October 17, 2005 – 11:46 pm
Alright, I’ve had it.
Once again today I heard someone say “it’s a chicken-and-egg thing”. This refers, of course, to that stale old chestnut “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” This trite saying is supposed to be an example of an impenetrable mystery, but it is nothing of the sort. The least understanding of biology, given a moment’s thought, easily resolves the question.
How does speciation occur? Is it by some creature starting its life as one species and ending up as another? Obviously not. New forms of life arise through mutation, through the imperfect transfer of genetic information from parent to child. So in this example something that was not-quite-a-chicken laid an egg containing the world’s first chicken.
Which came first? The egg. Move on.
October 17, 2005 – 4:07 pm
We can stop arguing about the existence of qualia, thanks to Sony.
Somebody should send Daniel Dennett one of these.
October 17, 2005 – 12:40 am
This weekend I was up in Wellfleet, MA, for the annual OysterFest. Lots of small towns the world over have shindigs like this to celebrate a local product, but this isn’t just any local product. These are Wellfleet Oysters, and they are magnificent.
Wellfleet is a lovely old fishing village on the slender outermost stretch of Cape Cod, and since its founding hundreds of years ago it has been renowned for this matchless mollusc. For two days each October the town’s picturesque main thoroughfare is closed to traffic, and epicures come from far and wide to sample the bodacious bivalve in every conceivable form – baked, grilled, fried, stewed, and, best of all, just as Nature made it: succulent and beckoning on its nacreous and razor-edged half-shell.
Wellfleet Harbor’s clean, cold, salty waters and 12-foot tides provide the ideal environment for raising these incomparable invertebrates, and as good as Wellfleet oysters are when ordered at Manhattan’s fancier tables, to savor them in their eponymous hometown, only hours or even minutes after they have been roused from their briny slumber, is enough to make one wonder whether there mightn’t actually be a divine Plan after all.
October 16, 2005 – 11:52 pm
Bill Keezer, who maintains several interesting blogs, has graciously added waka waka waka to the blogroll of his site Bill’s Comments. Bill is an open-minded, well-educated, intelligent, questioning Christian, and is just the sort of person that people like me, who are agnostic but intensely curious about what the spiritual truth of the world might turn out to be, need to have around. He also, as a trained scientist, provides a valuable perspective on how thinking people can reconcile science and religion, a project that is not going well in this country, to say the least.
In the post in which he lists recent additions to his blogroll, Bill refers to this site as “a serious blog by a philosopher”. I’m flattered; although I am curious and have read and brooded a lot, I have no formal training in Western philosophy, and am very aware of my amateur status in comparison to the real pros like Bill Vallicella, who have devoted their adult lives to the effort while I was off making records. But who am I to argue?
“A serious blog by a philosopher.”
I like the sound of that, and I shall try to live up to it.
October 13, 2005 – 12:55 am
I have already posted about Steven Pinker’s excellent book The Blank Slate, a salvo against the modern denial of innate human nature. In today’s Wall Street Journal Charles Murray, who as one of the co-authors, in 1996, of The Bell Curve was pilloried by the Left for suggesting that there might be inherent statistical differences among human genetic groups, has returned to the battle with an essay arguing that subsequent study has buttressed his position.
He has kept a low profile since his ruthless persecution by the Thought Police nearly a decade ago, but the recent tar-and-feathering of Lawrence Summers for suggesting that innate sex differences might have something to do with the low numbers of women at elite levels in science and mathematics was more than he could bear in silence. It is brave of him to speak up again, because he is sure to get little but contumely and derision for his efforts. I encourage all to read this essay, and to try to do so with an open mind.
October 9, 2005 – 12:31 am
Here is a remarkable image. It is the blazing surface of our Sun.
Each of the small granular regions in the picture is roughly the size of Texas. The Earth would fit comfortably within the large sunspot in the center.
Although they appear black in this image, sunspots are dazzlingly bright, as bright as lightning. It is only by contrast to the surrounding photosphere that they seem dark.
It is easy to look at such an image and marvel at it as an unusual and strangely beautiful visual phenomenon without making a deeper effort to establish a mental connection between our local context and what is being depicted here. Dwell for a moment on the scale of the scene in this photograph, both in relation to our Earth and to the Sun itself.
It is interesting that the picture can be taken in as somehow representing an object of comprehensible size.
“As above, so below.”
October 7, 2005 – 12:43 am
According to the news media, Gotham is once again in the “crosshairs of terror”. The problem this time, apparently, is a 19-martyr posse of fanatical suicide bombers with Metrocards. Al Qaeda the F-train ridah.
This news has little effect around here other than to give those who tend to become anxious something to become anxious about. My own parents lived through the Blitz in London, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let something like this bother me. I’ve been riding these subways, at all hours of the day and night, for 30 years. I’m used to staring death in the face.
They’re going to intimidate New York City?
October 7, 2005 – 12:18 am
Well, that’s about it – I’ve reposted everything I could find from the old site.
To recap, here’s what happened: this domain was previously hosted by a cheap-o hosting company called 1GBHosting.net. It had gotten good customer reviews, was a great deal ($5.95 a month) and gave me everything I needed.
