Guaranteed Mostly True: Bicycling Across Siberia

"One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,"

"Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?"

In my previous blog about metaphors, I alluded to conceptual metaphors and categorization. What can I tell you – it's something I've been fiddling with in the basement.

I've always been fascinated by the process of individuation; how we decide where one thing stops and another begins. How and why we group things into categories. How much of our compartmentalized vision of the world is actually hardwired into our nature? Why do we so often discount the concept of genetic programming in humans, but attribute it to other animals and call it instinct? Is there an acausal orderedness to the universe unrelated to the will of Man?

Who ate my Ding Dongs and put an empty box back into the fridge?

Whoa man! Deep shit.

WARNING: THIS BLOG MAKES WIDE PHILOSOPHICAL TURNS – STAY BACK 200 FEET

Time for a…

Boiler plate disclaimer: At best, any information contained within this blog should be considered the Cliff's Notes version of reality – assuming Cliff was really high and copying Spark's Notes. Sparky? Sparky was absent the day they covered this topic so he copied some gibberish he found carved on a table top in the back of the school cafeteria. Those random scratches in turn were left there by one, Ted Munson, etched with a pair of blunt scissors in a rare semi lucid moment during a long overdue yet well deserved detention period five years prior – and Ted, well frankly, Ted had shit for brains.

You have been warned. Take it with a grain of salt, a bite of lime, and a 5th of Mescal. Don't forget to eat the worm.

My blog about metaphors "danced around" an underlying assumptions regarding symbolic thinking and how we might move from inference to categorization. It might be that we categorize things because that it how our brains work at the most basic level. Internal lists provide order to our universe and remind us when to pick up the dry cleaning.

We'd have to bring in cognitive science to really delve into boundaries and categorization and I have to remind myself that this is a freaking BLOG. Oh, and I managed a solid D+ in every science class I ever pointed my blunt little head at, there is that too.

But philosophy as we all know is a hobby for the young, the unemployed, the unemployable and the insane. I think I can manage one of those categories. Pretend I'm a substitute teacher. I'll give you a hall pass to go smoke in the lavatory while this blog is in progress if you promise not to throw shit at me when my back is turned.

And now - a musing digression indicated by indented italicized text:

I don't know why I can't just blog about oral sex like everyone else. I could make SOMETHING up. Blame it on my reading habits; books about consciousness and cognition. Penance for a youth spent trying to destroy both.

[segue into movie loop representing endless internal dialogue]

"Hallo… My Name is Inego Montoya"

"You killed my brain cells."

"Prepare to die!"

I warned you.

[dissolve to elderly pipe smoking professor standing behind desk, hand resting lightly on small bust of Jane Austen. Jane is a consenting adult so shut up and those corsets were tight!]

Back to categorization.

There is probably nothing more basic than categorization to the way we think and perceive. Indeed*, without conscious thought we automatically categorize people, animals, and physical objects. It's easy to see the biological advantage of category making. Taking note of the environment and then grouping like things together helped early humans to determine which plants were edible and which plants would kill.

* I love saying "Indeed" – it makes it sound like I know what I'm talking about.

Say a prayer of thanks to those early pioneers the next time you nibble on a BBQ flavored pork rind. You stand at the apex of a pyramid made up of a lot of dead fucking cavemen.

And the experimentation process goes on to this day.

The act of categorization implies that things are to be grouped for some specific purpose like easy retrieval or time management. All vegetables belong in the produce aisle – or Congress. That way we know where to look for them and when. So we enter the domain of nominalism, or the naming of things; and taxonomy, the ordering of the things we name.

Plato said that in order to understand the world, we should "cut nature at its joints." Maybe he was just hungry. Who knows? But the point (whoa! a point!) is questioning the question: where is that joint?

"Oooo! I know!"

Shaddup.

Aristotle used a technique of applying successive narrowing questions to categorize things. Sort of like Twenty Questions for toga wearers.

Here is an example of Aristotelian logic used to determine whether someone is a witch or not.

Aristotle was an annoying fuck.

So am I.

Biological taxonomy is the arrangement of living organisms into the categories. Most of us are familiar with the taxonomy invented by Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus that goes; Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, Age, Sex, Location?

Linnaeus

OK. The last three I found on Craig's List – which by the way, is the best spot to find dates outside your species.

Much of Linnaeus' work has been discarded over the years as categorization methodologies have become more sophisticated; especially in light of recent advances in the study of DNA. His work has also been perverted for political ends such as the pseudo-science the Nazis used to justify genocide or, the racial typing done in the 19th century by people like Samuel Morton.

Samuel George Morton was the American ethnographer who put forth the theory that skull size equated to intellectual capacity. He collected hundreds of human skulls from all over the world claiming that he could judge the intellectual capacity of a "race" by the skull size. When it turned out - purely by coincidence because of his small sampling - that the skulls with the largest cranial measurements were Asian, he fudged his data and published anyway to show the supposed racial superiority of Caucasians.

Samuel George Morton was a douche bag.

A much cooler guy with three names, Jorge Luis Borges, once wrote a humorous piece poking fun at taxonomy. In it, he created a mythical Chinese encyclopedia called the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge that organized all animals into the following categories:

(a) belonging to the Emperor
(b) embalmed
(c) tame
(d) suck[l]ing pigs
(e) sirens
(f) fabulous
(g) stray dogs
(h) included in the present classification
(i) frenzied
(j) innumerable
(k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush
(1) et cetera
(m) having just broken the water pitcher
(n) that from a long way off look like flies

I fucking love this guy.

So classification can work against understanding if we accept categories created by others without question. For someone creative enough, the only limit on the number of potential categories or ways to categorize things is the imagination. Don't believe me? You should see my voter registration card.

But a large proportion of our categories are not categories of things, they are categories of abstract entities. It's easy to see how we order physical objects like stray dogs or douche bags but mysterious when we move into ordering abstract concepts.

I was going to do a whole thing on Set theory and Fuzzy Logic using really cool Venn diagrams.

But then my head started to hurt and I scrapped it.

Is this blog half empty or half full of bullshit? If you answered one or the other, you're an optimist and a literalist. Thanks for the kudos by the way. If you see it as both, then you are on your way to understanding Fuzzy Logic and unsubscribing.

Back in college I hung out with a bunch of Dead Heads. They would keep meticulous lists of all the songs the Dead played at a particular show and would compare notes between marathon hacky sack tournaments/rent parties. "Yeah dude. It was awesome! They started out with Franklin's Tower and then just totally moved right into Space Jam after Jerry died!"

Now I don't think I need to point out that as a group, Dead Heads have trouble wrapping their heads around basic concepts like life goals and personal hygiene. Yet give them a song list and a true Dead Head can rattle off the date, venue and whether Jerry was alive or not.

Great at ordering the physical – abstract, not so much.

Which brings us around to lists. If someone is going to display their insanity, a list is one of the sure ways to do it. MySpace is list crazy; Top Tens, Pet Peeves, etc. I just don't get it most of the time.

My lists tend to go a different route.

My wife comes up with to-do lists for me that rival Twelve Labors of Hercules because she is insane.

The world we live in is mysterious. Even our celebrities are categorized into lists. We have A-List celebrities like Brad & Angelina and D-listers like Tara Reid and Tom Anderson - and of course, celebs like Britney that tend to yo-yo through the alphabet depending on a complex formula of public interest to blood-alcohol content.

Some lists just flat out suck to be on:

If only we could somehow switch the celebrity list with the endangered species list, THAT would be cool.

Lists help us to organize our thinking, manage our time, arrange our sock drawers – you name it.

We have stores that help us organize our lives like

because lets face it – the Swedes are more organized than we are. Plus it's just good fun to buy stuff with names like Självupptagen (trans: shitty chair that will snap closed on you like a bear trap the first time you try to sit in it.)

Sure, Swedes know how to organize – but sometimes they shouldn't.