Twins.
The idea of a double-person. Two seperate but identical bodies and minds.
Another mundane thing that fascinates me- cars. Why, just a couple million years ago we were crawling around in primordial ooze, and now we whiz across the country in metal boxes. And sometimes I picture us without the cars around us, just us sitting there with our arms out, whizzing by. Silly!
Even in our own species there are people that derive education from our behaviour patterns - anthropologists and the like.
And people like myself who derive entertainment (in the form of fascination, not humour) from it. As individuals we are fantastically unique and individual but in the above scenario… we are a mass of consumers… And not ‘consumers’ in the normally used sense of the word…
More like devourers… A mass, devouring the resources on and in a ball of rock.
I do that. Most of the time we see cars and we dismiss them as cars, vehicles moving forward on roads.
But sometimes I see them and I think about the human inside, moving along in a sitting position with his or her arms out in front of him or her.
Everybody going somewhere with a purpose… but when you look at the whole it’s just things moving about like maggots on a rotting chicken carcas.
And I thought I was the only one to have that thought – weird!
There’s this one videogame – I forget what it is – but there’s a glitch where the cars sometimes disappear, but you can still see the people inside floating around as if they were driving a car. It’s creepy.
I think there’s a cheat in one (or more) of the GTA games where you can remove the cars (and you see people floating around the roads in the driving posture.)
They certainly are. And then there’s the fact that they grow from a tiny, tiny seeds. Even giant sequoias. Somehow, they’ve gathered enough nutrients and water to make them grow huge!
Similarly, the fact that a 7-foot-tall, 300-pound basketball player started out just the same as 5-foot-tall, 145-pound me is fascinating. We were both just an egg that happened to meet a sperm and then became a little baby. Except for gender, we weren’t all that different just then.
(Oh, Tully, this is OT but I’d be interested in hearing about the hobbies you alluded to. Perhaps you could start an “Ask the…” thread?)
That there is no absolute “up.” I was looking up at the stars, and it hit me that I might as well be “upside down” and strapped onto this hunk of rock and never know it, and I was seeing the universe upside down. That’s just cool
Exactly! We’re surrounded by dead stuff. All the plants, bugs, birds, snakes, all the insects and animals and fish and people who’ve died since the beginning of life – they’re everywhere!
That one hit me all at once when I was a kid. There came a moment where it dawned on me that the idea of up and down is limited to being on the surface of a planet. Up being away from the surface, down being towards it. And that in space there is no up or down.
Even so… At 28 I find it hard not to think of Australia as ‘underneath’ and the plane of the solar system having a top and a bottom. (And the galaxy, for that matter)
Edit: I only recently discovered the idea that there are no co-ordinates where you can say that the Universe began. Because “The universe began everywhere at once”. Because to imagine that there is a ‘place’ where it began, you have to be imagining it from the point of view of a place external to it… And that place would have to be outside the universe.
…But I guess that’s not really ‘mundane’, so may not count.
Anthropologists–who would have thought of such a thing? :rolleyes: 
I was actually thinking of a huge “person” or persons who, much like we do when we overturn rocks, is peering down at us, all frantically living our little lives and smiling at the scene. Or some massively humongous creature for whom Earth is essentially a terrarium… Think sci/fi or fantasy, not social sciences!
And sometimes I am sickened when I look around a crowded food court at the mall or even a huge outdoor event (like Taste of Chicago) and see everyone bellying up to the food… devourers, indeed.
I also wonder sometimes about the people around me in airports etc–are they happy? Do they have good marriages or relationships with their kids? Do they have steady work which they like? And where did they get that jacket, it’s ghastly… 
I had a similar universe conversation with a friend when we were 10. I remember saying that as hard as it is to imagine the universe never ending, it was harder still to consider the universe stopping at some point, because what is after that stopping point? Even if it’s just space, that’s something. There can’t be nothing, it must be infinite… and this was before I tried drugs, even! 
See this thread.
eleanorigby I knew what you meant. I just thought it was appropriate to mention anthropologists. It’s probably a really occupation to have.
On a similar vein to the universe question: As a kid I contemplated and failed to comprehend the idea that being aware/alive/conscious is temporary… And wondering what happens to the bit of me that does the observing (from inside the body)
finding it impossible to comprehend that it stops observing… not being able to accept that you can’t know what it feels like because there’s no you to know what it feels like.
I’ve always been, to some degree, an atheist. It’s things like this that make being an Atheist really cool thing to be. Being fascinated by the complexity of existence without a creator. (But please don’t let this thread derail with any theism/atheism talk)
Oh, I wasn’t referring to any god in my vision of a creature or species watching us like we watch bees in a hive. Have you ever seen films where the scene looks like a busy town street and then the camera pulls back and it’s really a toy town and then that gets pulled back and it’s a snowglobe in someone’s hand, which in turn in is a town which is yet another toy… Like those Russian dolls.
Sometimes I look at small plastic parts (say a spray bottle) or small mechanical things (a lever or a turnkey) and marvel at the precision of them.
I wasn’t saying you were refering to a God. My mention of atheism was a personal digression off the subject.
MIB (Men In Black) springs to mind as a film with differing layers of …erm… societies. For example the people that live in J’s locker. Or the galaxy on orion’s belt.
I fully comprehend what you mean. Like there’s a massive being holding the globe in it’s hand, and a magnifying glass in it’s other hand.
Reminds me of the Science of Discworld books, and the Unseen University’s Roundworld experiment.
I’ve never seen Men in Black–how intriguing. I think we’ve moved beyond the mundane…
Here’s one that gets me:
Look around the room at what’s in it. Ignore humans, pets and plants. You’ll see all sorts of stuff - I see my lighter, an empty CD case, the plastic base for a desktop microphone, a Pringles can, a wrist-strap for a USB drive, an ashtray, a cardboard box, a sheet of wrapping paper, a container for vitamin pills … I’ve not even begun, and I’m only concentrating on the simple, dumb things.
For each thing, someone or some people, somewhere, sat down and designed it. They picked the right materials, the right shape, worked out how it could be manufactured at a reasonable cost, perhaps designed tools to do the manufacturing … and that’s before it’s even been made.
I don’t have any other humans, or any plants, or any animals in this room, so absolutely every object I see has been consciously designed. Somebody did it. Who are these people? How long did it take them?
I daren’t even glance at my PC or my TV or my DVR or my DVD player or my hi-fi or …
Barrington, you’ve explained something I’ve often thought about, which is “What do people do?” All the millions of workers around the world – how can there be jobs for all of them? Now I know. 
And 99 percent of the time we take it all completely for granted. Our mind dismisses ‘man made’ files it away in the subconscious, and gets on with just using those things.
I’ve created stuff at work for people to use every day. They take all that stuff completely for granted… but it doesn’t really bother me.
But the obverse of that is true as well. When something mundane does NOT work due to poor design(like the spray nozzle on a pump bottle for a plant mister or one of those “tear here” type openers that never work) we get frustrated and irritated quickly. We may take good design for granted in mundane, workaday things, but poor design really pisses us off (or at least it does me).