‘Grabby’ Aliens, A Beautiful Funnel Of Air & A Few Past Links

June 23, 2022 / chr1 / Leave a comment

I tend to be skeptical of guys who, upon their deaths, freeze their heads into perpetuity. Probabilistically, though, I suppose it could be a bet worth taking.

We could use more outside-the-box thinkers with real-world experience making bets on where to fruitfully think.

Our institutions have more rot than usual, and dangerous capture. There are too many prizes, too many piles of old money, and not enough brains and courage.

I’m of a mind to say Nature is beyond value judgment (I judge things all the time, but Nature doesn’t seem to care). The people I love and who love me, do care about me (as long as we’re here).

God? Maybe. The universe: Unclear. The little I know of the laws of the universe suggest more of the same Nature I’ve known here on Earth.

Beauty plays a key part in understanding the world. It can both anchor us into our own bodies and experiences, while keeping us searching for new experiences. Truth has a clear empirical element in my thinking, and refers to a world I believe genuinely exists. Collecting data about the world is a lot like actually referring back to the book you’re quoting, or asking the other person what they’re really thinking…then listening.

Beautiful and dangerous. Maybe the tornado is telling you something? Maybe not.

Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’

Sunday Quotation: Edmund Burke On The French Revolution

Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…

Roger Sandall, Australian critic of romantic primitivism and the Western’s Left’s penchant for the Noble Savage: His home page where his essays can be found. Here’s “The Rise Of The Anthropologues“ and…

Repost-Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’

March 21, 2017 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here. (link may not last)

Perhaps Hawking is guilty of a little hubris in weighing in with such certitude on the God question?

Here’s a quote of his Hawking’s posted previously:

“His [Kant’s}argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever.”

-Stephen Hawking-A Brief History of Time

Not so much that time continues back forever, but that it’s impossible to conceive of a point outside of time. Kant wished to argue that both time and space are not necessarily inherent characteristics of the universe (or any object at all…especially those objects with which we have no direct experience, like a black hole, though according to Kant we can have knowledge of objects) but rather time and space are part of our onboard apparatus, and preconditions for us have intelligible experience in the first place (unlike as is assumed in calculus, for example). He constructed a vast metaphysics to make his point in the hopes of putting metaphysics on the same ground as the sciences (the Enlightenment was going strong around him, and he latched onto Newton’s laws especially). It’s questionable as to whether or not he succeeded, but fascinating to think about nonetheless.

Also On This Site: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism…

Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant

From The Times Higher Education: Simon Blackburn On The The Atheist/Believer Debate…From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky

Repost-From YouTube-Bryan Magee: On The Ideas Of Quine

February 6, 2017February 8, 2017 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Via Wikipedia-Quine’s position denying the analytic/synthetic distinction is summarized as follows:

It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact. … Thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component. Given this supposition, it next seems reasonable that in some statements the factual component should be null; and these are the analytic statements. But, for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.^[13]

— Willard v. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 64

As a pretty strong materialist, Quine rejects a priori synthetic statements as necessary, as well as mind/body duality problems, regarding the ‘why?’ questions as fundamentally unanswerable. At least such questions are not for philosophy to posit nor answer, anyways.

There simply doesn’t exist a category of knowledge we humans possess that doesn’t have its origins in our experience.

For Quine, it seems, philosophy is more abstract and general than the sciences (asking questions about questions, clarifying), but it it can’t hope, as Kant hoped, to be placed onto the same ground as the sciences.

Yet, as a Youtube commenter points out: Aren’t there still abstract entities beyond our material existences on Quine’s view (not souls, not God, not ideal forms), but rather just numbers and number sets naturally existing, and perhaps waiting to be discovered?

A link posing a re-purposed Quinian idealism:

ABSTRACT. Quine’s web of belief is influenced by, and encompasses, the entire scope of reality. It is established with a minimalist vocabulary, and is an efficient and integral vehicle toward his metaphysical [a]nd unambiguous ontological commitment, which leads to a somewhat bleak but rigorous membership in the world. Physical objects exhaust the domain of substance, and man becomes a mere four dimensional physical object. All states of mind are psychologized, or reduced to their impact on behaviour. Effectively, idealist criticisms have not simply been taken note of, but idealism has been hijacked, and the result is a new kind of empiricism and an original view of the world.

From HyperAllergic Via The New Criterion: ‘At the Internet Archive, Saving Data While Spurning the Cloud’

December 9, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full piece here.

Brewster Kahle is building an Internet Archive which aims to offer universal access:

‘…a Library of Congress for the 21st century built through private philanthropy and sweat equity…’

…How libraries endure was on Kahle’s mind when I visited the Archive in San Francisco’s Richmond District earlier this year. “What happens to libraries is that they’re burned,” he said. “They are generally burned by governments. The Library of Congress, for instance, has already been burned once, by the Brits. So if that’s what happens, well, design for it, make copies.”

You can’t step in the same river twice, and much of our stored knowledge can be gone in the blink of an eye.

Cloud computing seems poised to shake things up, but backup plans are welcome, and Kahle seems motivated to think about where technology and library science are meeting. He discusses his scanning centers and bookmobiles which are getting books cheaply into the hands of people who may never have held them before: