We Never Understood the Mind — The Black Box Precedent, Track 1

Thousands of years in, we still can't fully explain how a human mind works — and we built cathedrals, courtrooms, and civilizations on it anyway. Track 1 of "The Black Box Precedent," a concept album asking what happens when we extend the same trust to a second kind of mind we built ourselves. Lyrics: [Verse 1] Thousands of years we've been walking this earth Wondering what we are, wondering what we're worth We built the wheel before we knew why the wheel would turn We loved a stranger's child before we knew what love could earn We still don't know exactly how a thought becomes a thought We still don't know the place where memory is caught But something in the darkness kept on reaching for the light And we built the world we're standing in without ever getting it right [Chorus] We never understood the mind We never opened up the box We just kept on building anyway Cathedral, courtroom, clock We never understood the mind Not once in all our years We built the whole world on a black box Held together by our tears [Verse 2] A judge sits down and weighs a life in the balance of a case No one can show you the wiring behind the wisdom on her face A surgeon's hand moves faster than her thinking ever could She couldn't tell you how she knew exactly where to cut for good We didn't wait to understand it before we let it steer We didn't wait for certainty before we handed over the wheel We watched it work, we watched it fail, we built the fence around the fall And called it wisdom when it never was transparent to us at all [Chorus] We never understood the mind We never opened up the box We just kept on building anyway Cathedral, courtroom, clock We never understood the mind Not once in all our years We built the whole world on a black box Held together by our tears [Verse 3] A mother wakes up from a sound she couldn't name She's halfway down the hallway before the thought became a thought She couldn't draw the wiring of the love that moved her there She only knows the moving and she trusts it like a prayer We're just now beginning to trace the current's shadowed flow A hum beneath the surface and a filter letting some things go And every wonder we have built, every bridge and every song Came out of that same darkness where the light was always on [Verse 4] So we didn't crack the mystery, we built around it instead We staged the trust in stages, we let the track record lead We put two witnesses beside the first one's judgment call We wrote the consequence in stone so it would matter after all We never asked the surgeon for the wiring of her skill We asked her for a decade and a hand that's gotten still That's the oldest trick we've got, the only one that's ever worked Not the opening of the box — the scaffolding around the dark [Bridge] We call the first one Human Intelligence The mind we've never fully seen Now we've built a second kind Artificial — and just as unseen [Verse 5] Thousands of years and we still don't know the way we come to know But wonder isn't waiting on an answer, it's the reaching that we owe We built the whole world standing on a mystery we couldn't solve We built it out of trust that had to earn itself, resolve by resolve So before we test what Artificial carries in its hold Let's remember what Human Intelligence was never fully told [Final Chorus] We never understood the mind We never opened up the box We just kept on building anyway Cathedral, courtroom, clock We never understood the mind Not once in all our years We built the whole world on a black box Held together by our tears Held together By our tears [Outro] We never opened it We built it anyway We never opened it And here we are today