Fido the Yak

Does paper cover rock?

Imagine if Down Under rock covered paper. I know, I know, but just imagine. Would there be a zone of transition, or an abrupt reversal of fundamental laws of rock, paper, scissors? At the equator. Shouldn't there be some sort of ritual to mark the passage? Could you play rock, paper, scissors with a person on the other side of the equator? This would seem pretty strange, playing rock, paper scissors across the equator, but would it really be any stranger than known phenomena like magnetism?

It's pretty easy to stumble into an imagination of a quantum universe, a naive many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this universe, the shirt I want to iron is upstairs. In another universe, it's right here by the ironing board. But where am I in this other universe? Upstairs, perhaps, looking for that shirt I meant to iron. We tend to imagine ourselves as omniscient, or more accurately we imagine the world as if our viewpoint had qualities of omniscience and permanence that no viewpoint can truly possess. Why do we associate our selves with this fixed point? We could concievably wrap this point into our multiplications, but as a matter of habit we don't. Worlds are many, selves are one. For the self that is many, we reserve the term "schizo," which besides implying a pathology, implies that the true nature of self is oneness. This is strange.

I've finally got around to opening up Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves. It's unsettling. That's as far as I've gotten with it.

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:11 PM.