© Roger M Tagg 2011
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
The title (and subtitle) do not really reflect the contents of this book. Only a few chapters relate to the theme. The rest are a mixture of personal views about science generally or of particular scientific themes. A few are interesting comments from 'left field' - or rather multiple left fields. The usual hot topics get an airing, like climate change, extinctions and unified theories.
Bill Bryson only wrote an introduction - the rest is by 21 separate authors - most probably chosen by Bryson. Bryson's favourite FRS is Thomas Bayes - the 'prior probability' man. This seems to me like not a bad choice.
I have only selected highlights from 11 of the chapters. That's not to say the others were rubbish - just that they didn't seem all that 'FROLIO-related'.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
|
Margaret Atwood | 56 | Our discoveries and inventions are driven by "human curiosity and human fears and desires". "The mad scientist figure is ... our own Caliban's face in the mirror (RT: at which he became enraged). Are we merely very smart Yahoos, and if so, will we ultimately destroy ourselves and much else through our own inventions?" [RT: I'd say there is a fair chance of such an outcome!] |
| 56-7 | "Human toolmakers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't changed for thousands of years, because as far as we can tell the human template hasn't changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will always cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly, and the Hat of Darkness so that we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and to be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve (RT: may not be much!). We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We want to dance. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be as gods." | |
| 57 | "But in addition, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good." | |
|
Margaret Wertheim | 61 | "I want to argue here that adopting this view (RT: i.e. that of 'spatial continuity') set the stage for an unbearable tension between science and Christianity and has problematised the very concept of a human 'self'. |
| 62 | "While Newton's synthesis famously united the heavens and Earth, it tore a hole in our social fabric that we are still struggling to comprehend and whose consequences continue to reverberate in the US 'war' between science and religion." | |
| 65 | "... scholars of the time (RT: i.e. the Middle Ages) insisted that physical space was not the totality of reality but one half of a larger metaphysical whole." This they had separate 'terrestrial' and 'celestial' realms; the latter (not the former) being "prone neither to decay or change". | |
| 66 | Nicholas of Cusa started the 'rot' in 1440 with 'On Learned Ignorance', "positing that the stars and planets were also mundane material bodies'. | |
| 67-71 | 'Euclidean perspective', introduced by Renaissance painters, gave the viewer the illusion of being in a live situation - 'medieval Virtual Reality'. Previous art wasn't like this. Size on the image represented status, or importance - emphasized by halos, gold leaf, lapis lazuli colours etc. Other cultures didn't make this transition, and many at the time didn't like the change. [RT: and what about photography?] | |
| 72 | Spatial continuity leaves no space for a Heaven 'somewhere'. [RT: like above the clouds, beyond the stars, or 'over the rainbow'?] | |
| 73 | Newton "comprehended that neither the people nor the patrons would support his endeavour if it were seen to be in conflict with wider spiritual needs". [RT: my italics - what are these, and whose needs are they (individual, society or ruling hierarchy)? And are they the same in 2010 as in 1710?] | |
| "Both Hell and Purgatory could easily be abandoned, but Heaven - the domain of human salvation - is critical to Christian integrity. The soul also became collateral damage ... Humans became mere bodies ... as spiritual beings we actually don't exist in this world." | ||
| 75 | "Western culture has a long tradition of opposing matter and spirit." | |
| 76 | "... in hyperspace theories everything is reduced to a seamless monism." Wertheim says this is a 'mistake', just as Descartes' dualism was. [RT: this ought not to worry Hindus - Brahman covers everything.] | |
| "We have forgotten the wider picture in which 'the cosmos' encompassed multiple levels of being; we tell ourselves that older cosmologies are childish tales and that we moderns have outgrown these stories and faced reality 'squarely' to work out where we 'truly' are. | ||
| 77-79 | "... a great many of us" are "personally feeling this rent" (RT: of the loss of a spiritual realm). (Spatial continuity and totally material metaphysics) "is manifestly not being accepted by huge slabs of our population. Locke said we need a complementary science of mind. Is Freudian psychoanalysis an answer? Or Rupert Sheldrake's 'morphic resonance'? [RT: old-time religion seems to have too much silly baggage.] | |
| 79 | "... belief in astral planes, psychic channelling, reincarnation and past lives seems to be growing stronger." | |
| 80 | "... the refusal to accept spatial monism is also in part fuelling the rise of Creationism and other fundamentalist brands of Christianity." [RT: she doesn't mention Islamic fundamentalism, but I think that's fuelled by other factors.] | |
| My (RT) comment is as follows. Although the author herself doesn't support such religious fundamentalism, she does recognize a serious problem. Sure, all 'reality' isn't spatial (there's imaginations, wishes, models and feelings). There's information (independently of how it's stored, or expressed in language or symbols). These are real because "we can talk about them". I'd say that all the 'Abstract concept' part of any ontology, including my FROLIO, is in this realm. Freud may not be very scientific, but it's at least one pragmatic approach. We need ways of sorting out things in our mind, especially when we all too easily confuse different modes of thought. Confusion between 'stories' and 'mechanistic explanations' (e.g. with regard to 'Creation') is a case in point. So maybe Wertheim is just a shade too pessimistic. | ||
| Neal | 91 | Leibniz's Monadology says matter is unreal. [RT: not a good start!] |
| Steph- | 92 | Monads are 'mind-atoms'; each "perceives the state of every other monad in the universe ..." |
| enson | 93 | "... each exists in a certain state, and is capable of changing that state." |
