Rarely, but often enough to notice, say once a month, I do typing errors which blows my mind. I probably wouldn't have noticed them if they hadn't come in bursts, but they do. I'm not talking about the typical typing-a-letter-that-is-next-to-the-one-I-was-aiming-for-error. No! This is way stranger.
The latest one has happened two-three times in the last few weeks. I typed n instead of h. No biggie. Last time it was 0 instead of o. Before that it was I instead of l. Before that it was 1 instead of I. If nothing else, that last one is a dead giveaway. Somehow, very rarely, my brain maps my finger movement to the shape of a letter resembling the look of the desired one.
The reason I react to this is dissonance. In my rational thought-process, the letter I'm going to type next maps to what word I'm currently typing. To the muscle-memory of how I've typed the sequence thousands of times before. To how it sounds. Possibly to when I learned to spell the word in school. The idea that the shape somehow takes precedence seems ridiculous to me. Nonetheless it still does at rare occasions. An anomaly.
Would a machine, albeit a meat machine, make such errors? Sure. Would it react to those kinds of errors with some measure of astonishment? Doubt it. To me, this example shows there is an observer, a me, behind the meat.
There are so many things in our society that takes for granted that we are not just machines, products of our past, destined to do whatever we are genetically and environmentally programmed for. The hole idea of the law makes no sense what so ever if humans are meat machines, without any real control of what they're going to do. How can you convict a murderer if he doesn't have a will of his own? Still, this mad idea prevails in science, where consciousness is considered an epiphenomenon of neurons firing in the brain. Little by little, I think they're losing the war. Even to small things like a minor error in brain.
