Catmachine

I am a rationalist and were it not for the fact that I prefer not to define myself by what I don't believe in you could probably call me an atheist because most of my world view coincides with most of the world view of an atheist. I say most of because I think there are exceptions. Whilst I do not agree with the lazy but oft repeated mantra that "atheism is just like another religion" there are certain aggressive aspects of behaviour I have observed in atheism that I also don't agree with. Of course one could argue that they're just down to human nature rather than any flaw in the atheist argument - after all we are all human whether or not we believe in a god or gods. One particularly distasteful atheist argument is the "religion is a mental illness". I don't think this is a valid analogy for many reasons. In general people choose religion - or have it forced upon them as children - and can change their minds about it later. Furthermore th...

As a child I was absolutely terrified by skeletons in general and skulls in particular. I am curious now as to where this fear sprang from. Of course skulls are associated with death but as a very young child death is something you are blissfully unaware of. Is the fear of the skull something built in, an instinct that evolved over time or is it something that is learned? Very young children do learn to recognise faces very early on, and smiles in particular. You would expect that a baby's instinct upon being presented with a skull would be to smile - the skull is, after all, a very simplistic representation of a smiling face. One way of testing this would be to experiment with babies and pictures of skulls but this could very well turn out to be unethical and cruel should the findings of the research be that that a fear of the old bone face is not learned but is in fact built in... It could well be built in. In prehistoric times human bones would generally only be found in...

I fail to see the evolutionary advantage of procrastination. The bulk of human behaviour can be traced to an evolutionary advantage at some point in the past, even if it's one that no longer applies. Wanting to gorge oneself on carbohydrate and sugar rich food ? Yes, an advantage in times of scarcity. Xenophobia ? Repugnant these days but undeniably an advantage in days when you and the tribe in the next valley were competing for the same food source. Love? But of course, love leads to sex and sex leads to children; miniature copies of yourself to act as vessels which will carry your DNA down the road of time into the future. There's no intent here, it's all cold mathematics . Those people who were greedy / xenophobic / loving simply survived marginally better than those that weren't, with the result that the world now consists of us, their descendants. And rather annoyingly we now have to unpick all that instinct because some of it is quite clearly a supernormal s...

Awoke early this morning and spent a miserable couple of hours tossing and turning whilst hoping that the severe headache that had me in its grip would just GO AWAY . In the end it didn't which was most unsatisfactory. I had to get up and go in search of painkillers. Luckily I didn't have to go very far - they were in the kitchen. This is a marked improvement on the occasion when, whilst still living in Astra House , I had to actually get up at 3.30am, get dressed and stagger up Preston Street and along Western Road and into actual Hove before I found a twenty four hour store where I could buy some piss weak generic painkillers (not even something with added codeine oomph). I learnt a valuable lesson that night; always keep painkillers in the house. You'd have thought that by now we'd have evolved out of tension headaches  which are no good to man nor beast. I mean, from an evolutionary point of view they're a terrible burden... Thugg the Caveman sleeps in a ...

I don't have any wisdom teeth. I didn't have them taken out or anything, they're just not there and never were.  I am a mutant.  One of the first things some people say upon hearing about this unusual state of affairs is usually a hilarious variant on the " Why am I not surprised? " gag - the implication being that I'm a bit daft and lack wisdom. Of course that's all a bit arse over front and back to tit. As we all know very well they're called " wisdom " because they appear later in life when (presumably) one has accumulated some.  They're not called " wisdom " because their appearance imparts it, nor because their eruption makes you stagger about calling for Mr Grimsdale (unless that's your dentist's name). Age and wisdom used to be inextricably linked. Not so much nowadays. Anyone who hates Thugg the Caveman and his illuminating antics should skip to the end of the next bit. In Thugg's day reaching the rip...

"I don't have a drinking problem. I drink. I get drunk. I pass out. NO PROBLEM!" Sigh... "Also available in sober." For fuck's sake... "If found, please return to the pub." OH SHUT UP. I mean really. What on earth must go through someone's head when they buy an article of clothing with such a slogan on it? The kind of slogan that is only vaguely funny the first time you ever hear it when you're fifteen years old but loses all comedic value mere nanoseconds later? Woah... That's freaky! You know I have trouble controlling my drinking and often lose all memory of the end of the evening. It's as if the author of that t-shirt somehow could see into my life... I've got to buy it. It's fate. It's not enough that I'm suffering from a crippling addiction, I want to shout it to the world! To be fair these t-shirts are usually only available in souvenir shops in city centres so it's a fair guess that most of the time...

Thugg the Caveman and some of the other males from his tribe made their way across the tundra of Ice Age West Midlands.  It had been a hard winter and numbers had decreased significantly. Some had been lost to the cold, some to hunger and still others to the saber-toothed tigers that continued to plague this branch of infant humanity. It was a risky business, this hunter-gathering. If you didn't pay attention constantly it could spell doom for both you and your chances of passing on the genes for not paying attention constantly. Thugg clipped Foot-Watcher around the ear and by means of a series of complex grunts and gestures indicated to him that whilst staring at his own feet might one day become the de rigueur pose for indie musicians many millennia hence, right here and now it was about as much use as a chocolate teapot.  Foot-Watcher looked perplexed - as well he might seeing as neither chocolate nor teapots would be invented...

The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilisations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it. The Fermi Paradox Why haven't we come across any aliens yet? I'm talking about convincing scientific proof, not garbled " ...them thar moon-critturs been done abducted me ag'in ..." reports from the likes of Cletus Hickson in Bumfuck, Arkansas . It feels right that aliens should exist. Surely by now we should have come across some hard evidence? A belief in aliens is older than our knowledge of the wider universe. Even before we had any idea that there existed worlds other than our own we had a concept of non-human intelligent beings. These concepts were quite distinct from our ideas of other humans. Even if Thugg the Caveman had taken a gap year before going to The University of Central Ugland and had trekked across Europe and down i...

