Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Some more thoughts lifted from my ongoing work on my next book. -----------------------  The term “pyramid scheme” is sometimes used loosely as a synonym for “Ponzi scheme,” and their meanings are related, but they are in principle distinct. A pyramid scheme is a business model in which payments are promised to one level of participants for the act in bringing in another level of participants. You, dear reader, have no doubt received the simplest form of a pyramid pitch as chain letters or their e-mailed equivalents. “Send me a dollar. Also, send out six copies of this email to friends of yours, You will get $6 as a return on your $1 investment.” Each of those six people will soon be in the same situation if you comply. It isn’t exactly a Ponzi scheme, although it shares the unsustainability thereof. What’s the difference exactly? In a pyramid scheme, the originator can make a clean get-away. Once you’ve found your own six suckers, you’ve made your profit and the ...

According to a new calculation by Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon, life must have pre-existed the planet Earth. You can find the study here .  You can find some of my own earlier uncredentialed speculations about related matters here. Sharov and Gordon are both properly credentialed. Each is a Ph.D. with a research role with prestigious (though non-academic) institutions. Nonetheless, there is a good deal of speculation in their work, as one might imagine given the subject. The gist is that they infer that genetic complexity increased at an exponential pace: it doubles every 376 million years.  If that is right, then life originated roughly 9.7 billion years ago (give or take 2.5 billion). And if that is right then it could not have originated on earth. Radiometric dating puts the age of the earth at roughly 4.5 billion years. So on their guesstimations, life must have been already 5 billion years old before the earth was formed. Their calculations als...