Chapter 8.                                      Part B 

At bottom, the shifting nature of reality defies all categories, even "here", "now", and "stuff". (Matter, as Einstein showed, is really only a form of energy.) A mind (consciousness/sanity) is built up on concepts, some of them acquired from our genetics (babies fear heights and snakes, but grasp basic language concepts), some from the conditioning that is programmed into us by our cultures, and some that each of us has built up by spotting patterns in banks of memories gathered from his or her personal experience.

The "I" that is most deeply what I mean by "I" is a program that runs on brain tissue and that is constantly reviewing sense data, trying to decide whether they signify hazard or opportunity or are just more familiar, non-threatening, non-promising, background noise. A mind is any program that looks for patterns in data.

But sanity is a construct and like any construct it can be “deconstructed”, an idea that deserves a bit of digression. If a sanity (i.e. a human mind) really is deconstructed, as sometimes happens when a person's perceptions are distorted by drugs or sensory deprivation or mental illness, so that her/his programming becomes incoherent, some of his interactions with reality get beyond his ability to sort, and respond to, real world events. Then he has a "nervous breakdown". Real deconstruction of a human’s mindset, i.e. the set of programs that a person uses to organize his perceptions of reality, can happen, but it is not much like the Deconstructionists’ way of analyzing a work of literature.  

                     

Deconstructionism as a philosophy is a kind of playing at the borders of mental illness. It is correct in asserting that every sane human cognition is part of a "text" and as such can be deconstructed into its constituent parts, most of which are culturally imprinted and so can be shown to be culturally biased. But complete deconstruction of any "text" - or "context", to put it more accurately - would require the deconstructer to deconstruct the constituents and then the constituents of the constituents. She would have to continue until she had deconstructed her own mind as part of the full text being analyzed. In short, to go mad. Deconstructionists are too cautious to actually use their method to its logical limit. Mental illness, they well know, is not clever, sophisticated, illuminating, or fun.

But let us set regrets about Deconstructionism aside and return to our main line of thought. 

The thrust of Bayesianism is this: all of my sensory experiences and memories of experiences would seem to be jumbled, meaningless gibberish without concepts by which I can organize them. The crucial problem is that these concepts are not built into a supra-real dimension of ideas (Rationalism) nor into material reality itself (Empiricism). Our minds' thinking systems are based almost wholly on concepts that exist only in our minds and only for as long as they are functional, be that for seconds or centuries.