Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Someone on twitter issued a dare to all who could give him "the first name of each of your four great-grandparents." Basic arithmetic there and an identity-theft problem.  You, whoever you are, surely have eight great grandparents. It is possible that some of you know the first names of all of them. But the only people who really care for a list of such names are people who are trying to build enough of a profile of you to steal your identity.     So, some free advice: even if you do happen to know the answer to the question, and even if it is asked in an arithmetically accurate way: don't answer. Thank you.  

  Every once in a while, as regular readers know, I write about quantum mechanics. I don't write as an authority -- I was a solid "C" student in an adult-education course in calculus about 20 years ago and will never make a pretense to understand particle physics. The sphere diagrammed in this image has something to do with quantum theory, and something to do with calculus. And that is all I can tell you about it!   But quantum mechanics is relevant to many of the philosophical questions in which I have a vested interest in my capacity as a thinking human. So I do need to keep struggling with it.  I recently came across an interpretation I had not heard before: the transactional interpretation.  By way of preface: The mainline interpretation is known simply as "Copenhagen" after a period in the mid 1920s when Heisenberg worked as assistant to Bohr at the University of Copenhagen. The Copenhagen view accepts the complementarity of wave and particle readings, acce...

Lara Logan is in the news again.  In the early years of this millennium, LL seemed to be on a path to a great career as a television journalist. She was with CBS, for gawd's sake. Its news division has given the world Murrow and Cronkite. It is presumably where a young woman or man with ambitions in that line wants to be. In 2011, as the Mubarak government collapsed in Egypt, as crowds filled up the streets of Cairo, CBS sent Logan and a camera crew to cover this huge story for them.    This is where our story turns ugly.  Soon after Mubarak's resignation, Logan was raped by a rowdy celebratory crowd that may have included up to 300 men. She was rescued by soldiers and flown home where she was hospitalized for four days.  On a message board to which I was contributing with some regularity at the time, I remember one commenter saying that he disagreed with news coverage of the attack. He thought the mainstream media ought to shut up about Logan. said he thought i...

In another world this would be a very big story now. In this world, too much else seems to be going on and the Nikola trial has been thrown into obscurity. Even in the world of trial reporting -- Alex Jones was big, a document thief who lives in a golf club is big, Harvey Weinstein is big. The trial of Trevor Milton, the former CEO of Nikola, has been lost.  There can't be more than three trials-of-the-century underway at any one time.  But let's get into this. The title of the company is meant to honor Nikola Tesla and, if you are a cynic, you might suppose it was invented to suggest (without asserting) some sort of connection with the Elon Musk entity Tesla. There is no such connection, though.  Nikola (like Tesla) manufactured electric cars and trucks. In mid 2020 Nikola was flying high. Its stock was worth $65. By July 2021, though, shares were down to around $12 and the CEO, Trevor Milton, was indicted for "lying about nearly all aspects of the business" to attra...

  I don't know what is going on with the Trumpets' direct entry into the social media market, Truth Social.   The project does seem to have done the country some good in that it gave Rep. Nunes a new hobby, probably a more harmless one than were his efforts at lawmaking.  Other than this, it is confusing, especially since it has gotten mixed up with SPACs, a yesteryear trend not yet old enough to be a cool retro thing.  A SPAC is a "special purpose acquisition company." It is a shell of a company, listed on a stock exchange, but with no operations other than the search for another company to buy.  Who would want to be purchased by a SPAC? Generally, a company that wants to be on a stock exchange but does not want the operational difficulties and the costs associated with, first, applying for a listing then, if that application is granted, staging an IPO.  Getting yourself taken over by a SPAC that has already done the prep work and gotten listed evades that...

  Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology this year.  Paabo is one of the founders of paleogenetics, the science of extracting readable DNA from remains of hominids that  Svante Pääbo, who overcame the technical challenges resulting from the degradation of DNA during tens of thousands of years, receives the 10 million-krona ($900,000)  award  from  the Nobel Assembly in Stockholm. Congrats to him. I hope to say something about the subject matter behind his award soon. For now, enjoy the comic. 

  She doesn't think it is going to save the world any time soon, but she does think further research is necessary. https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/10/cold-fusion-is-back-theres-just-one.html   I leave you to her thoughts, and I will only add my know-nothingist nugget that Cold fusion, like quantum computing and AI, is one of those things that is ALWAYS the next big thing. 

  There has been a fair amount of chatter in recent days on social media to the effect that a former mayor of New York is about to be arrested for non-compliance with court orders regarding the payments he owes to his ex-wife.  The chatter generally comes unaccompanied by links to actual sources, so I just note it here as chatter.  I would find that amusing. I am not among the "tragedy" theorists of Giuliani's career. You know, the folks who say "he was once a great and important man, the sheriff of Wall Street in the '80s, when it so badly needed policing, and it is sad to see how far he has sunk."  None of that is right. He was never a great man and insofar as he was important in his pre-mayoral days his importance was always lamentable.  

 This spring I proudly announced on this blog that I believe I have achieved reflexive equilibrium on the issue of the relationship of the mind and the body. I am, I said, " an emergentist, and specifically one who embraces downward causation and a planetary mereology." I also tried at that time in the main text and in a brief exchange with Henry to explain what emergence means and why my mereology (my sense of parts and wholes) is planetary. For now I will just say that if we do discover life on other planets, I will think it perfectly moral to declare oneself an Earth Chauvinist. Today I would like to speak a bit about downward causation.    If we think of reality as layered, so that matter was a layer added on to space and life a layer added on to matter, then one might well ask: are events in the upper layers explained fully by events in the lower? And are events in the lower explained fully by themselves? Can we explain all of biology as chemistry, and all ...

  I take today's subject from a recent article in SLATE by Jonathan Fischer. Fischer's article was written prior to Musk's surrender this weekend -- Musk seems now to have decided to proceed with his Twitter purchase on the original terms, at great expense. The Fischer article involves in the first instance the litigation between Musk and Twitter, over whether Twitter was going to be able to get a court order requiring Musk to buy them out as he promised early this year.  Such orders for specific performance are rare, and it looked when Fischer wrote that the management of Twitter would probably have to be satisfied with receiving some of Musk's billions for their troubles. It wouldn't have been a shabby consolation prize, though. Fischer takes that as his start point. He then tells us that the Chancery Court in Delaware has released a lot of text messages to and from Musk bearing on the litigation over Tesla.  Fischer has been pouring over the texts and what he con...

As I've mentioned here before, I wrote for a little more than a year, (ending in April 2022) on a steady basis, for a small operation that hoped to explain public affairs to young people -- pre-teens and early teens. This operation created a small income stream for me ($400 a month) which nonetheless sometimes came in very useful when it arrived. I lost this stream of income when the project closed down operations. Their site went down in the aftermath of the cessation of operations, but someone brought it back. With one cryptic exception there is nothing on it posted subsequent to early May of this year, when they ran out of the inventory of my work. The site disappeared from its URL before May was done. Then it came back into existence briefly in August. I provided you in an earlier post with three samples of my work for it during that resurgence. Then the site disappeared again in early September. Now, as we get into October, it is back again. And again, I will use this brief op...

  So far the Webb telescope, launched with such hoopla back on Christmas Day last year, has been creating mostly confusion.  It started producing images this summer. The first full-color images were released on July 12.  Then there came a flurry of stories about how the new images create difficulties for the Big Bang Theory.   Not the dearly departed television show, but the actual theory.  Then the counter-wave of stories: that was a misunderstanding. And then still another wave: the instrument isn't really calibrated properly, so firm conclusions cannot be drawn. So call us when you've recalibrated and gotten it right, okay?