h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wrote this letter to The Irish Times but as usual they have preferred other space-fillers . . .

"Madam~" (yes we have a lady Editor)
"Seán Mullan (Letters, 7th October) speaks of "our Maker, if he exists." Such bad grammar cannot go unchallenged.

Of all our words "exists" is one of the slipperiest. It has a positive connotation but no absolute meaning. Its sense can only be taken from the context in which it is used: a groundswell of opinion exists (by consensus), the square root of minus one exists (it can be used in calculations), phlogiston exists (as a word in the dictionary), a fourth possibility exists (possibly).

These are very different meanings, and their connection is so tenuous that there exists a tag among philosophers: "existence no predicate". That means that if I name something, and I then add that it exists, I have said no more about it than I did at first by naming it.

So what is to be inferred from a sentence that contains the phrase "our Maker, if he exists"? That the supreme ideal, the universal consciousness, the common ground of all conversation, is to be visualised as male. Could do better, Mullan.

Yours etcetera

~Andrew Robinson"

Good point.

He thinks, therefore he exists. QED.

I log on, therefore it doesn't matter whether I exist or not.

As visiting professor ( especially at tea-time ) of All Things Advaitin, and alumnus par excellence ( not to mention co-founder ) of the aforesaid Marlborough Road Amateur Theological Society, I wish to protest absolutely that I do not exist, whether or not I log on.

C \|/

What, humbler than the root of minus one? The wallah doth protest too much methinks.

A most fascinating ramble into the realm of "Un SELF -ishness" is to be found here: http://www.amasci.com/~billb/cgi-bin/instr/instr.html if you scroll down past the crossed eyes. A further interesting view is to be reached by clicking on "dark aspects" at the end of the short paragraph.

*wonders (at lunchtime) whether "to protest that" means that one agrees with the statement or not*

In this usage, echoing Hamlet, it means "to overstate a case" as in protesting one's innocence when it has not yet been challenged.

Thank you. Sometimes little nuances of words and some superior meanings are, sadly, in my own tongue, foreign to me. Only here do I find people who have the patience to explain them to me.

The link you gave above I found very sad reading. Was this the wrong reaction?

Well it is sad, and I don't endorse this guy's opinions; I just found him interesting. I don't by any stretch go along with Carlos Castaneda, and in fact when I followed the link to "dark aspects" myself I didn't much read the particular entry you land at but surfed up the page to notice two paragraphs (though again I must not appear to endorse what he says; just found him interesting) beginning "The great secret" (it's honesty) and "Real human beings are gods" (which Alan Watts also says in "The Book About the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are", and Wittgenstein spoke in similar terms in his pre-Tractatus notebooks).

Apologies for mixing what I take seriously with what I don't.

My own attitude to the human/divine roles can (perhaps) be gleaned from the second last poem ("Men") at the bottom of my page~ http://www.Andrew.Robinson.net

I have reduced the download time for this page massively; aplogies to anyone who tried it before.