I saw an odd question on Quora recently. I suspect it was asked by someone with a weak command of English language idioms, and I answered it accordingly. But it leads to thought about a fascinating incident in the history of physics, the Bohr-Einstein correspondence over quantum physics. The question was as follows: What's the meaning of "only to have Bohr" here? "Einstein would come up with a scenario in an attempt to defeat the quantum theory, only to have Bohr present an argument consistent with quantum theory that overcame it"? I answered as follows. If the idiom is unfamiliar to you, it is because of the conditional wording of the sentence. “A would do X, only to have B do Y.” One could rework it this way, “Einstein repeatedly came up with scenarios in an attempt to defeat the quantum theory, and in each case Bohr presented an argument consistent with quantum theory that overcame it.” It was Bohr, by the way, who got the publication cre...
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Dear Readers: Enjoyable as my time spent here is, I do have to make a cutback, at least through the end of 2020. So this is your notice that I will only be posting twice a week, not the four that has been my custom. Starting immediately. The two posts will come up on each Thursday and each Sunday. All I wish to say after THAT is something I should have said back in June. A journalist who died because she dared probe the crookedness of Malta's ruling received a tribute in June of this year, about three years after her demise. https://www.fraud-magazine.com/cover-article.aspx?id=4295010544 Her name was Daphne Caruana Galizia. I believe I have told her story before. She was the author of the influential blog Running Commentary and a regular columnist in The Sunday Times of Malta. She met her demise on October 16, 2017, when someone detonated a car bomb within her vehicle. This year, her son, Matthew, accepted on her behalf an award from the Association of Certi...
More than a year ago, someone asked the following question on Quora: "Is there any way to reconcile Plato and Aristotle? I like them both. How strong is the schism between them?" There is much with which I could quarrel in the framing of the question, aside from vagueness. The personal-sounding note, as if the question had gone to school with them both and retained some fondness for their memory. No ... he didn't. They are the collective names given to sets of writings and the systems of ideas we think we find therein. We can understand and appreciate them. The word "like" sounds wrong. "How strong is the schism?" Again, the wording is off. But this is the Trump era, and the predicate "strong" is ubiquitous. My quibbles notwithstanding, two Quorans offered answers to this question at the time. I was one of them. But I won't quote my own answer today. I'll give you a good chunk of the other one, which frankly is...
A number of common fallacies in reasoning have a common property. They help us deny to ourselves the idea that we are responsible for harm to others. For example, there is a logically fallacious bias in favor of inaction. "I didn't do anything" seems to most of us, on some level, to imply "I did nothing wrong" and this seems to imply "I'm not in the wrong." There is also a fallacious bias in favor of non-contact. We tend to think the "trigger man" more responsible for a murderer than whoever hired him. The employer presumably was somewhere far away, which is exculpatory in some sense. Further, that is key to an explanation for the prevalence of these fallacies offered by evolutionary psychologists. Human beings evolved to live in small groups. There was a lot of potential for violence between the groups, but selection pressures must have strongly favored the gene lines of those in groups with a lot of cohesion. Groups where confo...
The philosopher Brian Leiter has listed the following as the characteristics of "cancel culture,: the cultural impetus for shutting down and punishing dissent. I will reproduce what he has written with only very minor re-writes. If you want the original, I'll leave the link to the source below. 1. Punitiveness. Are people denouncing you to an employer or social connections? Are they blacklisting you from jobs and social opportunities and jeopardizing your livelihood, directly and indirectly? 2. Deplatforming. Are campaigns trying to prevent you from publishing a work expounding the forbidden ideas? giving speeches? attending meetings? Are they claiming that merely allowing you such a platform is a form of "violence" against them? 3. Organization. Does this criticism seem to be organized and targeted? Are the organizers recruting others to pile on? Are people hunting through your work and scouting your social media for further ammunition? 4. Secondary boy...
I am told that physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists dream about is the placement of a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. Putting it on the dark side would of course ensure that the planet earth would not be in its way. What is more important, the moon has no atmosphere, so the clarity of radio 'view' the human race would get of distant parts of the cosmos would be ... well, to use a technical phrase, an ass-kicking thrill. And though a radio telescope would be all that, ambitious scientists have additional related ideas. For example, there is a proposal to put a gravitational wave interferometer in the moon. Obvious question ... a whaaaaat? Interferometry is a set of techniques by which waves are made to interfere with one another, creating patterns that convey information. Usually this sort of measurement involves electromagnetic waves. But the study of gravitational waves is a new thing. The first direct observation of gravity waves was recorded in...
