Posted by araucaria
(here)
This was written for the latest dinosaur thread before I noticed the thread was extinct
I am not suggesting for a minute that dinosaurs did not exist, but just think of this. I’ve mentioned this idea before.
The question is, Is a fossil is a sign, or is it the thing itself? Is it the map or the territory? And if the territory, what is the nature of the territory? If I see a road sign to somewhere, I can check its accuracy by heading off to that place, or not. If I saw that same road sign on a stage set, I would not apply that reasoning. The difference lies in the fact that a map is not the territory, but it can be a part of a territory, and it can also be a part of another territory; it can be both a sign and a thing in itself. As a petrified once-living organism, a dinosaur fossil is about as real as a stage prop, and as a sign pointing to the distant past, it is about as reliable as a signpost to Shangri-La.
The old Chinese proverb says, ‘When the finger points to the Moon, the fool looks at the finger’. Another kind of fool just looks at the Moon. The intelligent response I suggest is to look for the owner of the finger. Whose finger? leads to another question: Whose Moon?
Depending on who this dinosaur fossil belongs to, your narrative will change radically. If instead you take fossil seashells on a mountaintop, you can choose to take it as ‘real’, with all the catastrophic earth changes we are told would be required to get it there. You might more fancifully take them as the equivalent of litter on Everest, picnic leftovers deposited by sea-level tourists. But for dinosaur fossils there is no such alternative theory of this kind to monster animals. However, from the standpoint of a matrix designer, it would be much easier to plant fossils than to take several species through millions of years of evolution.
Monsters and catastrophes do exist, but they are also basic ingredients of nightmares. The issue is the chicken-and-egg situation of the fantasy and the reality. A fossil is a harmless bone with no surviving DNA and no particular relevance to our here and now. Unless, that is, you allow Jurassic Park-type geneticists to tinker with DNA to back-engineer a caricature of the real thing. In other words, is the killer monster a nightmarish memory from a past reality, or is it an evil dream to concoct a future reality?
Hence the question is not about deciding whether or not to believe in dinosaurs; it is about choosing in which direction we want to take this whole thing. In other words, it is about taking ownership, which is to say, These are
my fossils, i.e. long dead bones that need to be buried. Dinosaurs did exist, but they don’t any more, and they won’t any more, because they became us.
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