Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

What is the point of human life? We're all going to die anyway, after all, inhabiting thereafter an everlasting nothingness. Here's an answer to that question that doesn't try to deconstruct it. The point may involve saving the universe from itself. The Big Bang of contemporary astronomical theory, combined with the conventional understanding of the 2d law of thermodynamics, leads to a rather dismal prospect of a universe that expires slowly but inevitably into nothingness, by spreading out and cooling off until nothing is left. Like a clock that can never re-wind itself. Like our own lives, but on a really big scale. And with nothing left to carry on, nor any project left to be carried, or any place to carry it.   Can the universe avoid that fate? Perhaps -- I suspect that advanced species can and sometimes do get far enough in their own scientific development to figure out how to beat the 2d law in their cosmic locality. Those localities then become sources ...

The supposed "gravitational waves" created by the Big Bang, a "cosmic signature" of that Bang, may have been something a good deal less dramatic. The Guardian . A mission of the European Space Agency has found that the findings attributed to the 'waves' could in fact be due to ... dust. There seems to be a collective will-to-believe in the Big Bang, to rush to give it a mantle of accepted scientific facts. This incident is part of a broader pattern. But since the notion of a "signature" of the Big Bang has come unraveled, maybe some hard core steady-staters are planning a comeback.

As regular readers of this blog and its precursor know, I'm always happy to find support for myown prejudice against Big Bang cosmology. Sometimes my search for such support has led me into blind alleys, and I back out of those as quickly as I can . Recall this discussion from September. Here are a couple of pieces I've written that mention alleys that might not prove to be so blind. Maxwell's demon and panspermia might both bear upon the big cosmological questions. Today, I can report something else worth further investigation. Something from Robert Matthews' website: Cosmology and other questions Matthews, a Brit, is a professor who teaches at the Dept of Information Engineering at Ashton University, is a working scientist (a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, author of dozens of articles for refereed publications about statistics, encryption, neural networks, and related matters)  as well as a science journalist. Here is the full CV...

From the much-discussed new book by the distinguished philosopher Thomas Nagel,  Mind and Cosmos . "The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of that world, expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws. Biut at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. It seems inevitable that such an understanding will have a historical dimension as well as a timeless one. The idea that historical understanding is part of science has become familiar through the transformation of biology by evolutionary theory. but more recently, with the acceptance of the big bang, cosmology has also become a historical science." So the key distinction here is not so much between the mindful and the mindless elements in the cosmos, or between subjective and objective perspectives, but ...