Low Key Hijinx Last Night

Good thing we cleaned the house yesterday because we ended up having people over last night for beers and chitchat.





Had a real nice time hanging out with Jeff, Sherry, and later Johanna, listening to random 45's we'd picked up at various flea markets and yard sales over the years. I don't think we'd even played a lot of them before. Turns out the theme to "The Greatest American Hero" is not nearly as enjoyable as I'd remembered it from my youth. "One Night in Bangkok," on the other hand, remains a crowd pleaser.

After Jeff and Sherry left to catch their buses and Ali went to bed with beer heartburn, Johanna and I stayed up until what to me these days are the wee hours, drinking wine and discussing intuition and the limits of rationality. I was borrowing heavily from John Ralston Saul's On Equilibrium and she from, well, the Bible, I guess. It turned into a rehashing of a very convoluted and probably not very productive argument I'd had with her dad the weekend before on the island, about evolution, causality, the existence of universal laws, and God. This time, though, we got a chance to actually listen to what each other were saying and avoid the horn-locking that is as good as inevitable between a continental and an analytic philosopher. She saw my point that Hume's investigation into our knowledge of cause and effect was doomed, since to ask why or how we come to know about anything already assumes that the answer will refer to some sort of causation. I think of this as one of Wittgenstein's "hinge propositions," about which there can be no questioning without language breaking down, and which must therefore be taken as a matter of fact purely on something like faith. Johanna saw in there room for God in logic, since religious belief also involves both faith and rationality. I wish I could remember what conclusion Hume eventually came to. Was it one of those seventeenth century arguments, like Descartes's, that ends up invoking God to solve the matter, but everyone later just remembers the interesting conundrum and not the kind of arbitrarily tacked on "solution"? I'll have to reread it.

Anyway, it was all very interesting to me because I'm currently reading this sort of new-agey metaphysical but at the same time very scientifically based book that I got at a yard sale called Synchronicity - The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, in which the author attempts to connect physics and psychology through the fact that current physical models of the universe can't entirely be called causal in nature, much like the workings of the human mind. Seems kind of far-fetched and kooky, I know, but so far the guy's been pretty rigourous in his argument. I'll let you know how it turns out. But the fact that I keep ending up in discussions about causality and spooky metaphysics is an interesting little coincidence, and coincidence is itself always one of the main themes of these sorts of discussions. Neat.

Baseball this afternoon. Jeff will be playing too, but on his old team in a different game from ours. I hope we do as well as last week. Go, Bellies!

Have to go do the laundry now and work on the crossword over brunch. I'll post some "party" pictures tomorrow.

- Andrew