So many times I feel like a book is judging me, or a chair looks lonely, or a rock feels angry, or.... Is this merely me taking my own mental states and attributing them to inanimate objects? Am I just crazy? Am I just using language and feelings in ways that only writers use language and feelings?

I don't know.

But I wish philosophers would quit saying so forcefully that they know that chairs do not have identities or personalities or "consciousness" or anything at all they are just wood and cloth and little bits of metal nails.

Because we don't really know anything - now do we?

The Threads and Bubbles of Reality

As a writer of fantasy I believe in the possibility of multiple realities. And because I have an insane imagination sometimes it seriously feels like a reality threaded next to this one is getting really close - like having two bubbles come up side by side, and either they will merge or pop - and it makes me wonder...

What would that be like? How would that affect us? Would it even affect us at all?

Say our bubble of reality sidles up alongside another bubble of reality:

Would it cause the bubble to pop?

Or would it cause the bubble to become just a smaller add on to our bubble world:


If our bubble of reality pops a next door neighbor bubble, what happens to that reality? Does it no longer exist? Does it pop up and exist elsewhere? What if it gets downsized and become nothing but an add on bubble, like in the above picture? Will reality just become a fragment of what it was, like a shard of glass that used to be part of a larger whole, but is now just a piece of its formal self?


Can you imagine if our choices affected the movement of our bubble of reality? That would be crazy. Unlikely, probably not true at all, but it is interesting to think about. Most of my stories concern reality and its duplicates, or the bending of reality, or the fluidity of reality, at least in some manner.

What about you? Do you think about reality? Do you think reality is just one bubble out of many, or do you think of reality more like a cinder block, solid and unmoving and singular?