Final Curtain

"Hey, did you hear? George Carlin died!"
"George Carlin? I just saw him yesterday!"
"Yeah.......didn't help! He died anyway!"
Unfortunately this conversation was bound to take place two days ago. George Carlin, one of the greatest stand-up comedians of our time, died of heart failure in Santa Monica, California. And although it is all but impossible to write an obituary for every great person that passes away, I have to write one for him before his friends delete his entry from their address books in 6 weeks.

As George, I don't believe in an almighty, invisible GOD and therefore not in an afterlife, heaven or hell. But I do believe that people live on after their deaths: In the minds and the memories of people who knew them. And nowadays technology can help a little bit as YouTube, Wikipedia and other pages in the internet can act as external memories.
And lucky for us, George left us many there that can help, big time!
I only saw the first video of him on the web a few months ago and hardly ever enjoyed a video that much! Perhaps that's the reason why the news of his death hit me hard. I know that there a no more new shows coming!

Now that he gives less than a shit about the sanctity of life let's see who this comedian was:
His life is well documented on Wikipedia and I don't have to repeat that here, so let's look at his shows!
He said the seven words you can't say and even things no one ever said before. He had a lot of good business ideas worth looking at! He knew, he was ahead of his time, unfortunately only 1.5 hours. He knew we can't save this planet and was asking about the difference between abortion and an omelette.
He was also very efficient! He managed to slash the 10 commandments down to 3 by removing unnecessary redundancy. On the other hand, he was very confused about phrases and words constantly changing!
Google for videos of his shows and you find many more. Whenever I go to YouTube I find new ones that I don't know yet. Take the chance to get to know him and make sure the memory lives on!

Now on the off-chance that there is a heaven and a God, I can only hope this God has more humour than his self-appointed clerical workers down here who didn't get the best of the bargain in Carlin's shows. But anyway, if Carlin really went to heaven, let's go to the topless bar near the airport and bow to the man who said the things many of us should say more often!

You've been labelled!

If we look at a scenery, all that our eyes deliver are colours and intensities. But what we consciously see are trees, bushes, fields, cars, and so on.
Our brain extracts features in real time from the eye's input and matches it with objects in its database. This matching process is amazingly fast and efficient. We recognize an object as tree even if we've never seen a tree with this exact structure before. The brain tries to match anything to something it knows.
This ability is vital for us. If we face a tiger in the jungle, we are dependent on the speed our brain recognizes the animal as "Tiger". "Animal" or "Cat" would not be enough for some people, as trying to feed it wouldn't go as expected.

So we can roughly say (many scientists and philosopher will hate me for that) that the eyes deliver a picture and the brain labels everything it can find. What reaches our consciousness, is a picture with a lot of post-it notes on.
But it doesn't stop there! These post-it notes not only tell us the name for this object, they also tell us everything we know about this object. So if we can see "Chair" with the property "brown" and "grained" attached to it, we might also find "hard", "able to hold average person", "not painted" and "uncomfortable". Our brain matched the picture with "wooden chair" and gave us all the information we can remember from past encounters. This works with everything. We see a glass and know it breaks easily, we see a keyboard and know we can type on it, we see a stranger and know he's an idiot .... ok, I'll come back to that later.

One interesting observation is that the more familiar the object is, the less we question these post-it notes. Or to be more precise, the better an object is defined in our brains, the more we trust the attributes. Is that a problem?
Just before World Cup 2006 in Germany, an artist placed footballs all over Berlin. The balls were chained to nearby walls and looked exactly like footballs. Except for the fact that they were made from concrete. People who passed by, got the note "football" with the attributes "round", "leather" and fatally "can be kicked".
The artist was arrested after countless broken feet.
This is just one example were this labelling goes wrong. By changing the attributes of a familiar object we can easily trick the process. The more familiar, the easier.
Just imagine a chair made out of foam but covered with paint to make it look like wood. Would you test the attribute "able to hold average person" before sitting down?

So we know we constantly get post-its that are generally correct but can contain wrong information. In everyday life (except you live together with a clown or a Youtube lover with a camera) this doesn't matter as we very rarely encounter foam chairs.
But we should keep in mind, that we have to reassess these attributes as things change constantly. So should our post-its.

Now let's come back to the special object mentioned above: Humans. Our labeling machine labels everything, also humans. What is on these labels? If it is a friend for example, this could include name, job, history, wife's name, connection to other friends and so on. This is ok, but think about the "closest match" process. If we see a stranger, this process also tries to find as many attributes as possible. And there, things go wrong. We immediately label people as soon as we see them. But you might add, if we get to know them, we change the labels and keep them up to date, don't we? Do we? Here the fact that we don't constantly test attributes traps us! And things do go wrong.

The process that is vital to us in so many situations, gets in our way. It is sometimes really difficult to change the image we have of somebody. They are labeled. And the fact that human-to-human contact is a mutual process reinforces our dilemma. If we react strangely because of an overhasty label, they label us differently in return.
Many of you just thought "Oh, I'm not that bad". Really? If you see somebody with a beard and a turban, do you thing "Ah, muslim" or "Hmm, perhaps muslim"?
If you see somebody with a suit, do you think "Could be a hippie on the way to work"?

We label all the time and this is good and often vital for us. But we have to learn to constantly reassess the attributes we gave to objects. Especially to humans. Attributes for people we just met is a good starting point for that. Apart from the attribute "holds gun" perhaps.