2019.08.08
I don't believe in God - actually, I KNOW that God doesn't exist - and I still believe in him. [...] God as a religion is just poetry. So I'm using certain metaphors which are very helpful due to my cognition, I'm using them to communicate with you, with my children, and I say 'yeah, God will punish you if you talk like that.' Why not?
Which means... to be more scientific about it: most of our reasoning works around metaphors. Similarities. And the deepest metaphor that we have are the metaphors of family relations. We are born to a mother and father, our perception system is so attuned to whether our mother frowns, or smiles - it's the first thing that we learn.
You grow up, and you find out that the world is not only mother and father, it has stars, and it has other things - so you create a metaphor. Because I understand "mother" and "father". I don't understand this movement of the stars, so I will immediately come out with the conclusion that there is some force like my father that moves the stars around, and like my father, teaches me things, and punishes me things. And sometimes it's very natural, to say that's the basics of our cognition. So I do not fight it - I use it. But I remember that it's only poetry.
me, lightly touching miette with the side of my foot: miette move out of the way please so I don't trip on youMan, I have such a hard time with confabulated reality. Like I have to pause a second and remember, oh but cats can't actually condemn people to prison for a millennium.
miette, her eyes enormous: you KICK miette? you kick her body like the football? oh! oh! jail for mother! jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!
I'm not sure how many cookies it takes to be happy, but so far it's not twenty seven.
Talking about how doctors still use Pagers (I wonder if anyone has invented a smartphone case that can receive pages, since it's a different, more reliable network) - shout out to Al Gross. He never seemed to be resentful that his stuff - the walkie-talkie, the CB-radio, the pager - never made him rich before his patents would expire - he said they "permeated our society, and I'm delighted."
Interesting hearing about the French vs Québécois translations of the Simpsons