Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I admit to having very mixed feelings about the whole TikTok issue. Let's review.  The US House of Representatives has passed, in what is nowadays an impressively bipartisan vote, (and with 352 yeas) a bill that would force Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok or face a US ban.  A study last year out of Rutgers University indicated a "strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government." Perhaps more worrying, the broad use of TikTok is a means by which interests in China may build up a database on Americans and America, and whoever at ByteDance can get that information would be susceptible to demands from his/her government to pass it along.    What information exactly (aside from dance trends) would China get in this way that it could turn to nefarious purposes? It could help identify targets for recruitment for espionage, or data could be crossed-checked w

  I mentioned Whitehead's apparent sympathy with Heraclitus in my last post about him. My reading had not yet at that point discovered Process and Reality. Part II, Chapter Ten , which takes the form of an extended meditation on the sentiment "all things flow." In Heraclitus' Greek, panta rhei.   The sympathy is here made explicit. Indeed, a full understanding of that sentiment is said to be one of the main goals of philosophizing at all.  Some of the thinkers of the early modern world tried to ban flow, or fluency, from their picture of the world.  But Whitehead adds, "Newton, that Napoleon of of the world of thought, brusquely ordered fluency back into the world, regimented into his 'absolute, mathematical time, flowing equably without regard to anything external.' He also gave it a mathematical uniform in the shape of his Theory of Fluxions." What a marvelous packing of two concise sentences!   Almost as magnificent as Heraclitus' two words.

  The arbitrage of rental periods turns out to be a somewhat common (or at any rate a not-too-rare) business model. A company or other business entity can enter the market as a tenant, taking long-term rental properties, and then turn around and serve as landlord, leasing out the same spaces (perhaps after renovating them, etc.) to shorter-term and higher-rent paying tenants. If this works: great!  The arbitrager has one stream of money going out the door and another larger stream coming in the door.   If it doesn't work ... the relations between a landlord and a tenant can become a complicated matter once the tenant has placed itself under the protection of a bankruptcy court by way of a chapter 11 filing. As sub-lessor tenants attempting this arbitrage play have done repeatedly.  This isn't the most exciting subject in the world but, hey, this is a hobby blog. My hobby blog. I may come up with something that interests you more the next time.  If a business declares bankruptcy

Friday, I shared some thoughts about Rudyard Kipling's poem RECESSIONAL.  I quoted especially this verse: Far-called, our navies melt away;   On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Today I would like to talk briefly about the two Biblical references, Nineveh and Tyre.  Nineveh figures in the story of Jonah. Jonah was ordered to deliver God's wrathful message of impending destruction to Nineveh, a city near the one we know as Mosul.  Jonah is reluctant to do his duty, and in the course of his flight he is swallowed whole by a large sea creature.  Everybody remembers that bit. What they might not remember is that eventually Jonah gets to Nineveh.  He cries out that in forty days God will destroy the city.  But Nineveh reforms its ways. God sees this and relents. Nineveh is not destroyed. The biblical resonance of Tyre is a bit stranger. In the book of E

  Rudyard Kipling, in his poem Recessional (1897) famously prophesied a time in which the British Empire would be no more, hard though this may have been to imagine in 1897, the diamond anniversary of the reign of Victoria.  The poem consists of five stanzas of six lines each, and each stanza has a straightforward ABABCC rhyme scheme. The third sticks to my mind right now.  Far-called, our navies melt away;   On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Of course, the British Empire did in fact melt away, under the pressure of two world wars in the first half of the following century and then of the sweeping anti-imperial mood in the non-industrialized parts of the world that followed the end of the second of them. Fortunately, as it melted away it was replaced in near-hegemony by a more-or-less friendly successor power where people spoke the same language, so its fa

This is my fifth recent post on the meaning of Whitehead's masterpiece, PROCESS AND REALITY.  On the big issue of Time versus Timelessness, Whitehead generally seems more on the side of Heraclitus than on that of Zeno. He believes that time, change, motion are all real. Indeed, at points in this book he seems to be struggling to invent a new vocabulary to allow precise statements about the realities of THOSE realities.  But every once in a while he can pull us up short with a mention of "eternal objects."  What the heck are THEY?  An eternal object is an abstraction. Whitehead uses "eternal" in this sense to mean precisely outside of time.  And he uses "object" to denote something objective, neither a social construction nor a subjective whim. So Whitehead, it is fair to say, is not a nominalist about abstractions.  Eternal objects are the sorts of things that can recur. That is, Christopher Faille as a living breathing person does not recur.  The pers

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr The true US Declaration of Independence from our Mother Country may be found in these words.

  ... the Love of my Life wanted to get to the nail salon for a scheduled appointment a few days back. We also needed to pick up some dry cleaning.  I suggested I knew a convenient route, we could do the latter on the way to getting to the former.  I might mention that her nail salon is a couple of towns away, and it happens to be in the town I grew up in. I can be a bit cocky about the best routes for getting to places there.  On the day in question.... she had to be there by 12:30 PM.  That was mission critical.  I told her as we left our driveway we could pick up the pants and get to the salon too. Right after we picked up the pants, she became anxious about the salon and how I was taking my bloody time and ... YOU'RE NOT GOING TO MAKE IT. She started looking obsessively at the clock. When we were in my home town I noticed one conveniently green light and said, "We can go straight here -- it wouldn't be my usual route but..." "You aren't going to get ther

  THIS is a fine and perceptive scoop.  May have been the best single piece of 'morning after' journalism on the Super Tuesday primary. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/03/05/super-tuesday-2024/cryptos-big-night-00145274 Congrats to Jasper Goodman.  Personally, I think it is still an open question whether Bitcoin and all its kin, cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets, are a permanent feature of the American and world financial landscape or whether they are going to vanish away.  They may be doomed to become as hard-to-find as an etch-a-sketch.  BUT ... if you are of the permanent-feature persuasion, you will consider March 5, 2024 an important on the way to the securing of that status not through market savvy but through the political system.

Artificial intelligence, in the form that bothers people most these days, is a matter of the consumption of very large masses of text, and their re-packaging and re-use of that text to look and sound like something new and original.  Should this worry us? Maybe not. It may be about to self-destruct.  After all, as it happens more and more often, the AI algorithms are more and more busy digesting AI-generated texts. As a group of (admittedly human) researchers noted recently, “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models." The models as they consume their own work will self-degrade and become useless over time. One of the members of the group of scholars involved is Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor. He has put the problem this way, in a blog post,   “ Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will m

 So, what's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the tee shirt we live?  I have written of late in this blog about Alfred North Whitehead's book, Process and Reality. But I have written chiefly of what he says there about other philosophers.  Plato, Locke, Hume....Now I hope to get to the core of Whitehead's original thought. What does he say about ... process and reality? What is his cosmology?  I have to bring one more historic figure, Leibniz, into the mix even to say this next bit, though. Because you can think of Whitehead's core supposition as a monadology. Any one of us is a society of society of societies ... all the way down. The ultimate bottom level, the individual nuggets (or monads, if you will) at the bottom of this hierarchy of societies? Whitehead seems to think there is a bottom, and he does give it a name: occasions. A lot of unconscious and brief occasions, conceived of as independent of content, might constitute the bottom building block. Sort of a

Merger and acquisition activity in the telecommunications market slowed in 2023. Around the globe, such activity reached a mere $61 billion in deal volume, down 15% from 2022.  Furthermore, the deal value numbers may be misleadingly high, because a single deal -- an outlier -- made them look respectable. Telecomm Italian agreed to sell its fixed network business to KKR and that is a $23.3 billion deal, almost two fifths of the whole.   I'm sure the question on your collective mind right now is -- "Wait:  KKR is betting on old-school landlines?"  But let us move on to another question. Why this decline in deal value?  Here is a short answer. Interest rates have persisted at high levels for years now.  Central bankers stopped raising them, but this was a pause AT a high level, with the bankers taking a "high for longer" stance rather than "an even higher peak for shorter".  The plateau is more annoying that the peak would have been, if you are trying to

