1)

The other day Judith came up to me.  She said, "Did you hear the one about the woman who ran across the United States?"

I said, "No, I haven't."

She said, "Yeah, she had a sponsor and everything."

I said, "Judy that's not funny."

She said, "I'm not joking."

2)  

For a while, I was going up to people and asking, "Did you hear about the circus fire?"

They say, "No,"  and then I say, "Well, it was intense."

Then they say, "Was everyone all right?  What about the monkeys?"

Then I have to explain that it's not a serious thing, it's just a joke.  

3)

One time I said to my ancient philosophy professor Dr. Puryear the quote by Wittgenstein that a whole work of philosophy could be written in joke form.

Dr. Puryear said, "It's funny that he didn't."  Dr. Puryear didn't crack a smile as he said this.  

4)

I messed up my ankle a couple of weeks ago.  Again, this isn't a joke.  I just messed it up running too hard.  I did end up running a 52 minute one, which, depending on my secondsmight be  a season-personal best.  (Funny story, I actually got really adrenalinized  and started yelling with my running buddy.  When he started sprinting ahead I yelled at the people around me.  I was also able to run a brutal 9-miler NOT the Boilermaker, with my friend Kevin on this injury.)  

There's some cool stuff we can talk about when we talk about pain.  First of all, I want to specify:  I'm talking about the analytic as opposed to emotional pain.  We could say that all pain is emotional, but I want you to consider some sort of at least hypothetically precise firing of neurons that everyone has.  I have this to a very dull degree in my ankle, when I walk on it in a certain way.

  Earlier in this blog I might have mentioned Descartes and the problem of Dualism.  Descartes, who invented what we call Snell's law, but the French call Descartes' Law, who also invented the coordinate plane, and various miscellaneous inventions and discoveries;  also was a decent biologist-philosopher.  The question is:  if we are in a world of stuff, what are the mental processes that go on in our brains?  

   The question is very important because it supposes that there even is a difference between brains and mental processes.  People who have taken their feelings to the extreme end up believing so much that mental processes are separate from the body that we have an un-seeable energy unit in us.  It's really hard to describe, because what is energy?  When you get up on a monday and you want to take a shower?  Some people might say that your energy doesn't come from your puny body, but rather is motivated by the energy-unit's eagerness.  Some say that the biggest energy-unit in the whole universe is what makes you want to take that shower so bad.  Unfortunately, it never quite forces you to do boring stuff like read complicated Cartesian Philosophy.  (Have you ever noticed that?  No one ever gets A Calling from the biggest Energy Unit to be a cashier, a truck driver, or a doctor of chemistry...)  It turns out that the energy-unit is fairly believable to most people.  People call it the soul.

They couldn't find it when they first opened up skulls.  Digging and digging, it seemed that the soul had been only a superstition.  Disproving it would have made a lot of people unhappy.In light of this he switched: Descartes thought that the soul was in the hypothalmus!    

We will redeem Professor Descartes' and the concept of the soul later, when we do some more Immanuel Kant.