Hume's Fork

is the name of a fun book by Ron Cooper.  

Legare Hume is the surname of the  central character and he hails from a place called Hume's Fork in South Carolina--the community was founded by some distant--and dubious--relatives of his back in the day.  

Hume is an assistant prof. of philosophy at a backwater college in Florida & he is having notable marital difficulties--a fairly common affliction among philosophers.  (Socrates's difficulties with Xanthippe are well known.   More recently, Louis Althusser "accidentally" strangled his wife while giving her a neck massage--even so, he's doing serious time.  I could cite others, but I'm sure y'all have heard of this sort of thing)   

Any way, Hume is slated to go to a conference of the American Philosophical Association in South Carolina not too far from where his family lives even though proximity to his family is the last thing that he wants.   By some stroke of luck, he has managed to get a paper accepted at the Conference.  If he attends the Conference and successfully defends the paper, it is likely that he will get tenure.  Even though he has never set the world of academic philosophy on fire--far from it--nevertheless, his college's expectations of their liberal arts faculty tend to be on the low side.  But he is not sure he is even going to the Conference and not sure if he even *wants* tenure.  On the day he must decide on departure, he has a fight with his wife that results with her beaning him on the forehead with a well-thrown dinner plate.  He decides to go.  

He calls his colleague, Grossman, to come and pick him up.  Now unlike Hume, Grossman is almost supernaturally brilliant (he may be high functioning autism spectrum)  He is also a professor of logic and philosophy of language.  Grossman publishes in very prestigious journals and is highly regarded among philosophers.  He could have had his pick of any college in the country, but due to Grossman's difficulty with ordinary conversation, he misunderstands what a recruiter said to him and he winds up accepting a position at this particular backwater college.  

Well, stuff happens and Hume and Grossman have to stay with Hume's family in order to attend the conference.  

Professional wrestling, much angst over critiques of Anselm's ontological proof of the existence of God, critiques of the critiques of Anselm's proof, drug-dealing & other crimes, a prof with Tourette's syndrome, a love story, the solution to the mind-body problem, the non-solution of the mind-body problem, synesthesia,...in short, everything a body could possibly want.   There's even some family drama. 

I urge y'all to read this book.  If you feel like it. 

R. 

P.S.  As an unrecovered philosophy major, I should like to point out the significance of Legare's surname, Hume.  David Hume was an 18th century British philosopher.   When Bishop Berkley "proved" that there was no such thing as "matter," Hume responded by "proving" there is no such thing as "mind."   This gave rise to the oft-quoted expression, "No matter, never mind."  

P.P.S. As an unrecovered philosophy major, shamefully, I did not know this, but "Hume's Fork" is also an allusion to David Hume's distinction between relations among things that are purely ideas and relationships among things that are actual existents.   

 

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Some fun findings about the *I Write Like* website...

You can compare yourself to the Great Writers--well, and some well known writers--by pasting a couple paragraphs of your writing to the *I Write Like* website at  http://iwl.me/

If you find yourself somewhat distressed at the results, here's an interesting critique of the results: 

 http://www.unlikelywords.com/2010/07/16/i-write-like/

Apparently, *I Write Like* has about a 47% reliability.  

Several famous writers are tagged as writing like Dan Brown...which may be okay, but I doubt few of them made as much money.  

I've entered my stuff several times and my writing is most often tagged as like H.P. Lovecraft, whose work is a precursor to the modern horror genre.  His critical reputation is somewhat improved of late, but his prose is generally considered to be somehow...excessive.  

But I must point out, as my fervent narcissism requires, my last entry was said to be *like* James Joyce--and he is one writer who's writing turns out to be most like...James Joyce.  I find this comforting, somehow. 

