Ghyll:Whim of the beholder

Dibbeth upon this. --Brother Arfrus 10:17, 22 October 2005 (EDT)

research:

"categories based on their internal and external visual characteristics, their reproduction and feeding habits and the whim of the beholder."

is the whim of the beholder what determines the special designation (yes!), (no.), or (maybe?)

or does whim of the beholder categorize the order (and the commensurate problems since whims are notoriously opposed to orders of any kind.

Research and scholasticism in Ghyll, for at lest the last few centuries, has relied on the Observational Principle. The Whim of the beholder is the means by which a researcher is able to cause observed phenomena to be fact, even if what is observed is just something the researcher has created by their own preferences and biases.

The Observational Principle

The Observational Principle holds that no event occurs unless and until it has been observed.

Consequently, there was no distinction between Darseeds and puffball flowers until Kmuppens took the time to observe that there were differences between them, and wrote them down. Until that time, no one had bothered to notice that there was in fact a difference between them.

But, once an observation has been made, the facts, which may have been indeterminate until that time, are henceforth fixed. The whim of the beholder may, in fact, serve to influence the facts in the matter. This is a matter that is debated by philosophers. But I cannot determine that you are not an ordinary Ghyllian but instead a hideous, carpaceless, pink grub just by looking at you, because you have already been observed and distinguished beforehand. The Whim of the beholder can only be applied to previously indeterminate phenomena.

Because of this misunderstanding, the Whim of the beholder has come to be misused all to often in common parlance. The establishment of fact that the Observational Principle describes applies to the initial observer only. Once a phenomenon or an object has been observed, no future changes can be affected, although folk superstitions such as the notion that a witch can curse people by looking at them or that the sun warms things by looking at them, still abound.

When the scholar Morbus Iff writes about the Order of Mnerr: "Regardless of how ... .. passive the monks of Mneer are, you'd think them a crazy bunch once you got to know them; that is, got to know the literature that's been distributed about them. Could - Be - Arfrus won't confirm or deny the more religious and cultural of the following, but most are accepted as truth, especially those at the whim of the beholder:" he is writing in the vernacular sense, rather than the scientific sense of the phrase.

Pre-Harandraffian Knowledge

It is, of course, well known that King Harandraff the Great sought to obliterate all knowledge, other than histories that were favorable to him, personally. Very few records of any sort survived the Harandraffian Period. In the aftermath, with very little information available, everyone was forced to start making things up.

It is believed, though this is, of course, only conjectural, that there were many, many scholars in the land before Harandraff came to power, and that King Harandraff, and his anti-librarian, Borges W. Gush, tried to systematically remove as much knowledge as he possibly could. Logically, then, there were hundreds if not thousands of scholars, philosophers and other learned types who were put to death during this period.

But something more insidious must have taken place. In order for so much knowledge to have been forgotten, not only would the scholars had to have been put to death, but some kind of forgetfulness must have been forced upon the remaining populace in some fashion.

Practices such as Grenfing may have originated as a means of storing and collecting information during the Harandraffian Period. After the intellectual suppression of that period, the practice was able to become something that was solely recreational, rather than as a clandestine method of preserving information.

The evolution of Ponce Gardening is one of the first post-Harandraffian expressions of popular observation taking place. Sailors who enjoyed exercising their whims would go out and collect interesting things from the sea in order to classify them. This is why so many phrases about ill-informed scholars have a nautical theme: He's only got one oar in the water, Sails full and tied to the dock, etc.

Kmuppens and the Whim of the Beholder

It was, of course, the taxonomist Ull Gitshire Kumuppens who brought the Observational Principle to the forefront of Ghyllian science.

Taxonomic identification continues to this day, and therefore there are

Observation and the Heh-Blammo Balance

One of the key questions remaining is whether the Heh-blammo balance is maintained by the Brothers of the Lantern through their exercise of the Whim of the beholder. If this is the case, then there may be closer similarities between them and the Order of Mnerr, who steadfastly work to ensure that if a tree falls in the forest, it does make a sound.

Finally, An Experiment in the Whim of the Beholder

For years scientists and historians have wondered about how it came to be that so much knowledge was apparently lost during the Harandraffian Period.

Citations: King Harandraff the Great, Grenfing, x.

--Brother Arfrus 19:16, 28 October 2005 (EDT)