empiricism vs rationalism, zzzzzzzzzzz

It’s all very well what you say, about being dependent on our senses, or worse yet on somebody else’s senses, or worse even than that, what somebody says are his senses, and worser still than that, what you think he said. Why get out of bed in the morning?

But the coffee is perking (does anybody still perk their coffee? How much cheerier was that sound than the dismal drip, drip, drip, we wake up to in this modern world?), and we get up, and our philosophical engine has not turned on yet, so we have no problem navigating our way into the kitchen and pouring our coffee without worrying for a second whether the chair we are sitting on and the cup we are drinking from really exist.

And if we have any sense we will keep that philosophical engine shut off, until maybe late in the evening, when perhaps after a few beers, we are having a conversation or clickety clacking the keys, we turn it on as sort of a court jester to entertain us until it is time for bed.

And you know this was a big battle in philosophy around the time of the American revolution. The empiricists vs the rationalists. The empiricists thought that all knowledge entered through the senses, while the rationalists thought it was all the logic in our head that we were born with.

You know we know that all ravens are black, well we’re pretty sure we know that, but we can be derailed by spotting a white one. On the other hand we know that the squares of the sides adjacent to the right angle of a triangle equal the square of the hypotenuse for every single right triangle (on a flat plane) imaginable. Of course a right triangle, does not exist in the way that a raven does. Perhaps this is something you could consider when you are lounging around, in a manly manner, in your undies and smoking jacket.

Myself I am more inclined to have my philosophical engine humming in the morning when I am doing completely useless things like writing to you and doing my morning painting. The ideas pop out of my head like popcorn at this time of day, but they are mostly forgotten by lunchtime.

I am a big fan of naps. I have been taking them regularly for thirty years and often they are the highlight of the day. Back in the sad old days when I had to work, my first thought upon awakening and preparing to go into the office was that I would have a nap later that day. These people who brag about how they only sleep like five hours a night and never take a nap, they don’t impress me none. Obviously there is something wrong with them.

As you know I am a cat man, and they may have something to do with it. I know dogs tend to sleep a lot too, but something about the way a cat stretches out and goes to sleep like it has just put in a sixteen hour day of hard labor, when you know the only things it has done since it woke up an hour ago was nibble some kibble and take a crap, it just tends to make a guy sleepy.