March 02, 2005

• Fantastic article. (Quibble with the "presentists": The present does not exist any more than the past or future. We can never truly be in the present, always one step ahead or behind, remembering or planning. It's an interesting idea to teach the ape Heidegger, to get his perspective on it...)
• Thanks for this interesting article, islander.
• What soulful eyes this orang has.
• Beautiful story. Thank you.
• Been mulling over the presentist position, insofar as I've grasped it -- seems likely if we can be aware of nothing but the present instant, we can never learn to speak nor read nor a myriad other things. Nor would animals be capable of learning etc. So it seems easy to write off that notion. And yet ... Has someone has been looking at too much film footage, staring at one frame then another? I fathom little of the nature of time as a physicist might describe it -- a movie-frame by movie-frame consioderation of time is so far divorced from what's commonly held to be time passing that I'd have to learn more of it to really understand this, I expect. From such a perspective, time would perhaps be like a strand of beads with the mind's awareness somehow analogous to the thread holding the workd together. In which case, of course, why don't we we experience time backwards as easily as forward? Or are we to equate memory with dirctionality in experiencing in time-frames/beads? And how do we -- if we do -- explain precognition? O I am so confusion! Even if Burns did write of the mousie, the present only touches thee, I have reservations/many questions about this.
• I think I like your comment even better than the linked article, Beeswacky.
• Very interesting. I find orang utans much easier to identify with than chimps because of their relatively calm, thoughtful ways and solitary habits. They also pick up human practices very readily - have you seen the David Attenborough film of an orang refuge, where they are spontaneously washing socks, riding in boats, and sawing wood (having what amounts to four hands is very good for sawing, it turns out: you can use two hands to hold the wood steady, use one to do the sawing, and still have one free to scratch yourself with)? 'Presentism' sounds rather like Parmenides to me, or at least like his 'way of truth' arguments, which show that nothing can ever actually happen, and the past and future are illusory (if I've got him right). I think he would argue that your refutation fails, bees, because it rests on the assumption that we have learned, spoken, read, etc - which he regards as just more illusions (at least when he has his 'way of truth' hat on - he also has a 'way of seeming' where common sense prevails).
• I wonder a bit about the ethics here. If Lyn Miles thinks Chantek is a person, should he be in a cage? What gives her the right to plan his life? What if he wants nothing to do with ape culture experiments, and just wants to sit in McDonalds all day? Is the internet link with Koko being introduced because it's the best thing for both of them - or because it's, you know, kinda neat? I don't mean to be condemnatory - I imagine Ms Miles must ask herself this kind of question.
• Parmenides of Elea! - who argued that motion and change were impossible, illusory! The universe to him was an eternal, constant sphere. People criticised him for his dour view, but from what I understand he was actually having a ball. /rimshot
• Heh! Actually, been wondering much the same things, Plegmund -- if Chantek needed to have things to spend his earnings on, couldn't it have been on grapes or oranges or something of that sort? Why McDonalds rather than the Farmert's Market? What was the idea behiond bringing him up as a human child when it is quite clear he is not going to be allowed to lead a normal life as a human adult. Or as a human child. Nor much of a one as an orang, either. And if it had to be a human child, why make it a child rooted in a couch-potato culture? Was this really necessary to teach him signing so his linguistic abilities could be studied? I have many questions about this project: it doesn't seem to have been too well thought out from the standpoint of what Chantek might learn to want/get used to and later become frustrated about not having.
• Why keep him in a cage? While he has been brought up to be an Orang person, he's still not a fully functional adult. He's closer to a signing downs kid. And while he's being used (that's kinda the point of teaching him sign- to research him), he doesn't seem unhappy about it. I wouldn't want every Orangutan brought up as human, but I don't think there's great harm in this one. (McDonalds may have been a poor choice to expose him to, but most American kids will give the same clamor for it). As far as presentists, the easiest way to defeat one in a debate is to smack him in the head and then claim that it didn't happen, that he just experienced the illusion of being smacked in the head. Bees- I kinda like the rosary of human experience that you're working through there, and I'm not even a Catholic. And I hate to be the cold materialist, but precognition is pretty easy to explain: Everyone thinks that they occassionally sense things before they happen, whether they be through dreams or just blips of hunches. Usually, they're wrong. But with that many sensations of prediction, it would be mathimatically much more strange if no one were ever right.
• Why keep him in a cage? Orangs are really, really fucking strong, and like the other great apes, have a habit of screwing around and breaking shit. I'm not sure where else you could keep him safely.