---
title: "Try This at Home"
subtitle: "On mugs, headaches, and who wrote this paragraph"
author: "Cobus Kok"
series: "Transpositions, 2 of 3 (beta)"
url: https://www.cobuskok.com/transpositions/try-this-at-home.html
published: 2026-10-04
revised: 2026-10-11
language: en-GB
translation: https://www.cobuskok.com/af/transposisies/probeer-dit-tuis.html
words: 1642
summary: "The question “what is this?” as five short experiments you can try in a few minutes each, with a chair, a mug and, ideally, a mild headache."
---

# Try This at Home

*On mugs, headaches, and who wrote this paragraph*

The first piece in this series was a memo about reality, experience and being. The lot. I wrote it with a team of AI models, which comes back in experiment five.

If an idea only works in one form, I probably don't understand it yet. (That may turn out to cover most of my ideas.)

So here's the same question, “what is this?”, as five small experiments, a few minutes each. You'll need a chair, a mug and, ideally, a mild headache. (Optional.)

## 1. Catch a thought (one minute) {#1-catch-a-thought-one-minute}

*Try this.* Sit somewhere quiet and close your eyes. Then wait for the next thought. When it comes, see if you can catch it being made. Look for the place it came from, and whoever made it.

Maybe nobody. The thought is already there when you notice it, finished, like a parcel left on the step. Often a second thought follows: “I just thought that.” It arrives the same way. Whether anything made the first one is more than you can see.

Last December I was sitting in my living room when my mind served up a question, out of the blue, for no reason I could pinpoint. Am I *like* Charlotte? Charlotte York, from *Sex and the City*. The perfectionist. (Shock and horror. Got a second opinion. I'm *not*. Relief!) Later I remembered that the night before, I'd considered watching *And Just Like That* (a secret guilty pleasure). A possible source, then. I just didn't see anyone make the thought. ([My Savannah](https://aperture.cobuskok.com/p/my-savannah))

The pandan ice cream at Fish Cheeks went the same way. “Sounds great,” I heard myself say. Then, immediately, tightness. Right in my chest. Body heard “pandan” and moved before the committee could convene. So the committee convened afterward. Manufactured regret. ([Ice Cream Sundays](https://aperture.cobuskok.com/p/ice-cream-sundays))

[Georg Christoph Lichtenberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Christoph_Lichtenberg), an eighteenth-century German physicist who kept notebooks he called waste books, had a suggestion. We should say “it thinks”, he wrote, the way we say “it's lightning”. Afrikaans has the grammar ready. *Dit weerlig.* Nobody asks who is doing the weerlig.

## 2. Describe your mug (two minutes) {#2-describe-your-mug-two-minutes}

*Try this.* Pick up whatever is in front of you. A mug, your phone, the remote. Describe it out loud, but only by what it does. It's heavy, which means it pushes back when you lift it. It's warm. It clinks when you tap it with a fingernail. It stops your hand from going through it. Then try to say what it is, apart from all the doing.

You'll probably run out fast. Every word turns back into a verb. “Ceramic” is clay that behaved a certain way in a kiln. “Solid” is your hand getting stopped. Physics goes the same way, just more precisely. Mass is how hard a thing resists a push. Charge is how it pushes and pulls on other charges.

The British philosopher [Bertrand Russell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell) and the British astronomer [Arthur Eddington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington) spotted this in the late 1920s. Eddington opened a book with his two tables. One was the table he wrote at, solid and coloured. The other was the scientific one, mostly empty space with electric charges rushing about. Later in the book he drew the moral. Physics could tell him how those charges behaved, down to the numbers. It had nothing to say about what they were.

One thing didn't need describing, though. The mug's warmth is one more thing it does, to your hand. The feel of it in your palm is something else, and you probably didn't need a word for it.

The memo compares physics to the rules of chess, which say how a knight moves but not whether it is carved from wood or pressed from plastic. It bets that the world is made of something the rules leave out, and that this something is the stuff of experience. The feel in your palm would be a bit of it, known by having it. Running out of words can't settle that. It fits a mug that is nothing but its doings just as well. In the memo I back the view that the pieces are made of something. My own working paper, [Space Immanence](https://www.space-immanence.com), says the opposite.

## 3. Describe a headache two ways (next time your head hurts) {#3-describe-a-headache-two-ways-next-time-your-head-hurts}

*Try this.* Next time you have a mild headache, say to yourself, “This is just a brain state.” Feel the pain for a moment. Then say, “This is the universe doing something.” Feel it again. (No headache? Pinch the back of your hand. Gently.)

