How’ve you been? We haven’t chat­ted in a while. What up?

Really? I’m sorry. I fig­ured that you had other peo­ple to hang out with. You totally should have called! I was busy, but I wasn’t that busy, you can always give me a ring, or write.

Well, I guess that’s true, but you’d think that since I’m anthro­po­mor­phiz­ing you in my head, you’d just mag­i­cally acquire the abil­ity to write, speak, and act upon the world. No con­straints, right, what­ever goes? You are, after all, just part of my imagination.

Con­straints? But I thought imag­i­na­tion was all about free­dom. Dreams, you know, fly­ing, falling, super­pow­ers, there are so many things that are pos­si­ble. It seems to me that when we really let our minds be free, we can imag­ine any­thing. Why would my brain limit my imag­ined per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of my blog to com­mu­ni­cat­ing only with me and not with the rest of the world?

Wait: so you’re say­ing that what I think, what I dream, is all just lim­ited to things I already know? But what about learn­ing? I can learn new ideas, acquire new per­spec­tives, and use this new knowl­edge to break con­straints. For exam­ple, today I learned about a whole body of work asso­ci­at­ing pro­noun use in con­ver­sa­tion to per­son­al­ity dis­or­ders. Now, when I reflect on my speech and oth­ers’, I’ll gen­er­ate new per­spec­tives and new ideas about the mean­ing in the words. There are new ideas. There are wheels, there are inter­nets. I fun­da­men­tally dis­agree that every­thing has been dis­cov­ered, every­thing has been invented, that every­thing is just a mashup.

Hm. You have a point. If I imag­ined you actu­ally talk­ing to peo­ple in the world, or even pre­tended that you were a sep­a­rate entity from me, some might call me crazy. But no one would really believe I was crazy unless I acted on this believe. And isn’t it nat­ural to dis­so­ci­ate one’s self from one’s expres­sion of self? Isn’t that a nat­ural part of writ­ing? Unlike speech, I’m cre­at­ing an arti­fact, some­thing that lit­er­ally and phys­i­cally does exist sep­a­rate of me. There­fore it seems per­fectly nat­ural to think of you as sep­a­rate from me because you lit­er­ally are.

No, I’m try­ing to make a point. You can influ­ence the world if you want, because you exist sep­a­rate of me. You may not have a body or a brain, but you have a con­nec­tion to me. You’re like my child. And because of this, every word of you I write and then read causes me to reflect back on my own exis­tence. You have arms and legs, but you can only use them to poke and prod and ping my brain. You may not be able to act on the whole world, but you do have influ­ence on me. See, you’re freer than you think!

That’s true. I guess you’re free, but only on my terms. You’re less like a child and more like a robot. I’ve pre­de­ter­mined your scope of influ­ence. You may lead to unex­pected things, but they only occur within a cer­tain range of pos­si­bil­ity. Of course, a moment ago, you were say­ing I was under the same con­straints, that the scope of my own exis­tence is pre­de­ter­mined by my cre­ators and my world.

Yeah, I’ll have to think about that. I don’t know. You’re pretty cool, blog. We should hang out more.