Friday, May 13, 2011
Trickster gods and breakfast cereal
The Trix Rabbit is probably the most striking example of a cereal trickster who closely follows the mythic conventions of the North American tricksters in particular. The plot of his 30-second tales follows a mind-numbingly predictable sequence. The Rabbit observes some kids eating Trix cereal, and decides to disguise himself in order to get some too. At first his plan appears to succeed, but then his manic enthusiasm for the fruit-flavor properties of the cereal cause him to convulse in such a way that his disguise is thrown off and the trick revealed. The kids take the cereal away from him and pronounce the ritual condemnation mantra: “Silly Rabbit. Trix are for kids.”
In his basic form, the Trix Rabbit resembles mythical trickster figures in that he is an anthropomorphized animal, like the hare trickster Wakjunkaga. He exhibits the insatiable hunger typical of Wakjunkaga, but not for foods typically associated with rabbits. He desires only the Trix brand breakfast cereal, and is willing to cheat and deceive in order to get it. In the early days of Trix, the variations on the specific disguise that the Rabbit adopted were still closely identified with the plot premise: He was attempting to appear as something other than a rabbit, so a little old lady or astronaut disguise would do. In more recent years the disguises have begun to take on the form of whatever the advertisers perceive as popular with kids at the time, so in the 1980s the Rabbit disguised himself as a breakdancer, and, most recently, a karaoke singer. In any case, the Rabbit is using these disguises, to appear more human than rabbit, which emphasizes the way in which the Trix Rabbit most closely corresponds to the archetypal Radin/Jung trickster.
Source: Thomas Green, “Tricksters and the Marketing of Breakfast Cereals,” J. of Popular Culture 40/1 (2007): 49-68 (doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00353.x).
In his basic form, the Trix Rabbit resembles mythical trickster figures in that he is an anthropomorphized animal, like the hare trickster Wakjunkaga. He exhibits the insatiable hunger typical of Wakjunkaga, but not for foods typically associated with rabbits. He desires only the Trix brand breakfast cereal, and is willing to cheat and deceive in order to get it. In the early days of Trix, the variations on the specific disguise that the Rabbit adopted were still closely identified with the plot premise: He was attempting to appear as something other than a rabbit, so a little old lady or astronaut disguise would do. In more recent years the disguises have begun to take on the form of whatever the advertisers perceive as popular with kids at the time, so in the 1980s the Rabbit disguised himself as a breakdancer, and, most recently, a karaoke singer. In any case, the Rabbit is using these disguises, to appear more human than rabbit, which emphasizes the way in which the Trix Rabbit most closely corresponds to the archetypal Radin/Jung trickster.
Source: Thomas Green, “Tricksters and the Marketing of Breakfast Cereals,” J. of Popular Culture 40/1 (2007): 49-68 (doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00353.x).
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
And the Angel Spake...
(From http://www.marriedtothesea.com/archives/2010/Jan/)
Also, I start my new job Monday.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Anti-Dualism Stories Are the Best
Raymond Smullyan: An Unfortunate Dualist
Once upon a time there was a dualist. He believed that mind and matter are separate substances. Just how they interacted he did not pretend to know--this was one of the "mysteries" of life. But he was sure they were quite separate substances.
This dualist, unfortunately, led an unbearably painful life--not because of his philosophical beliefs, but for quite different reasons. And he had excellent empirical evidence that no respite was in sight for the rest of his life. He longed for nothing more than to die. But he was deterred from suicide by such reasons as: 1)he did not want to hurt other people by his death; 2)he was afraid suicide might be morally wrong; 3)he was afraid there might be an afterlife, and he did not want to risk the possibility of eternal punishment. So our poor dualist was quite desperate.
Then he came upon the discovery of the miracle drug! Its effect on the taker was to annihilate the soul or mind entirely but to leave the body functioning exactly as before. Absolutely no observable change came over the taker; the body continued to act just as if it still had a soul. Not the closest friend or observer could possibly know that the taker had taken the drug, unless the taker informed them.
...our duelist was, of course, delighted! Now he could annihilate himself (his soul, that is) in a way not subject to any of the foregoing objections. And so, for the first time in years, he went to bed with a light heart, saying: "Tomorrow morning I will go down to the drugstore and get the drug. My days of suffering are over at last!" With these thoughts, he fell peacefully asleep.
