i never knew what time it was

what happened to walter?

what happened to walter? i came here with something on my mind something ive been thinking about for a while and thinking about it i havent been able to resolve it its a question thats been addressed by a lot of people whether there is such a thing as repetition and how we should think about it if there is such a thing and even if there isnt now ive thought about it a number of times which already suggests there is such a thing but its an old problem that goes back a very long time in european thought if you consider turkey part of europe because herakleitos lived in ephesus on the western coast of turkey during the persian domination toward the end of the sixth century bc which was a long time ago and herakleitos observed that you can never step into the same river twice this made a lot of sense to me because it seemed to confirm a conclusion id come to long ago that experience prepares you for what will never happen again but how does this square with kratylos’ subsequent wisecrack you cant step into the same river once its always good to have a smart student wholl push you further which is what the kratylos crack seems to do the river changes 151 so fast that by the time you step into it its already a different river but when you think about it the kratylos pushes the herakleitos further than that in fact it pushes it over a cliff because it implies that you cant experience anything once because to experience it once you have to experience it twice which kicks the question from an argument about repetition into an argument about experience consider an infant trying to engage with the alien things out there in the world around it it sees something out there it might turn out to be its toe but at this point in time the infant doesnt know that its toe is its toe eventually it discovers a relation it feels it when it moves it sees a hand its hand reaching toward it feeling its hand reaching and then touching and its toe feeling something touching it but all this cant happen the first time around a child isnt born with a map of its body and it doesnt know its hand is its hand until it sees it several times and connects its movements with the feeling of its movement and seeing it move it takes a few shots the child reaches may fail to reach reaches out randomly grabs and then it feels something else and it has to process this and recognize it the next time as the same thing it saw before but its not exactly the same thing because its the other foot now the child may not know its the other foot it may not yet know it has two feet because its early in its career later the child will be a philosopher and will know perfectly well or maybe because its a philosopher the child will not be certain that its the other foot the point is that kratylos positions the argument in such a way as to start the debate on whether we can see anything once at all and whether repetition however impossible to imagine may be necessary for any apprehension of reality at all the problem doesnt go away nobody seems to know how to deal what happened to walter? 152 with it what we do know what we come to know now about the brain which is not the mind nonetheless the brain and the mind have a sufficiently close relationship such that if you cut somebodys head off he cant think beyond that the connections though illuminating are somewhat more uncertain the mind is not the brain and the brain is not the mind but the brain seems to support all the activities of the mind we recognize as taking place and one of the things weve come to recognize is that the inputs of the sensory system are very strangely dissociated that is to say if i notice your green shirt if i notice that you have a green shirt on and youre leaning on your elbow the visual information about your color and shape and location in space are registered separately by differentially sensitive parts of...