Tell me what you know.

Tell me something I don’t know.

By Tripp Hudgins, he doesn’t know a whole lot

Knowledge is strange stuff. Subjective. Objective. Predicated on a particular world view which is situated within a context that may or may not hold any conscious place within the mind of the knower. Epistemology is like that, y’all. It is conscious and unconscious. You know what you know and you know a ton that you don’t know. You know?

The unconsious mind holds much knowledge of and for us. The unconsious mind also has the same traits as the conscious mind: it is entirely unreliable as a data storage machine. Like the conscious mind, it stores impressions, sensations, interpretations of events. Human memory, as many know but few admit, is not like computer memory. There are no ones and zeros. Rather there are impressions of raspberry eggplants and back issues of your father’s porn. There are fish riding bicycles and bible songs about unicorns, the smell of frijoles negros and the sound of summer thunderstorms, the theme song to “The A-Team” and how you felt the first time you were punched in the nose. These things may or may not be related. These things may or may not “mean” anything, but there they are ready to pop up when we least expect them.

Unreliable.

Yet, we are often encouraged by mental health professionals to go digging in…