Dog blog 22 - The examined life?

The examined life?
"It's important - very important - to examine things", said Dave the other day; "key to a happy dog life", he went on.

Dave was showing off quoting Socrates and all that. But Socrates wasn't really talking about happiness as such - he said life "wasn't worth living" if you didn't examine it.  Except, he said it in Greek.

But should we examine everything? That's me sticking my head out of the window on the way over to see Dave. Completely happy with myself, sniffing out for rabbits. Admittedly, I was still thinking about the problem of whether 1 + 1 = 2, but I wasn't thinking about the view; that was a pleasure in itself: sniffing, wagging, barking.

That then gave me a bit of a paws-over-the-eyes headache:

1) Was looking out of the window made any different by my examining it later? I don't think it made the smells I could remember smelling smell any better because if it, or the wagging made more waggy.

2) But, could I only have really said that by examining it?

I wasn't really sure what the answer was. I remembered Dave talking about quantum theory and what he called "fizzics" (which in Dave's view also explained why fizzy drinks are fizzy), and that looking into the experiment, measuring something, changed it in some way. And I wasn't sure I wanted that on the way back from Dave's: so I didn't think about the view on the way back - and just enjoyed it.

Until now.  And that made my head hurt again. I think it's rabbit chasing time now.....






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