“Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies and entities operating in the world,” Hood explains. “More important, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense.”

We are natural-born supernaturalists.

Not two weeks ago, I pumped out a grad-school final on less (...granted, it wasn't very good. But still...). I bet he even nourished himself more frequently than every other day!

Geez, where do they find these people?????

From an Enlightenment or Positivist point of view, which is Hume's point of view, and mine, there is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad. There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

 

Plato was born of a virgin, after Apollo had appeared to his reputed father in a dream, according to a story which was widely current soon after Plato's death and possibly even before it.6 And since he was a lifelong enthusiast for creating popular beliefs which he knew to be false, and beliefs, at that, with rather less to recommend them to him than this one had, who can say with confidence that Plato himself did not encourage belief in this stupid story? Plato - that scourge of the human mind, whom we have to thank for persuading philosophers for 2400 years, and more years to come, that it is a problem, how something can be a certain way and something else be the same way! Then, entrust yourself to Augustine's mighty intellect, and you too must agonize, as he does, over the 'problem', for example, whether Jesus is still bleeding from hands and feet? Or has he lost by now all trace of the scars of the crucifixion? Or, does he retain some scars but only faint and not-unattractive ones? It is this third alternative, Augustine concludes, which will recommend itself to every rational mind.7 Auguste Comte simply appointed himself Supreme Pontiff of his new, but final and worldwide religion, the Religion of Humanity. George Hegel thought that his thought not merely discloses, but is, the final coming-to-consciousness of the Absolute Thought. Marx, too, saw himself as the prophet and architect of a fundamental transformation of the entire human race, and ... But no! Let us, for pity's sake, as well as for horror's sake, draw a veil... But let us never forget, either, as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what the 'great thinkers' really are: proper objects, indeed, of pity, but even more, of horror.

Towards a nosology of thought. A penetrating, deliciously satirical and thoroughly devastating perspective on the history of philosophical achievement in these past two millenia.

Say what you will about the blipsters and their crazy tastes—but we should have seen it coming. Black folks have had plenty of role models when it comes to edgy style. Dwayne Wayne, a character on A Different World and one of the earliest templates for today’s blipsters, wore flip-up sunglasses without irony. Black rockers like Prince laid the track for musicians such as Brooklyn-based TV on the Radio, singer Kelis, who famously “screamed on a track” or even hip-hopper Jim Jones, who’s partnered with fairy-funk act MGMT and once declared himself “too fat to fit into those skinny pants.” And don’t forget the sheets, diapers and hot pants worn by Parliament Funkadelic and Earth, Wind and Fire.

In short, blipsters are proof that everything old is new again.

Arnoldussen handed me a pair of blacked-out glasses with a tiny camera attached to the bridge. The camera was cabled to a laptop that would relay images to the mouthpiece. The look was pretty geeky, but the folks at the lab were used to it.

She turned it on. Nothing happened.

"Those buttons on the box?" she said. "They're like the volume controls for the image. You want to turn it up as high as you're comfortable."

I cranked up the voltage of the electric shocks to my tongue. It didn't feel bad, actually — like licking the leads on a really weak 9-volt battery. Arnoldussen handed me a long white foam cylinder and spun my chair toward a large black rectangle painted on the wall. "Move the foam against the black to see how it feels," she said.

I could see it. Feel it. Whatever — I could tell where the foam was. With Arnold ussen behind me carrying the laptop, I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them with my eyes. Tyler's group hasn't done the brain imaging studies to figure out why this is so — they don't know whether my visual cortex was processing the information from my tongue or whether some other region was doing the work.

I later tried another version of the technology meant for divers. It displayed a set of directional glyphs on my tongue intended to tell them which way to swim. A flashing triangle on the right would mean "turn right," vertical bars moving right says "float right but keep going straight," and so on. At the University of Wisconsin lab, Tyler set me up with the prototype, a joystick, and a computer screen depicting a rudimentary maze. After a minute of bumping against the virtual walls, I asked Tyler to hide the maze window, closed my eyes, and successfully navigated two courses in 15 minutes. It was like I had something in my head magically telling me which way to go.

You can almost see the dark fluff of ‘Duh’ swelling to fill their talking-pointy heads. And just barely hear the audience squirming in their seats, panicking in awkward anticipation of their next uproarious gotcha! cue for applause. Ah, I do love TV moments like these....