Ok, woke up this morning with verses from the poem Gunga Din by Rudyard Kipling running around in my head. The line in the poem where the narrator is saying "He'll be squatting on the coals, giving drinks to poor damned souls, and I'll catch a swig in hell from Gunga Din." I haven't read that poem in almost 20 years, (maybe longer) and I'll be damned if I know why it showed up now. (Has it been bubbling around loosely in my brain for 20 years, just waiting for the right moment to vex me.) After I climbed out of bed more of the poem came unbidden to my memory, the last line of the poem which is the part most people remember, "though I've belted you and flayed you, by the living gawd that made you, You're a better man than I am Gunga Din." (Kipling spelled god that way, don't look at me.)I have supplied a link to the poem here. It's a short one, I recommend you read it, then maybe you too will wake up with this thing in your head. The human mind is a strange contraption. For example, the spot where your nerve endings go back through your eyeball has no rods or cones in it, which means there should be a big black spot in the middle of all of our vision, but our brain sees the area around the black spot and fills it in for us. Or when we see color for example, if you are looking at an object and it is blue, it is because the object is absorbing the light in the blue wavelength and reflecting all others. So we see blue. But think about this, what you see as blue, and what I see as blue could be completely different things, after all, we have been trained all of our lives that what we are looking at is blue. But I have know way of knowing what you are really seeing, our perceptions of the world could be completely different. And no matter how I try, I can't show you the world I am seeing. And you can't show me. We could trust that the make up of the human mind is standardized and therefore what we see could be standardized. But all we need do is look at a cloud, and some will see the face of Jesus, some a ducky and a horsey, it is simply a matter of perception and paradolia (mentioned in an earlier blog). The mind sees what it wants to see. And our brain interprets the world the way it was taught to do. For example, the air we breathe is made up of molecules that are moving constantly, (at about a thousand miles an hour) yet we don't see them, feel them, or taste them. Yet we need them to survive. The floors we are standing on, and the ceilings over our heads are made up of innumerable molecules that are constantly moving, protons and photons are passing back and forth to hold it together. In constant motion, yet we perceive none of it.
(Maybe that's for the best, imagine if you could see it and you were hung over.)
Sir Arthur Eddington (English astronomer 1882-1944) said it best, "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." (Italics mine) Or as the Greek philosopher Democritus said "Nothing exists, but atoms and empty space. All else is conjecture."
(Don't ask me how a man who died in 370 BCE (Before current era) knew about atoms.)
What's the point of all this? I don't really have a point, I'm just trying to get that Gunga Din thing out of my head. In the words of an unknown philosopher, "We thought we knew the answers, but it was the questions we had wrong" Just a little early morning philosophy to start the day. Entirely unrelated but also interesting is a quote a news reporter once said "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila" which isn't really philosophy, but it's funny. Ciao for now.
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