Everyone knows that white cats are not compatible with black wool pants, but I neglected this important truth while dressing this morning and didn't discover the disastrous result until I was halfway to campus. However, a length of sticky tape works as an impromptu lint brush, and then the more resourceful amongst us might want to knit an entirely new cat out of the cat hair so collected.
It's good to be back on campus after a relaxing break. A thoughtful student in my 9:00 class brought me coffee, which I appreciate very much except for the fact that I can't drink coffee. It's absurd to share my life with one of the world's great coffee brewers when the mere taste of coffee makes me vomit, but that's the way it goes sometimes. (One of these days I'll tell the whole nauseating story about my previous life as a coffee drinker and how it changed, but not this early in the day.)
Yesterday at home we played Boggle and my family refused to allow me to use the following words: swot, qualia, and swedes (the vegetable). I still won. This afternoon I'll attend many hours of meetings where other kinds of games will be played, possibly more significant in the long run but not nearly so enjoyable. Committee meetings have their own rules, mostly unwritten, and it's not possible at any given time to know who or what is winning. Right now, judging from the condition of my pants, I would say the cat is winning.
1 comment:
I am what is sometimes known as a "qualia freak." I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes. Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain, the kind of states, their functional role, their relation to what goes on at other times and in other brains, and so on and so forth, and be I as clever as can be in fitting it all together, you won’t have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy, or about the characteristic experience of tasting a lemon, smelling a rose, hearing a loud noise or seeing the sky.
['Epiphenomenal Qualia,' Frank Jackson,' Philosophical Quarterly, 1982]
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