The sculpture here is supposed to be of Aristotle,
the famous Greek philosopher from the 4th century BC and
teacher of Alexander the Great. Lauded by some as the
“father of modern thought.”
Rubbish. Aristotle was a chump.
Have you seen modern thought lately? I sat on the train yesterday and both the woman next to me and the guy on the seat across the aisle from me were reading about Angelina Jolie in the MX and were, no doubt, only moments away from drooling and moaning. One of them had presumably just got some clever person to tie their shoelaces for them.
This is clearly Aristotle's fault because his three main laws of logic are stated as:
- A is A — an apple is an apple
- Everything is either A or not-A — it is either an apple or not an apple
- Something cannot be both A and not-A — you can presumably plug in your apples yourself by now.
Now this was fine for Aristotle back in his day. But we have new shit now. Heaps of things are both A and not-A. Is that light a wave or is it a particle? Well, it depends on how you measure it, I guess. Is that house painted green or brown? Well, it's a sort of greeny-brown isn't it? Do you like living next to a train station? Well, I like it because it's handy having public transport so close but I don't like it because I end up with MX readers gibbering incoherently all over the footpath.
If you feel like a bit of light reading for your own trips on trains pull out your copies of Descartes and Einstein. You will read that there is more to life than either-or. We have points of view, we have fuzzy logic, we have nuances, we have imperfect perceptions.
Light bouncing off an object goes in all directions. That which hits your eye reacts with cells causing a chemical reaction that triggers an electric response that travels along the optic nerve to the primary visual centres of the brain. Then the brain constructs a model that represents the object that the eye is looking at. And then it puts a label on it: a blue teacup. All these processes are at various levels of abstraction and if we forget that then we start living in a bizarre dreamworld where our assumptions start ruling our lives and we end up reading MX to keep up.
Either-or thinking is one old-fashioned way of thinking; another is the verb ‘to be’ which I have already used twice this paragraph. The use of that verb in the language sets up an Aristotelian identity — an A is A kind of thing — in your abstractions that may not need to be there. The teacup is a cup (‘is’ joins a noun to a noun). This particular teacup has angles, six panels, a delicate handle, a pleasing curve as it widens from the base, thin walls but a substantial weight and it has a great many other qualities denied by the identification of it with a mere ‘cup.’ The teacup is blue (joining a noun to an adjective). This seems to make its blueness some sort of integral essence of the teacup as though they were one and the same thing. No, the teacup appears a soothing light-blue colour to me.
Suspect the verb ‘to be.’ Watch it closely. If you were to cut this word out of your vocabulary you would find your entire perception change. Items you perceive are not lumped together under categories that deprive them of all detail. You would begin to notice things for what they actually are. You would become more conscious of the assumptions you make from the abstractions you have of the world about you.
But you won't drop this word from your vocabulary — certainly not from reading this badly edited ramble. I haven't and I wrote it. But still I find it interesting to think that this one word has so much power.
So, yes. Aristotle's three laws of logic? Bollocks. If Aristotle were alive today he would surely revise them. But then again, maybe not: he was a chump. He'd probably just be reading MX.
¶ 3:40 pm 6 comments
One of the techniques that comedians use is the
‘callback.’ This is where they make a joke
that references a joke used earlier in the set. Go and
watch some Ross Noble if you still aren't sure what I'm
talking about (or just go and watch some Ross Noble
anyway — you could not spend your time better).
For we civilians the callback can often add a humorous twist to a conversation but there is one particular abuse of it that we sometimes make:
A: “Did you see the FA Cup final? My lord, that was dull”
B: “Yeah, like watching synchronised swimming”
A to Z: “Ha ha ha”
It's the lazy callback to a joke made, not earlier in the conversation, but just in assumed common experience — in the received popular culture. As though it were an established fact that synchronised swimming is so dull that the mere mention of it should elicit nothing but derisive laughter.
One popular example of this phenomenon from a few years back was Damir Dokic — the Yugoslav-born father of tennis player Jelena Dokic. All you had to do at the time was say the word ‘Dokic’ and you would expect the eager crowd gathered about you to collapse giggling to the floor, incapacitated with the biting humour of it, without you actually having to go to the effort of actually thinking up an actual joke.