Now at this point a curious thing happened. A friend of the dualist who knew about this drug, and who knew of the sufferings of the dualist, decided to put him out of his misery. So in the middle of the night, while the dualist was fast asleep, the friend stole quietly into the house and injected the drug into his veins. The next morning the body of the dualist awoke--without any soul indeed--and the first thing it did was go to the drugstore to get the drug. He took it home and, before taking it, said, "Now I shall be released." So he took it and then waited the time interval in which it was supposed to work. At the end of the interval he angrily exclaimed: "Damn it, this stuff hasn't helped at all! I still obviously have a soul and am suffering as much as ever!"
---
Excerpted fairly heavily, because I like to leave out the little snippy editorial comments that don't add to the idea that something is pretty wrong with dualism.
Once upon a time there was a dualist. He believed that mind and matter are separate substances. Just how they interacted he did not pretend to know--this was one of the "mysteries" of life. But he was sure they were quite separate substances.
This dualist, unfortunately, led an unbearably painful life--not because of his philosophical beliefs, but for quite different reasons. And he had excellent empirical evidence that no respite was in sight for the rest of his life. He longed for nothing more than to die. But he was deterred from suicide by such reasons as: 1)he did not want to hurt other people by his death; 2)he was afraid suicide might be morally wrong; 3)he was afraid there might be an afterlife, and he did not want to risk the possibility of eternal punishment. So our poor dualist was quite desperate.
Then he came upon the discovery of the miracle drug! Its effect on the taker was to annihilate the soul or mind entirely but to leave the body functioning exactly as before. Absolutely no observable change came over the taker; the body continued to act just as if it still had a soul. Not the closest friend or observer could possibly know that the taker had taken the drug, unless the taker informed them.
...our duelist was, of course, delighted! Now he could annihilate himself (his soul, that is) in a way not subject to any of the foregoing objections. And so, for the first time in years, he went to bed with a light heart, saying: "Tomorrow morning I will go down to the drugstore and get the drug. My days of suffering are over at last!" With these thoughts, he fell peacefully asleep.
Now at this point a curious thing happened. A friend of the dualist who knew about this drug, and who knew of the sufferings of the dualist, decided to put him out of his misery. So in the middle of the night, while the dualist was fast asleep, the friend stole quietly into the house and injected the drug into his veins. The next morning the body of the dualist awoke--without any soul indeed--and the first thing it did was go to the drugstore to get the drug. He took it home and, before taking it, said, "Now I shall be released." So he took it and then waited the time interval in which it was supposed to work. At the end of the interval he angrily exclaimed: "Damn it, this stuff hasn't helped at all! I still obviously have a soul and am suffering as much as ever!"
---
Excerpted fairly heavily, because I like to leave out the little snippy editorial comments that don't add to the idea that something is pretty wrong with dualism.
Monday, May 2, 2011
The Soul of the Mark III Beast
”Anatol’s attitude is straightforward enough,” Hunt said. “He considers biological life as a complex form of machinery.”
She shrugged, but not indifferently. “I admit being fascinated by the man, but I can’t accept that philosophy.”
“Think about it.” Hunt suggested. “You know that according to neoevolution theory, animal bodies are formed by a completely mechanistic process. Each cell is a microscopic machine, a tiny component part integrated into a larger, more complex device.”
Dirksen shook her head. “But animal and human bodies are more than machines. The reproductive act itself makes them different.”
“Why,” Hunt asked, “is it so wonderful that a biological machine should beget another biological machine? It requires no more creative thought for a female mammal to conceive and give birth than for an automatic mill to spew forth engine blocks.”
Dirksen’s eyes flashed “Do you think the automatic mill feels anything when it gives birth?” she challenged.
“Its metal is severely stressed, and eventually the mill wears out.”
“I don’t think that’s what I mean by ‘feeling.’”
“Nor I,” hunt agreed. “But it isn’t always easy to know who or what
Excerpt from The Soul of Anna Klane by Terrel Miedaner. Copyright © 1977 by the Church of Physical Theology, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Coward, Mc Cann & Geoghegan , Inc.
has feelings. On the farm where I was raised, wee had a brood sow with an unfortunate tendency to crush most of her offspring to death – accidentally, I imagine. Then she ate her children’s corpses. Would you say she had maternal feelings?”
“I’m not talking about pigs!
