Doing A Degree In Philosophy Like

19th August 2014: Ed's Philosophy Degree Timeline.

I decided to do a degree in philosophy. It's a subject that has fascinated me ever since Monty Python's 'Philosophy Song'. Who were these people they were going on about? The boys had already taught us about the Spanish Inquisition, which were the longest rivers (The Yangtze was third or something, but very popular with english goalkeepers and climbing up the league table), and that Venuzuelan Beaver Cheese existed. It doesn't: they were mucking about some of the time. And then I saw a documentary on philosophy and happiness. It turns out that most of the thinking that these great thinkers do is an attempt to find a happier existence.

An example is the author and philosopher Michel de Montaigne who so enjoyed the act of falling asleep, that he had his servant wake him every hour so he could enjoy the experience all over again. More importantly perhaps, Blaise Pascal worked out an equation or 'Wager' so you could decide if you were better off believing in God or not (apparently you should, who'd've thunk it, eh?).

Me, I just like thinking. We do it all the time! It's great! Make a cup of tea and is that one act? Or is the filling of the kettle, moving to where the kettle goes, waiting for it to boil, putting in the tea bag.... all different acts? And bingo, the tea is made and you can move on. During that five minutes or so you could have faced an imaginary over from Mitchel Johnson, walked out in front of a capacity crowd at Wimbledon to face Jocky Whoeveric in the singles final, or described the whole process to the audience of 'Saturday Kitchen'. There are no rules. Unless there are real mind readers, everything that goes on up there is private.

More on the thinking once I learn how to think and how to think about the thinking. I've enrolled. It's an Open University course so I won't be "hanging out" on campus and discovering drugs; but it needs paying for. When I did my HND in graphic design in the late 80's I got a grant. To new listeners, a grant was a payment of monies that payed for your studies. If you didn't spend all day in the pub you could easily make a profit, especially if you nicked everyone else's pencils (I'm looking at you, €∞√øså Bø˙Kx&)*.

Those days are gone of course, and I had to apply for a student loan. Sadly, my passport expired only weeks ago; this made applying a much more tiresome affair. I had to send my original birth certificate and find some upstanding member of the community who would vouch for my commitment while not living here, being in a relationship with me, or having just met me. This part of the process is still pending. It is possible the finance will not be sorted in time for my October start; I assume I'll have to try again for the next 'term' if it goes skywards.
*name removed to protect the guilty

I was given a list of books to buy. None of them contain the word 'philosophy'. I was expecting 'The Complete Works Of Those Old Greek Guys IN LATIN', but happily no. And a DVD! Remember school classes when you got to watch a film? I'll be able to sit at the back and muck about.
Here's the list:

Heaney, Seamus (tr) 'The Burial at Thebes'
Gurinder Chadha (Director) 'Bhaji on the Beach' (Channel Four DVD)
Marlowe, Christopher: O'Conor*, John (ed) 'Doctor Faustus the A text' 
Muldoon, Paul (ed) 'The Faber Book of Beasts'
Prescott, Lynda (ed) 'A World of Difference: an anthology of short stories from five continents'

*The OU spelt 'O'Connor' with one 'n', which is strangely encouraging.
If I read them before the studying starts, I'll be a shoe-in... 

Note: it's an own goal!

Bangers

Twenty years ago, give or take a month, FIAT and Alpha released some new wheels for the one-day-I'll-get-a-Ferrari brigade. Alpha gave us a new, radical, GTV and its chopped-off Spider. A "GTV Cabriolet" would have been a more accurate name - 'Spiders' should be designed from the ground up, like the Duetto of 1966 and 'The Graduate' fame. FIAT, on the other hand did what FIAT traditionally do: put a fancy coupé body on humble underpinnings. Their already ageing Tipo hatchback was the mule in this instance. The Alpha was a much more sophisticated machine than the 'Coupé FIAT' and more expensive as a result; FIAT toyed with a convertible version of the Coupé but it would have eaten into Alpha's Spider sales [owned by FIAT of course] so remained on the shelf. Available in 2.0 litre 16v and 2.0 16v turbo versions [later a volvo 5 cylinder engine would replace both], you had 140 or 195 bhp to play with [150/225 with the '5]. The opposition at the time consisted of the Vauxhall Calibra, Nissan 200SX and Honda Prelude - all much more sensible options given FIAT's reliability reputation but dull as dishwater that had all the tasty impurities and funky colour boiled out of it.

Designed by Chris Bangle, [later famous for his "flame surfacing" on BMW's Z4] built by Pininfarina.

