"Patience comes to those who wait / he who's lost will hesitate"
See now, that was from a song I wrote a decade-plus ago. Yet now, I see the first part of that couplet ("Patience comes to those who wait") attributed as a quote to some guy Terry Ballard.
It doesn't usually bother me when that happens, because most of the pithy snippets I come up with are pretty butt-obvious after the fact. It's not like something anybody couldn't have said by mistake!
But it does go to show you. Something. It goes to show you something.
Who is this "Terry Ballard."
See now, that was from a song I wrote a decade-plus ago. Yet now, I see the first part of that couplet ("Patience comes to those who wait") attributed as a quote to some guy Terry Ballard.
It doesn't usually bother me when that happens, because most of the pithy snippets I come up with are pretty butt-obvious after the fact. It's not like something anybody couldn't have said by mistake!
But it does go to show you. Something. It goes to show you something.
Who is this "Terry Ballard."
Comments
I've often thought I'd make a good curmudgeon, but only if I could combine it with ombudsman. Not necessarily via Carrollesque portmanteaux - although that could be mighty cool! - but I'd settle for just being a curmudgeonly ombudsman.
Jung. Jung Jung Jung. Fun to say, especially if you pronounce it like it's spelled rather than how it's pronounced. I'm probably not what you'd call a Jung follower, but I'm familiar with his collective unconscious bit. As a theory, I like it as much as I like Plato's separate reality of ideas.
I love the way you put it, though! "...using no mechanism that we know about." Quite! I'm pretty gullible on hypothetical mechanisms, but I always like 'em a little better if someone can take a crack at describing what the operating principles might be.
I think the shared Jungian archetype concept works if we limit it to working backwards. The thousands of generations of experience we shared prior to history kicking in may well have stamped itself pretty deeply into the grain, so to speak. But I am not convinced that an idea today can spread into a collective unconscious that all humans can then tap (italics mine). I mean, even if it seeps in through the collective eyes via the collective television set, that's going to leave a whole bunch of us out.
The part I doubt is the part where an idea that wasn't previous in the collective unconscious can then be added in, and at that point it is accessible to all. That's a bit too quantum memetics for me.