“We could talk about humans in the same breath. Would you care to estmate how many newborn babies drown in toilets?”
Dirksen was too appalled to speak.
After some silence Hunt continued. “What you see there in Klane as preoccupation with machinery is just a different perspective. Machines are yet another life form to him, a form he himself can create from plastic and metal. And he is honest enough to regard himself as a machine.”
“A machine begetting machines,” Dirksen quipped. “Next thing you’ll be calling him a mother!”
“No.” Hunt said. “He’s an engineer. And however crude an engineered machine is in comparison with the human body, it represents a higher act than simple biological reproduction, for it is ate least the result of a thought process.”
“I ought to know better than to argue with a lawyer,” she conceded, still upset. “But I just do not relate to machines! Emotionally speaking, there is a difference between the way we treat animals and the way we treat machines that defies logical explanation. I mean, I can break a machine and it really doesn’t bother me, but I cannot kill an animal.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“Sort of,” Dirksen recalled. “The apartment I shared at college was infested with mice, so I set a trap. But when I finally caught one, I couldn’t empty the trap – the poor dead thing looke so hurt and harmless. So I buried it in the backyard, trap and all, and decided that living with mice was far more pleasant than killing them.”
“Yet you do eat meat,” Hunt pointed out. “So your aversion isn’t so much to killing per se as it is to doing it yourself.”
“Look, “ she said, irritated. “That argument misses a point about basic respect for life. We have something in common with animals. You do see that, don’t you?”
“Klane has a theory that you might find interesting,” Hunt persisted. “He would say that real or imagined biological kinship has nothing to do with your ‘respect for life.’ In actual fact, you don’t like to kill simply because the animal resists death. It cries, struggles, or looks sad – it pleads with you not to destroy it. And it is your mind, by the way, not your biological body, that hears an animal’s plea.”
She looked at him, unconvinced.
Hunt laid some money on the table, pushed back his chair. “Come with me.”
A half hour later Dirksen found herself entering Klane’s house in the company of his attorney, for whose car the entrance gate had automatically moved aside, and at whose touch the keyless front door had servoed immediately open.
She followed him to the basement laboratory, where Hunt opened one of several dozen cabinets and brought out something that looked like a large aluminium beetle with small, coloured indicator lamps and a few mechanical protrusions about it’s smooth surface. He turned it over, showing Dirksen three rubber wheels on its underside. Stenciled on the flat metal base were the words MARK III BEAST.
Hunt set the device on the tiled floor, simultaneously toggling a tiny switch on its underbelly. With a quiet humming sound the toy began to move in a searching pattern back and forth across the floor. It sopped momentarily, then headed for an electrical outlet near the base of one large chassis. It paused before the socket, extended a pair of prongs from an opening in its metallic body, probed and entered the energy source. Some of the lights on its body began to glow green, and a noise almost like the purring of a cat emanated from within.
Dirsen regarded the contrivance with interest. “A mechanical animal. It’s cute – but what’s the point of it?”
Hunt reached over to a nearby bench for a hammer and held it out to her. “I’d like you to kill it.”
“What are you talking about?” Dirksen said in mild alarm. “Why should I kill . . . break that . . . that machine?” She backed away, refusing to take the weapon.
“Just as a experiment.” Hunt replied. “I tried it myself some years ago at Klane’s behest and found it instructiver.”
“What did you learn?”
“Something about the meaning of life and death.”
Dirksen stood looking at Hunt suspiciously.
“The ‘beast’ has no defenses that can hurt you,” he assured her. “Just don’t crash into anything while you’re chasing it.” He held out the hammer.
She stepped tentatively forward, took the weapon, looked sidelong at the peculiar machine purring deeply as it sucked away at the electrical current. She walked toward it, stooped down and raised the hammer. “But . . . it’s eating,” she said, turning to Hunt.
He laughed. Angrily she took the hammer in both hands, raised it, and brought it down hard.
But with a shrill noise like a cry of fright the beats had pulled its mandibles from the socket and moved suddenly backwards. The hammer cracked solidly into the floor, on a section of tile that had been obscured from view by the body of the machine. The tile was pockmarked with indentations.
