All they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.
As P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.
You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)
In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.
Home_____The self is a conceptual chimera
John Allen Paulos says this about the self: "Doubt that a supernatural being exists is banal, but the more radical doubt that we exist, at least as anything more than nominal, marginally integrated entities having convenient labels like "Myrtle" and "Oscar," is my candidate for Dangerous Idea. This is, of course, Hume's idea — and Buddha's as well — that the self is an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes, that it is not an essential and persistent entity, but rather a conceptual chimera. If this belief ever became widely and viscerally felt throughout a society — whether because of advances in neurobiology, cognitive science, philosophical insights, or whatever — its effects on that society would be incalculable. (Or so this assemblage of beliefs perceptions, and attitudes sometimes thinks.)"
This is his answer to the annual question posed by Edge. For 2006 it is, What is the most dangerous idea of the year?
Paulos is Professor of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia and authored A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, among other works.
posted by John
at
09:50
Current posts only at the home site.With eclectic interests, I take wide license, but here are a few themes--
Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas
This implies a self separate from "my" brain & that the self is a victim of the brain. From a strictly reductionist vantage, a more logical statement would be"Nobody's brain made nobody do it." I can see defense lawyers licking their chops if we get to this point.
Ernst Mach
I can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John
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