Art Reboot

33 4 the analys ing mind The enormous value of the intellect lies in its capacity for analysis, the separating of a whole thing into its parts. By naming distinct parts of self and environment, and by separating the ideas behind them, we build the tools and languages through which we seek understanding. But the moment something is separated and given a name, it is, by definition, limited. This remains true even if we can never know exactly how limited. Knowing the exact number of insects on our own planet, for instance, will be forever beyond our grasp, unless we manage, catastrophically, to reduce that number to zero. To expand our intellectual knowledge in encyclopaedic fash- ion is a valuable endeavour, but an unending one; a worthy pur- suit with enormous practical benefits, but not a fulfilling one for consciousness. Imagine an eternally-growing dictionary whose compilers become so caught up in including new words that they lose sight of its purpose. The intellect deals with the self and its environment by analysing both into their component parts. The languages it has created in order to do so are analogical, in the sense that the word ‘mouse’ is not a mouse but a series of symbols that common