When I was a kid, I loved science fiction and this included alien abduction and UFO stories. I don’t think I really believed, even then. For a while, I even claimed to have seen one, though this was a lie. In this way, perhaps I better embodied the X-Files slogan “I want to believe” than the characters — I wanted to believe, but I simply didn’t.
Read MoreThe solid and the ethereal, though, have traded traits, and the result is something new and unfamiliar. We no longer have the “spiritual” and the “material” – I would argue that what we have is the “informational” and the “totemic”.
Read MoreDick’s behavior indicated knowledge, but his explanation for it was, frankly, not something one would expect from a sane person, and there were other delusional beliefs, amounting to the continuation of the Roman Empire and a fabricated world history. For all people talk about, the content of his delusions was not new.
Read MoreConsider: we think of paper when made by human beings as an artificial substance – a relatively benign one, but artificial nonetheless – but when made by wasps for a nest, the paper is natural. Every building is artificial, but a beaver dam is clearly natural. A tool made by an octopus or a crow feels more “natural” than something made by a human.
Read MoreWhenever considering a system of categorization, some categories are marked: they’re stated and described. Others can’t be. Some categories are unmarked because they are unknown: this disease hasn’t been witnessed before, we’re still trying to figure out what it is. Still others are unmarked because they’re what the others are a deviation from: consider, there are ten thousand thousand different maladies and diseases in the world; how many kinds of health are there? Consider, also, the Anna Kareinina principle, articulated by Tolstoy: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
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