I was at the time rather fond of Dokic. Do you remember he was once thrown out of Wimbledon for alleged drunken and disorderly behaviour? He had approached a British journalist Mark Saggers, working for Sky Sports at the time, and asked to use his mobile. Saggers handed it to him; Dokic looked at it saying “I used to have a phone just like this and the stupid thing never worked!” and hurled it to the ground, smashing the phone into a very large number of very small pieces.
If you were Saggers you'd be livid and would want to see Dokic man-handled off the Wimbledon grounds in front of his teenage daughter. But for the rest of us, that's pretty bloody funny.
My heart warmed to the big old lunatic after that and
yet to this day we still hear people mindlessly reaching
for the Dokic callback.
But it's true: the FA Cup final was like watching
synchronised swimming.
I can recommend eye surgery to anybody thinking of giving
it a try: it's a barrel of good times.
This morning I was able to take the eye-patch off and see with my miraculous new vision. It was deliciously exciting: for the first half-hour or so, before my brain got used to it again, my whole house stood out in vivid, even exaggerated, 3D — like those magic-eye pictures that used to be popular. I mooned about the house with a stupid grin on my face: “oh look at that bottle it's in front of that other bottle! Bwaaa haha!” etc.
The procedure itself, on Monday, was a breeze. Firstly, nurses rock. Seriously. Nurses are just ace. If you are a nurse then you have my good opinion and if you know any nurses you can tell them from me that I think they're lovely. It's all about blankets: they just looooove giving you blankets. If you want to pamper a lad just give him some blankets and then inject some sedatives into his arm. Secondly, unlike the dentist, say, where you have to jack your own jaw open and breath through your nose and forbid yourself from swallowing and so on — and I still struggle with that — you don't have to do anything once your eye is anaesthetised. You don't have to keep your other eye closed or stop yourself blinking or anything: I was naïvely thinking I might have to do something of the kind.
The actual anaesthesia I mentioned might have been a bit of a test of nerves, though: two needles directly into your eyesocket either side of the eyeball. The staff there, however, didn't seem to make much of a fuss about it and I was all relaxed with my blankets and my sedative so I was perfectly happy.
The procedure involves cutting a small slit along the side of the eye, inserting a probe that chops up the lens of the eye, inserting another probe that sucks the bits out and then sliding in a plastic lens and I was able to watch it all from the inside! Very blurrily, of course, but I thought it was interesting.
Took today off work and spent the afternoon relaxing and just looking at things. Oh yeah, car coming up the street, I see you. Yes book, I'm reading you. Yeehah!
It wasn't cheap though. That private health insurance stuff is actually some pretty cool shit.
¶ 8:40 pm 7 comments
I had never seen a game of ultimate frisbee before I
volunteered at the annual
national championships last week.
Yes, indeed: competitive frisbee. The game is sort of like netball, in that it is non-contact and the person with the frisbee can't run with it — only pass it to a teammate — and also sort of like gridiron, because you score by getting the frisbee to a teammate in the endzone and that the idea in general play is to gradually make yardage up the field as you have possession.
The sport surprised me in a number of ways. Firstly, the higher-seeded matches displayed a great deal of skill: those guys can really throw with speed and accuracy and have superb control, when it's needed, over the way the frisbee swings to the left or right; and they were quite competitive as well: teams made a lot of noise when they scored and there was fierce support from the sidelines as games were on. And secondly, the lower-seeded matches were much less skillful: the participants were clearly just having a pleasant little run about in the park with their mates. I knew it was an amateur sport but at rare times I found the national championships just a little bit surprisingly amateur.
My task was simply to assist the organising committee with whatever was needed to aid the players. I helped prepare the lunches, man the bar, keep the bins empty and the water barrels full and also just point at stuff for people — all your standard volunteery things. They gave me a T-shirt.
The kicker was that I went five days straight without email and internet! How I am still breathing, I don't know.
¶ 11:50 am 6 comments
