Happy new year! It looks like you're still suffering from hangover. Tell me, how much champagne did you have?
I wish it were the bubbly stuff. I'm simply trying to wake up from a nightmare.
Was it so bad?
Yes, you know that one...
Let me guess. It was raining, you were alone in a Versailles-like garden, desperately trying to locate a loo, but all you could find was a pond after pond overflowing with rainwater. I knew you drank too much!
Only if it were something like that.
Oh no, was it worse?
Yes, considerably. It's this familiar nightmare called life.
I was hoping to start the new year much less gloomily.
Okay, I shouldn't have called it a nightmare. Let's rename it a dream.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the streeeeaaaammmm. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dreaaaaaammmmm.
Sorry, no applause for the singing performance. By the way, do you know this story? "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly."
He is a Chinese philosopher.
"But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi."
In your case, it would be more like a cockroach, rather than a butterfly.
Applause for the first insult of the year! If you are thinking about Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," that was not a dream, but a true transformation. Anyway, Zhuangzi implies that we may swap the status of reality and dream, because we can never be sure which is which.
Isn't that called denial?
In some cases it could be. Again, we need to use this manner of looking at life in a way that would benefit us. All things good can be abused, you know. Let me change the tack a bit, and ask how can we all be certain that what we see does exist as we see it?
Dogs and cats see things differently from us, but we all agree which are water bowls and litter boxes. What matters is the correspondence between the object and the perception.
It only needs to be consistent. For many abstract notions, they don't even have to be very consistent. I am for anti-realism.
I am, too. Think about all the lovers around the world. It cannot be, but the perception that matters.
Indeed. How is it that one woman can make one man happy and crazy, just by standing in front of him, but not another arbitrary man? It is his perception of her that is important. We could say that it is a matter of taste, but I think both explanations are basically the same.
When you are in love, you get up everyday with the feeling that the world is such a wonderful place. But somewhere in the world, hundreds of people continue to be killed each day because of political, economic, or religious conflicts. That reminds me---I saw you skipping like a fool in front of the café. Are you...?
A dog with bowel problems happened to be walking a step ahead of me, that's all.
I'm glad you didn't trip. Getting back to the perception issue, although I am an anti-realist, I have the urge to find "the truths" and "the facts."
As long as you believe that the truths are the truths and the facts are the facts, you don't have to engage yourself in any inquiry. It's the desire to have something that you can rely on without questioning. They become some kind of axioms in your thought system.
If you are an anti-realist, axioms tend to be formed by what you perceive.
As anti-realists, we must be conscious of our thought systems if we wish to communicate our ideas to others, because perception tends to differ from person to person.
Here is where religions come to the rescue. They spare some of us the pain and the trouble of going through self-analyses and give us explanations for most of the worldly events.
At religious gatherings, you know that the person sitting next to you is thinking the same, or can give you a convincing and comforting explanation to anything.
Whatever it may be, God wished it so.
And you are assured that both of you have the same god in mind!
I wish it were the bubbly stuff. I'm simply trying to wake up from a nightmare.
Was it so bad?
Yes, you know that one...
Let me guess. It was raining, you were alone in a Versailles-like garden, desperately trying to locate a loo, but all you could find was a pond after pond overflowing with rainwater. I knew you drank too much!
Only if it were something like that.
Oh no, was it worse?
Yes, considerably. It's this familiar nightmare called life.
I was hoping to start the new year much less gloomily.
Okay, I shouldn't have called it a nightmare. Let's rename it a dream.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the streeeeaaaammmm. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dreaaaaaammmmm.
Sorry, no applause for the singing performance. By the way, do you know this story? "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly."
He is a Chinese philosopher.
"But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi."
In your case, it would be more like a cockroach, rather than a butterfly.
Applause for the first insult of the year! If you are thinking about Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," that was not a dream, but a true transformation. Anyway, Zhuangzi implies that we may swap the status of reality and dream, because we can never be sure which is which.
Isn't that called denial?
In some cases it could be. Again, we need to use this manner of looking at life in a way that would benefit us. All things good can be abused, you know. Let me change the tack a bit, and ask how can we all be certain that what we see does exist as we see it?
Dogs and cats see things differently from us, but we all agree which are water bowls and litter boxes. What matters is the correspondence between the object and the perception.
It only needs to be consistent. For many abstract notions, they don't even have to be very consistent. I am for anti-realism.
I am, too. Think about all the lovers around the world. It cannot be, but the perception that matters.
Indeed. How is it that one woman can make one man happy and crazy, just by standing in front of him, but not another arbitrary man? It is his perception of her that is important. We could say that it is a matter of taste, but I think both explanations are basically the same.
When you are in love, you get up everyday with the feeling that the world is such a wonderful place. But somewhere in the world, hundreds of people continue to be killed each day because of political, economic, or religious conflicts. That reminds me---I saw you skipping like a fool in front of the café. Are you...?
A dog with bowel problems happened to be walking a step ahead of me, that's all.
I'm glad you didn't trip. Getting back to the perception issue, although I am an anti-realist, I have the urge to find "the truths" and "the facts."
As long as you believe that the truths are the truths and the facts are the facts, you don't have to engage yourself in any inquiry. It's the desire to have something that you can rely on without questioning. They become some kind of axioms in your thought system.
If you are an anti-realist, axioms tend to be formed by what you perceive.
As anti-realists, we must be conscious of our thought systems if we wish to communicate our ideas to others, because perception tends to differ from person to person.
Here is where religions come to the rescue. They spare some of us the pain and the trouble of going through self-analyses and give us explanations for most of the worldly events.
At religious gatherings, you know that the person sitting next to you is thinking the same, or can give you a convincing and comforting explanation to anything.
Whatever it may be, God wished it so.
And you are assured that both of you have the same god in mind!
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