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This Online Edition Play: Katherine's Questionable Quest for Love and Happiness, by Bo C. Klintberg [text image, no navigation]

This Play:
Katherine’s
Questionable Quest
for Love and
Happiness
(View All Plays)

This Version:
1 January 2008 (1.0)
(View All Versions)

This View Mode:
One Scene Per Page
(View All Scenes On One Page [size: 0.3 MB])

SCENE I. The Floridian Liti-Gator

SCENE II. On Battles, Wars, and Meaning

SCENE III. Maximum Happiness, Minimum Unhappiness

SCENE IV. Katherine’s Real Problem

SCENE V. The Mustachio Man

SCENE VI. Death Is Nothing Like a Toothache

SCENE VII. Not In the Hands of the Scientists

SCENE VIII. Important and Unimportant Knowledge

SCENE IX. Physicians Can’t Stop Death

SCENE X. Are Foetuses Potential Persons?

SCENE XI. The Body-Bomb

SCENE XII. The Cartesian Theatre

SCENE XIII. Radha’s Microscope

SCENE XIV. Ontology Drives Explanation

SCENE XV. Another Look at Radha

SCENE XVI. Confessions of a Satisfactionist

Philosophical Play: Katherine's Questionable Quest for Love and Happiness, by Bo C. Klintberg [text image, no navigation]

< PREVIOUS (Scene XIV) | NOTES | CITATION | NEXT (Scene XVI) >

SCENE XV. Another Look at Radha

1 CHRISTIANUS. Sure, that’s perfectly understandable. Maybe you want a coffee refill?

2 KATHERINE. Yes, but only a small one. I can’t stay very much longer.

3 CHRISTIANUS. That’s fine. Waiter!

4 KATHERINE. So what else should we talk about?

5 CHRISTIANUS. Well, why don’t we just quickly return to Radha’s lab, just to solidify some of my points about scenarios and explanation.

6 KATHERINE. All right.

7 CHRISTIANUS. What we might say, then, is that it’s good that we have populated our little lab scenario in such a way that Radha is one individual entity, and the electron microscope is another.

8 KATHERINE. Why is that?

9 CHRISTIANUS. Because once we have decided what characters and what props we should fill our little scenario with, our explanation will almost produce itself. Choosing the wrong characters and props not only would have guaranteed a wrong explanation, but it may also have made it more or less unintelligible and unbelievable.

10 KATHERINE. How?

11 CHRISTIANUS. Since we know that Radha herself is not a product of some processing going on inside the electron microscope, but an independent person using and controlling the electron microscope instrument to see some particular microscopic world, it is easy to understand that the microscope’s power switch does not change Radha’s general ability to perceive the world.

12 KATHERINE. Yes, it is easy.

13 CHRISTIANUS. And it is also easy to see that even if the microscope’s power switch is irrelevant in regards to Radha’s general ability to perceive the day-to-day human world, it is not irrelevant in regards to Radha’s more particular ability to see the microscopic world with her advanced electron microscope: for if the power is off, she can’t see any microscopic world; but if the power is on, she can.

14 KATHERINE. Yes, it’s easy: if the power is on, then the show is on; if the power is off, then the show is off.

15 CHRISTIANUS. Exactly!

16 KATHERINE. And once more we assume, of course, that she isn’t electrocuted when she touches the power switch?

17 CHRISTIANUS. Naturally.

18 KATHERINE. And we also assume, of course, that her powering-on doesn’t blow a fuse, so that everything becomes dark in the room, making her lose even her general ability to see things in the room?

19 CHRISTIANUS. Yes, for now.

20 KATHERINE. So what is the overall conclusion?

21 CHRISTIANUS. If one wrongly thinks that Radha’s general ability to perceive the day-to-day world around her is produced by the processing within the electron microscope, then it becomes very difficult to explain how it is that Radha still doesn’t lose her general ability to perceive the day-to-day world when the microscope’s power is off.

22 KATHERINE. How does this connect to the theories of the materialists?

23 CHRISTIANUS. Well, once one has furnished one’s scenario with an individual soul equipped with a general ability to perceive things in any world, including the physical world, one’s explanation doesn’t have to be so anti-intuitive on the personal level as the theories of the materialists are.

24 KATHERINE. How so?

25 CHRISTIANUS. In my explanation, then, one wouldn’t have to try to explain away our feeling of ourselves as individuals as some sort of illusion; rather, in my theory our perception of ourselves as individuals is a completely natural one: it naturally follows from my original setup where each individual soul uses the body as an instrument.

26 KATHERINE. So after my body dies, my perception continues?

27 CHRISTIANUS. Yes, according to my theory.

28 KATHERINE. That is hard to believe.

< PREVIOUS (Scene XIV) | TOP | CITATION | NEXT (Scene XVI) >

Notes (SCENE XV)

[This scene has no notes in this version of the play.]

< PREVIOUS (Scene XIV) | TOP | NOTES | NEXT (Scene XVI) >

HOW TO CITE: Bo C. Klintberg (2008), ‘Another Look at Radha’ in Katherine’s Questionable Quest for Love and Happiness. Online edition of Philosophical Plays, 1 Jan. 2008. Retrieved [today’s date] from http://philosophicalplays.googlepages.com/pgKQQv1sc15.htm.

All published material in Philosophical Plays, both in the print edition
(ISSN 1654-6296) and in the online edition (ISSN 1654-6318), is
Copyright © 2007-2008 by Bo C. Klintberg. All rights reserved.
No part of these publications may be reproduced, or re-
published, or stored in a retrieval system, without
prior permission in writing from Bo C. Klintberg.

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