tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3804114935312811175.post2093804922337991775..comments2024-01-27T20:32:17.610-05:00Comments on Pinchgut: Oh say can you seeBadgerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11283813317560446754noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3804114935312811175.post-26654572022052940872017-02-10T09:12:03.160-05:002017-02-10T09:12:03.160-05:00When we gaze up into the sky and suddenly see an a...When we gaze up into the sky and suddenly see an aircraft gliding through the atmosphere, we realize immediately that it’s some kind of a metallic vessel that’s probably full of such things as human minds, accompanied by bugs that happened to grab a ride. Maybe there’s even a stowaway crouched inside a corner of the airplane. There could even be such things as mice that are shivering to death, if not already dead. We know nothing whatsoever about the identity of those various creatures. Maybe some of them are Islamic monsters flying back from a terrorist assassination… or maybe they’re flying towards another such event. The aircraft makes no audible sound, and we wouldn’t even normally know it was up there above our heads, except that we happened to look up there by chance. We also happen to glimpse our moon. First of all, are we sure that it’s “our moon” and not simply a disc of reddish dust that happened to be drifting by? Can we see any evidence up there of such things as human minds, creatures of any kind whatsoever? Maybe a former astronaut left some bugs up there on the moon, which scraped off his boots. Do we know whether those bugs might have evolved into a colony? No, we don’t… and nobody’s going to go up there just to find out whether or not a layer of dog shit on the soles of John Glenn’s boots have indeed been transformed into a colony of future moon dogs. Maybe those trillions of apparently “empty” stars in the sky are full of such creatures as humans with minds, bugs, etc. We would never know. The cosmos is like Beyonce’s belly. We suspect that it contains some kind of magic, but we know nothing. And so we ramble on stupidly about things that we can talk about… such as whether or not Beyonce’s baby will be an asshole. In any case, there’s nothing outlandish in what I’ve just been saying. You simply need to have a mind that wastes its time thinking such foolish thoughts, which don’t harm anybody, not even the thinker. But it’s easier, of course, NOT to think such thoughts. That way, you’re a serious member of the Homo sapiens species. But thinking such thoughts won’t drive you crazy. At least I hope not. I’m a scientific philosopher. Incidentally, your friend Ernest has the right, if he reads me (which I hope he does), to say that William has forgotten to take his daily pills (which, of course, exist only in Ernest's imaginative mind). William Skyvingtonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10052367756561555096noreply@blogger.com