I’m a tired boy, what with a talk to write, other work to do, and a passel of hungry squirrels that never get full. And so, to end the day, I’ll simply present you with two nice cat graphics. I’m sure you’ll want to send at least one to your friends.
The left half is of course wrong in a couple ways, but the right half is as it should be.
I’m getting increasing irritated with “progress of human evolution” diagrams which are straight out of the 1950s. Surely someone could do a new one and get it a bit more right.
Indeed.
hmm … What would a more accurate version look like? Maybe we (collectively) should make one.
I think we should include Frankie and Benjy mouse controlling the process ….
🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾
What’s the guy presenting to the cat? Canned fish? The guy in the middle has a funny butt…
Ha ha! I didn’t even notice the deformed butt. I think it’s supposed to be his hand. The thing the guy is presenting looks like an old-timey record player or a jewelry box. If so, the cat will just scratch him afterwards.
Yeah, I guess it must be the guy’s hand;-) But I think there’s an image of a fish on the record-player thingie??
Probably Christisn music on the record player then.
Jesus loves me, this I know?
Just a can of catfood. It’s possible to overthink these things.
😀
My cat isn’t an atheist. She knows she’s God.
My roomba is religious because it takes Saturday off.
I wonder what that makes mine…it works seven days a week….
b&
Probably one of those over zealous Protestant religions.
Can’t be — I thought they were all into full water immersion, no? This is a Roomba, not a Scooby (or whatever they call their mopping robot).
b&
I’m thinking Dutch Reform. They are crazy about endless work.
Dutch Reformation of 1873, or Dutch Reformation of 1931?
b&
Oh hells, I don’t know that it matters.
Well, how else am I supposed to know if it’s heretic scum and worthy of death?
…though I suppose I could just play it safe push it off the bridge either way. Be nice if there were some way to be sure, though….
b&
Poor roomba; don’t push it off a bridge. It could be the start of a robot uprising.
Well, if it rises up far enough to wash the windows, I’d be cool with that!
b&
My three daughters are slaves to cats. I unfortunately no longer serve one.
One of my old standard replies to vegetarians : My cat is unapologetic about being a carnivore and as am I
Well I hate to be a humourless so-and-so, but no cat is an atheist. Atheism is a philosophical position, and philosophising is not an ability that even the most deluded cat-lover can attribute to their kitty.
Indeed. Cats are too intelligent to bother with philosophy. They eschew such pseudoscientific nonsense and go straight for the empiricism.
…which, incidentally, is why atheism also has nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy. Theism does, of course, but not atheism.
Got any credible evidence of a phenomenon you’d like to attribute to a god? If not, can you offer a coherent definition of how one would identify an hypothetical entity as a god and distinguish it from a not-god?
…no…?
Well, then, there’s your scientific conclusion of atheism. Anything further is soundly the realm of philosophy and of no relevance whatsoever to the real world.
b&
Philosophy isn’t pseudoscience because it doesn’t pretend to be science (in the modern sense of ‘science’).
But the question of God’s existence is a philosophical one, and can only hope to be answered by philosophical means.
Sorry you’re so down on philosophy, but there are many issues pertaining to the real world that can only be addressed through philosophical inquiry. I.e. matters ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological.
Well, it comes down to a very simple question — and one of Richard Dawkins’s favorites: “How do you know that?”
Philosophy as a discipline has no valid answer to that question. When it even bothers to attempt to answer it, its answers range all over the map.
Science is about little more than answering that question, and the answer is always some variation on the them of, “because the answer is consistent with this list of carefully-made observations.”
By what ruler do you measure success? That is what your answers will most closely align to. By measuring itself against observable reality, science ensures that its answers best approximate observable reality.
Measure your answers against observable reality and you’re doing science.
Measure your answers against anything else and all you reap is ignoance.
It’s really that simple….
b&
The question of how scientific knowledge is possible is itself a philosophical question. You cannot explain or justify the scientific process through empirical methods. (Although given the notorious problem of induction, it may not be possible to justify the scientific method at all.)
I’m sorry, but it’s the height of arrogance for philosophers to insist that scientists must go begging to them for justification. You want justification? Try five sigmas. That’s what justification looks like — not some gasbag whinging about teenaged Platonic existential angst.
And this is especially galling considering that the philosophical grounds for such insistence are obviously logically invalid, what with philosophers priding themselves on their mad logics skillz and all.
Every time a philosopher wants to claim that science validating itself is circular and therefore invalid, I want to introduce said philosopher to recursion…by…erm…suggesting that the philosopher’s own recto-cranial inversion is a not-bad first approximation of the concept….
b&
Sorry but Pia, Hili’s predecessor, was a cat with definite philosophical abilities.
Is that first image a t-shirt? If not, it needs to be, even if I no longer have a cat, my d*gs see me as a useful fool, and my turtles as too big to eat.
“My turtles see me as too big to eat” would make a good bumper sticker.
Thank you for these; they’re wonderful! The first one puts my in mind of a poem — parts of a poem by Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939).[1] The full work, “A House”,[2] takes as its subject a stereotypical house (“[t]he drawing of a child”), & gives voice to all within & without it — The Cat of the House, The Dog of the House, The Clock in the Hall, The Unborn Son, The Maid, The Tree, The House itself, etc., etc.
The ‘poem’ consists of a selection of The Cat’s lines;[3] here it is, for those who might be interested — which could be no one (though poems about cats should pass muster, methinks):
*The Cat of the House*
I am the Cat. And you lie!
I am the Atheist!
All laws
I coldly despise.
I have yellow eyes;
I am the Cat on the Mat the child draws
When it first has a pencil to use.
I muse
Over the hearth with my ‘minishing eyes;
Until after
The last coal dies.
Every tunnel of the mouse,
Every channel of the cricket,
I have smelt.
I have felt
The secret shifting of the mouldered rafter,
And heard
Every bird in the thicket.
I see
You,
Nightingale up in your tree.
Enough of your stuff of dust and of mud!
I, born of a race of strange things,
Of deserts, great temples, great kings,
In the hot sands where the nightingale never sings!
____________
[1] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ford-madox-ford
[2] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/17/6#!/20572986
[3] Excerpts from: “A House”. *Poetry* 17.6 (1921): 291–310. Repr. in: *Ford Maddox Ford: Selected Poems*. Ed. & intro. Max Saunders. 1997. New York: Routledge, 2003. 126–139.
I like, esp the part about the eyes. Thanks door posting it
Door = for. My iPad likes to edit things.
heh. So does mine.
Thx!
Thank you for that–very nice.
(^_^)
I like the first graphic, though its author – is this Prof. Coyne? – shouldn’t have drawn and publicly broadcasted my cat without my permission!
(We have an old TV set broad enough for her to position herself on top and to suspend her tail exactly as drawn – in front of the screen, so that to obstruct our TV watching.)