At first the proprietors were engaged and helpful. Once I was up and running, though, they became somewhat aloof, especially when things started breaking.
First I noticed that I couldn’t send emails to some domains (aol.com, for example). This turned out to be because reverse DNS lookup was failing. I wrote the support staff about it, and got a response weeks later that said something like “um… yeah, we’re working on that…”
Next the cPanel application that provided a user interface for managing the site went dead – an expired license file. I wrote to the hosts again, but by now they were radio silent.
I started thinking about how I might get my content backed up and out of there, but before I could do anything the whole website vaporized.
So BACK UP YOUR CONTENT, ye bloggers.
October 5, 2005 – 9:45 pm
Well, it appears that the new location is becoming visible to the Web. As the smoke clears I am beginning to put things back together. Many thanks to my friends over at Maverick Philosopher for all the help and moral support.
I have copies, kindly cached by Google, of a lot of the old content (thanks, Sam, for the tip), but it is going to take a little while to get it all reassembled.
October 4, 2005 – 4:59 pm
We can rebuild it. We have the technology.
We’ll be back very soon.
September 21, 2005 – 12:44 am
A lively discussion has been going on over at Bill Vallicella’s website. I seem to be spending so much time over there, in such engaging company, that I am getting very little done in here!
One of the topics we’ve been grappling with is the physicalist view of the mind. As you might have guessed from previous posts, I hold the view that our minds are entirely grounded in the physical world: that all of our thoughts, memories, fears,imaginings, etc. – in short, our inner lives – are the result of the activity of our physical bodies, in particular our nervous systems. We are a long way from completing the scientific program that will exhaustively map subjective experience onto objectively measurable physical states and transactions, but I do believe, along with most scientists studying the problem, that the idea is sound, and the goal attainable, in principle at least. But this view, all but hegemonic among research scientists, has met considerable resistance in the philosophical community. A recent posting at Dr. Vallicella’s site sums it up:
Marvelously complex as it is, the brain is just another chunk of the physical world. Study it till doomsday with the most sophisticated instruments, map every cubic millimeter of it, establish detailed correlations between brain regions and types of conscious phenomena — and what do you accomplish? You learn more and more about a highly complex piece of meat.
September 8, 2005 – 1:05 am
I have been preoccupied by discussions with Bill Vallicella in this space, and should give him a moment’s peace.
In a letter to the New York Times (fifth letter down), one Linnda Caporael shows us once again how deeply entrenched the perverse cultural doctrine that Steven Pinker calls “The Blank Slateâ€still is. MS Caporael writes (italics mine):
David Brooks is right to see that the “bursting point†has come (column, Sept. 4), but it does not include “the elemental violence of human nature.â€
There is no such thing as human nature without culture and its institutions. The message of Katrina was not from Hobbes; it was from a neoconservative leadership: “Starve the beast,†feed the rich, abandon the poor, disgrace the nation. That’s not a natural disaster; it’s an American tragedy.
September 6, 2005 – 11:24 pm
Yesterday I left a comment on a post by Bill Vallicella (who maintains one of the most interesting sites anywhere in the blogosphere) about Richard Dawkins’ antipathy toward the “theory†of Intelligent Design. Dr. Vallicella has responded here, and I’ll take this opportunity to respond to his response.
September 1, 2005 – 11:56 pm
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has commented here on my previous “Logic and Faith†post, with his usual thoughtfulness and insight. He has also expatiated further on the general question of faith and intuition.
I feel the need to add a few more thoughts of my own.
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, comments here on Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I haven’t read the book, so I must be careful about what I say here, but from the excerpts quoted, and the interview given by Harris at Amazon, he (Harris) appears to be staking out a position that, with unintended irony, is the product of his own faith. The most telling example of this is something he said in this interview:
‘Faith’ is a false belief in unjustified convictions.
There has been quite a ruction lately about the Topeka, Kansas school board’s wish to accommodate literalist Christians by introducing new teaching standards for biology. The proposed guidelines would suggest to the impressionable student that the Darwinian idea, in which modern organisms (including humans) arose through a lengthy process of evolution by natural selection, is mere scientific dogma, and that an alternative account of the phenomena — “intelligent design†– should be given serious consideration.
April 22, 2005 – 11:24 pm
Yesterday’s Times carried a sad notice: renowned bassist Niels-Henning Oersted Pedersen has died at age 58 in Denmark. I in no way intend this space to be devoted strictly to remembrances of deceased bass players, but Niels deserves a mention. He was one of the great ones, and played, in his long career, with the best of the best.
April 18, 2005 – 11:17 am
On Thursday, the 24th of March, New York City’s musical family assembled at the Church of the Tranfiguration on East 29th Street to say goodbye to the gifted bassist Wayne Pedzwater, who had died the previous week after a long and grueling struggle with gastric cancer. To know Wayne was to love him, and since pretty much every professional musician in New York knew him, the gathering was not small.
Wayne was a remarkable figure; he seemed to glow from within. He was tall, athletic, and strikingly handsome, with the sort of physical presence that one might imagine could only be the result of a carefully managed eugenics program. He had a dazzling smile, a nimble, curious and capacious mind, and a splendidly pungent sense of humor. Above all, though, were his extraordinary musicianship and his dedication to excellence.