You guys gotta help me. (A ha ha I begin my journal like chickenfinger )

I’m writing this paper on the MIND and what we can know about it, using Wile E. Coyote as a metaphor for the Philosopher, and the Road Runner to represent Consciousness. It’s the eternal conflict.

How is consciousness even possible? If I scan your brain somehow while you’re looking at an apple, I won’t find anything resembling the apple. Yet the apple is in you. That’s the basic problem. I mean, what, you think you understand consciousness just because you are conscious! HA!! WRONG!! Just try and really grasp it, really get a feel for what it is! It’s like trying to catch your own reflection looking away!

It’s like, Meep meep.

The Philosopher constructs all these elaborate traps of logic to catch Consciousness and understand it… But the traps always backfire, and they only trap the philosopher. OH NO THE ACME CANNON I THOUGHT WAS POINTED AT THE ROAD RUNNER WAS ACTUALLY POINTED AT MY OWN HEAD!! BOOOO000JJ~~~

But, the philosopher shakes all the soot and dirt and humiliation off and gets another kit from ACME. He tries the same approach again and again and again.

Sometimes he gets so caught up in the chase that he follows his quarry right off the edge of a cliff… and then after walking on air for a minute he realizes… Oh, no. I have no logical support for my position! AAAHHH!! I PLUMMET INTO THE CANYON OF EPISTEMIC REGRESS! }}} boomf {{{ My ACME Logic-O-Matic has failed me yet again!

Meanwhile, Consciousness is undisturbed and it stands on thin air just fine as it watches you fall. Then it strolls back onto solid ground and goes bulleting off into the desert. Consciousness isn’t bound by the rules of logic, you see?

Okay, I’ve got that far, but … but. …

BUT MY PROFESSOR IS FROM FINLAND! HE WON’T GET IT!

But it’s too late to turn back, now! I’ll just add a footnote explaining the whole Coyote/Road-Runner mythos and leave it at that!

And then I’ll parlay it into a justification of a more Eastern perspective. Zen practitioners are clearly trying to chase down consciousness, but they’re trying to do it first hand — empirically. They’re trying to just grab it rather than trick it or trap it. I’ve read accounts of people who reached enlightenment in various cultures — and it’s pretty uniform. They say, “once you’ve got it, you don’t care about it. Don’t ask me for it, I can’t give it to you, because you already have it. You just don’t know it. I’m not any different from you. Actually, I’m just a bum who walked in off the street, thanks for the sandwich! No, just kidding…”

It is as if Wile E. Coyote had become so transformed in catching the Road Runner, that he became a different kind of creature. Sure. The reason he never catches it is because his approach never changes.

To reach any kind of enlightenment, he has to take himself to a different level. He has to abandon the ACME stuff: he has to abandon his mechanical prostheses…. But nothing is faster than a road runner! Then… YES! To capture the Road Runner, the coyote must become a road runner! And if the Coyote can become the Road Runner, then he was the Road Runner all along… You say this doesn’t make sense, to which I say: “You fool! Don’t look down. you’ll fall into the Canyon of Epistemic Regress again!”

So that’s the hidden message of all those Road Runner cartoons. They are a brilliantly compact, eloquent commentary on Western Philosophy’s lack of progress since the 16th century.

And don’t even get me started on Felix the Cat.