A year ago, I saw the following question on Quora. "Why did Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a musical about Alexander Hamilton? Was he popular at the time of the Revolution or during his presidency?" I am going back to that old post now, chiefly because it helps me illustrate what a big-hearted soul I am.  I wrote a reply to that question (or, strictly, those questions) that barely even mentioned the fact that, no, Hamilton never had a "presidency".  Instead, since I am a big-hearted soul, I gave that gaffe a pass and focused on what makes Hamilton a gripping musical.    For the record, though, the display of ignorance there tears me up inside.  I have to imagine this is a fairly young person betrayed by a disastrously bad education system, one that obviously has not conveyed the basics of the life of one of our founders.  On a slightly related point: I overheard a conversation not too long ago in which the guy on his cell phone in a restaurant near me was talking to some

It is probably the single best known sentence Alfred North Whitehead ever wrote. It appears in the third paragraph of chapter 1 of Part II of Process and Reality. "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." The next three sentences, though, give that one some important context. "I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systemization, have made his writings an inexhausible mine of suggestions."  It becomes clear that Whitehead is not interested in the overly thoroughly mined Republic and, say, the myth of the cave.  He is much more interested in the esoteric Timeaus as a source for

 Anti-abortion forces have often focused on what one may simply call the anti-killing argument. Killing a human being without justification, mitigation, or excuse is murder. A fetus, or even an embryo, is in relevant respects a human being. Thus [insert obvious conclusion here.] Bracket that argument for a second. My point in bringing it up now is simply to contrast it with a very different argument one has also often encountered in recent decades. I think of it as the natalist argument.  It is not pro-life or even anti-killing.  It is pro birth. The higher the birthrate the better.  In recent years this has often gone hand-in-hand with arguments over social security.  "To make social security work, we have to have new young people entering the workforce in a regular basis -- the more of them do so, the more fiscally sound the system is for another generation. The prevalence of abortion (or ready availability of birth control for that matter) limits the number of people entering t

  The United Arab Emirates naturally wants to reinvest some of its oil wealth in a way that will survive once the oil reserves are either pumped dry or (given a successful transition to other energy systems by the world at large) no longer wanted. One small piece in THIS puzzle is the UAE's announced project on the Mediterranean coast, The goal is to make Ras al-Hekmaa, west of Alexandria, a great world tourism Mecca.   The project could in time attract as much as $150 billion in investment capital. Egypt is dealing specifically with ADQ, a sovereign investment fund for Abu Dhabi.    The opposition press in Egypt appears to have gotten wind of this weeks ahead of the formal announcement. It isn't playing well. The country's government selling a beautiful stretch of coast to foreign investors! But the Egyptian government's decision has been catalyzed by its foreign exchange crisis. We will see how the politics of it will play out.  My thoughts, though, are with the UAE a

Capital One now says it wants to buy Discover. No actual cash will change hands, according to the proposal, but the all-stock transaction will be worth more than $35 billion. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express are the Bigfoot types in the credit card market. But both Capital One and Discover are important enough that their merger will require a lot of regulatory review, and there is a good deal of suspicion that they will never get the necessary sign-offs.   Specifically, the Office of the Comptroller will have to approve. So will the Federal Reserve. Even if they both do, the Justice Department could bring an antitrust action to block the merger.   The two parties to the contemplated transaction have begun a PR campaign to persuade us that this merger would actually be GOOD for competition.  "The three giants have it all locked up. By uniting, us two outsiders will be able to crash their club force down the rates that cardholders pay!"  It is a familiar argument. In this