There will be no Readers’ Wildlife for the forseeable future, as I have no submissions. But here is a reposted Jesus and Mo strip, announcing a compilation of the best of the strips.
A friday flashback from 16 years ago. A “best of” Jesus & Mo collection is in the pipeline with about 150 strips from the collection. In plenty of time for Christmas. If you have any particular favourites you’dlike to see included, let me know in the comments.
You can comment on the site’s Patreon page, and I urge you to throw a few bucks towards the continuation of this strip (remember, the artist has to remain anonymous for obvious reasons).
The strip jibes with Richard Dawkins’s comment in River Out of Eden (1995):
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
That guy can write!
Well, our world full of beauty and horror, love and viciousness, the sublime and the vile, actually reflects rather well the bipolar, psychopathic, puerile, genocidal, sadistic, repentant wife-beater type portrayed in the Bible (or, alternatively, a panoply of good, bad and ugly gods and goddesses such as those seen in many polytheistic religions). So Dawkins’ ruminations are not really much of an argument against the existence of some such deity. Of course, most so-called monotheists (henotheists would be the better term) would very much prefer not to see their god this way, and there’s the rub.
Well put.
Dawkins’ phrase “pitiless indifference” reminded me of the end of “The Stranger” by Camus, where Meursault opens himself up to the “benign indifference” of the universe.
Thanks for the vocabulary builder.
100%
Definitely worth a comment :
Bound and constrained by one Natural order —
Discerned by guesswork — and its guesswork all the way down —
But
Not all guesses go one step further, to empiricism.
(A sort of mash-up of Feynman, Dawkins, and the ‘turtles’ metaphor – note that one is free to be as “religious” (whether we know it or not) as they want — the choice is “theirs”)
Reminds me of the question Wittgenstein asked Elizabeth Anscombe: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-31662317
Fun stuff, thanks for sharing! The explanation of the dramatic difference in perception of the color of the dress between individuals is not quite right though. Those who perceive it as white and gold have a color constancy system in their brain that corrects for blue illumination, as it assumes in this case that the blue light from a clear sky is illuminating the dress through a window. Those who perceive it as blue and black have a color constancy system that corrects for yellow illumination, as it assumes that the yellow light from an ordinary tungsten lamp is what illuminates the dress. There is evidence for both genetic and early experiential factors contributing to these differences. (BTW, the real-life dress is blue and black, and the illumination in the photo was from a tungsten lamp)
For me, the BBC picture is white and gold with a hint of mauve. My monitor is old, so the colour balance may be off. Having said that, I could zoom in and identify each pixel individually. I would only see red, blue and green (and perhaps off, black). A bright yellow on a monitor is an interesting philosophical thought experiment.
To me, questions like the colour one are a reminder not to be too comfortable with naive realism, including:
free will
good and evil
morality and ethics
time
…. pretty much everything
Matter? Space? Reality? Existence? Such concepts are useful though.
Yellow is your visual system’s response to suitable combinations of red and green, so if lots of red and green pixels are activated simultaneously without the blue one, you should see yellow on your monitor. Our eyes have red, green, and blue pixels too – the red, green, and blue cone cells.
Sort-of, but definitely not the same RGB as video screens.