In the chapter on Bleak House,
in his 1911 book about Dickens, GKC (as we shall call him, in the Minimalist
spirit) delivers himself of the following mysterious phrase:
the
mind of an intelligent potato
Ponder that.
Here, I’ll write it a little
larger, for clarity:
the mind of an intelligent
potato
Beginning to make sense? Not quite yet? All right, try this then:
the mind
of an intelligent
po-ta-to
Believe me, it makes perfect sense
in its critical context; but outside of any context, it is downright
epiphanic.
~
You should read and re-read this,
until you attain enlightenment.
Background music for your quest:
by
Dr. Franklin Zappa
Concert version (if you can call it
that):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnhgQsat0mo
[Update] By chance, I was perusing Wiki’s introduction to Abduction,
which schematizes the basic process
thus:
=> The
surprising fact, C, is observed
=> But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
=> Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
Now: in the Comments to this post (below), we observe irrefutable
evidence that a certain Potato, Peter
by name, is at the very least familiar with the basic tenets of Relativity, and
may even claim to have deduced its principles independently. This, inarguably, is “surprising”; few of us can claim ever to have met a
Potato of such impressive attainments.
Thus, then, C.
But: Suppose it were the case (a fact hitherto seldom
suspected) that all Potatoes were in fact superintelligent god-beings from the
planet Xan-Dor. Then C would follow as a matter of course.
We have, ergo, our A.
Conclusion: All Potatoes (or, as skeptics, we must
caveat: Peter, at any rate) are superintelligent god-beings from the planet
Xan-Dor.
Back to that intelligent potato: Can it really know that other intelligent potatoes have minds?
ReplyDeleteThat is a problem known to the traditional Kartoffel-philosophical community as "the Problem of Other Potatoes".
DeleteIt has never been satisfactorily resolved.
E = em cee squared.
ReplyDeleteQ E D.