A chimera to a paleontologist
is a fake fossil made up from bits and pieces
selected from real fossils of various kinds.
Large profits can be made trading in weird fossils
and reputations can be made studying them.
Large profits can be made trading in fake fossils
and reputations can be ruined describing them.
Chimeras, it’s believed, always have been found out.
Sometimes high-tech analysis finds tricky flaws.
Sometimes flip-sides of pieces are discovered, whole.
Teams have been fooled but never the field over all.
That is one of the very few advantages
to having a dozen or more people living
inside my head with me: They check each other’s work.
Three or four of the fragments of me might get fooled
but there are always dissenters, contrarians
promoting alternatives to the assembly
of slackers gathered together behind my eyes
making neuron scrapbooks, grey matter collages,
cerebral found art, cognitive droodles and stuff
designed to one-up all the other slackers’ stuff.
It’s a complex mess but some order emerges.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When We Meet Monsters
Droodles
“Unearthing the Dragon”
— An odd non-fiction account
of the discovery of fossils
of feathered dinosaurs. There is
an interesting discussion
of a recent chimera incident
that fooled some reasonably famous
figures in the paleontology world.
Conscious Realism
Society of Mind
No comments:
Post a Comment