The Ghost Institute

The Ghost Institute is not a thing but a tale, a story, a bit of a Faustian revision about a man who sought to translate into a machine not the contents but the action of his mind. He did not seek to replicate the processes of his mind, his goal was not to create a machine that thought as he did. His goal was not to create a machine that thought at all.

In his mind the man sensed something that was not any of the things he had been told a mind could contain. It was not thoughts, for he sensed that thoughts were nothing more than the waves upon the sea. It was not sensation, for these were the shores the waves crashed against, retreated, and returned redoubled to crash again. He sensed that something was occurring of which the waves, the sea, the shores were only a part, or a reflection. The action of his mind existed in spite and above and in between everything that identified his mind. He found that he did not identify with this thing at all, He thought of himself of his senses and his thoughts, the meat of his brain whose weight he could feel balancing atop his neck. And he sought to expunge it from himself.

He sought hard and searched his mind for the hints of its existence. When he felt that he was close to it he tried to capture the action in files that seemed to him to be small and incomprehensible windows into something completely seperate for anything he had ever experienced, and he felt that he must be near to an answer. He noted that the feeling seemed to travel forward, so he designed the files to travel forward. He saw that the feeling travelled backwards, and so he designed the files to travel backwards. He heard it vibrating to either side, and so he designed the files to travel from side to side. Where it felt random he wrote the files random and where it seemed to follow a course he wrote the files along a course.

The files of the Ghost Institute remain, somewhere in cold storage. The man could see no entrance into what he felt from the outside, and so he created no portal of entry. The man could find no exit from what he felt, and so he created no escape hatch from the labyrinth of the files. He himself had nothing to do with the files: he said they had turned out to be nothing more than more of what he was trying to get away from in the first place.

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