Philosophy

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When I was twelve or so, I used to hang with a group of neighborhood kids, we would play Cowboys and Indians in the local woods, and when we got tired, we would sit around and ask each other stuff, like 'if I see a color as blue, how do I know that you see it as blue? I mean like, if you saw blue as red, but your mom and everybody told you that color you saw was blue, but you saw it as red, you would say red was blue!'.   One of us, I forget who, proposed that for all he knew, we were all in one of his dreams, and that when he woke up we would all be gone,  I think he got that from a Twilight Zone episode. We all knew this could not be true, unless of course, we were the dreamer.  Ethics received attention whenever we were playing baseball on the vacant lot two doors down, these discussions were often resolved with someone taking their ball and bat home. We wondered why we were here and what was the point of it all.  Then somebody shared their Dad's Playboys and we found the answer to that question.  
I have to say at this point, I never considered myself or my friends as either particularly smart or stupid, and neither did anyone else.  As I recall, most of us were told by our guidance counsellors that we would probably be happiest taking 'shop' in high school.  They were right too.  So imagine my surprise when I got to University that they were still talking about the stuff we had dealt with when we were twelve, except that they were using more syllables,  a lot more syllables.  It seems that the only one who came to the same conclusion we did was a fella named Wittgenstein, but it took him longer than it did us.


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