what does it all mean Mr Natural?

Well what did we learn of science at good old Gage Park high? As I recall it went from biology with Ms Tichy who used to speak of her little beasties, then a guy named Purcell who I think was prematurely bald, anyway not much hair on the top of his head back in the day when half the men in the country didn’t shave their heads and what is with that anyway? Doc Small for physics who I idolized. Gruff Fulton for chemistry who I think used to talk about how he played football for the U of Chicago back when they had a team, talked a lot about stuff that wasn’t chemistry, and anyway what he knew about chemistry seemed to be from whenever graduated from school, maybe the thirties or forties. Wasn’t too crazy about him.

Well I remember the line from Paul Simon, “When I think back to all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” I guess we must have learned a bit, we were there for four years, we did papers, we took tests.

Maybe it’s like you say, we just pick up things, don’t really remember where we picked them up, just stuff we seem to know, like you say that I give you trouble over, read it somewhere, heard it somewhere. There is a thing where when you hear something, in addition to analyzing it logically we compare it to what we already know and if it fits in with that we are more likely to accept it, which is good enough I suppose, but what if what we already know is wrong? How will we find that out if we only accept things that agree with what we already know? When I took a philosophy course I tended to think oh this philosopher has it right and this other guy is full of shit which was maybe not fair, but what are you going to do?

We had a textbook and we went from this guy to that and it would tell us what they believed. These guys had all written books, and you could read them, but they were generally so big, and if you think well I already read what he believed in the textbook and it wasn’t all that interesting why am I going to read that whole book?

There was this guy Wittgenstein, who all the philosophers at the time thought was the smartest of them all and he wrote this big dense book called the Tractatus, but nobody but he, we assume, could understand it. But that didn’t matter too much because later he said he had been thinking about it and he realized that it was all wrong. I’m not sure if that was exactly how it worked, but I think I’m pretty close. You will have to take my word for it.

I’ve been thinking that he committed suicide, but it turns out that I’m wrong on that, it was cancer. I did get this from wiki though: when his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, "Good!"

Most of the philosophers, especially the ones about that time seemed of be anguished souls, trying to make something coherent about an incoherent world. I guess religion is a little easier because you can always answer because God wanted it that way, but after the bible He hasn’t had much to say, and even in the bible people disagree on what exactly he is saying, so I guess you just accept the parts that fit in with what you already believe and the rest you just say He must have been misunderstood.

Wherever you go, there you are.