The Ignorant Wisdom of Dudes

[wuliheron]

Ignorant wisdom is just what I call any humor, knowledge, or sagacity acquired by becoming aware and accepting of our ignorance and can also refer to a genre of comedy that pointedly revolves around ignorance which, I suppose, Dudeism might qualify as. The divine fool of legend that bounces like a toddler on their butt down the aimless path of life and never seems to get hurt. The shaman madly dancing around the void of their ignorance cracking jokes, while trying to convey something like cool and interesting rather than literal. It is the wisdom of the toddler who naively laughs at the merest suggestion that humor and truth require justification. Socrates said, "True wisdom is knowing your don't know Dude" to which I can't resist adding, ignorantly accepting our ignorance is how we come to know anything silly Dude!

Seriously, I still have yet to read more than a few pages at this website, but I got the cool vibes right away and just felt like sharing. I'm literally a brain damaged ignorant hippy dippy who happens to be ignorantly fascinated with ignorance. Call me a twisted Dude if you want but, for me, ignorance is like the kind of comedy money can't buy and what the Chinese called the "pearl of great price" or "great joke". In Socrates' case, some very ignorant Dudes indeed sentenced him to death for insisting he was ignorant and founding all of modern logic by telling his favorite bar room joke, "The only thing I know Dude is that I know nothing" which, I suppose, you could interpret as meaning everything I know is absurd and cracks me up. This is the law of identity or principle that if you can't identify when you have identified nothing Dude, you have an identity problem. Anyway, its a fun philosophy to play with if an ignorant one.

Serious academic type Dudes with that dry kind of academic humor might call it a functionalist or contextualist or pragmatic type of philosophy, but when people ask me I prefer to tell them I'm a master of the ancient art of Bull-with-Diarrhea. Among other things, the trick is to always have the punch lines refer to something demonstrable, you know, like something that is easy to demonstrate like a bowel movement or whatever. It gives the punch lines more umph because, as the comedian Will Rogers used to complain, you can't just make up any joke and expect people to laugh because they'll only laugh at jokes based on the stupid truth. The ignorant truth being that reality is for those who can't handle stupid truth because they don't get the running joke that the truth keeps changing with each new punch line. Similar to the way a cartoonist can get away with anything so long as the humor of the joke justifies how much you have to suspend your disbelief.

Anywho, I just came across the work of evolutionary biologist Alastair Clarke who published the first universal theory of humor that describes every joke possible in terms of fuzzy logic and renormalization and its driving me nuts thinking about all the ignorant possibilities. It's like a Bagua theory of comedy as far as I can tell because the humor is even dryer than most and I have trouble keeping my eyes open when I read it. I was good at math in school, but they never taught fuzzy logic when I went to school and if, they did, I'd prefer someone with a bit more flamboyant humor teach it if you know what I mean. A class like "Something About Nothing 101" is what I imagine might be nice. It never ceases to amaze me just how much there is to say about nothing and if anyone here has something to say its my favorite subject! The whole Bagua thing has me confused though because I never got into that kind of detail studying the comedy of Lao-Chuang Taoists and I'd especially appreciate any good jokes that might help me see how it works with the whole yin-yangy thingy.

As far as I can tell so far Clarke seems to be suggesting all of cognition arises from humor and humor functions as a sort of B.S. detector. Imagine a toddler rummaging around through the mountain of distorted and misleading and downright false crap we see all day long. The brat doesn't really care what the crap actually is and just rummages around looking for anything shiny or interesting. You could say the kid has 8 funky lenses it uses in different combinations to distort the crap and see if it might be fun to play with to produce their own little cartoons. When the kid finds something really funny, he laughs to inform the conscious mind and if you have the time and are interested and the kids laughs loud enough you check it out to see if it is a dust bunny or a burglar wearing mask of the kid's favorite cartoon character. If the kid cries, it's a kind of distressed laughter and if they squeal with delight it means they are ready to socialize with rat in the corner or pull the dog's hair or whatever.

You could also use the same idea as a theory for something like quantum mechanics and, theoretically as far my brain damaged mind can tell, demonstrably prove that 42 really is as good an answer for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Ignorant physics is sort of a hobby of mine.

P.S.- This is my favorite piece of ignorant advice I give all the time. At least half the time when people ask its all I ever need to say.

When in trouble, when in doubt,
Run in circles, scream and shout!
If that doesn't work, keep trying to figure it out,
Just laugh at the punch lines,
And the truth will come out.
Don't waste your guilt or anger,
Put it all to good use,
Stupid jokes are sometimes priceless,
When encouraged to be obtuse.

[LotsaBadKarma]

The line "True wisdom is knowing you don't know" is a good one to remember, especially for opinionated folks like me. It's kinda the same as "Beginner's Mind" from the Zen. There's a post in here called "enlightenment in 3 minutes, guaranteed" wherein the speaker makes basically the same point albeit using different words.

