Categories: uncategorized
Date: 17 June 2005 13:59:46
Without wishing to sound like a philospophical version of Dr. Denzil Dexter from The Fast Show and his mantra "Science is fun!", I would like to persuade you that philosophy can be fun. Of course it may be the case that I end up with the philosophical equivalent of singed eyebrows and a smoke-stained ceiling, but hey, it's all for a good cause. Take Dr. Daniel Dennett. He's the sort of philosopher whose books you can buy from Waterstone's and make more sense of than A Brief History of Time, which is quite possibly the best selling doorstop / dinner-party set pseudo-intellectual ego-boost in history. Dennett reckons we are the perpetrators of a crime called "timescale chauvinism", and who am I to argue? Basically, reckons Dennett, we tend to form relationships with those things around us which evolve at a similar rate to ourselves. For example, we have close relationships with cats, dogs, horses and lop-eared rabbits and we might have a certain affinity for particular trees. Thus it's socially acceptable to say things like, "I'm just sat here on the end of the pier watching the sun go down, just me and my dog", or "Tonight I'm going to teach Misty to turn the lights on and off", or "I remember when I was a kid and used to swing from the branches of that old oak". Our relationship to things which evolve over a much slower timescale than ourselves is less affectionate, for example "I'm just sat here playting my guitar on the front porch, watching the sun go down, just me and my oyster", is likely to attract attention from psychiatric services. I would like to promote the idea of having an oyster as a pet though, maybe fairgrounds could be persuaded to give away an oyster in a plastic bag instead of a Goldfish 17 hours away from meeting its maker. Maybe keeping an oyster would be good for our sense of time and help us to realise that not that much really changes, either before we're born or after we die, the water closes in over our heads and the sun rises the next day and nothing changes except maybe the planet gets a bit warmer and the ice-caps a bit smaller. Yes, the keeping of oysters as pets, I would wish to suggest, may help us gain a sense of 'timescale reality', which is an effective cure for watchers of Celebrity Love Island (...er...no celebrities - no love - I guess I'll concede on the Island bit...) and readers of OK! Of course if 'timescale reality' gets a bit boring you can always sacrifice poor Shelly in order to boost your libido. Some things never change.