A detail from a story

Jack sat down at the PC. It was one of a line of them in the local library.

He took out his keychain, which had small "library card." (This was not like the old sort of library card that he remembered from school days -- this was a smaller thingy suited to a keychain, presumably to make it had to lose.) The card was there along with other convenient little items that have nothing to do with the act of entering or starting a car, including a card of roughly the same size that got him discounts at the local Shop & Grab store.

So he entered a longish number into the PC -- thinking it was the library card number. A box in the screen informed him that number was not active. He entered it a second time, being more careful about his typing this time. He got the same error box.

He moved over to the next computer at the bank. That seat was also unoccupied. While he was getting himself settled, by habit, he stuck the keychain back in his pocket. When he realized this, he fished it back out of his pocket, fiddled around until settling again on the library card, and entered the key numbers again. THIS time it worked, and he was into the library's computer system, and by commutation onto the internet.

When he realized this, he noticed the numbers affixed to the two machines. The one that had frustrated him had a small label on it that said "9". The one that had allowed him access, said "10." He would remember that. Nine bad. Ten good.

He would never know what my reader by know will surely have figured out. Desktop 9 had rejected his Shop & Grab card number. If he had given it the library card number, he would not have had to change seat.

And so began Jack's irrational preference for 10 over 9, which....

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog