Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  The human species has been sending signals into outer space since Marconi's day. After all, once radio waves are out there, they just keep going. Marconi's first crude experiments, at his family estate in Italy, took place in the middle 1890s -- so, 130 years ago.  Famously, less than 20 years later the radio operators of The Titanic stayed at their posts on that awful night in April 1912 tapping out Morse code distress signals.  In principle, an extraterrestrial intelligence one hundred and fourteen light years away from us could even now be picking up on those signals. What do such beings make of them?  Do they take them to be evidence that "we Fl'korgians are not alone!"?  There is a rhythm to them -- those signals from The Titanic -- that likely seems an intelligent construction. Dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. Pause and repeat. Over and over.  My guess is that if the Fl'korgians have technology powerful enough to pick up on that pattern at th...

Yesterday we asked when and how life on earth began.  We didn't answer that question.  We offered a scenario for a proto-life, but also noted that much more would have to happen for that to become cellular life as we generally understand the term.  It is possible that life -- considered as something DISTINCT from the proto-life I discussed yesterday, had two origins. There were two paths forward, so to speak, bacteria and archaea. The bacteria developed first.  Muh later, the archaea developed and absorbed the bacteria so the later became the energy producing part (the mitochondria) of larger cells.   As to the timing?  The best guess sets the early RNA replication (proto-life) at about 4 billion years ago.  There were complicated cells, leaving a fossil record, by 3.5 billion years ago, so each of the two paths described above had been executed by then. IF any of this is right.  Science proceeds by falsification, and this all may be falsif...

  The origin of life on earth -- a lasting scientific mystery -- may have a lot to do with alkaline hydrothermal vents.  These are geysers - like vents found in the ocean floor. Marine biologists have long noted that they create the sort of  chemically rich and energy intensive environment around them that mimics the electrochemical conditions found in cells.  So ... maybe (thinking that thought in reverse) the cells of the world are indeed to this day mimicking that sea floor environment.  In this context, with the vents themselves offering abundant energy, scientists can model the creation of RNA molecules, some of which prove to be self-replicating, although in a highly imperfect fashion.  Does it make sense to call this already "life"? Probably not.  Call it "proto-life" if you will. There is some irony here, though. We often think of life as paradigmatically bound up with the absorption of sunlight. Light, through photosynthesis, becomes plant mat...

Moving from the lofty epistemologyical/metaphysical realm of yesterday's quote to the  questions of national character. A thought from a wise French observer of our country.   I  accost an American sailor and inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years. In these words, which fell accidentally, and on a particular subject, from an uninstructed man, I recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a great people direct all their concerns. [ Democracy in America Vol. II, Part One, Chap. 8.]

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe once wrote the following: F or years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: 'I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?' ... I always hated phenomanlism and felt trapped by it. I couldn't see my way out of it but I didn't believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. The strength, the central nerve of it remained alive and raged achingly. It was only in Wittgenstein's classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought "I have got this, and I define 'yellow' (say) as this" being effectively attacked. Phenominalism is in essence, George Berkeley without the God. The tree was not there in the Quad yesterday, except in some hypothetical sense -- if some perfceiving being HAD been there, he/she would have seen.... What e...

Today's random memory takes us back to October 1974, when I turned 16.  As was then the rite of passage, [maybe not so much now?], Mom and Dad instructed me in a period of weeks on the basics of driving a car.  My chief memory of this involves the signal lights, and how utterly unperceptive on the subject I had been in my 16 years of life.  Adding up my time in cars would surely have summed to a plural number of those sixteen years.  I might have paid a bit of attention. But I hadn't. I knew that drivers did something involving a lever that turned on a light telling other drivers where you were turning. I also was sort-of-aware going in that this lever did not have to be used a second time to turn the light back off. But I suspected there was a timer involved. Signal left, then turn left and after X seconds, the light will go off ... no?  Oh, wait, you mean there is no timer, the light goes off when and because I turn the wheel the other way?  Who knew?...