Dude, your post is like one of the more earth shaking pieces I've read in this joint. It brings new shit to light with regard to the topic of what the women refer to as "toilet humor", also known as grown men acting like high school boys. I get accused of this all the time and upon re-reading your post I may just find the justification you mentioned for my glee when discussing the topic of adults having misplaced bowel movements. It might also go a ways toward explaining my tendency to make sucking motions with my mouth when an attractive woman with large and shapely breasts walks into a room having already taken the liberty of exposing the absolute maximum cleavage possible (while still avoiding arrest) and applying an almost invisible amount of glitter to the uppermost surface of the mammary apparatus so as to draw the attention of most of the men in the room. In this way she can leave the gathering with the knowledge that all men are pigs still secure in her feeble mind after reminding all of them that "I'm up here pig, look me in the eye, I'm up heeeeerrrrrreeeee".

Congrats and thanks again on a most excellent post.

[wuliheron]

Thanks, I started out trying to write this real serious western contextualist philosophical approach to the subject, but no matter how hard I tried the humor kept creeping back in. So I gave in and explored the humor! All the potty humor, gross humor, and whatnot is merely the result of the necessity to embrace your inner toddler and relearn how to laugh at ourselves with the innocence of a child again and reclaim our humility. I've tried to push most of it to the back of my philosophy as appendixes or whatever. Otherwise it just gets really old really fast and you could fill volumes with the potty humor alone. I use Groucho Marx instead to show how adult and toddler humor overlap. Groucho portrayed an excellent zombie cockroach that gets to just about everyone. However, I am seriously interested in doing a chapter on Bullshit detectors and consciousness and one on the Bullshit physics. Think shit-rolls-downhill, ignorance is the great universal constant and just gets around sometimes like a bad case of the clap. That kind of thing.

[LotsaBadKarma]

Speaking of gross humor, my very next Amazon purchase will be a card game called "Cards Against Humanity". It was recommended by a female co-worker when we were discussing how some people react when they look in the mirror one day and realize that their sense of humor is just better than anyone else's. It's done on a kind of Trivial Pursuit format, a box of cards with questions on them, another group of cards with answers, and a group of blanks so you can write down answers of your own creation. The object of the game is to reward points to the player who can come up with the most repugnant answer to a question. An example of one of the all-time favorite answers in the game is "Lance Armstrong's left testicle". I don't know what the question was.

One of the kinds of humor I find most entertaining is, I guess I would call it Irony or Subtle Sarcasm. The one where I say or write a line that only I see the humor in. Well, me and the more sophisticated members of the proletariat. This kind is tricky because if I do it just right I'll have people ready to murder each other over it. It works particularly well when discussing politics. It's difficult for me because it requires an unknowing setup by a second or third party, I lack the ambition to just dive in and start the conflagration. But when it works it's a scream.

[wuliheron]

With ignorance the fun never ends and I've been pondering if an ignorant wisdom version of I-Ching might be especially worthwhile. Academics from all kinds of different disciplines spent a ridiculous amount of money tearing apart the I-Ching to see how it works so well as a psychological tool especially and, like ten years later, figured it out and realized their was almost nothing they could do to improve on the text. They figured out two minor additions they could make and I'm sure it has to do with the Bagua or Pakua or whatever you wanna call it because it has the 64 hexagrams and which is 8 squared and so on and so forth, but's all deep in the esoteric doodoo that I'd have to research in my own ignorant way without some inside tips. I could really use some root metaphors or, better yet, somebody to walk me through it as I do a sketchy ignorant interpretation. I've dreamed of having a stupid Yoda doll that could spout ignorant wisdom like the I-Ching. If something is bothering you all you have to do is keep pulling the string until some of the jokes help walk you through thinking the problem out.

[DigitalBuddha]

wuliheron dude, welcome to our family restaurant, beach party, bowling lane, and dudetopia! Grab a rug and share some notes! 

[wuliheron]

I thought this was hippy commune? Did I make a wrong turn somewhere? Where are all the hairy hippy chicks? I need a joint or a beer or something if I'm gonna stay here cause things are getting interesting real fast! Some people actually seem to understand the crap I spout!

[RevKHyler]

Relax, man! Hang loose with us! The oat sodas are in the cooler waiting for you. A great many of us do indeed understand (and appreciate) what you're saying.

[wuliheron]

Well, if you don't have a beer or a joint I'll meditate on my inner toddler for a minute and try to chill an oat soda.

Thanks for the chill factor Captain K. I feel much better now. Any relation to Captain Kangaroo? I always liked that dude, while Mr Rogers gave me the creeps despite being real friendly.