Tabula Rasa

Early Morning Sprinkles

For a moment, picture your mind as a blank slate just waiting to be coded. Is it possible to re-write the firmware that is your minds operating system? Is your firmware open source code or a closed system? What a captivating concept!

Today the social and psychological sciences tend to take the view that Human Beings are 'formed' socially and psychologically by nature as well as by nurture and that there are inherited traits that society can build on and to some extent modify.

Early in the seventeenth century, it was statesman-philosopher Francis Bacon who, first strongly established the claims of Empiricism - the reliance on the experience of the senses - over those speculation or deduction in the pursuit of knowledge.

John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding restated the importance of the experience of the senses over speculation and sets out the case that the human mind at birth is a complete, but receptive, blank slate (tabula ras) upon which experience imprints knowledge.

Locke argued that people acquire knowledge from the information about the objects in the world that our senses bring. People begin with simple ideas and then combine them into more complex ones.

Is this what determines the built-in software that is our mind (our firmware)? Or as individuals do we have the free will to program our software from experience? Let’s imagine the mind as a white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. Locke did not believe in powers of intuition or that the human mind is invested with innate conceptions. In his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1697), Locke recommended practical learning to prepare people to manage their social, economic, and political affairs efficiently. He believed that a sound education began in early childhood and insisted that the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic be gradual and cumulative.

What about today? Is the education we receive passive? We live in a society exposed to more information in a single day than our forefathers were exposed to their entire lives. What are the affects of Television, the Internet, radio, blogs, social media, text messages, and the plethora of information allowed to fill that Tabula rasa?

Through our free will are we allowing our blank slate to be filled with ideas that build strength of character, values, information that teach us to grow and develop as an individual? To build character, integrity, and a strong work ethic, (useful information)? Or do we passively allow junk to filter into our minds to fill the slate with garbage?

These are questions to explore this year. If you have thoughts or opinions please post them here and lets’ explore them together.

Comments

The Language of Home: Building a Sanctuary

This episode is for anyone trying to find their footing in a new place—whether it’s a new city, a new job, or a new country. The light in Florence, Italy, has a way of making everything feel like a Renaissance painting—the golden hue on the stone, the steady rhythm of the Arno River, and the feeling that you are walking through a history much larger than yourself. I was there to give a presentation to a class of Gemology students. I was prepared to discuss color grading and refractive indices, but not to be outed as a language tutor . Feeling very much like a guest in a storied land, a hand shot up enthusiastically. "You’re the guy on the podcasts," the young woman said, her eyes bright with recognition. "You’re the one teaching us English." I laughed nervously. If you know my flat Midwestern accent, you know the irony here. I am hardly an Oxford professor. But later, as I wandered the cobblestone streets beneath the shadow of the Duomo, the humor faded into a powe...

Practiced Hands: The 50-Year Warranty

What Doc Burch Taught Me About Staying Active. We talk a lot about "life hacks" these days, but most of them don’t have a very long shelf life. Usually, they’re forgotten by the next app update. But back in 1972, I received a piece of advice that came with a 50-year warranty. It’s the reason I’m still on my bike today, still chasing a golf ball around Carlsbad, and still—mostly—in one piece. The Kick That Changed Everything It started with a literal kick in the pants. A kid at school in Cuba, Illinois, was joking around and caught me just right. By the next morning, my lower back was screaming. My mom didn’t reach for the Tylenol; she reached for her car keys. "Let’s go see Doc Burch," she said. "He’ll fix you right up." Harry E. Burch, D.C., was a fixture in Lewistown. He’d graduated from Palmer College in ’59 and had been our family’s go-to for years. He was a man of practiced hands and steady eyes. After a quick exam and an X-ray, the mood in the room s...

On the Fly–Taking Flight

In this special 500th episode, On the Fly is moving to a new home. Here’s why—and what’s staying the same. For a very long time (since April 2012), On the Fly has lived on Blogger . Blogger has been a reliable host—dependable, quiet, and never complaining when I arrived late with another half-baked idea, a guitar riff, or a story that needed a little air. It faithfully archived my thoughts, my music, and more than a decade of curiosity. But the internet has changed. It’s louder now. Flashier. More insistent. Every thought is nudged to perform. Every sentence wants to be optimized, monetized, or interrupted by something that really wants your attention right this second. I’ve been craving the opposite. So today, On the Fly is moving to Substack . If you’ve been with me for a while, you know my quiet obsession: the A rt of Seeing . I’m interested in the moments we rush past—the Aversion Trap, the discipline hidden inside a guitarist’s daily practice, t...

Life OS: Version 2026

In this episode: Why Your Mind Feels Like It Has 47 Tabs Open. Back in 2017, I wrote about how your mind was a blank slate at birth. A Tabula Rasa . Clean. Empty. Ready for some elegant code. Bless my 2017 heart. But in 2026, that “blank slate” looks more like a cluttered desktop. Forty-seven open tabs. A “Storage Full” warning. A cooling fan that’s screaming for mercy. If our minds are computers—and I’m convinced they are—most of us are running cutting-edge, high-demand software on hardware that’s still trying to process a resentment from 2004. So . . . let’s update the experiment. This isn’t about reinventing your life. It’s about fine-tuning your firmware—without crashing the system. The Legacy Code (Or: Why You’re Still Like This) We all run on firmware: low-level code installed early and rarely questioned. The Good Stuff: Breathing? Big fan. The Buggy Stuff: Ancient survival logic from ancestors who assumed every unfamiliar sound meant “ Run or Die. ” That same code now trea...

On The Fly

Search This Blog