Jump forward a decade and the "broom yellow" Coupé in these pictures appears on a Norfolk forecourt. I watched it for months, sitting there gathering dust, blossom, leaves, snow, dust again... until a birthday when, mid-life crisis or no mid-life crisis, I decided to buy it.

"If that car can move under its own power, it's coming home."

The dealer claimed he had to wrestle the keys off the previous "new-baby-forces-sale" owner; unfazed by this speil I took it for a lengthy test drive. Taking heed of the warnings available on the www dot  sites, I listened for tell-tale knocks, rumbles and OH IT DIDN'T MATTER I was always going to buy it.

Standard FIAT parts abound but Pininfarina designed a special-feeling interior - note the body-coloured dash.

R35 JNV was a 5 cylinder 20v turbo with an advertised top speed of 150 m.p.h. and 0-60 in 6.5 seconds. In those days there was a phenomenon called "turbo lag"- you could plant your foot on the floor with the accelerator pedal underneath and nothing would happen for a moment then WHOOSH: the trees melted. The trick of cramming a big turbocharged engine into a small hatchback's dimensions caused one major problem: to change the cambelt you had to take the engine out. Only a Lotus Esprit or Ferrari F355 gave you a bigger bill for this job at the time. I had the cambelt changed once in the nine years the car was mine; it cost so much I had to take the car off the road until I could afford to tax & insure it again. Over the years, like Boycey's broom in 'Only Fools & Horses', I changed everything that moved except the clutch [which was about to snap when we finally parted company].

Tempted? The styling of the FIAT Coupé is gawky from some angles: "If you don't like the look of it, walk a bit further round until you do." Said CAR magazine in 1995.

One summer the sun heated the bonnet to the extent that the alarm went off. Later, a chirping noise came from the garage, singular at first, then double. We thought a bird was trapped inside and opened the doors and windows to let the stricken thing out. No bird, still the chirp. Next day the chirp was a treble, quadruple and eventually the alarm sounded constantly and only disconnecting the battery stopped it. The car alarms used on the Coupé were bolted on once the cars arrived in Britain from Italy; most owners replaced them with better examples. Eventually I became less precious and used the Coupé as everyday transport. Like all machines, it needed to be used and became very reliable. One snowy night the handbrake froze 'ON' - with older cars you should always park in gear to stop this. One long journey caused the exhaust to burn a hole in the plastic bumper - it was a neat elipse which looked perfectly fine without mending. I used to "touch up" stone chips when the car first arrived but its low bonnet was so prone I eventually lost the will...

The filler cap harks back to more exotic machines from the 60's - looks nice but requires an Alvin Stardust grip on the fuel nozzle to fill up.

One day I was driving my nine-mile commute from Hoveton to the University of East Anglia and (attention, Partridge fans) I was stuck on the ring road literally going nowhere. At the front of a large stream of traffic, the lights went green. As I pulled away I felt a bump under the car: "Oh no, I've run over a cat or something", I thought. Unwilling to look in my mirrors to see the worst I ploughed on to the campus, followed by a big 4x4 which kept flashing its lights. I reached the car park and the driver got out waving at me; perhaps it was her cat, perhaps she thought I was Kevin Keegan, no: 

"Your exhaust fell off at the lights - I managed to get over it in my 4x4 but it was chaos behind me - how did you not notice?"

I gently and, let's not be coy, illegally, drove home. I put 'JNV in the garage and decided enough was enough. The clutch was going [another engine-out job] and now this: I couldn't afford to own this car anymore. Eventually Mike [who had fettled 'JNV over the years, building a sizeable property portfolio with the takings] trailered the old banger away. At time of going to press, a friend called Keith is gradually bringing the beast back to life.

The Coupé looks exotic, but everything is easily replaceable due to it being based on the humble Tipo hatchback.

You can find examples of these cars for pennies online - they were among the first Italian motors to be galvanised so won't rust away like FIATs of old. My tip would be to try and find an early non-turbo which shows no sign of modification. They are cheap enough for boy racers to buy and boy racers love to lower the suspension and fit stupid wheels: original is best. High mileages need not be a problem; my best pal Jonesy is near the 200,000-mile stage with his red example. Use the car often, and service it regularly.

Oh, and the yellow paint attracts flies - go for red or blue.

To Infinity But No Further

Wow, infinity right? 
We are living in, when last checked, an infinite universe. You might think this is just another scaremongering pop-up theory formed by the Tory government (under Thatcher) to keep us from worrying about house prices. But no, scientists (I'll check which ones in a minute) maintain (endlessly of course) that the universe goes on for ever. Let us for the sake of argument agree with them.

