The other day I was watching TV and out of the clear blue sky the word “Quoin” came to mind. Boy, that was a blast from the past!

50 years ago I had my first few jobs connected to the printing industry. Mostly I did small job offset printing but I had some experience with letterpresses too and a quoin is a tool used to “lock up” all the movable type that made up a paragraph or a story before printing.

Back in the day, everything printed had to be “composed” by hand taking on piece of lead with the letter “e” on it and putting it in a tray, then a piece with the letter “v” on it and putting that in the tray next to the “e”, then a piece with the letter “e” on it, then the letter “r”, then the letter “y” and when you had done this with an entire word, and then paragraph, and then story all those little fiddly pieces needed to be locked into a matrix so that the entire story could be mounted on a movable table without all the little bits falling out.

It’s a strange way that our brains work, randomly conjuring bits of history that we’d thought we’d forgotten and reminding us of days gone bye. Or perhaps not days gone by — perhaps an idea of how something could be done in the future? We don’t understand much about the process of thoughts. Oh, we know a lot about the chemistry of the brain but how to go from chemistry that tells us the mechanics of thought to understanding what it is that gives a person’s brain the “idea” to think about a letterpress key instead of what to eat for dinner — that is magic! That is what makes us human.

Scientists and programmers can talk all they want about Artificial Intelligence — but artificial intelligence is really just about finding similarities that already exist in the known universe. I doubt that we’ll find an artificial intelligence computer — unplugged from the world of the InterWebs — that just decides on it’s own whether to think about flowers or to think about compose a poem because it was inspired by the sight of a beautiful man/woman or to decide that today is the day to solve a quadratic equation.

Somewhere there’s a spark that makes a decision from nothing. I wasn’t thinking about anything having to do with words when the word “quoin” popped into my brain. It had been so long since I’d used that word that I had to use the dictionary to make sure I was spelling it right and that it was even the word my brain thought it to be.

We live in a strange and magical world. It’s easy for the rational ones among us to poke fun at God, at creation, at souls and death and afterlife. But there are equally valid questions to be asked, like where did we get any idea that there wasn’t a god, that everything didn’t just happen, that everything ends when we die? The ability to conceive a concept — from nothing is a problem. No matter how much we study the functioning of the brain I doubt humans will ever be able to define just how it is that we think. Not the chemistry, but the magic. The momentary act of creating a thought out of nothing.