What could you do for a million dollars?

A week ago I asked my brother if he thought he could make himself to believe that a given ordinary object were in a sealed box simply upon my asking him to, and he said he could: he would trust my testimony. So, if I said "Jeff, believe that there are scissors in this box", he thinks he could believe it, just like that. So he claims.

Then I asked him if he thought he could make himself to believe, for a million-dollar reward, that a given ordinary object were in a box, after my having opened the box, clearly showing him that nothing whatsoever was in the box, and then sealing the box in his presence. A million dollars to believe that scissors are in a box he had plainly seen moments before to be empty. He thought he could do it.

He said he would have to really lie to himself--deceive himself into discrediting the evidence that I'd just presented him with.

Then I asked, "what if you had to shake the box up and down?" That got him.

A reply to Dillard.

Read this bit from Dillard today:

Once, when the pond was younger and the algae had not yet taken over, I saw an amazing creature. At first all I saw was a slender motion. Then I saw that it was a wormlike creature swimming in the water with a strong, whiplike thrust, and it was two feet long. It was also slender as a thread. It looked like an inked line someone was nervously drawing over and over. Later I learned that it was a horsehair worm. The larvae of horsehair worms live as parasites in land insects; the aquatic adults can get to be a yard long. I don't know how it gets from the insect to the pond, or from the pond to the insect, for that matter, or why on earth it needs such an extreme shape. If the one I saw had been so much as an inch longer or a shave thinner, I doubt if I would ever have come back.

How do such parasites get to the pond, you ask? Let me help you out, Dillard. The internet has an answer: they turn their insect hosts into zombies.

Read all about parasites turning insects into zombies here, courtesy of Scientific American.
Watch a video of hairworms going all 'Dawn of the Dead' on crickets here, courtesy of the French internet.
Play a cartoony video game based on this biological premise here, courtesy of Nitrome.

Here's another little passage from Dillard that I dog-eared because it made me laugh aloud, not because it also mentions hairworms (but it does mention hairworms for those of you waiting to read any and all sentences about them).

Along with intricacy, there is another aspect of the creation that has impressed me in the course of my wanderings. Look again at the horsehair worm, a yard long and thin as a thread, whipping through the duck pond, or tangled with others of its kind in a slithering Gordian knot. Look at an overwintering ball of buzzing bees, or a turtle under ice breathing through its pumping cloaca. Look at the fruit of the Osage orange tree, big as a grapefruit, green, convoluted as any human brain. Or look at a rotifer's translucent gut: something orange and powerful is surging up and down like a piston, and something small and round is spinning in place like a flywheel. Look, in short, at practically anything--the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear--and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing.

Hello and Jon, on the floor.

This morning I petted Hello, the cat my family feeds. I happened upon it as it lay lounging in the sunlight, like pagan royalty. Without explanation I flopped prone down next to it, and extended my hand. Hello took little notice, and continued to service the immediate needs of its back by rolling back and forth on the carpet. However, my hand, proving by its movements to be more in line with Hello's agenda of satisfying ever-present itch, established for itself a place of primacy among Hello's fund of nearby objects against which to rub an itchy body. I thought to myself how itchiness truly is ever-present for Hello. This cat's life is devoted to the stimulation of its fur, and it will be not be sated. Considered renaming cat Sisyphus. Or, I thought, if not a single physical craving, there is a small set of basic appetites--itchiness, hunger, horniness--that Hello will tend to for its feline lifetime. And there I was, stupidly stretched out on the floor, scratching the cat, helping it along merrily merrily merrily. I saw in Hello some reduction of myself: although I boast a chorus of (perhaps) subtler and more sophisticated iterations of desire, it is difficult not to think of the range of my behavior as at root an ongoing, elaborate, idiotic scratch.

These were my thoughts just before Hello started playing with my hand: biting it, holding it in its front paws, kicking at it with its back paws--behavior apparently gratuitous. And me, playing along, also without explanation.