Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Lawrence Krauss, who teaches physics at Arizona State University, also fancies himself a popularizer of science in the manner of Asimov or Sagan. In that spirit, he wrote A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING (2012). He argued therein that something could in fact come from nothing, and physics could explain why. In effect, he proposed to answer the age-old philosophical question "why is there something rather than nothing" in a thoroughly non-theistic way. The book made Krauss a big deal within what is nowadays broadly called the 'skeptic community.' Heck, no less a figure therein than Richard Dawkins wrote the afterword to Krauss' 2012 book.  All well and good, except that his something-from-nothing effort doesn't hold up. Many bright people, without any taint of mysticism about them, have explained why, and science journalist John Horgan collected the key points in a column for Scientific American : https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-lawrenc...

And how is that surname pronounced? This seems like someone I should have on my radar. An important philosopher. Taken quite seriously in Europe (on the continent, though news of his significance hasn't crossed the channel). Anti-welfare state, ambivalent about globalization, given to hyperbole and to the celebration of hyperbole, and a transhumanist.  All that I get from in-depth research, i.e. skimming the wikipedia article for him. From the profile pic above, looks old school.

"Perhaps there is no source of things at all, no simpler form from which they have evolved, but only an endless succession of different complexities." # GeorgeSantayana # philosophy Perhaps, indeed. In modern terms, perhaps the multiverse exists in a steady-state, so that the original steady-state theorists, those of Hoyle's heyday, were wrong only by being parochial. Such a new steady-state theory would hold that a big bang in one universe is the collapse of a star in on itself, the creation of a black hole or singularity, in another universe.  Thus, universes give birth to one another and the whole system of which they are all a part needs no beginning and cannot be expected to have an end. 

What is it like to be a human? It is about having experiences, and having those experiences be like something for me. Dan Zahavi, of the University of Copenhagen, has written this: Consciousness and (minimal) selfhood. It has been posted on the web, and will soon see hardcover existence in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Zahavi revisits a by now familiar thought experiment in philosophy, asking himself what it is like to be a bat? He stipulates that to be a bat is for phenomena to have a "what is it like FOR ME" aspect to the bat as a "me." The bat never experiences a blue sky. Does the bat experience the dampness of the cave? It he aware of the relative dryness of certain corners of his cave versus the extra dampness of others? And is that a for-me experience for a bat to have? What about anguish? My guess: a bat probably does have a subjective sense of relative dryness. Probably not an experience of anguish. The former wo...

Not one of the more important questions one might ask about the Johnson presidency, and Caro still owes us a book, but.... Here's a link. It's a fact that Johnson despised this painting, by Peter Hurd. A recent article in Smithsonian delves into the question: why? It is in one respect compositionally innovative. I'm sure Johnson didn't actually model for the painting standing on the roof of the Library of Congress, Hurd placed him there by act of imagination.  The result, a view of the Capitol Dome and environs that makes Johnson seem both towering and reflexive. Not a bad day's work. Why did Johnson despise it?  Perhaps the simple asymmetry of it. Maybe he had the preconceived notion that the subject of a portrait is 'supposed' to be in the center, with a neutral background. Maybe the conjoined fact that he's portrayed on a roof, and holding a book, was off-putting, Does the L of C let people take books to the roof with them? IS there even a...

The Justice Department's bill of indictment against various Russians who are alleged to have worked to influence the 2016 election includes some of the posts they supposedly made on social media outlets. Today, I'd like to talk a bit about one of them, an Instagram post. It reads in relevant part,  "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary."  The use of "Killary" was the result of accurate research.  Trump's hardcore supporters used it often to suggest that Hillary Clinton was a killer --  a charge going back at least to the discovery of Vince Foster's body in July of 1993.  The phrase "particular hype and hatred" seems odd, though. The intended meaning presumably is "certain lies by hateful people directed at Trump are misleading the people" etc. But it takes some time to figure that out.  After all, in English "hype" does not necessarily refer to l...

"He who says that all things happen of necessity can hardly find fault with one who denies that all happens by necessity; for on his own theory this very argument is voiced by necessity." That was Epicurus. He and the Epicureans in general believed in an atomistic picture of the world they had picked up from Democritus, but they also believed that atoms sometimes "swerve," that is, change course randomly.  I don't know what is the Greek for "swerve" but later Latin authors used the term "clinamen."  The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (above) revived use of "clinamen" as a philosophical term of art inthe late 20th century.  But of course, he HAD to do that....