MythTickle by Justin Thompson for January 12, 2010

Cool! Her shadow in front of her disappears when she turns back.

Way too Platonic for a simple-minded Aristotelean like me!

I can never remember the first of a pair of limericks on this subject that I read in an old paperback on cosmology, but I do remember the second precisely:

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd; I am always about in the Quad, And that’s why this tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours Faithfully, GOD!

(Life is just so much easier on so many levels when you’re a robust theist….)

I played one of my old Black Sabbath vinyl records backwards at 78 speed and saw God.

Sysyphos: I take your comment as irony since you probably realize there is nothing simple-minded about Aristotle. One of the greatest minds in history, the first biologist, the codifier of the laws of logic, and IMO virtually the founder of Western civilization.

Johanan: Sounds like Berkeley’s answer to Hume’s skepticism. But Berkeley was a bishop, so whaddaya expect?

Karma: Stop torturing yourself with idle speculations you really don’t believe. If you doubted for a moment your home ceases to exist when you leave it, you never would. Even Hume admitted that nothing he ever wrote should prevent someone from stepping out of the way of a runaway carriage.

Does the image of the comic still exist when you scroll down to make a comment?

No

I have a feeling none of this would happen to Boody.

How does that old song go?

As I was climbing up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I really wish he would go away.

Whoh This is to existential for me !

Go kick a big rock, but put on your steel toed boots first.

One of the questions that Schrodinger and other quantum theorists have never been able to answer is what exactly constitutes an observer.

Which leaves us with this conundrum: does the observer continue to exist when nobody is looking? Even, when, say, the observer is unconscious? How do we know?

Does Karma exist when we don’t see her?

The clerk’s rebuttal of Bishop George Berkeley’s solipsism: a swift kick in the shins. [In our more extreme times, I suppose it would have been a kick in the oompa loompas….]

Tree rings are caused by cutting or breaking. They’re never seen in undamaged trees.

It doesn’t really exist. She’s being bamboozled.

ChukLitl–I’ve never heard a tree ring. Some have creaked, or snapped, but never ring.

Perhaps Karma is asleep, and this is her dream.

Yes and no…

Actually, it’s all there when she’s not looking; it just doesn’t go to the bother of reflecting light.