A funny from the Future of Freedom Foundation

My wife, Mary, and I have been married for forty-seven years, and not once have we had an argument serious enough to consider divorce; murder, yes, but divorce, never.


-- Jack Benny

They also sent me this quote which goes along with something I've been thinking about, inspired by Ludwig von Mises. Well, quote first:

They who have read about everything are thought to understand everything, too, but it is not always so; reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections--we must chew them over again.
-- William Ellery Channing

Experience is incomprehensible without a framework with which to understand it. As babies, we begin to develop a sort of implicit philosophy to interpret our sensations. If we never realize that "If I do this (cry or smile or coo), this happens (I get fed, or The Big Ones get all excited and tickle me)"... Some version of cause and effect... We don't grow into human beings with any understanding at all. Like the silent Russian orphanages I heard about on PBS. The social connection gets broken when adults don't respond. For most children it can, with love and patience, be rebuilt, but for a large minority, I don't know the percentage, it can't.

I think the evidence is in that we are hard wired to understand cause and effect and that is the foundation of all practical and theoretical knowledge. And I believe that any philosophy or theory that posits a break between them, or insoluble uncertainty, signs its own death warrant.

We can't understand anything without a theory, and myriads of them have been proposed. I doubt that we've achieved perfection in any of them yet. But action and consequence are the basis of all our plans. It IS rocket science. Etc.