Professor Blastoff Afterthoughts: NTK

Where do thoughts come from? My mind is a meadow where thoughts cultivate and grow, but the guy harvesting my thoughts seems to have a problem with letting them ripen. What I’m often left with is bushels of green blatherings. I do the best with what I am given, though. If that means I have to let the thoughts ripen in my frontal lobe a while before releasing them into the speech center of my brain, so be it. This is why I enjoy writing. I have plenty of time to look over my thoughts as they lie in front of me. I get to reflect on them a moment and then decide if they are worthy of representing my current condition. I also like having a record of my thoughts, to see how things have changed. My earliest writings display a desperate and unquenchable thirst for video games and chocolate.

A lot has changed since then. Video games have exploded into 3D and chocolate has joined forces with pretzels to form a new type of M&M, thanks to the New Thotter department at M&M Mars. Keep up the good work kids!

One early record I have from my childhood is the time my 5th grade teacher told us he could force us to think about an elephant. He then said, “Try not to think of an elephant for one minute.” Everyone failed but me. I succeeded because during that minute I screamed in my head, “Hamburgers are good! Hamburgers are good!” over and over again. I knew I had a one track mind, and as long as I stayed fixated on my favorite, non chocolaty, food I would be home free. Well, the teacher didn’t even believe I did it and that made me feel like a Jedi. Then I went home and realized how sad it was that I could only think about one thing at a time. This is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because if I want to forget about something all I gotta do is play video games. It’s a curse because I can’t think about video games and chocolate at the same time. I can change my focus real fast so I can think about both in the same second, but for some reason I can’t conjure up two mind’s eyes to think about chocolate and video games simultaneously. Even when I eat chocolate while playing a game, once I start thinking about how good the candy bar is I find my thoughts have drifted from the game. This is why I like roll playing games. They require hours of mindless level-upping. This allows me to continue playing video games using only my subconscious while freeing up my conscious thoughts for more important things like lectures on linear algebra.

But I don’t want one subconscious and one conscious mind, I want to have two conscious mind’s eyes. If there is someone out there who has two simultaneously active mind’s eyes, I would love to pick their brain. The only way I can imagine this functioning is similar to a multi-core computer processor. You would still have limits. For example, if you had two trains of thought going on at once, and one of them requested you to go cash a check while the other one requested you to go work out, one task would have to give. So naturally one would need two bodies to go with the two trains of thought, but would any one really want to be in control of two bodies? I could go to more than one class at a time, get an education twice as fast. I could use one to chase after athletic ambitions, and allow the other to binge on all the delicacies the world has to offer.

The only down side might be coming up with enough tasks to keep yourself occupied and not getting twice as bored or twice as hurt. If you double your pleasure your just as likely to double your pain. Taking this a step further, imagine having a global consciousness with one mind controlling all the bodies of the Earth. With he entire planet and all its resources at your whim, what would you do with it?  Obviously I would turn the planet into a galactic yo-yo, but then I would get pretty lonely and bored after realizing there was nobody there to be impressed by all the work that went into making a giant yo-yo Earth. Who would tell me how stupid I was for making the Earth spin so fast that it ejected most of my drones off it’s surface? I think we need to have other people to learn from, to teach and to throw ideas off of. In conclusion, there is a lot more to think about with respect to expanding out our consciousness. With technology advancing far into the future will we build such an entity? Are there pan dimensional hyper intelligent beings like this out there now, and more importantly do they still like chocolate and video games?

Go to professorblastoff.com for extras including some pretty cool fan art. Also check out aaronburrellcomedy.com to see what else I’m up to.

Listen to episode #39 Free for All: NTK