Library of Babel: Slow 2


	The only two things that Johnny was good at were art and the tests with blocks and spots that the educational psychologist asked him to do. He decided pretty soon on that he was an artist. It wasn't a calculated decision that he would choose himself to be the person to be. It seemed like the only option at the time. The more sure of himself he became and the more people praised him for the artistic things he did the more convinced he became that he was himself. It was after his marriage broke up and the kids went to university and after he had become successful with all those exhibitions that he began to doubt again if there was anybody home or perhaps, more to the point, anybody in particular home. This is what he reasoned, based on the few pop science books he had tried to read: "The human brain is an organ. Its activities are essentially a series of electrical charges. Together they regulate the wellbeing of the body and produce unconscious and conscious thought. The human brain gets hit with loads of different information; we have no control over what we get or don't get to find out about, and the outworking of all this activity is thought". So it was that Johnny reasoned consciousness to be the fall out from a lot of arbitrary electrical activity. As a result of this vision he started to imagine another brain removed from his own, which was suspended like a companion star some distance from the first and that this brain had been stripped down of all the extraneous nonsense. It was just the bits of fall out that had fallen together and that the particles of all this electro-chemical garbage were attracted to each other by the gravity of opinion. This was the point at which Johnny started to doubt himself because he started to remember the class and the tests
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