What, Why & How do we Know ?
Having finished The Blind Watchmaker – I was browsing Dawkins contribution to The Third Culture, which includes commentary on, and by, other members. I was struck by one of Dawkins quotes about Stephen Jay Gould “building non-existent windmills to take a tilt at” and felt the same problem I’m having with Rorty at the moment. … Continue reading “Brian Goodwin”
Chrucky’s paper (yesterday’s blog) covers interesting ground, even if the purpose is a catholic religious / abortion argument about what constitutes a human person. The concept of whether “morals” are something fundamental and whether consciousness and communication shared between “persons” are really part of some social contract, existing at tacit levels to build on more … Continue reading “Social Contract”
Having finished Foucault, I was off to Borders the night before. Scan read Wolfram’s “New Kind of Sience” yet again. Just can’t bring myself to buy it. For anyone excited by patterns in numbers and nature, it has a million and one examples to play with, but I cannot fathom any structure in the book … Continue reading “Reading Matter.”
Texte zur Wirtschaft. German Business Newsletter (via Thomas **) entitled “The Archaeology of Blogs” discussing the idea that the rhizome / network view of knowledge has been around since the end of the 70’s. (I beg to differ – Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus” popularised rhizomes in 1977, but Foucault coined “The Semantic Web” back in … Continue reading “Texte zur Wirtschaft”
This, below, is one of my earliest posts from 2002. [Here I’ve simply added a couple of links to later (better) posts: The Meme of Maslow’s Mojo (2011) ,and Motivation 3.0 – The Pink Way (2013)] I’ve made countless references to Maslow ever since I noticed that Pirsig’s levels of “value” (absolute quality or goodness) appeared to … Continue reading “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.”
Finished Foucault – ultimately unsatisfactory despite 80% good content. Conclusions as incomprehensible as the penultimate chapter on Man. Did Foucault get tired towards the end, or his translator, or his editor (or was it just me) ? Discovered publishers note about the mysterious translation of the title – sure enough, the publisher suggested The Order … Continue reading “Housekeeping”
Gustav Flaubert(via Jorn) His St Anthony was cited by Foucault as a Semantic Web.
“It’s like receiving a threat from a post-modernist gangster, who makes you an offer you can’t understand.” – Charlie Stross (via Jeff Vogel, via Jacob Haller, via “kibology”, via Jorn). [Link omitted intentionally. I’ve not ventured into kibology yet, whatever that is, but the time may yet come.] Seriously though, I re-read most of Joe … Continue reading “Talking of Post-Modernists”
Struggled with the penultimate chapter of Foucault – He name drops every philosopher since 18C that I’ve heard of (except Wittgenstein), but I don’t get what this chapter is about – the concept of Man. Fortunately the final chapter on Human Sciences is much clearer – the balance between science and anthropology / behaviour / … Continue reading “Man and His Doubles”
From NYT via Adam Curry. The 10 most elegant experimental demonstrations as voted by physicists. Chronologically … Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth’s circumference. (7th) Galileo’s objects falling with constant gravitational acceleration. (2nd) Galileo’s balls rolling down inclined planes also under gravity. (8th) Newton’s decomposition of sunlight with a prism. (4th) Cavendish’s weighing the Earth / … Continue reading “10 Most Beautiful Experiments”