This literally took six minutes. My daughter was involved once again. We set a 3-minute timer. She drew the ghost. When time was up, we started the timer again, and I drew the recursive thought bubbles with the frog, the fly, and the poop.
The scanning, researching, and blogging took longer than the sketching. But this is almost always the case.
Higher–Order Mentalizing
This ghost, I learned through my research, is “higher–order mentalizing” – that’s “the ability to represent the beliefs and desires of other people at multiple, iterated levels.” And this supposedly is “a capacity that sets humans apart from other species.” (Source)
I stopped the recursion at the poop. Certainly there is precedent for anthropomorphizing poop, but I went no further. Maybe it was the ticking clock. Maybe it was failure of imagination – failure to imagine what the poop would be thinking. Even now, I’m stuck in a scientific mindset. Never mind that this began with a ghost. (And, for the record, I don’t believe in ghosts – even though I probably saw one once.)
If feces had desires, what would they be? A desire for fertility and renewal? A desire for recognition of its role in the natural order?
Or maybe the poop would desire transformation that leads to its integration back into the natural world, continuing its journey within the cycle of life and death. That is: in the mind of the fly, in the mind of the frog, in the mind of the ghost.
But neither I nor the ghost made it that far. The mentalizing ended with the fly.
In my failure to imagine what the poop desires, I reveal a reluctance to fully embrace my own role in the circle of life and death. Or maybe it was just the 3-minute timer.
2 comments
Paul
June 23, 2024 at 4:33 pmThere’s a plausible philosophical argument that all possible thought-bubble recursions end in poop.
Ted
June 23, 2024 at 5:04 pmI would argue that they all begin in poop as well.