12.9.10
A few things to share with you today:
1. A quote from a book called The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul - a very paragraph club-y read if you ever come across it. And you know I like this quote because I'm willing to type out the whole thing.
"The idea that what you are is not simply a living body (or a living brain) but also a soul or spirit seems to many people to be unscientific, in spite of its ancient tradition. 'Souls,' they might want to say, 'have no place in science and could never fit into the scientific world view. Science teaches us that there are no such things as souls. We don't believe in leprechauns and ghosts anymore, thanks to science, and the suspect idea of a soul inhabiting a body - the 'ghost in the machine' - will itself soon give up the ghost.' But not all versions of the idea that you are something distinct from your purely physical body are so vulnerable to ridicule and refutation. Some versions, as we shall see, actually flourish in the garden of science.
Our world is filled with things that are neither mysterious and ghostly nor simply constructed out of the building blocks of physics. Do you believe in voices? How about haircuts? Are there such things? What are they? What, in the language of a physicist,is a hole - not an exotic black hole, but just a hole in a piece of cheese, for instance? Is it a physical thing? What is a symphony? Where in space and time does 'The Star Spangled Banner' exist? Is it nothing but some ink trails on some paper in the Library of Congress? Destroy that paper and the anthem would still exist. Latin still exists, but it is no longer a living language. The language of the cavepeople of France no longer exists at all. The game of bridge is less than a hundred years old. What sort of thing is it? It is not animal, vegetable, or mineral.
These things are not physical objects with mass, or a chemical composition, but they are not purely abstract objects either - objects like the number Pi, which is immutable and cannot be located in space and time. These things have birthplaces and histories. They can change and things can happen to them. They can move about - much the way a species, a disease, or an epidemic can. We must not suppose that science teaches us that every thing anyone would ever want to take seriously is identifiable as a collection of particles moving about in space and time. Some people may thing it is just common sense (or just good scientific thinking) to suppose you are nothing but a particular living, physical organism - a moving mound of atoms - but in fact this idea exhibits a lack of scientific imagination, not hard-headed sophistication. One doesn't have to believe in ghosts to believe in selves that have an identity that transcends any particular living body."
2-106. LIFE's 2010 Pictures of the Year. Beautiful and especially exciting because one of the photos was taken by a photographer friend of Ward's! The link below is to that picture, but you can click through to see the rest of them at your leisure. Some of them are truly breathtaking.
http://www.life.com/image/ugc1148861/in-gallery/52491/2010-pictures-of-the-year
1. A quote from a book called The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul - a very paragraph club-y read if you ever come across it. And you know I like this quote because I'm willing to type out the whole thing.
"The idea that what you are is not simply a living body (or a living brain) but also a soul or spirit seems to many people to be unscientific, in spite of its ancient tradition. 'Souls,' they might want to say, 'have no place in science and could never fit into the scientific world view. Science teaches us that there are no such things as souls. We don't believe in leprechauns and ghosts anymore, thanks to science, and the suspect idea of a soul inhabiting a body - the 'ghost in the machine' - will itself soon give up the ghost.' But not all versions of the idea that you are something distinct from your purely physical body are so vulnerable to ridicule and refutation. Some versions, as we shall see, actually flourish in the garden of science.
Our world is filled with things that are neither mysterious and ghostly nor simply constructed out of the building blocks of physics. Do you believe in voices? How about haircuts? Are there such things? What are they? What, in the language of a physicist,is a hole - not an exotic black hole, but just a hole in a piece of cheese, for instance? Is it a physical thing? What is a symphony? Where in space and time does 'The Star Spangled Banner' exist? Is it nothing but some ink trails on some paper in the Library of Congress? Destroy that paper and the anthem would still exist. Latin still exists, but it is no longer a living language. The language of the cavepeople of France no longer exists at all. The game of bridge is less than a hundred years old. What sort of thing is it? It is not animal, vegetable, or mineral.
These things are not physical objects with mass, or a chemical composition, but they are not purely abstract objects either - objects like the number Pi, which is immutable and cannot be located in space and time. These things have birthplaces and histories. They can change and things can happen to them. They can move about - much the way a species, a disease, or an epidemic can. We must not suppose that science teaches us that every thing anyone would ever want to take seriously is identifiable as a collection of particles moving about in space and time. Some people may thing it is just common sense (or just good scientific thinking) to suppose you are nothing but a particular living, physical organism - a moving mound of atoms - but in fact this idea exhibits a lack of scientific imagination, not hard-headed sophistication. One doesn't have to believe in ghosts to believe in selves that have an identity that transcends any particular living body."
2-106. LIFE's 2010 Pictures of the Year. Beautiful and especially exciting because one of the photos was taken by a photographer friend of Ward's! The link below is to that picture, but you can click through to see the rest of them at your leisure. Some of them are truly breathtaking.
http://www.life.com/image/ugc1148861/in-gallery/52491/2010-pictures-of-the-year
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