mindsets

Remarks by preacher Joseph Frederick Berg, addressed to Joseph Barker:

“My opponent's reasoning reminds me of the heathen, who, being asked on what the world stood, replied, "On a tortoise." But on what does the tortoise stand? "On another tortoise." With Mr. Barker, too, there are tortoises all the way down.”

It sounds absurd, of course, to imagine the world resting on an infinite stack of tortoises. But is it really?

Maybe it's not tortoises all the way down. But it certainly is mindsets all the way down.

Everything we know — or think we know — about the world arises through the mind. Or the brain, if you prefer. It doesn't matter: no one knows what "mind" really is. Or "brain," for that matter. All perception, intuition, thought, and feeling — all of it happens through the mind/brain.

This makes it fundamentally impossible to know what mind or brain actually is, just as an eye can't see itself or a hammer can't strike itself. Likewise, it's impossible to determine whether anything exists "objectively" outside the illusion of this mind/brain.

We don't see the world. We see a world — our world — filtered through a layered complex of mindsets.

If it's mindsets all the way down, then what is truth? Absolute, objective truth becomes impossible — because how could it ever be known without a filter? A belief may be "true" in one mindset and false in another.

Some mindsets are chosen or absorbed consciously, usually because they seem to "fit" with others we already hold. Others operate unconsciously and still exert enormous influence — like the mindset of identity: who we think we are, how we relate to others, our ideological or spiritual frameworks, our myths and meanings.

Deeper still are primitive, embodied patterns: territorial instincts, attraction, survival drives. These mindsets shape bodily experience directly, without narrative.

At the deepest level are the most foundational mindsets: assumptions of objecthood, color, space, causality, selfhood — the metaphysical scaffolding of our experience. These feel self-evident, but they too are mindsets — so deep they go unnoticed.

The more unconscious the mindset, the more we mistake it for reality itself. We no longer see it as a lens — we see through it, unaware it exists.

There is no escape.