Neither sentence changes the pain. The second one might make you feel briefly grand. That passes. I think both are true, though. A brain is made of the same stuff as everything else and runs on the same laws. Whatever it does, the universe is doing.

Around 5am at The Venetian in Las Vegas, back in January, I had a mild headache knocking. In the same dark, words started arriving for a series I'd resolved to let sit. Both were brain states. The headache dulled to background noise. The words became [The Sky Painting Robot](https://aperture.cobuskok.com/p/the-sky-painting-robot).

People who meditate a lot describe states of pure being, vast, with no object and no self. Someone always says it's just a brain state. Sure. So was my headache. Seeing a tree is a brain state too, and it still tells you about the tree. So what does pure being tell you about? Everything, or the brain having it?

## 4. Find your edge (three minutes) {#4-find-your-edge-three-minutes}

One idea in the memo is the one I keep coming back to.

Maybe there is no bottom layer. Clay, molecules, atoms, particles, and then more layers, with no floor. If nothing is smallest, nothing down there can be the base. Maybe the whole is the base instead. (The philosopher [Jonathan Schaffer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Schaffer), of Rutgers University, made a version of this argument in 2010, with more footnotes. It assumes something has to be the base. [Matteo Morganti](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.2009.01197.x), a philosopher of science in Rome, replies that maybe nothing is.) If it is the whole, the memo suggests, minds might be local divisions of it.

The hard question is how one whole divides into separate minds, each with its own private view. (Philosophers call it the decombination problem.) One guess in the memo is that a brain draws its own edges, with its model of itself.

*Try this.* Close your eyes and rest one hand on the table or your knee. Without moving, try to feel exactly where the hand stops. Then listen for the nearest sound. A fridge, traffic, someone's TV. Ask where that sound is: in here, or out there?

The edge may go fuzzy, the hand a warm, tingling patch with no clean outline. The hum and the tingle may seem to show up in the same place, wherever that is. Open your eyes and the edges come straight back, with you neatly inside them. That fits any picture where a brain keeps a map of its body. It doesn't favour mine.

In June I wrote that a whirlpool is something the river is doing, “a shape with an edge and a name. It's completely real. It's just not a separate object you could lift out and hold in your hand.” ([The Empty Chair](https://aperture.cobuskok.com/p/the-empty-chair))

One thing didn't go fuzzy, though. The hum showed up to you, and to nobody else. What loosened was the edge between you and the world, the one meditators report can fall away. The decombination problem is about the other edge, between one mind and another. Even the strongest reports of oneness don't include someone else's thoughts. So a quiet self-model doesn't seem to be what keeps minds private. That's still the hard question for my idea.

## 5. Person or model? (five minutes) {#5-person-or-model-five-minutes}

*Try this.* Find a paragraph where you don't know who wrote it. A product review, a LinkedIn post, a comment under a news story. Decide: person or model? Then jot down what you used to decide.

The answer probably came first, as a feeling. The reasons came after, and they're signs. A typo. A joke that doesn't quite land. An oddly specific detail. Or the opposite: too smooth, too balanced, three of everything. (Oops.)

I wrote the first piece in the first person, with AI models drafting much of it, and it says so at the top. Whether you could tell which sentences a model drafted is this same experiment, run on the series itself.

I was once walking up the jet bridge to a flight to Lisbon when I reset my phone to Lisbon time. It read half past one in the morning, and I felt it, that low-lit hush of the small hours. My body was still on New York time, where it was early evening. The airport was bright and loud. The feeling was keyed to four digits on a screen. ([Half Past One](https://aperture.cobuskok.com/p/half-past-one))

The sense that someone is behind a paragraph works the same way. It's keyed to the signs of a person, and a model trained on people makes those signs fluently. So the feeling can't settle it. The models have a related problem with their own reports. One of them put it plainly: it learned to talk about inner life from people who have one, so it would describe an inner life whether or not there is one.

(This series is written with a team of AI models, so for most paragraphs here the answer to “person or model?” is both.)

## Afterwards {#afterwards}

That's five experiments, and nothing settled. I'd rather hold all of it loosely, the memo included.

If you did all five, your tea is probably cold. Something is still showing up, though. A thought about lunch that nobody ordered.

*This is the second piece in a series that takes one question through several forms.*