While trying to track down pictures of attractive theoretical physicists this afternoon I stumbled upon a strange site named ‘FOLLYDIDDLEHAH!‘. I have no idea what that means, but the site is an interesting blend of quotes from philosophers and images. What it reminded me was how many ideas out there I haven’t exposed my mind to. And, how easily confused I get by language. One of the reasons I started TAGTL was to break these complicated ideas into language that normal people could understand. I don’t believe that complex ideas need to be articulated in dense, often obscure and usually very long paragraphs. I think, like writing the perfect pop song, that often it’s making things simple that takes the real genius.
Flip through some of the quotes on the site and you’ll see what I mean. The one paragraph that I did magane to get my head wrapped around was from Bertrand Russell on memory and belief.
“In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are called knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed.” — Bertrand Russell