Memories of the 28th Century

I may have had an epiphany recently, but I’m not all together sure what an epiphany is. There was a beautiful example of bogons doing what they do, stopping things from working around persons afflicted with bogosity. And I realized that it often is a sign of an intellectual lack, which wasn’t a surprise in itself, but I also noticed that the particular variety of intellectual deficiency is marked by a lack of understanding of sequential events. More specifically, there is a tendency to speak in the present tense only and to neglect cause and effect.

It has become a style for authors to write in the present tense. That annoys me, but the people who speak or write that way don’t seem to understand that there is anything illogical about it. I suppose that I should have wondered more when I first encountered such writing, but I didn’t really believe that anyone could fail to understand the logical problem.
It is uncertain whether this problem is somatic or a matter of training, but it gives the impression that the brain is not using time as a characteristic in indexing things learned, and that suggests that there may be a physical cause for this, either genetic or from early development.

It is ironic that the here and now attitude may be an indicator that someone isn’t really here completely. Truly being here now entails understanding cause and effect, because that is the instrument through which the world operates. The here and now attitude appears to treat every event as something isolated from other events.

It is also ironic that some people who seem reasonably intelligent seem to have trouble understanding sequential cause and effect. Similarly, there are people who seem quite intelligent who emit bogons in great quantities. Just to make things more complicated, there are people who are plagued with bogons who understand cause and effect and can even comprehend chains of case and effect. There was a man I worked with a number of years ago who was reasonably competent, but in the course of conversation he mentioned that he had been unsuccessful in burning a rotten stump. Someone asked whether it was dry, which seemed like an unnecessary question, since one doesn’t even bother trying to burn wet wood. He answered that the stump was quite wet; he just dragged it inside and put it in his fireplace. The other person there and I shared glances that expressed incredulity, and the non-drier of stumps said, “No one told me that it need to be dried.” In a way that suggested that it was so unlike wood that it would be treated differently. This was an example of bogosity at work. The example got me started on this was someone running a washing machine with the temperature set to “warm” when there was a sign on it that said that only “cool” should be used, and this was a machine that was out of action because it needed parts related to temperature sensing and water levels. The machine took more than twice its normal time for that load, but it got back to its normal speed for later users who heeded the sign. I had considered the person in question to have been reasonably intelligent, but it seems that he had trouble connecting the temperature setting and the slow operation of the machine.

It turns out that there is extensive literature regarding bogons and the beginnings of a general theory of “Quantum Bogodynamics”. While the theory exists, it has not been fully developed. I think that my comments connecting bogosity with a lack of understanding of grammar, especially to verb tense will be regarded as an improvement in the theory, and my suggestion that the underlying cause probably is somatic suggests direction for further development. Unfortunately, it is possible that in some cases bogosity is caused by simple ignorance, or there may be two, or more, forms of bogosity, and it may be curable in many cases.

References
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1426
http://web.mit.edu/humor/Incoming/unix.wizard.howto
http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2007/03...wer-of-prayer/
http://forum.iwethey.org/forum/post/387459/
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bogon?s=ts