| Each monad has a 'production rule' (Christia Mercer's name for them) "that governs how it changes its state in response to its current state and the perceived state of all the other monads." This needs a "divinely ordained pre-established harmony" to coordinate it all. But is this any better than 'Laplacian determinism' (RT: i.e., it's all atoms in time and space)? | ||
| 94 | Newton supported divine intervention, but Kant rubbished monads as 'noumenal' (i.e. we can't know them). | |
| But, despite Logical Positivism, we can't say metaphysics is pointless, because we always assume some metaphysical structure when we develop a model of what we observe. | ||
| 98-9 | Quantum physics appears to require some knowledge between atoms (because certain combined states aren't possible). But that knowledge is presumably limited to nearby atoms. | |
| 99 | Relativity means that space-time isn't so Euclidean (although it is for most useful purposes). | |
| 101 | Looking at composite things, there does appear to be some goal-seeking - but is that teleology? | |
| 102 | Some theoretically envisageable states of affairs are 'incoherent' in 'configuration space'. | |
| Rebecca | 110 | "... the only reasons anyone might have to cling to the old crumbling teleological cathedral ... were speciously theological." |
| Newberger | 117 | To replace teleology, there's still friction between empiricism (i.e., experiment is paramount) and logical deduction from mathematical foundations. |
| Goldstein | 129 | "Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty." |
|
Steve Jones | 289 | In genetics, "levels of inherited variation emerge
from a balance between random
mutation and the accident of
genetic drift." "When cataclysms strike ... huge numbers of species of many kinds disappear through mere ill luck, and rules that might help predict their ability to withstand everyday pressures do not much apply." That's even true of northern Europe in the last ice age. |
| 290 | "In ecology ... as in the weather and the stock market, a small disturbance can lead to a sudden and unpredictable change in state." | |
| 291-2 | Examples of the above: sudden collapse of fisheries, Dutch Elm disease. | |
| Philip Ball | 316 | In most western countries, 'pure science' is considered worthier than applied technology and engineering. |
| 317 | What are the boundaries of 'human dignity', and how do we decide if biotech is going beyond them? | |
| 318 | "... employment prospects for an engineer are better than for a string theorist." | |
| 319 | "Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff." | |
| John Barrow | 363 | We look for patterns in Nature - these may then become 'laws'. |
| 373 | "When we look around us we do not observe the laws of Nature; rather, we see the outcomes of those laws." | |
| 375 | No explanation yet exists for the 'cosmological constant'. [RT: see also 'anthropic principle' - of which Barrow is an authority.] | |
| 376 | How many planets there are in a solar system is random. | |
| 377 | There are two kinds of complexity, organised and disorganised. The latter covers 'chaos' and unpredictable things like the weather. However the statistical distributions of the outcomes may be stable. | |
| 377-8 | Organised complexity shows "feedback, self-organisation and non-equilibrium behaviour". | |
| 378 | Complex systems "display the behaviour that they do, not because they are made of atoms or molecules (which they all are), but because of the way their components are organised." | |
| 381 | "Chaos and order have been found to co-exist in a curious symbiosis." Example: sand piles. One could add (RT: some of these are mine) oceanic turbidity currents, avalanches, earthquakes, stock market crashes, bankruptcies, traffic flow on a motorway, formation of oxbow lakes by a meandering river, species extinctions. | |
|
Oliver Morton | 388 | The view of earth as a globe, seen from Apollo, needs to be balanced "by a deeper sense of the world as it is felt from the inside, and as it extends out of view into past and future". |
| 390 | Otherwise it shows "a rationalist, map-making mentality". [RT: that sounds like me, if one includes diagrams.] | |
| 391 | George Carlin said words to the effect that the planet can handle it whatever, but it's the human race [RT: and surely many other species?] that is at risk. He was thinking primarily of threats to agriculture. | |
| 394 | He (Morton) suggests a 'nested sphere' view, from local concerns to the 'whole cosmos' view. | |
| 395 | Earth is subject to lots of cycles; some are fast, some are slow - there's no synchronization. Examples: sweat, waste water, CO2, Nitrogen, Phosphorus. | |
| 397 | Heavier elements come from 'stellar furnaces' in stars exploding before our sun and earth were born. [RT: I think it has to be 'supernovas'] | |
| 400 | Maybe we can slow down some cycles, e.g. by using more solar energy, wind power etc. | |
| 403 | The Apollo photo didn't show all this dynamism. | |
| Earth's atmosphere is far from biogeochemical equilibrium. [RT: I think it has't been near equilibrium for some millions of years.] | ||
|
Maggie Gee | 412 | "Why do people (or some part of their psyches) long for an ending?" [RT: my italics] She suggests it's the boring struggle, the discouraging normal lot of most human beings. |
| 413 | "Some individuals, whether artists or scientists or neither, feel the pull of the void more than others." [RT: I'm definitely in these 'others'.] | |
| 420 | (Re climate change) "How are we to strike a balance between self-indulgence and self-flagellation?" | |
| 420-1 | "Artists (as opposed to scientists) are protected by the worn trench coat of irony. We can place everything we say in distancing quotations; we have a thousand alibis. 'This is fiction: this is a joke: this is a confession I am half ashamed of: this is just personal, take no notice if you don't want to. It's not me, it's just a character. Don't ask me, I'm an entertainer.' " | |
| 421 | "With greater knowledge can come an underestimation of what is still in doubt." "Power can bring with it a blindness to the limits of what it can achieve." | |
| 421-2 | The 'quick fix' illusion, as in 'Fixing Climate' (Broecker and Kunzig, 2009) | |
| 423 | Writers peering apprehensively into the future can "make our readers realise afresh how marvellous our living planet is" and "help us both to appreciate the complex human society that scientists are trying to shore up against ending". | |
|
Gregory Benford | 456 | Einstein: "... the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." |
|
Martin Rees | 485 | A "runaway spasm" (RT: of the history of the earth) - an extraterrestrial alien would probably judge that this is what we are going through now. |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 28th February 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .