Willy Wonka is a freak

Willy Wonka is a freak, originally uploaded by ordinary-art.

Integrity

Integrity, originally uploaded by ordinary-art.

Clouds

Clouds, originally uploaded by ordinary-art.

Gecko

lizard, originally uploaded by ordinary-art.

The Aquaduck

The Aquaduck, originally uploaded by ordinary-art.

moar funny pictures

Consciousness.

I went for a walk today, part of my increasing effort to get fit and preferably not die (at all). While I was walking I listened to a podcast. Bless ipods. You can find it here: Thought and Experience . I listened to Daniel Dennett, famous modern philosopher talking about consciousness. Old Daniel says quite a few startling things. I just want to concentrate on one.


You are a 'you', right? You are a self, a unified entity of consciousness. You have a 'stream of consciousness' as exemplified in  'Ulysses' by Joyce. You can contemplate your 'self'. Dennett says that this is not innate but rather produced by human society, almost a loading of software into your pliant young brain. Perhaps this is why hardly anyone can remember their birth and first year. 'You' are just not there yet to organize those memories coherently.


As if that is not enough, Dennett says animals don't have this quality. If we ask what it is it like (as an internal experience) to be a dog, Dennett replies 'What's it like to be a brace of oxen?' We naturally say, well, you can't be a brace of oxen in the same way you can be 'us'. Consider ants. Ant colonies behave in cohesive ways, they work to common goals and son on. Can you imagine 'being' an ant colony? No. Can you imagine being an ant? Dennet says if you can you're mistaken because the brain of an ant is the same kind of entity as the colony in that it serves a purpose but is a competing and cooperating matrix of drives and impulses with no unifying entity present. Maybe, you admit, but surely mammals are more like us and hence have a self. Dennett says the science is against you.


Here is a remarkable experiment. You take a rabbit and cover its left eye and train it to be afraid of a visual stimulus. You then uncover the left eye and and cover the right and expose it to the same stimulus. The rabbit is unmoved! If we ask 'What's it like to be a rabbit?' are we asking about the left-eyed rabbit or the right-eyed one?

captioned trail, originally uploaded by ordinary-art.

Brains

Brains, originally uploaded by ordinary-art.

Silver Splinter

Silver splinter in the sky
Lodges in my still mind's eye
People in that javelin hurled
Fly above the passing world
Looking out they do not see
Rushing on from A to B

Jerusalem

Woke up late this morning
Cloud across the sun
Gathered up my blanket
Waved to everyone
Later on I'm walking
Holding out my thumb
Guy pulls over and says to me
'I'm on the road to Jerusalem'

I ask him why he travels
What he hopes to find
He looks in my direction
And just says 'Never mind'
I thought about a song I knew
I began to hum
There's not a lot to talk about
On the road to Jerusalem

Stop to buy a coffee
Put some petrol in the tank
Bought myself a paper
But it turns out it was blank
It happens when you're led by
The blind and deaf and dumb
Maybe we can learn something
On the road to Jerusalem

There's many miles behind us
And many more to go
The maps we have are useless
There's too much that they don't show
Kerouac lies bleeding
Another highway bum
Used up and defeated
On the road to Jerusalem

There's mountains out before me
Rising from the plain
But they don't get any closer
As we drive on through the rain
I sometimes get the feeling
That we'll drive 'til Kingdom come
And never see another soul
On the road to Jerusalem

Burt Reynolds

Burt Reynolds had a mustache

That he bought for fifty cents,

He fed it beans and turkey

Which is only common sense,

He took all of his clothes off

In a famous centrefold,

Just as well he did it then

'Cause now he's getting old

I think about Burt Reynolds

And the hair beneath his nose

And notice it precedes him

No matter where he goes

So I wonder if the mustache

Is the CAUSE of his success

He wouldn't want to think that's true

Is my educated guess.

Here it comes ...

In recent times our part of the world has had tsunamis, earthquakes and fires. All of these natural tragedies caused loss of life and property.

We are pattern seeking creatures. In our evolutionary past, finding connections and meaning allowed us to predict outcomes and survive where lesser brains would not. We draw inferences and extrapolate and a lot of the time we're right. But we can also be wrong. We can also make connections where there are none. 'Magical' thinking is like this. An athlete succeeds while wearing a particular pair of underpants and suddenly, in his mind, he succeeds BECAUSE of his underpants.

Religion is another area where this kind of faulty connection making happens a lot. Ever since the time of Jesus, fervent believers have been expecting the end of the world. From several things Jesus is reported to have said, even He expected the end of the world SOON. Letter writers in the New Testament expected the end SOON. Every generation thereafter expected the end SOON. There is a particular kind of believer who makes a big deal about signs of the end. Natural disasters always figure highly in this. Hence, lately, we've heard that same talk again (not that it ever goes away) claiming this or that disaster is a sign of the end.

Frankly, this is sloppy thinking. These same people will try to 'prove' God's existence, by using cause and effect. The universe is orderly, therefore, they claim, there had to be a first cause, God. Now I'm not going to show why that argument is false. I think I've already done so elsewhere. What I will say is this: Suddenly, when it suits them, God will provoke 'uncaused' events, like earthquakes to make a theological point. Setting aside the idea that this makes God seem to use a terribly nasty blunt instrument, it also stops the universe being orderly and brings 'magic', action by divine fiat, back on the agenda. You can't have it both ways (although this kind of believer likes to have it all kinds of ways).

A few more things to consider:

1. Is earthquake frequency increasing? Who knows? Records have only been kept for barely a century and certainly not over the whole world with any degree of accuracy. Don't say it if you can't demonstrate it. A century is a piddling little amount in geologic time.

2. Do you REALLY want your God to be responsible for thousands of deaths and injuries just to make an announcement? What would this say about His character?

3. In terms of mathematics, given the number of people who have lived and died on the earth, isn't it statistically unlikely that it just happens to be while YOU'RE alive that the cosmos wraps up?

Give up the lucky underpants.

Dear Editor

Dear Editor,
The people who write to you are mad
Exposing strange conspiracies when there's none that may be had

Dear Editor,
I sense that their mental boats adrift
Lost upon the raging sea of a local seismic rift

Dear Editor,
They prattle on about the weirdest stuff,
Aliens and cosmic rays, and other silly guff

Dear Editor,
I must confess I do not understand
Why you publish all this nonsense from this most peculiar band

Dear Editor,
Why not (and I offer this for free)
Publish more along the lines of sane folk,
more like me