Friday, April 07, 2006
Friday dinner party conversation stopper
We reduce the bewildering flux of observable events to system and simplicity, comparatively speaking, by interpolating an unseen intermediate career or trajectory between our observations of what we choose to regard as the same body or substance. We adjust and readjust our reifications and our reidentifications with a view to contriving the simplest and laziest of all possible worlds: the simplest and laziest of all worlds, that is to say, compatible with our observations. Our tacit maxim is the law of least action -- a law which, therefore, is one not so much of our discovery as of our own unconscious enacting. There is no denying, even so, that the maxim suits the whims of nature well. Our overwhelming success in predicting and controlling our environment, for good or ill, bears ample witness. - W.V.O. Quine
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I know what I have nothing to say. I just landed here looking for photos from the Maxim 'suits issue.
Well played, sir/madame/mademoiselle.
Quine might have been talking about a magic show.
You're right. Emerson wrote something somehwhat similar, along the lines of: we have such exorbitant eyes... upon seeing the arc, we complete the circle. [too lazy to look it up]. We wouldn't be able to think otherwise, but also the source of magic's effectiveness. Interesting.
Well, I can't agree that this is a conversation stopper. I'd open with something along the lines of: "Primitive man'reduced the bewildering flux of observable events to system and simplicity by inventing the idea of God."
And if it's any kind of dinner party, we'd be off to the races.
I like to think that I'd be branded as an atheist religion-bigot and bade to leave, and never to return. Of course, as I left, I'd refer to my erstwhile host and hostess as a couple of hpcqgqrs. That's what I call a party!
Oh, I think we do go to similar dinner parties, roxtar. But I've at least become grown up enough to bolt before I'm told to go, kiddo. Drink the booze, hit on the wife, swing from the chandelier, stop the conversation about the top ten movies now playing by bringing up Quine or Bataille or Cervantes' tale of the asses while doing underarm fart sounds, then bolt,... stumblingly, but bolt. I am Malcolm Lowry! THAT is a party! I skip the whole way home knowing that somewhere there was a conversation stopper.
I can never be sure (post-ejection), but I assume that a conversation stopper frequently becomes a conversation transmogrifier, magically turning "I read the most fascinating article yesterday" into "Gee, I'm glad that guy is gone."
To shift religious gears, roxtar, in the immortal words of the great Buddha, the conversation stopper is always the beginning of the conversation starter. Where one ends and the other begins is a mystery.
That being the case, I shall be even more willing to let fly with the odd outrageous remark, that more may have occasion to contemplate the mysterious pivot point upon which their conversations have turned.
Thus is born (again) the koan.
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