Space: It’s what you’re taking up.Time: It’s what you’re wasting.Responsibility: It’s what you’re evading.Photo by: John Fowler
Answer: Anytime some dumbass pretend-philosopher maunders about unreality.
PS: From Man Alive:
The universe is internally self-consistent. This is what we mean when we say it “makes sense” – the laws of nature are comprehensible to us because they are all consistent with each other, all superficially differentiated manifestations of the law of identity. This is actually a matter of controversy right now in theoretical physics, where the self-consistency of the universe and humanity’s seemingly uncanny adaptation to it are held to be evidence – in the mother of all We-Now-Know-We-Know-Nothing theories – that there is not merely one universe, but, the physicists claim, as many as ten to the five-hundredth power universes.
I am not making this up. I’m inclined to think that there can be only one everything-that-exists, and that, where the math does not conform to the observed evidence – where the map does not correspond to the territory – it is probably not the evidence that is incorrect. And doubt you nothing, the theologians are dancing in the streets: No longer are they the only madmen insisting that the cosmos consists of the products of their fevered imaginations. They get to play the Even-Physicists-Agree card over and over again, to the detriment of clear thinking everywhere.
But even stipulating the physicists’ claims, in the massively redundant cosmos prescribed by these theories there will be at least ten to the five-hundredth power instantiations of William of Ockham around to demonstrate the awesome detergent power of the law of parsimony. It can’t make black swans white again, but there is nothing like it for day-to-day clean-up of those nasty intellectual messes.
Academics don’t like to be mocked, and contrary to all appearances, they are not actually trying to invite derision. But when they insist that everything is really nothing or that science proves that science proves nothing or that the one tiny piece of existence that one of them studies is actually everything-and-then-some, just about anything they say is going to sound absurd. That’s a good thing, though – for you.
By now, I hope you know that the proper rejoinder to a ludicrous proposition put forth by a government functionary wearing a lab coat is to say, at full voice, “Say WHAT?!?” Don’t be shy. You’re not being anti-intellectual – very much the contrary. Instead, you are defending the mind against a reductionist labyrinth of compartmentalized madness. As soon as you ask any breathless theorist to connect his claims to the whole of existence – as soon as you demand to see an ontologically-consonant correspondence to realty – you will find out if he actually knows something, or if he is simply posturing for politicians and journalists.
Here are some examples of my style of intellectual guerrilla warfare: Every time I read about yet another Dancing Bear theory, I burn with the urge to ask the theorist if his claim would be a good scam to get his mom into bed – you know, since she’s really no more than an animal, and it’s no big deal if I pull one over on her. When a neuro-scientist insists that the human mind is useful only in the production of errors, I want to offer to discuss his ideas at length, but not until he is being prepped for surgery. And if there really are ten to the five-hundredth power universes, I want to know why we can’t live in the one where professional intellectuals earn their keep by producing real economic value in the open marketplace, rather than by writing outrageous exaggerations for government grant proposals – which are then echoed and blown still further out of proportion by clueless, credulous journalists.
