Another blog

An Edge of Ordinary

Expanding on the question of the purpose of this settlement where T shaped monoliths were later buried in debris, forming the hill as we see it now----It is lovely if unlikely to wonder if the T shaped columns were meant to represent the idea of form, and the debris, matter. Their joint relation then an attempt to understand how man comprehends his world.  Put another way perhaps men were then struggling to grasp the fact of consciousness and how it appears in a solid world.

As above, so below

The full article is at space.com

"Baby alien worlds are indeed likely slicing gaps in the disk of dust and gas swirling around the young star HL Tauri — a finding that could help reshape scientists' current understanding of how planets form.
Astronomers found that some of the rings in the disk's gaseous component line up with rings in the dust, further supporting the theory that exoplanets are coalescing there — and suggesting that alien worlds may form much more quickly than scientists had thought.
"To our surprise, these gaps in the gas overlap with dust gaps," lead author Hsi-Wei Yen, a researcher at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, said in a statement. "This supports the idea that the gaps are the footprints left by baby planets. Our results indicate that planets start to form much earlier than we expected."


Baby?
Alien?
....Minds
in your head?

from gaps....?

I Read the News Today, oh....

A headline this Sunday morning, from the Nautilus blog

NEUROSCIENCE The Wisdom of the Aging Brain Tantalizing evidence suggests that brain activity shifts to increase wisdom as we age. BY ANIL ANANTHASWAMY

It may be an interesting read, but what the headline reminded me of was a point Jan Cox made decades ago.

The "wisdom" of the aged, touted by them, and spoken of by other generations, is merely this: that one's hormones have died.

Obvious

Invisible

Easy to say and see.

But to remember,,, 

ah....

Well I Saw her Face

HIS face, actually, was in a chip, 

unmistakeably

Jacques Derrida, in a dorito chip

and he was reading.

Now I'm a  Believer.

Humid Hume

Quoting a lead into an article recently published:

If moral responsibility and the social institutions that enforce it depend on belief in our own agency, what happens when we lose faith in free will?

I haven't read the article, that is not the point in today's post.

I say that because --- the support for good behavior is not the most dangerous loss when people glimpse their own helplessness. The aspect of the debate on free will which is so scary philosophers and natural scientists won't even talk about it, is

that rational discourse depends on faith -- faith that man is a rational animal and capable of surveying the evidence and coming to conclusions, and then defending them.

To suggest that man has no free will is to glimpse that  his words and sentences might be determined by non-rational factors, his mega and micro biomes, or something equally appalling to the presumptions of cognitive flag-wavers.

Even David Hume,who tossed out the validity of causation, rather fliply, did not tear up his own books. As radical as Hume's conclusions about causation might appear, he could not glimpse that everything people said might just be foam bubbles, erratic juxtapositions, like vomit, because the words are not based on a sober analysis of facts, as they are claimed to be.  Rather even within a sentence words are concatenations based on non-rational, unglimpsed, forces.  The illusion of cogency then may just be a reflection of man's assumptions about his own agency.

One picture Jan Cox drew, from science fiction tropes, is of the modern intellect is that of a brain in a laboratory vat, thinking away in a bubbly medium.

Jan's is an apt picture, not because of what it says about the possibility of human rationality, but for the accuracy of the picture of the typical mechanical mind.

An Avian Trope

Why would a hawk
undertake to educate sparrows....

Dr. Lamarck I Presume

Notice also that nobody is even using the word Lamarckism, though that is precisely the term for instances where environmental changes get translated into heritable characteristics. The standard example is the long neck of the giraffe, gained over generations of stretching to reach high leaves. I think now of studies suggesting  trauma affects the genes of offspring, among other headlines. For most of the last century Larmarckism has been an example of out-moded thought. It had to be--- since ordinary thought is binary. This means Darwinism is defined by what it is not--- and it is not Lamarckism. This was the natural conclusion with the explanatory success of Darwin's idea. But step back--- why couldn't both explanations be correct. Why can't evolution have two methods of advance. What a good question.