What, Why & How do we Know ?
… here in Perth … I only mention the weather, ‘cos we’ve had a lot of it recently.
Since last Sunday we’ve had stormy weather (ripping up trees and washing away railway ballast kinda stormy weather) and about one quarter of the local annual rainfall, which means we’ve had about half of it since that 43C day at the end of March.
Yesterday evening we had a most spectacular storm – I first noticed the dark ominous clouds moving in opposite directions about 4pm – circulating around the eye of an impending storm. By sunset, out over the Indian Ocean, it was thoroughly formed with lightning and rain sheeting down 5 or so miles out over the ocean around Rottnest island. Dozens, hundreds (?) of people standing watching along the city-beach and Cottesloe – taking advantage of the photogenic storm-with-waterspout-at-sunset opportunity.
By 6:30 it was clear this was just one of several drifting in from the west and the torrential rain was set in for hours … but today … glorious.
I expect I’ll get to go sit and read on the beach later (Quixote), once the chores are out of the way. (Oops spoke to soon – here comes the rain again – closing in again this evening, from inland this time.)
Sue Blackmore’s latest and briefest “Introduction to Consciousness”, in the “Very Short” series reviewed positively here in the Grauniad. The Full “Introduction” was a great book. [here], [here], [here] and [here]. Not read this abridgement myself, yet. Glad to see the reviewer finds the idea of “I” as a temporary fiction as disconcerting as … well … “I” do.
I’m reminded by Dave Pollard’s latest post that this timeline (and the book it comes from), got a lot of airtime post-9/11, since it seemed to have predicted a 9/11-type intiated catastrophe by 2005, back in 1997.
Useful resource. It links the Geoffrey Moore Crossing The Chasm “early adopters”, etc view of technology uptakes and the Kondratiev 80 year (three human generations, in my view – one to learn, one to exploit, one to forget why and lose the plot) industrial cycles or shifts in prevailing “Techno-Economic Paradigm” (Freeman, Dosi et al.) – with the prevailing political and social situation at the times. Wholly US focussed – but useful none-the-less.
Dave’s been in a bit of a depressing “the end of the world is nigh, and there’s nothing we can do about it” mode recently – a release to make the best of the time left he says – a real driver for many astro-physicists and the like to get us surviving humans off the planet too, apparently. This question of the reality or illusion of human free-will, is thoroughly in focus. Consciousness and free will may be metaphorical, but they’re real enough. Read David Deutsch (you too Sue) for a more optimistic antidote.
I’m getting used to the new look and style – but I’ve had conflicting feedback about the “all lower case” script. Whaddya think ?
One of the reasons I like it, is that it took away any rhetorical intent behind using capitalisation conventions (or not) for theistic terms.
Jorn gets a mention in this review of 10 years of Yahoo, as blogging pioneer and originator of the term “blog”. [Via Anol’s SoulSoup.]
Interesting theist / atheist thread at Catalarchy.
WIE is redifining spirituality for an evolving world they say. Is there any other kind ? Via Sue Blackmore, who has a broadcast item link on this page.
(Sue, your link to the Grauniad review of your “Very Short Introduction” is broken.)
Actually WIE is an intriguing site, but is it worth $10 / month, even not-for-profit ? Several luminaries in print and voice – but watch those pop-ups.
From Berkeley University via Jorn at Robot Wisdom.
The repositioning of birds and the insignificance of mammals are noteworthy.
Did Timothy Leary really say that (as Dave Pollard quotes) ? You learn something every day. Pretty much every linguistic representation or explanation of anything is metaphor at root, dead or alive, (Lakoff et al) , so no argument with the sentiment.
Can I have some of what he’s having ? Maybe not, as Dave continues [LSD and other] psychedelic drugs work for some people, and have for thousands of years. And, nope, I don’t have any on me.
Typically thorough review from Dave of “twelve ways to think differently”. It’s not rocket science, and there’s nothing new under the sun for 6000 years or so (as one commenter already pointed out). Dave also has a review of ways to access blog content as knowledge bases – which oddly misses the fact that many blogs already have categorisation. Post Note – it’s not the categorisation or tagging that is Dave’s problem, it’s the presentation of the “topics” in browsable form – Matt Mower’s Blog and my comments on this.