My idea that my body is a network in the same sense that a computer is a network is a thought experience I’ve transcribed here, leaving evidence. Your thought, reading this, is your own, and if you talk about it then that conversation becomes another part of my ideaworld’s life as it extends beyond me.

This idea is a metaphor: a mechanism (there’s another metaphor) made up of language (a good system, a useful set of networking protocols) that I use to understand my body’ relationship with the world and other bodies.

This conversational space, this extending beyond of the lifeworld where things like metaphors and protocols circulate is the commons.

This is the commons, this communal idea world , and yet “the commons” itself has its origins in other people’s ideaworlds (Habermas’ for example) extending beyond themselves, and connecting with other people’s thoughts, growing and changing in transaction. Did the commons exist before it was named? Not in the same sense. As we look at it we attempt to aid it, or understand it, or take advantage of it, or we build reflections of it, or shrines to it, or our own, jealously protected, versions.
Because an idea has that tertiary life, outside of the commons, in the mind and lifeworld of the you who hears it, and because we are afraid of what others might make of or with our ideas, the distortions that might ensue and hurt the world and maybe even be blamed on us, we want to control their release. -