Solaris IV

A conceptual artist, or perhaps a neurological scientist, has come up with a new toy where by means of a hat with electrodes you can connect your head to a bowl of a special green liquid containing a special brown blob. The brown blob then takes on life from your subsconscious; pulsing, throbbing and moving around the bowl. The edges of the blob might become frilly in a more or less elaborate way, reminding one of those pictures of fractals.

Some part of your subconscious has been projected into the brown blob.

If you are the right sort of person and you give the thing enough time, you come to be able to control the brown blob, at least up to a point. Apparently it feels very odd to watch some part of yourself swimming around in the green. Can the brown blob take on a life of its own, more or less independent of yourself? Do you get upset if someone switches your blob off?

Maybe, if you are a person with split personality, you can organise things so that one of your personalities swims around in the bowl while another, the conscious one, watches from the side lines.

Given the symmetry of the diagram, who is to say that the brain is in charge, rather than the bowl?

Not sure about the ethics of this sort of thing, this meddling with the unknown. It makes me a little uncomfortable, in the way of but more strongly than those tricks which some conceptual artists play with our vision. Is it wise to be meddling with a brain in such an intimate way? But then again, is it any worse than bathing the brain in strange & unnatural substances - for example nicotine? Or is the brain such a robust & resilient beast that it can just soak it all up?

Reference 1: http://ceeds-project.eu/2014/09/23/solaris-a-magnetic-pool-of-liquid-controlled-by-human-brainwaves/.

Reference 2: I associate to dancing water bowls. See http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/search?q=dancing+water.