Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 I know someone who knows someone who just won a Nobel Prize! Just two degrees of separation! I won't name the intermediary link.  But she is an old college friend of mine who married into the Ambros family. She thus became the in-law of a biologist named Victor Ambros [with no "e"], a professor at UMass Medical School.  And Professor Ambros just won the Nobel Prize in medicine for work on microRNA.  Allow me to bask in reflected glory. And here is a link should you want to know more about his work.  U.S. Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of mRNA (usnews.com) And a word to the ghost of Alfred Nobel.  You're forgiven for that high-explosives thing. 

 In a television commercial for an insurance company, a child (9 ish?) causes some consternation. After the adults around him start bemoaning "the economy," the child asks, "what's the economy?"  They can't answer, and he ends up deciding to 'Google it.'  Let's try to answer. It is a question from a child [actor], but not a childish question.  Even a 9 year old is probably familiar with the catch-all term "society".  How about telling him that "the economy" and "society" are the same fact, looked at from two different points of view. Or, if he doesn't know either word so this doesn't help, speak to him in single-syllable bits, and tell him they are "two names for the fact that folks all have to find ways to work and live with folks."  When we refer to society as "the economy," we're thinking about this living-together thing in terms of limits, and choices made in awareness of limits. 

 Last week I posted about Wilhelm Wundt, and said that he was a structuralist, as distinct from a functionalist, in psychology. What does this mean?  It means that his goal was to break down consciousness into elements, and then to suggest how the elements combine, or could have combined, to create the whole structure that we know through introspection.  For Wundt the structure begins with sensation. At first blush a sensation is a physical fact -- light striking an eye, for example, The physical facts are much the same for us as they are for other creatures. But we are humans, with minds. So (WW's line of thought here)... we have apperception, a process that turns sensations into something different. Apperception turns sensation into intuition.   Wundt saw his laboratory's experiments were an effort at learning something about this transformation.  One issue that troubled him was: how does the human mind acquire its intuition of space? These three dimensions of extension into

I believe several Mayors of the city of Waterbury, Connecticut, have been indicted. Some have served time.  There are protocols for this in Waterbury. Regular training for what to do when the federal marshalls show up and want to speak to the Mayor.  Nobody who grew up in Connecticut is all that impressed with the indictment of Mayor Adams in the city to our southwest.  One neat thing about the indictment though, is that they don't play the cutesy games other indictments do when they are made public. The bill of indictment is readily available.  In fact, I'll just give you the link in case you haven't come across it elsewhere. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/u.s._v._adams_indictment_1.pdf But what do I mean by "cutesy games"? The anonymization of terms with pretty obvious referents. Some US Attorneys would have referred to "Country Number 1" yet made it obvious what country was referenced. Maybe with a reference to a waterway that rhymes with the word

 I don't know whether I can run polls within this simple blogpost format.  If I knew how, I would run one now.  Which one of the following, dear reader, best reflects your view about the recent sentencing of Caroline Ellison? 1) I have no idea who she is 2) I know but don't care 3) The sentence was too harsh 4) The sentence was too lenient 5) The sentence was about right. 

A few words today about psychology before James, or Freud, or Pavlov. Before any of them there was Wilhelm Wundt, who may have been the first scholar writing about the human mind to call HIMSELF a "psychologist".  A few words about the timeline. Herbert Spencer wrote his PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY in two volumes, which appeared a decade apart, in 1870 and 1880. Wundt's most important works in the field were published in 1873-74 and 1881. James published his brilliant two volume Principles in 1890. Freud's breakthrough began with Studies in Hysteria and Three Essays, in the 1890s and after the turn of the century, respectively.  Pavlov published his lectures on the nervous system, which included his famous observations of salivating dogs,  in 1897.   One gets the impression, then, of Wundt (and perhaps Herbert Spencer in his psychological writings) as constituting the Old Guard in psychology, in the days just before the field was about to explode in a variety of dif