Derek Parfit's book, ON WHAT MATTERS, published in two volumes in 2011, acquired a third volume from his posthumous writings, in 2017 (he died on the very first day of that year). The book was much anticipated, generating both discussion groups and an academic conference in advance of its 2011 publication. Parfit's thesis, in short, is that there are three distinct moral theories and that, if each is pursued rigorously, it ends up in concord with the other two. Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, and contractualism are all different paths on different slopes of the same mountain. They lead to the same behavior: that is, the paths come together at the summit. That's a bold claim. Decoded (in accord with pragmatism) it means that the differences turn out to be merely conceptual not practical. A right-thinking Kantian and a right-thinking proponent of either of the other views will do the same thing at the notorious trolley switch. Today I will merely say a few wor...
Well, I was right last week when I said that it wasn't going to be Bass! Victory lap taken. Allow me a moment of reflection on former Vice-President Biden's choice of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Actually, I don't have a lot to say on this, except that what the Orange Dynast has been saying about it strikes me as unusually odd, even for him. It seems that President Trump and his acolytes have heard that Harris has a "tough cop" reputation, developed because her upward path through Californian politics was a path through various prosecutorial offices. So there are people to her left (for lack of a better concise term), who are unhappy with Biden's choice. They are for the most part containing their unhappiness, because they have their eyes on the November prize. But they are unhappy. At any rate, Trump's circle is at least vaguely aware of this, and they are trying to benefit from it. In 2016 they did benefit by the unhappiness of ...
Someone named Tom McClelland, back in 2012, completed a doctoral thesis (0f 242 pages) about the problem of consciousness, in pursuit of a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex. The thesis "aims to provide a compelling and distinctive response to the Problem of Consciousness. This is achieved by offering a bipartite analysis of the epistemic gap at the heart of that problem, and by building upon the hypothesis that the apparent problem is symptomatic of our limited conception of the physical." https://www.academia.edu/3522302/DOCTORAL_THESIS_-_Self-representationalism_and_the_Russellian_ignorance_hypothesis_a_hybrid_response_to_the_problem_of_consciousness?email_work_card=minimal-title In McClelland's view, the heart of the "problem of consciousness" s the "epistemic gap" between the physical and the phenomenal. Between everything we do and can know about light waves, their neurological effects in eye and brain, on the one hand, and knowledge of ...
What was the significance of the Space-X flight, now concluded? By way of clearing away of side-issue: I'm not an admirer of Elon Musk. He is the epitome of the faux-entrepreneur who makes his money on connections rather than real savvy or productivity. He has sometimes seemed like Donald Trump, but with a high-tech gloss (I mean of course the Trump of casinos and a television show, before his descent into politics, where his role has been something far worse.) But Musk aside: what is the significance of Space-X? My answer: it marks a stage in the privatization of space travel. We have passed the 'hero stage' of astronauts. Much of what they do -- replacing old satellites with new ones, running experiments where zero-grav is important -- has become a more-or-less routine matter. Yes, the science of those experiments can be cutting edge, but the heroes stay on the ground. The astronauts are important for laboratory maintenance. Or, sometimes, their bodies ARE the e...
As I write this, I don't know who Joe Biden will pick as his running mate. But it seems clear that it will not be Karen Bass. Bass looked promising for a time. From what I understand, her name was put forward by Christopher Dodd, a close adviser to the former VP, as a counterweight to Kamala Harris, the obvious choice, but one to whom Dodd has acquired an aversion. Bass (I hear her name is pronounced like the fish, not like the guitar) is in many respects a standard issue grassroots 'progressive' activist. She is also the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Biden needs to show that he knows who got him this far, and he has to make nice with Sanders loyalists. Bass would do both. But ... there is the matter of Scientology. It is a pyramid scheme masquerading as a cult so it can masquerade as a Church. It is secretive and violent, and treats blackmail like the greatest of all sports. Leah Rimini has done some fine work exposing it. The animated television sho...
As the importance of east Asia (not just China and/or Japan) in the global picture increases, it may behoove is to learn a little something about Pancasila. That is an Indonesian term, derived from Old Javanese words for "five" and "principles." It has become a political philosophy central to discourse in that country. The principles are: Belief in the One and Only God; A just and civilized humanity; The unity of Indonesia; Representational democracy as an expression of collective wisdom, and Social Justice for all Indonesians. Sukarno presented these principles in a speech on June 1, 1945, when the war in Europe was over and the end of the war in Asia, too, was in sight. Sorry to sound neocolonialist and all that, but ... is that list of principles as vacuous as it sounds?
The Federal Trade Commission seems to have reached a settlement with Facebook over privacy related issues that they two sides have been litigating since 2012. That, you will remember, was the midpoint of the Obama administration. The gist of that lawsuit was that Facebook had been making deceptive claims to its users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal data. It offered settings which were suppose to limit access to their data to those they designate as their Friends. But the same information is in fact made available to a lot of other parties, such as the developers of the apps those friends use. As a general rule, folk: if you aren't paying for something, you aren't the customer. You're part of the product. Facebook's whole business model depends upon SOMEBODY being willing to pay money for the data stream you generate by using the site for all the free fun in provides. The new settlement won't change that. Informational pri...