Dirksen looked up. Hunt was laughing. The machine had moved two metres away and stopped, eyeing her. No, she decided, it was not eyeing her. Irritated with herself, Dirksen grasped her weapon and stalked cautiously forward. The machine backed away, a pair of red lights on the front of it glowing alternately brighter and dimmer at the approximate alphawave frequency of the human brain. Dirksen lunged, swung the hammer, and missed –
Ten minutes later she returned, flushed and gasping, to Hunt. Her body hurt in several places where she had bruised it on jutting machinery, and her head ached where she had cracked it under a workbench. “It’s like trying to catch a big rat! When do its stupid batteries run down anyway?”
Hunt checked his watch. “I’d guess it has another half hour, provided you keep it busy. He pointed beneath a workbench, where the beast had found another electrical outlet. “But there is an easier way to get it.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Put the hammer down and pick it up.”
“Just . . . pick it up?”
“yes. It only recognizes danger from its own kind – in this case the steel hammer head. It’s programmed to trust unarmed protoplasm.”
She laid the hammer on a bench, walked slowly over to the machine. It didn’t move. The purring had stopped, pale amber lights glowed softly. Dirksen reached down and touched it tentatively, felt a slight vibration. She gingerly picked it up with both hands. Its lights changed to a clear green colour, and through the comfortable warmth of its metal skin she could feel the smooth purr of motors.
“So now what do I do with the stupid thing?” she asked irritably.
“Oh, lay him on his back on the workbench. He’ll be quite helpless in that position, and you can bash him at your leisure .”
“I can do without the anthropomorphisms,” Dirksen muttered as she followed Hunt’s suggestion, determined to see this thing through.
As she inverted the machine and set it down, its lights changed back to red. Wheels spun briefly, stopped. Dirksen picked up the hammer again, quickly raised it and brought it down in a smooth arc which struck the helpless machine off-centre, damaging one of its wheels and flipping it right side up again. There was a metallic scraping sound from the damaged wheel, and the beast began spinning in a fitful circle. A snapping sound came from its underbelly, the machine stopped, lights glowing dolefully.
Dirksen pressed her lips together tightly, raised the hammer for as final blow. But as she started to bring it down there came from within the beast a sound, a soft crying that rose and fell like a baby whimpering. Dirksen dropped the hammer and stepped back, her eye son the blood-red pool of lubricating fluid forming on the table beneath the creature. She looked at Hunt, horrified. “It’s . . .it’s – “
“Just a machine,” Hunt said, seriously now, “Like these, its evolutionary predecessors.” His gesturing hands took in the array of machinery in the workshop around them. Mute and menacing watchers. “But unlike them it can sense its own doom and cry out for succour.”
“Turn it off,” she said flatly.
Hunt walked to the table, tried to move its tint power switch. “You’ve jammed it, I’m afraid.” He picked up the hammer from the floor where it had fallen. ‘Care to administer the death blow?”
She stepped back, shaking her head as Hunt raised the hammer. “Couldn’t you fix – “
There was a brief metallic crunch. She winced, turned her head. The wailing had stopped, and they returned upstairs in silence.
She shrugged, but not indifferently. “I admit being fascinated by the man, but I can’t accept that philosophy.”
“Think about it.” Hunt suggested. “You know that according to neoevolution theory, animal bodies are formed by a completely mechanistic process. Each cell is a microscopic machine, a tiny component part integrated into a larger, more complex device.”
Dirksen shook her head. “But animal and human bodies are more than machines. The reproductive act itself makes them different.”
“Why,” Hunt asked, “is it so wonderful that a biological machine should beget another biological machine? It requires no more creative thought for a female mammal to conceive and give birth than for an automatic mill to spew forth engine blocks.”
Dirksen’s eyes flashed “Do you think the automatic mill feels anything when it gives birth?” she challenged.
“Its metal is severely stressed, and eventually the mill wears out.”
“I don’t think that’s what I mean by ‘feeling.’”
“Nor I,” hunt agreed. “But it isn’t always easy to know who or what
Excerpt from The Soul of Anna Klane by Terrel Miedaner. Copyright © 1977 by the Church of Physical Theology, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Coward, Mc Cann & Geoghegan , Inc.
has feelings. On the farm where I was raised, wee had a brood sow with an unfortunate tendency to crush most of her offspring to death – accidentally, I imagine. Then she ate her children’s corpses. Would you say she had maternal feelings?”
“I’m not talking about pigs!
“We could talk about humans in the same breath. Would you care to estmate how many newborn babies drown in toilets?”
Dirksen was too appalled to speak.
After some silence Hunt continued. “What you see there in Klane as preoccupation with machinery is just a different perspective. Machines are yet another life form to him, a form he himself can create from plastic and metal. And he is honest enough to regard himself as a machine.”
“A machine begetting machines,” Dirksen quipped. “Next thing you’ll be calling him a mother!”
“No.” Hunt said. “He’s an engineer. And however crude an engineered machine is in comparison with the human body, it represents a higher act than simple biological reproduction, for it is ate least the result of a thought process.”
“I ought to know better than to argue with a lawyer,” she conceded, still upset. “But I just do not relate to machines! Emotionally speaking, there is a difference between the way we treat animals and the way we treat machines that defies logical explanation. I mean, I can break a machine and it really doesn’t bother me, but I cannot kill an animal.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“Sort of,” Dirksen recalled. “The apartment I shared at college was infested with mice, so I set a trap. But when I finally caught one, I couldn’t empty the trap – the poor dead thing looke so hurt and harmless. So I buried it in the backyard, trap and all, and decided that living with mice was far more pleasant than killing them.”
“Yet you do eat meat,” Hunt pointed out. “So your aversion isn’t so much to killing per se as it is to doing it yourself.”
“Look, “ she said, irritated. “That argument misses a point about basic respect for life. We have something in common with animals. You do see that, don’t you?”
“Klane has a theory that you might find interesting,” Hunt persisted. “He would say that real or imagined biological kinship has nothing to do with your ‘respect for life.’ In actual fact, you don’t like to kill simply because the animal resists death. It cries, struggles, or looks sad – it pleads with you not to destroy it. And it is your mind, by the way, not your biological body, that hears an animal’s plea.”
She looked at him, unconvinced.
Hunt laid some money on the table, pushed back his chair. “Come with me.”
A half hour later Dirksen found herself entering Klane’s house in the company of his attorney, for whose car the entrance gate had automatically moved aside, and at whose touch the keyless front door had servoed immediately open.
She followed him to the basement laboratory, where Hunt opened one of several dozen cabinets and brought out something that looked like a large aluminium beetle with small, coloured indicator lamps and a few mechanical protrusions about it’s smooth surface. He turned it over, showing Dirksen three rubber wheels on its underside. Stenciled on the flat metal base were the words MARK III BEAST.
Hunt set the device on the tiled floor, simultaneously toggling a tiny switch on its underbelly. With a quiet humming sound the toy began to move in a searching pattern back and forth across the floor. It sopped momentarily, then headed for an electrical outlet near the base of one large chassis. It paused before the socket, extended a pair of prongs from an opening in its metallic body, probed and entered the energy source. Some of the lights on its body began to glow green, and a noise almost like the purring of a cat emanated from within.
Dirsen regarded the contrivance with interest. “A mechanical animal. It’s cute – but what’s the point of it?”
Hunt reached over to a nearby bench for a hammer and held it out to her. “I’d like you to kill it.”
“What are you talking about?” Dirksen said in mild alarm. “Why should I kill . . . break that . . . that machine?” She backed away, refusing to take the weapon.
“Just as a experiment.” Hunt replied. “I tried it myself some years ago at Klane’s behest and found it instructiver.”
“What did you learn?”
“Something about the meaning of life and death.”
Dirksen stood looking at Hunt suspiciously.
“The ‘beast’ has no defenses that can hurt you,” he assured her. “Just don’t crash into anything while you’re chasing it.” He held out the hammer.
She stepped tentatively forward, took the weapon, looked sidelong at the peculiar machine purring deeply as it sucked away at the electrical current. She walked toward it, stooped down and raised the hammer. “But . . . it’s eating,” she said, turning to Hunt.
He laughed. Angrily she took the hammer in both hands, raised it, and brought it down hard.
But with a shrill noise like a cry of fright the beats had pulled its mandibles from the socket and moved suddenly backwards. The hammer cracked solidly into the floor, on a section of tile that had been obscured from view by the body of the machine. The tile was pockmarked with indentations.
Dirksen looked up. Hunt was laughing. The machine had moved two metres away and stopped, eyeing her. No, she decided, it was not eyeing her. Irritated with herself, Dirksen grasped her weapon and stalked cautiously forward. The machine backed away, a pair of red lights on the front of it glowing alternately brighter and dimmer at the approximate alphawave frequency of the human brain. Dirksen lunged, swung the hammer, and missed –
Ten minutes later she returned, flushed and gasping, to Hunt. Her body hurt in several places where she had bruised it on jutting machinery, and her head ached where she had cracked it under a workbench. “It’s like trying to catch a big rat! When do its stupid batteries run down anyway?”
Hunt checked his watch. “I’d guess it has another half hour, provided you keep it busy. He pointed beneath a workbench, where the beast had found another electrical outlet. “But there is an easier way to get it.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Put the hammer down and pick it up.”
“Just . . . pick it up?”
“yes. It only recognizes danger from its own kind – in this case the steel hammer head. It’s programmed to trust unarmed protoplasm.”
She laid the hammer on a bench, walked slowly over to the machine. It didn’t move. The purring had stopped, pale amber lights glowed softly. Dirksen reached down and touched it tentatively, felt a slight vibration. She gingerly picked it up with both hands. Its lights changed to a clear green colour, and through the comfortable warmth of its metal skin she could feel the smooth purr of motors.
“So now what do I do with the stupid thing?” she asked irritably.
“Oh, lay him on his back on the workbench. He’ll be quite helpless in that position, and you can bash him at your leisure .”
“I can do without the anthropomorphisms,” Dirksen muttered as she followed Hunt’s suggestion, determined to see this thing through.
As she inverted the machine and set it down, its lights changed back to red. Wheels spun briefly, stopped. Dirksen picked up the hammer again, quickly raised it and brought it down in a smooth arc which struck the helpless machine off-centre, damaging one of its wheels and flipping it right side up again. There was a metallic scraping sound from the damaged wheel, and the beast began spinning in a fitful circle. A snapping sound came from its underbelly, the machine stopped, lights glowing dolefully.
Dirksen pressed her lips together tightly, raised the hammer for as final blow. But as she started to bring it down there came from within the beast a sound, a soft crying that rose and fell like a baby whimpering. Dirksen dropped the hammer and stepped back, her eye son the blood-red pool of lubricating fluid forming on the table beneath the creature. She looked at Hunt, horrified. “It’s . . .it’s – “
“Just a machine,” Hunt said, seriously now, “Like these, its evolutionary predecessors.” His gesturing hands took in the array of machinery in the workshop around them. Mute and menacing watchers. “But unlike them it can sense its own doom and cry out for succour.”
“Turn it off,” she said flatly.
Hunt walked to the table, tried to move its tint power switch. “You’ve jammed it, I’m afraid.” He picked up the hammer from the floor where it had fallen. ‘Care to administer the death blow?”
She stepped back, shaking her head as Hunt raised the hammer. “Couldn’t you fix – “
There was a brief metallic crunch. She winced, turned her head. The wailing had stopped, and they returned upstairs in silence.
Avoiding Reductio Ad Absurdum
In philosophy of mind.
Suppose someone claimed to have a microscopically exact replica (in marble, even) of Michelangelo's David in his home. When you go to see this marvel, you find a twenty-foot-tall roughly rectilinear hunk of pure white marble standing in his living room. "I haven't gotten to unpacking it yet," he says, "but I know it's in there."
Need we not simply print the whole alphabet just once and be done with all of book publishing? Who says we should print the whole alphabet? Will not just one letter, or one stroke do? One dot?
The physicist John Archibald Wheeler once speculate that perhaps the reason all electrons are alike is that there is really only one electron, careening back and forth from the ends of time, weaving the fabric of the physical universe by crossing its own path innumerable times. Perhaps Parmenides was right: there is only one thing!
Hee. Philosophy jokes. They crack me up.
Suppose someone claimed to have a microscopically exact replica (in marble, even) of Michelangelo's David in his home. When you go to see this marvel, you find a twenty-foot-tall roughly rectilinear hunk of pure white marble standing in his living room. "I haven't gotten to unpacking it yet," he says, "but I know it's in there."
Need we not simply print the whole alphabet just once and be done with all of book publishing? Who says we should print the whole alphabet? Will not just one letter, or one stroke do? One dot?
The physicist John Archibald Wheeler once speculate that perhaps the reason all electrons are alike is that there is really only one electron, careening back and forth from the ends of time, weaving the fabric of the physical universe by crossing its own path innumerable times. Perhaps Parmenides was right: there is only one thing!
Hee. Philosophy jokes. They crack me up.
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