Things I wonder about

Some things I’m thinking about today:

• What would it be like to “hear” colour instead of see it? I read something recently that suggested that bats may be able to recognise specific textures on objects, through their super-sensitive hearing; so this could be thought of as “hearing colour”. Thinking about this reminds me of when I tried to get my head around non-base-10 number systems at school.

• Nobody who has ever watched The Shawshank Redemption has gone on to become a suicide bomber. Prove me wrong!

• Why is it that so often arguments end up being two-sided? Why is it so common that there are only two sides to an argument? I would have thought it’s far more likely, for anything complex, that there would be more than two points of view. I suspect this is something to do with the attention span of the average TV viewer. Take a few examples: evolution / creation, Republican / Democrat, PC / Mac. The English political system is an example of where the public have managed to cope with three major political parties: Labour, Tory and LibDem. But even there, politician’s views (and, correspondingly, the views of the people they represent) are probably more of a continuous, not discrete spectrum. My point is this: given any argument, why can’t we as individual people have our own individual opinions, without feeling the need to give ourselves a label, such as “I’m an atheist”. Labels aren’t that interesting - complex individual opinion, on the other hand, is.