From Wikipedia:
In 1584, the Italian philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno proposed an unbounded universe in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds: "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds."

So if you have an infinite universe, there is not only one other sun like ours, but an infinite number of suns exactly like ours, with exact replicas of Earth revolving around them. 

A similar theory involves pi. Again, from Wikipedia:

The number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.141592. Being an irrational number, π cannot be expressed exactly as a common fraction, although fractions such as 22/7 and other rational numbers are commonly used to approximate π. Consequently its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern. 

You can argue that pi isn't really a number, but an idea of a number. But if it is a number, it's an infinite one. As a result all number sequences must appear in it. For instance: take all the phone numbers in the Yellow Pages, string them end-to-end, and this sequence will be in pi. One business in the book goes under, their number is removed, the new sequence will still eventually appear in pi. 

Now fingerprints.
Everyone knows that every human's fingerprints are unique. But this can only be a theory because not everyone has been born yet and not everyone's fingerprints have been checked. Similarly, it might take a while, but two identical snowflakes might turn up: "Quick, Madge! Get the microscopic camera, it's melting." etc. Perhaps stretching a point; Mike Silverman (who introduced the first automated fingerprint detection system to the Metropolitan Police) has his doubts about the theory too. To be fair however, he is factoring human error into the equation:
From The Telegraph...

So which one of these theories should we believe? None of them are religious or creationist mumbo-jumbo. They're like evolution, making sense but also making you stare off into space when you should be concentrating on work or whatever.

But they can't all be right. 

If all fingerprints are different, then all the planets and stars in the universe can be different too. If all snowflakes are unique, then all the numbers in pi can be random and follow no other sequence. If someone finds two sets of similar dabs then we are not alone.

And then there's God.
Another infinite concept, he/she has to keep an eye on everything ALL the time while creating new stuff in the process; it must be infinitely exhausting. When asked what his religious beliefs were, the writer and all-round good egg Frank Muir replied: "I'm a lapsed agnostic - my doubts are beginning to waver." How can an atheist explain the universe if he can't believe it's infinite? Must he downgrade to agnosticism? Unfortunately for those reading this, neither of you will reach far enough into space to take a picture of The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. And the other one is unlikely, let us be frank, to bump into God at Tesco. 

Blaise Pascal tried to work out what was the best philosophy to live by, given the fact that we don't know what will happen to us at the end:

From Wikipedia once more:
'Pascal's Wager' is an argument in apologetic philosophy which was devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or not. Given the possibility that God actually does exist and assuming an infinite gain or loss associated with belief or unbelief in said God (as represented by an eternity in heaven or hell), a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.).

So be nice and you might be rewarded later with infinite fun in Heaven, or have all the fun now and risk infinite nasties. You do the maths.

Any comments welcome....

"John Davies ‏@artfulbooks  I reckon any number also has infinite potential, so Pi can go on indefinitely without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Irrational numbers do my 'ead in. 
And what about those frogs jumping half way to a wall and never reaching it? #strewth"

Even 1 can be an infinite number if you give it enough decimal places: 1.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000... (I could go on)

The experiment John refers to is this: 

Place a frog a foot away from a wall and ask it to jump half way. Then tell it to jump half way again; will froggy ever reach the wall? If the frog keeps jumping, it must eventually reach the wall. There's a formula for working out why the frog must reach the wall: on one side you have the distance jumped in fractions "1/2, plus 1/2 squared" and so on. These distances equal 1, which is the original distance to travel. 

But, just saying all those fractions = 1 doesn't prove that the frog reaches the wall! If it is only jumping half way it will never be closer than half of any distance, no matter how small. Show us, clever cloggs! First of all, I'm on to the RSPCA - why not try it with an inanimate object? Something you can control? Or are you worried that it won't work and you made up the story of the frog to cloud the issue. Also what if, like a piece of A4 paper, you reach a point where you can no longer halve the space between the frog and the wall? The frog will be sitting there drumming its fingers, waiting for the next leap, NOT at the wall.
Mathematicians: don't trust them.

Peter G. Casazza writes: (on this and other, possibly crackpot, maths problems)

I maintain that Casazza is wrong. The frog doesn't reach the wall because eventually the space between the frog and the wall will be too small to halve. If the frog decides to jump on, into the wall, it will be of its own free will and nothing to do with Peter G. #FreeTheFrog