The cat that can be spoken of is a pointer to the eternal cat.

[pseudomammal]

A reply to apollotiger, who said some things about language and thought, including:
There’s an old Calvin & Hobbes strip of which I’m fond - Calvin says to Hobbes that he’s “verbing”, turning nouns into verbs. Hobbes replies that maybe one day, they can make language into a complete impediment to understanding. The irony there is that language is an

Comments

[aredridel]

Wow. That's an entertaining read.

I see you even gave up on wretched splines.

[pseudomammal]

I totally drew that kitten by hand.

[aredridel]

I can totally spot the colored pencil marks.

Swooft!

[apollotiger]

Nice, I enjoyed reading that, and it certainly taught me to understand things I hadn't before.

And yeah, I guess maybe I shouldn't put too much philosophical worth in something that other actors refer to as “the jukebox”; however, there's something in the idea that if you try hard enough, you can learn something from everyone. If so, how do you truly differentiate between the truly wise and the people just pretending? They both help you learn something.

My idea of the limitedness of language was off, I guess, and I see that now: the word computer would be meaningless and necessary (probably difficult, too) to describe to Aristotle, but for us, it's a simple concept of everyday life.

Watchin' the all-static channel

[pseudomammal]

Thanks. Your point about learning something from everyone is well taken.

I think the difference between truly wise people and jerks is that learning from the wise people is more efficient; they have some particular and presumably useful thing they want you to learn, and if things go well you might pick it up with a minimum of fuss. (I really like Vruba‛s formulation here.)

Babbling idiots are more general catalysts. If they throw some nonsense at you, your brain will try hard to find meaning in it, and maybe come up with something useful, but it was you doing all instead of some of the work, and they just provided the impetus. Being able to take advantage of random input like that is a very useful skill, but one has to be careful to not wind up idolizing the source.

(I don't think this effect is limited to people as sources of randomness either. E.g., tarot, astrology, literary criticism, etc. might work - and I'd argue this is a very real sense of “working” - along similar lines.)