Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I mentioned Tuesday of this week that Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize this year for work capturing neutrinos at the South Pole.  Why does that matter? As background, consider that neutrinos (unlike, say, electrons) have no electric charge and virtually no mass.  They are everywhere, passing quickly through us and anything else with little interaction. This justifies the nickname "ghost particles". They exist because supermassive black holes (and certain other bodies) create them and fling them out.   Again: what do we learn from catching such a ghost in polar ice?  We learn in what direction and how quickly it is moving when it hits the ice.  Furthermore, whatever line it has been moving on when it did so, we know that it has been on precisely that line, without any swerving or bouncing about, for a looooooong time.  Detect one, as Astronomy mag says in its treatment of the Nobel, and it points right back to its origin.  Scientists will often b...

  Continuing my train of thought from yesterday.  (Please look back at yesterday's post before telling me this one makes no sense.)  So: Suncor wants the Supreme Court of The United States to find that climate change policy must be federal policy, so Boulder has no business bringing a state law based suit against Suncor or ExxonMobil.  That understood: how did arguments go?  Chief Justice Roberts expressed skepticism about the preemption argument. He said it is not uncommon to base state law litigation on actions taken in whole or part in other states. He wanted to know: what makes this case special? Sarah Harris, the solicitor general for the US (here because the administration is taking Suncor's side) replied that if Boulder prevails it would ban the production of fossil fuels anywhere in the country. Roberts appeared unpersuaded. "That's a question of relief" to be raised in the context of the lawsuit if the lawsuit is allowed to proceed, not an argument agai...

  And on its very first day hearing arguments, the notorious "first Monday in October," the justices heard a potentially momentous case out of a Boulder, Colorado state court. Plaintiffs in the state court dispute want to hold two big hydrocarbon-marketing concerns (Suncor and ExxonMobil) liable for their role in climate change and for obscuring that fact that climate change is underway from the general public.  Samuel Alito has recused himself from the case, apparently because he is heavily invested in the petroleum industry. It is worth observing here that the plaintiffs do have a right to move forward with this dispute, according to Colorado's own Supreme Court.  That court ruled that Boulder's state-law claims were not preempted by any federal statute. If the US Supreme Court does not reverse that, the Colorado court's decision stands.  In this case, that means "tie goes to the runner," a 4-4 split in Alito's absence, which seems quite possible, ...

In his 1907 book PRAGMATISM, William James makes one use of the expression "cosmic weather," an expression he likely picked up from his friend Chauncey Wright, a Metaphysical Club member.  James writes (in Lecture 3) that according to a certain materialistic view of things, all that happens in time is arbitrary and pointless, just the doing and undoing of cosmic weather. James uses it as a throw-off phrase, but tracing the idea back through Wright we can see that it had significance for Wright in the context of astronomy. Gravity draws bodies together, thermodynamics disperses heat from centers to margins. Coming together is balanced by coming apart. Great structures like galaxies come together, disperse, and come together again. There is no progress to it all, Wright thought.  Astronomy, and cosmology, have changed a good deal since Wright's day, or James'. The general view now is that there is a progression (in an amoral sense), not just a lot of aimless cycles.  Th...

A random memory.  My mother went through a phase of believing that what I needed were lessons in transcendental meditation. She had seen some newspaper article about TM, when it was all the rage, and she thought it would be good for what ailed me.   She had a lot of such phases. I generally resisted. There was reason for this, other than sultry passive-aggressive rebellion.  There was that, too.  But the chief reason I balked at TM was the sense that it would badly backfire on me.  I would start, become attached to it, and then in another swing of her own phases my mother would decide to stop it, and I'd be getting lectures about how much time I was wasting with this silly pose and mantra.  In time, she did forget about the wonderfulness of TM and she did pass on to something else, as I had expected. Mom died about ten years ago, and I offer this recollection of course with regret for the fact that we never really managed to communicate honestly with o...

W illiam James once offered the following summary of his critique of Hegelian philosophy: 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When that happens, one must go forever, nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive. 2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. Their partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and space. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. But between different qualities...