Skip to main content

The rude mechanic and the cat

I have a cat that is extremely catlike. Cuddly (whenever she wants to be), scratchy (whenever the world has been mean to her), smart (always), in need to be left alone (except when she needs not to be left alone).
When a dustball crosses her path in the wrong moment she gets totally flustered and scared and runs for cover. I know, there ought not to be any dustballs where she is. I should keep the place tidy anyway. Problem is: a vacuum-cleaner is worse than dustballs.
Life is not always easy.
So my friend hid behind the big fridge for over a week, only coming out at night to get some food and then disappearing again through that small gap between fridge and washing-machine. 
I started to get worried and tried to coerce her out of there. Great food didn't help. Sweet-talking led to nothing. Turning the lights off - or turning them on. Futile. She seemed to blame me for the dustball-scare. She was totally unforgiving and made me feel terrible.
One evening I talked with a colleague. He suggested to withhold food altogether. No water, no dead animals, no nothing. She would come out eventually. When I said that this sounded too cruel and would certainly ruin all trust of that little fur-ball and - knowing the cat - she would rather starve than give in, he just said: I am a neuro-scientist - I know what I am talking about! Those critters are a bunch of hard-wired neurons, they function like robots.
Well.
My cat certainly didn't. And, actually, robots don't.
There is this big not-understood mess of bio-matter which my brain-mechanic might allude to as 'hard-wired neurons'. But then there is the software that controls all that. It certainly is not as easily separable as in your chunky iPad-one (commonly known as 'the old iPad', thanks), it is an agglomerate of neurons, synapses, connections, currents, chemistry - you name it. But it is certainly wrong to claim that since the parts of the brain can be labelled, listed, and charted the whole system is understood or even that its function is superbly deterministic.
(How boring the world would be! Those scientists claiming to understand the world by reducing it to their latest model are probably simply too scared themselves to face reality. It is full of ill-understood stuff that might sometimes resemble dustballs.)
Does my Brain-Mechanic accept that his laptop has software running on it? If the word-document doesn't open properly, would he plug in the soldering-iron? If the cat does not behave as desired that means what? Call a neurosurgeon?
I tried cat-psychology.
It is tricky. But it worked. My cat got out from behind the fridge and we both cursed dustballs at length. What a wonderfully complex world we live in!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Academics should be blogging? No.

"blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now" The London School of Economics and Political Science states in one of their, yes, Blogs . It is wrong. The arguments just seem so right: "faster communication of scientific results", "rapid interaction with colleagues" "responsibility to give back results to the public". All nice, all cuddly and warm, all good. But wrong. It might be true for scientoid babble. But this is not how science works.  Scientists usually follow scientific methods to obtain results. They devise, for example, experiments to measure a quantity while keeping the boundary-conditions in a defined range. They do discuss their aims, problems, techniques, preliminary results with colleagues - they talk about deviations and errors, successes and failures. But they don't do that wikipedia-style by asking anybody for an opinion . Scientific discussion needs a set
8 comments
Read more

Information obesity? Don't swallow it!

Great - now they call it 'information obesity'! If you can name it, you know it. My favourite source of intellectual shallowness, bighthink.com, again wraps a whiff of nothing into a lengthy video-message. As if seeing a person read a text that barely covers up it's own emptyness makes it more valuable. More expensive to produce, sure. But valuable? It is ok, that Clay Johnson does everything to sell his book. But (why) is it necessary to waste so many words, spoken or written, to debate a perceived information overflow? Is it fighting fire with fire? It is cute to pack the problem of distractions into the metaphore of 'obesity', 'diet' and so on. But the solution is the same. At the core of every diet you have 'burn more than you eat'. If you cross a street, you don't read every licence-plate, you don't talk to everybody you encounter, you don't count the number of windows of the houses across, you don't interpret the sounds an
3 comments
Read more

How Does Knowledge Get Into Society? A fly-by-artist-in-residence and a Dialogue

The artist Sadie Weis was shadowing some of the scientists at Paul-Drude-Institut (a research-institute for nanomaterials) for eight weeks, observing the way they work, how scientists communicate with eachother, how they explain stuff to an outsider. The result of this dialogue is a light-installation and - maybe more important for the scientists involved - a reflection of the scientists  and of the artist on the languages they use.  T his project of an artist in a fly-by-residency will be wrapped up on Saturday, November 10th with a p resentation by the artist Sadie Weis and a panel discussion on differences and similarities in the way artists and scientists communicate with the outside world                  November 10, 2018 from 14-18                 Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik                  Hausvogteiplatz 5–7, Berlin-Mitte                Germany For  the Dialogue,  please register at   exhibition@pdi-berlin.de .   Der Dialog wird auf Deutsc
Post a Comment
Read more