"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron." Spider Robinson Everything we like is bad for us. Well, that's not strictly true. I am sure that watching, say, the reimagined series of Battlestar Galactica hasn't done me any harm no matter how much I might have frakkin' enjoyed it. No, I'm, talking more about physical rather than intellectual pleasure. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, and it's not the thrill that some weirdos get from a session down at the gym. I'm talking about eating whatever we like to eat, drinking as much as we want, and in some cases introducing pharmaceutical products into our bloodstreams in order to alter our mood or behaviour. These are all things that can give us enormous pleasure and yet seem to be ultimately very bad for us. It's not that hard to work out where this annoying state of affairs comes from at least with respect to t...

"It's certainly a phenomenon in all walks of life. "What do you mean?" "Well, at one time, you've got it, and then you lose it, and it's gone forever. All walks of life: George Best, for example. Had it, lost it. Or David Bowie, or Lou Reed." "Lou Reed, some of his solo stuff's not bad." "No, it's not bad, but it's not great either. And in your heart you kind of know that although it sounds all right, it's actually just shite." Sick Boy & Renton, Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh Odd that people tend to sneer at the new and different. It's been my observation that the creative mind can be at its most interesting when first it releases its brainchild upon the scene. Perhaps people have an inbuilt conditioning to be wary of the brand new? In Thugg's World, for instance, what's brand new might conceivably kill you. People also dismiss the new and the popular because of the hype. In an attempt to appear mo...

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell Much as I find the above quote amusing and intellectually appealing, I'm not sure it's entirely true. Of course on one level I'd like it to be because it would appeal to my vanity. It would allow me to take one of my flaws - a lack of confidence and surfeit of doubt - and turn it into a virtue. I'm scared therefore I'm smart . But logically that's not acceptable. Even if it were true that the intelligent were full of doubt, it doesn't necessarily follow that those full of doubt are intelligent. All smurfs may be blue, but it doesn't follow that all blue creatures are smurfs. The funny thing is that if I accepted the quote to be true and used it for self validation as described above I'd be indulging in an intellectual vanity, which could of course be considered confidence of a sort. A paradox. And wherever we find a paradox w...

"The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it [but] as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me ... immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents." Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past There seems to be nothing quite like smell (and its twin brother taste) for stirring up the memory in a way and to such a powerful extent that none of the remaining senses are able to. At the moment I seem to be stopped in my tracks by this experience on an almost daily basis. I step out of the building onto the frosty campus and am instantly thrown back to any one of a number of past winters; in the playground at school, on this very same campus some twenty years previously, visiting my grandmother fo...

The psychology behind Hate Week is precisely that of working up both party members and proles into a frenzy of self-righteous hate for the enemy, pushing out of their minds all thought of the unsatisfactory lives that they themselves are living. George Orwell 1984 If we return to our old friend Thugg the Caveman, whose antics are always handy when it comes to trying to explain modern behaviour, it's straightforward to see why we human beings find it so easy to hate. The Other Tribe at the far end of the dirt track that would one day be the M6 are in competition with Thugg's gang; there are only so many sabre-toothed tigers to go around. In order to maximise the chances of Thugg's people making it out of the Stone Age in one piece they have to be able to kill members of The Other Tribe without a moment's thought if necessary. Chromosomes are ruthless bastards when it comes to ensuring that they're passed on. The only problem of course is that in its journey toward...

What makes getting up in the morning so difficult sometimes? I've just spent ten minutes wrestling with my volition, although in this case it's been time well spent as I was deliberately analysing what it was that made me want to stay in bed. Apparently it's not physical tiredness (and if I was writing a Wikipedia article I'd have to "cite" something here). All the physical body needs to recharge its batteries is around half an hour's lying down and then it's good to go. No, it's the brain. It's always the brain. Lying there analysing why I didn't want to get up I noticed there was a mental glow in the back brain and a general low level endorphine buzz throughout the body. I was enjoying it enough to be physically conscious of the Happy Mechanism. Usually the Happy Mechanism kicks in when we're doing something that we oughta, so what was it about lying there in bed and possibly falling asleep again that was biologically better for me ...

What makes something funny? Why do we laugh? There are many theories about what constitutes humour, about what makes comedy. That's not quite what I'm trying to understand. I want to know what it's for . In general everything about us has a beneficial biological purpose (apart from the appendix which seems to exist merely to become inflamed, affording many of us our first experience of an operation in which general anaesthetic is used). Even our behaviour - some would say especially our behaviour - has evolved in response to a specific need, to give us the advantage over those not so blessed. So where's the advantage in finding things funny? I can't see it. Perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way. Using an analogy might help. Why do we feel lust? Like feeling amused it's an irresistible emotion which can temporarily take over our mind so we can think of nothing else. Well that's an easy one. We feel lust in order to make us have sex. What's ...

Q: What do you get if you take the content of the previous two blog entries and extrapolate from there? A: Something that sounds a bit like Weird Shit. Sorry, that wasn't my intention. In the tradition of the good old thought experiment I'm only going to talk about what is or what might be and am not going to invoke any mysterious ineffable power. There'll be no " god did it " here - it's the philosophical equivalent of " because I say so " and we all remember how annoying that was when we were kids. Yesterday I was trying to demonstrate how linear time might be an illusion. I realised later that in doing so I inadvertently implied that another sort of time existed - in saying " your previous present was in 2023, and you may shortly be departing for 1977 " I was indicating that these three selves, 2023 , 2009 and 1977 , were being visited in sequence. A sequence implies time. A kind of meta-time. I didn't mean to; it's just that a...