Have you ever wondered why we change our mind, sometimes? Actually, writing that sentence, I wonder at the visual: I see a physical mind replacement occurring. I am sure over the years myriad cartoonists have drawn such an image — a face with two hands reaching above it and lifting out a brain so to replace or rearrange or change it. There’s that. And, there’s the question, what comprises the mind? Physicists and philosophers, neurology focused persons, and psychologically focused persons all have theories. But facts?
What are facts?
I looked it up:
A fact is a true datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by experiments or other means
And then I remembered something I just read this morning that talked about the “fact” that repeatable careful observations or measurements enacted to verify the factness of facts, are not directly applicable to real life, because randomness is everpresent, and randomness disallows the inviolability of a fact. Randomness does not happen the same way each time, nor is it from the same place, nor is it the same size, shape, color, tone, weight, ….. So how can a controlled test (and are not tests, by definition, controlled?) both allow randomness and enable arriving at a fact? Can it do either?
Also, we can’t forget that any picture we are in, any place we are in, we are in, so we can’t, in fact, see it all.
Let’s move on. It just began to rain, and thunder is rolling along beside it. The humidity had gotten too full, and over it flowed. Would that it would abate. But at this very moment, I simply feel the air around me weighs just a little more. Ugh.
The other day a Night Heron stood on a rock across the Concord River from us and watched, and watched, and watched, and dunked! Up he raised his beak, back he leaned his head, and down his gullet he let the fish slide.
And, then, a day or so after the Night Heron, I got to watch a hummingbird case out and then consume sugar water, then flip away, only to fly back, then away, then back, ….. Imagine the energy consumption, and then also realize the understanding this tiny bird has of its limits and of its resources.
Then imagine their resources–both the flora and the feeders, sliding northward to keep out of the heat, and the encroaching heat waves becoming faster, larger, longer, wider. So the hummingbirds’ gauges are constantly reassessing, because summer is longer and hotter and yet wetter. When is it time to leave turn south now? The air, heavy, presses down on their backs. They cannot fly as far as fast in their thousands of miles seasonal migration.
And the rivers: one year up–flood stage one year down–herons’ feet stepping along bottom muck and tossed trash, one month up one month down, one week up and one week down. Dabblers losing their rock outcrop perches to rushing, overexerting and overtopped waterflows, carrying with their streams the often poisonous waste we thought we’d contained, or buried, or disguised to be drunk by the dabblers, the divers, the dunkers.
Oh me.
The beginning storm I mentioned earlier, has come, poured, rumbled and left. It is cooler now. There is that.
whereIwonder&why 