So this is not an Objected Oriented Paradigm post, it's more like a nature of reality rant, which is kind of the same thing, so my IT friends might want to review their Philosophy 101 to get the angle of attack right, especially the chapter on Plato and Forms, which I don't claim to understand but continually attempt to measure the distance between me and that understanding. A Form is the abstract Reality that exists behind representations of it, things, physical realities, that we can sense, through the properties of the physical form, I think. Feel free to straighten me out on this, everybody else does on everything else anyway.
I bought deodorant today, not like I really need it(ha) and I remembered that the other day a person walked by me in the store and I got an overwhelming smell of aquarium rocks, you know, like when you clean your fish tank, then it was gone. I started thinking, did that guy really smell like aquarium rocks? Was he Aquaman? Or did I imagine that? Like how can a person smell like aquarium rocks? I know it's been raining a lot, I was standing in the rain for a month myself and my feet never dried out even though I rotated through four pairs of boots, but really, aquarium rocks? So did that guy have some kind of physical property, smell, like aquarium rocks? Was he a fish hobbyist? Work in an pet shop and just cleaned the tanks? If you ride MUNI/BART, you know some people have definite physical properties of smell, but I never smelled a person that smelled like aquarium rocks.
Can things have properties that we don't know about on the physical level but somehow sense on some other level? Like can you know that an orange came from Florida or California without evidence? Where that orange was grown is a definite physical property, necessary to its existence, but can we sense that property somehow? When we have experiences that don't quite fit the usual paradigms, that we can't explain, we say that it's a coincidence or use some convenient existential metaphor, something that helps us preserve our world view or comfortable consciousness without having to admit that we need to modify our cosmology. I know what you're thinking King Lear, "Oh, that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that."
Two years ago almost to the day, April 12, 2009, we were waiting in the Mexico City airport for our flight back to the USA, and the first reported death from swine flu was happening in the city of Oaxaca. I noticed many traveler's aides, helpers, information providers in different types of clothing, costume and uniform. One group was great in helping people find their terminal and departure gate, they were all wearing black pants white shirts and were all in wheelchairs. Another group had on a smart looking, well fitting military style green/brown uniform, and I noticed that most of those folks had a very definite indigenous look. One woman in particular reminded me of some of the people that were in the movie Apocalypto, especially that King on the pyramid, her features, expression and skin tone were were amazingly similar. I was awe struck in a fearful way and I didn't attribute it to me being Weak Whitey in a foreign country. It was some kind of sensing going on at another level, an archetypal emotion triggered by DNA communication or something, like some kind of flashback to some time I never experienced, it was just so irrational. How do you know what you know ?
