Harry takes the wheel and makes small talk

Good to see the stodgy old Beaglestonian using some esoteric words.  Back when I was in college studying psychology there was a branch (there were a million branches) of psychology called gestalt theory, which meant you had to take everything into account when talking about anything.  Everything was a part of everything else so to talk about anything you had to talk about everything.  You can see why it was not that popular.  Nowadays I think they call it holistic, but I hate holistic, it sounds like a guy sitting in a pyramid wearing a tiara of crystals,.

We have our own umwelts but a large part of our umwelt is the outside world,  Not everybody agrees that you can cure cancer by living in a pyramid with crystals dangling on your head, but most everybody agrees, when the occasion arises, that that is a pretty big truck bearing down on us and knows to get out of the way.  The sidewalks of downtown have their share of crazy people, generally yelling passionately at somebody who isn't there, but they all wait for the green light to cross the street.  Funny too, they never yell at real people on the street because somewhere in their umwelt they know they could get punched out or in trouble for that.  So we all get together on the friendly sidewalks of Chicago, the sane and the nuts, the real and the unreal.

Harry has, like Toonces (the driving cat, old SNL skit, Old Dog can look them up on his fave, YouTube) learned how to drive, and has only killed one of us so far.  Is it because that passenger muttered, "Stupid Harry," when Harry let a parking space go by?  We shall never know, but I expect that when in a Harry driven car, one is careful not to speak ill of the driver.  Since Harry is the driver as well as the pilot there would be no need for him to tell himself to turn left at Huckleberry and Honeysuckle, but he might engage in a little small talk with the carbon units.  He might casually ask them how they felt about robots taking over the world.


I totally agree with Beagles on the subject of Objective Reality.  Though our politics may range from
liberal democrat to unreconstructed Bircher, we are both solid believers in Objective Reality and maybe Old Dog didn't realize when he joined The Institute that he was stepping into solid OR territory.  At one of the seminars last summer I was patiently explaining something to him in my kindly Uncle Ken manner and, even as I was speaking, I could see that he was only listening with half an ear because even before I had finished my sentence he was organizing his argument against it.  The reason I could tell that is because I do the same thing all the time.


Isn't that little orange Send feedbag rectangle in the lower right. that sometimes you have to type behind because it doesn't get out of the way, fucking annoying?