"...Now there are all sorts of entities we are also aware of, as
well as particles, forces, tables, chairs rocks, and so on, that
are almost invisible to science; almost invisible, because science
has almost nothing to say about them whatsoever. I'm talking
about dogs and cats and cows and each other. We living things
are so far beyond the purview of anything science can actually
say, almost beyond even recognising ourselves as things that
science might be expected to have something to say about.

I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his
laws of motion and figuring out the way the universe works
and with him, a cat wandering around. The reason we had no
idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had pro-
ceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how
things work, we took them apart. If you try to take a cat apart
to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a
nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies
outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we have any
means of understanding that we just think of it as a different
class of object, a different class of matter; "life," something
that had a mysterious essence about it, was God-given—and
that's the only explanation we had..."

(From an "Extemporaneous speech given at Digital Biota 2,
Cambridge, SEPTEMBER 1998" by Douglas Adams.)

"...Now imagine an early man surveying his
surroundings at the end of a happy day's toolmaking. He
looks around and he sees a world that pleases him mightily:
behind him are mountains with cave in them—mountains are
great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out
of the rain and the bears can't get you; in front of him there's the
forest—it's got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a
stream going by, which is full of water—water's delicious to
drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with
it; here's cousin Ug and he's caught a mammoth—mammoths
are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can
use their bones to create weapons and catch other mammoths. I
mean this is a great world, it's fantastic. But our early man has
a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, "Well, this is an
interesting world that I find myself in," and then he asks him-
self a very treacherous question, a question that is totally mean-
ingless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the
nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has
evolved into, and the sort of person who has thrived because he
thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world
and says, "So who made this, then?" Who made this?—you can
see why it's a treacherous question. Early man thinks, "Well,
because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes
things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger,
much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me, and
because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's
probably male." And so we have the idea of a God. Then,
because when we make things, we do it with the intention of
doing something with them, early man asks himself, "If he made
it, what did he make it for?" Now the real trap springs, because
early man is thinking, "This world fits me very well. Here are
all these things that support me and feed me and look after me;
yes, this world fits me nicely," and he reaches the inescapable
conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one
morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find
myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in— fits me rather
neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have
been made to have me in it!" This is such a powerful idea that
as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradu-
ally, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically
hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right,
because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to
have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather
by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the
watch-out for..."

(From an "Extemporaneous speech given at Digital Biota 2,
Cambridge, SEPTEMBER 1998" by Douglas Adams.)

i like it

what is the reason you posted this

Because I like it. ;)
The man is not only funny, but extremely intelligent. (Though of course, the two are often interrelated, though not always... of course.)

BTW: The two quotes are out of order... the second actually precedes the first in the original speech.

true Chillum. Douglas Adams was so bloody funny, especially because he had the ability to make fun of things on a very complex level. A very sad day when he passed away...

Dig it. Adams was a funny & erudite dude.
Points for being a diehard Mac user as well.
Anyone here ever play "Starship Titanic?"

"...It's a fascinating series of studies. The
one I have in mind at the moment is the culture
and economy of Bali, which is a small, very crowded
island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly
efficient food and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively
small space, but it's hugely labour-intensive and it requires a lot
of very, very precise cooperation amongst the people there, par-
ticularly when you have have a large population on a small island
needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way
in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it,
because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that
religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in
that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they
are, what their status is, and what their role of life is. It's all
defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a
very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely
defined, and oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being
very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the seventies,
people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was deter-
mined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensi-
cal, so they said, "Get rid of all this, we can help you make your
rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're,
very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use
this calendar, do this, that and the other." So they started, and
for two or three years the rice production went up enormously.
but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out
of kilter. Very shortly the rice harvest plummeted again, and the
Balinese said, "Screw it, we're going back to the temple calen-
dar!" and they reinstated what was there before and it all
worked again absolutely perfectly..."

(From an "Extemporaneous speech given at Digital Biota 2,
Cambridge, SEPTEMBER 1998" by Douglas Adams.)

HUGE fan of D.A. Meaning of Lif is hilarious, too. The Hitchhiker's Guide is possibly the funniest thing ever written (though The Mouse that Roared is up there). Too bad they fucked up the movie big time.

Edited for stupidity... and by stupidity...

Lif is the only one of his books I don't have. ;)

They did? I didn't get around to watch the movie yet...

If you expect the movie to be accurate to the book, then you expected wrong. The book wasn't accurate to the radio show either. Sadly, they did cut some jokes even though they built up to them.

"... A guy said to me, "Yes, but the whole theory of evolution is
based on a tautology: That which survives, survives." This is tauto-
logical, therefore it doesn't mean anything. I thought about that
for a while and it finally occurred to me that a tautology is some-
thing that means nothing, not only that no information has gone
into it, but that no consequence has come out of it. So we may
have accidently stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it's the
only thing, the only force, arguably the most powerful of which
we are aware, which requires no other input, no other support
from any other place, is self-evident, hence tautological, but nev-
ertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects. It's hard to find
anything that corresponds to that, and I therefore put it at the
beginning of one of my books. I reduced it to what I thought
were the bare essentials, which are very similar to the ones you
came up with earlier, which were "Anything that happens hap-
pens, anything that in happening causes something else to hap-
pen causes something else to happen and anything that in
happening causes itself to happen again, happens again." In fact
you don't even need the second two because they flow from the
first one, which is self-evident and there's nothing else you need
to say; everything else flows from that. So I think we have in our
grasp here a fundamental, ultimate truth, against which there is
no gainsaying. It was spotted by the guy who said this is a tau-
tology. Yes, it is, but it's a unique tautology in that it requires no
information to go in, but an infinite amount of information
comes out of it. So I think that it is arguably the prime
cause of everything in the universe. Big claim, but I feel I'm talking to a sympathetic audience..."

(From an "Extemporaneous speech given at Digital Biota 2,
Cambridge, SEPTEMBER 1998" by Douglas Adams.)

So... interestingly... many "atheists" (including Mr. Adams here) move God from the top to the bottom, where He/She/It has ALWAYS been. (According to many "religious" traditions.)

I actually believe there are NO atheists... just those who react against the "top-down" model." Which is fine... top-down is inherently problematic as Douglas Adams pointed out so eloquently in this speech. But it in NO WAY refutes the existence or reality of God. (Defined in a more complete way than the standard Judeo-Christian-Muslim manner at least.)

So... I guess that was my point in posting these... your point in reading them may differ. As long as thought is stimulated my typing was worthwhile.

Cookies

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person
is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in
Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I'd gotten the
time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do
the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I
went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It's very
important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here's the
table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There's a guy wear-
ing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn't look like he
was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he sud-
denly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it
open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are
very bad at dealing with. There's nothing in our background,
upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with
someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.
You know what would happen if this had been South Central
Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, heli-
copters coming in, CNN, you know ... But in the end, I did
what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And
I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue
in the newspaper, couldn't do anything, and thought, What am
I going to do?

In the end I thought, Nothing for it, I'll just have to go for
it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet
was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for
myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn't because a
moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.
Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even
harder to raise the subject the second time around. "Excuse me,
I couldn't help but notice..." I mean, it doesn't really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the
whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but
it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I
took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and
walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he
walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed
back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper,
and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I
like particularly about this story is the sensation that some-
where in England there has been wandering around for the last
quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who's had the same
exact story, only he doesn't have the punch line.

(From a speech to Embedded Systems, 2001)

What goes up must come down.
What is made must be destroyed.
What is written must be said.
What is started must be finished.

A tribute to the man that brought joy to my life.

So long and thanks for all the (your words here).

So long and thanks for all the laughter.