R. 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Abreaction cast as an exorcism

An Exorcism

 

By the power of the Earth that nourishes all the souls of the biosphere

By the power of the Air that inspires all those self-same souls

By the power of the Water that sustains them

And the power of the Fire that warms them

And by the Power even greater than these

I command you,

Miasmic spirits who have strayed from your proper sphere

To depart in haste from certain bodies and souls;

For you are vile in our nostrils

Even as eggs left too long in the sun;

Or flesh left to the mercy of flies so as to become a nest for maggots;

And as your taint befouls

Both the City of God and the City of  Human Beings;

Depart hence for those environs beyond the Air to dwell amidst the darkness between the stars that is your proper Home;

Leave you now the bodies and souls of James Inhofe, Tom Coburn, John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Lindsay Graham,  John Mccain, Paul Ryan,  Eric Cantor, and all their minions, known and unknown, and, yes, all their mentors, known and unknown;

So that they may again be innocent and teachable babes, ready to hear and learn the wisdom of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and all their ilk that we know as the very souls and embodiments of Truth and the Best of the American Way;

For the Cost otherwise will exceed consuming Fires that burn all the wealth of all your tools, Winds that topple all their towers,  Earthquakes that powder their bones,  Floods that will swamp their souls and leave you, O, Dubious Spirits, Homeless and Bereft, far from your Places in the Comfort of the Eternal Dark…

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

A Evidence against natural selection

as the primary motor that drives evolution continues to mount, we begin to see a crack in the facade of Neo-Darwinism.  

"Barely a whisper of this vibrant debate reaches the public..."  Well, that's interesting.  For one thing science writers simply don't write about it much.   Since they themselves are often not scientists, I suspect that may be because they are fearful of a backlash from the orthodox & the writers don't feel they have sufficient authority to discuss the pros and cons of the issue.  

I suspect that many science-minded folks also feel that to question natural selection is to throw one's lot in with the proponents of Intelligent Design and religious fundamentalism. 

30 April 2013

...We should admit that we don't fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level. ...In short, the current picture of how and where evolution operates, and how this shapes genomes, is something of a mess. That should not be a criticism, but rather a vote of confidence in the healthy, dynamic state of molecular and evolutionary biology. Barely a whisper of this vibrant debate reaches the public.
 Philip Ball, "DNA: Celebrate the unknowns" [html], doi:10.1038/496419a, p419-429 v496, Nature, 25 Apr 2013.
 Neo-Darwinism is a related local webpage.

I myself dislike the idea of natural selection on aesthetic grounds and also the uses to which it has been put--such as shoring up Social Darwinism.   None of that makes it false, but I'm glad to see that some scientists are beginning to voice opinions that support my philosophical preferences.  Well, not surprisingly, I do tend to be right. 

And poor Rupert Sheldrake.   He has formulated his idea of morphic resonance in a scientific way and an open-minded person who examines the evidence should be impressed.  Morphic resonance is no less and no more vague than the idea of gravity--they are both influences that are known only by their effects.   Now Sheldrake is on record as being something of a fellow traveler and an inspiration for some New Age beliefs--but that shouldn't affect evaluation of his scientific theories any more than Isaac Newton's belief in Biblical prophecy and alchemistry vitiated his physics.     

But I remain deeply disappointed they actually found the Higgs boson--or one of them--and hence shored up the Standard Model.  I was hoping (and still hope) the Standard Model would be devastated and hence that would be the undoing of the Big Bang Theory.  

There are plenty of other ways to do it, though, and I remain optimistic I will be vindicated vis a vis the Big Bang Theory one of these days soon.  

I like the old Steady State theory best and don't really understand why a little microwave radiation is such a big deal.  Couldn't it simply be the birth pangs of new matter coming into existence as Fred Hoyle suggested?   Or the ambient average temperature of starlight?   I know there are other weaknesses to SS also, but it seems to me that a few minor ad hox fixes would not be a big deal--especially given the constant stream of *major* ad hoc fixes that are invoked to shore up the Big Bang.  

Steinhardt and Turok's cyclical colliding branes is a little more appealing than the Big Bang, but it too involves some major inventiveness--invisible dimensions and an assumption (I think) that string theory (one of the 500+ versions) is correct.  

Happy May Day

R. 

 

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