Essays in Idleness

During my minor ischaemic breaks from productivity, I have made it my habit not to “follow the science.” Of course, in this ischaemic condition, which I unscientifically call a “mini-stroke,” I cannot actually follow anything; and my perpetual dizziness limits rambling; but I have certain estimable advantages. What better time to observe the properties of mind and body, than when both are in process of slipping away? For once they have slipped, they will be in their most permanent condition, and static from the worldly point-of-view. Whereas, prior to this, they are restless and unpredictable.

Indeed, I would recommend my technique for time passage to Mr John Fetterman, as a better method of rehabilitation than by running for the U.S. Senate. For one is slightly less likely to make a fool of himself on national television, when one never appears on it. However, those who literally “follow the science” also obtain a reputation for foolishness; so as Voltaire would say, each to his own garden.

The sciences I don’t follow are the study of mind and, broadly, the weather. This is because neither of them can be shown to exist. Instead we have, as substitutes, brain surgery, and the collection of climate statistics.

This latter may seem a plausible subject for inquiry, until my reader notices that it excludes serious consideration of the sun. Various technocratic devices are proposed against the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, and fertilizers in the soil. Gigantic, bird-slaughtering fans are erected in formerly attractive places. But the sun is ignored, except by those who think they can impound its mysterious photonic energies, by vast, quaintly temporary, solar panels.

We do not look directly at the sun, from fear of being blinded. We turn away from it into the dark, or seek enlightenment over our shoulder. We might call this the speleology of Plato, although, I am told, this is also not a science. (Hardly anything is.)

Brain surgery is, today, a technocratic art (as opposed to a -logy), which flourishes even in the absence of mind. The mechanics of brain operation is studied with indifference to causation. That aspect of life is inaccessible, except to the blinking eye of faith. But if one could assemble precise inorganic copies of every particle that is needed to make up a human brain, or even less ambitiously that of a salamander, it almost certainly wouldn’t work — even if you powered it with wind and solar.