Hacker on Philosophy

James Garvey discusses Peter Hacker (wiki) and Wittgenstein in "Hacker's Challenge" in The Philosopher's Magazine. Here is a quote from that article by Hacker:

“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”

Emerson

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

"Assistance"

In a cloud of exhaustion the train pulls into the station. The doors slide to the side meeting the crowded platform full of mothers and girlfriends and children jostling for a clear vantage of their loved ones spilling from the door one by one like chickens from a narrow coop. The sun, still low in the sky, peeks through the slots in the roof. Rigid from the long night ride in artificial illumination, you raise a hand to block the morning sun, then realize the futility of the act and lower your hand. You stare at the sun and the sun stares back.

The night ride wasn't easy, a passage common enough, but this time your quota for hardship is full. You're ready to be done. Now, once you're finally stationary you drop from the train, breathing a sigh, but your deliverance is drowned by the push of passengers, and you're reminded of the unbearable absence of breathable air.

Coming out of the crowd, there's a man in a gray wool suit holding a small piece of paper with your name on it. He raises his hand in greeting and leans forward to catch your eye.

"I'm glad you're here," you manage to say, reaching the man.
He nods. "Thank you for the payment. Now that everything is in order are you sure you'd like to continue?"

The man motions toward the parking lot. "How was the train ride? Did you get any sleep?" "The lights in the carriage were blinding," you say. "I couldn't see the stars for my reflection."

His car is waiting. Leather seats, water bottles, boxes of white tissue. A sweat of rain pervades the interior like a mountain forest after a downpour.

We arrive in front of a smart-looking apartment building. You get out, and as you cross the narrow street the uneven lay of cobblestones buffet the soles of your feet. The stones look recently washed in strips, shiny and clean where the cars run. Even the gutters are clean. The air here is light and crisp as if never having been inhaled. The sky is blue and full, the sun shining sideways as if saying, "Behold, the world."

The man opens the door of the building and enters, beckoning in. You mount the staircase until the door with DIGNITAS written on a plaque. The man shows you in and closes the door.

"Here it is," says the man. The apartment is sparsely decorated with a large window opening onto the city. The lake, shimmering in the morning light, is visible to the right. "Are you sure you'd like to continue?" the man asks.

The man motions to the plush seat by the window. You lower yourself gently into it and breath out until your interior and exterior reach equilibrium, an equilibrium that sinks you lower and lower into the plush. The train ride tired you. A lifetime of renewal and fatigue pulls on your body.

The man walks out of the room returning immediately with a glass of water. Out of a cabinet he removes a small vial and empties the vial into the glass watching the two colorless liquids mix, twisting and contorting around each other in a lewd dance. He places the glass on the side table next to the window.
"The doctor's forms are all in order. Are you sure you'd like to continue?"

Your fingers wrap around the glass, cold with its colorless fluid, and outside the sun shines on the still lake, and trolleys snake proudly up and down the street like parents with their children in tow. A couple below, a boy and a girl, walk hand in hand. Their gait is so youthful in its moxie that the street scene becomes hopelessly infused with a seductive nectar of vitality, one that lures the innocent into a room with no exit and clouds the view with a mist of impossible dreams. The couple, they must be on their way to the lake to drink in the new day. The boy stops, hand around the girl's waist, and pulls the girl close. He whispers in her ear, and they dive together into an endless embrace.

Back in your plush seat you see the man in gray and he looks at you sitting in a cloud of dust and the colorless liquid in your hand.

You put the glass to your lips, close your eyes and let the poisonous drink chill the back of your throat. It coats your throat, then esophagus, then gut and you can feel your arms and legs not feeling your arms and legs. And the air in the apartment suddenly wanes thin and frigid lifting hanging dust particles that grow in prominence like countless waxing moons. And your mind stumbles back to the apartment, to the gray scratching wool of the man's suit, to the life you've just about finished, a burnt day-old-pizza-crust-of-a-life lying still after the delicious part is gone. Gone and you're ready to go, fantastic visions of color-wheels and city lights, the purple surge of passion in youth and its measured companion in aging brown, and the blurred majesty of sunflower fields, memories eddying, spilling like neglected spaghetti water boiling over in protest. Boiling dust in colorless liquid. Boiling leather seats and tissues. Trains stop and breathe. Sputter.

And as you lean your head to look over the city one last time, you are blinded by the glory of the morning sun, dead in the dusty plush seat by the window.

J.D. Salinger is dead

Hide not thy tears on this last day

Your sorrow has no shame;

To march no more midst lines of gray;

No longer play the game.

Four years have passed in joyful ways — Wouldst stay those old times dear?

Then cherish now these fleeting days,

The few while you are here.

By J.D. Salinger

NYTimes

The Arrow of Time

He [Sean Carroll] explains how, at a subatomic or quantum level, it is far from obvious why the arrow of time should point the way it does, for the laws of physics stipulate that particle interactions are reversible. In the quantum world, time might as well run backward as forward. Imagine a film clip of two billiard balls moving at a steady pace, colliding and bouncing off each other. How can you be sure that the film was not shown to you in reverse—that what you actually saw was time running backward? So Mr. Carroll persists: "Why then, in the observable universe, does time appear to run in one direction only? Why, for instance, when an egg is broken and scrambled into an omelette, if the quantum processes that allowed this to happen are reversible, why does the omelette never reassemble itself into an egg?"

- Alexander Waugh in the WSJ


It is exactly for the reason that billiard balls would not be moving at a steady pace, rather would be slowing down at each instant through resistance, that the arrow of time points the way it does. And this resistance, or reaction activation requirements in the language of interactions reversible or otherwise, would accumulate at each infinitesimal moment leading to a formidable requirement at the meta level manifested in unidirectional time, just as the billiard ball noticeably slows down. This may be more evident in the cracking of an egg as each quantum crack, falsely proposed to be reversible, has a very low activation requirement to be overcome in one direction, yet a much larger one in the opposite direction due to the reduction in entropy. Hence, the overall reaction is irreversible.

"I must retire now"

I must retire now to the sandbox,
to make cloud castles of sand
to steel them with lettered might
while seated squarely in this box;
prolix castles too vast, too sandy
to stand and bear their weight.
They cannot escape
the lashing waves of one life.

I must retire now, dear friend,
for castles are crumbling
fine dust to the incessant wind.
In the morning light, sand layered
on sand, and later, without notice or care,
decay undoes what builds the mind
its rotting hands sculpt and boil
the castle immensity to grain.

I'm sorry, dear friend, for I must retire
and tend the castles towering
beyond the overhead bulbs
that bleach the eyes white.
I can't see you any more, dear friend,
for the castles need tending,
and the lashing waves
lick and dissolve my words.

- Atticus Plumm

Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus.

Again from the wonderful Letters of Note, a Christmas note:



Transcript

Question:

Dear Editor,
I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says "If you see it in the Sun it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon.
115 W.95th St

Answer:

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank GOD! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Go to Letters of Note, or the post.

"Vocabulary Changes... as an Indication of Dementia"

Retrospective diagnostic strategy employing linguistic analysis of works by the champion of murder-mysteries, from the Times:

"Did Agatha Christie, who wrote several dozen mystery novels during her 53-year career, suffer from Alzheimer's-related dementia? Though some of her biographers have suspected as much, actual evidence was advanced in March by a research team led by Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, professors at the University of Toronto, in a paper called 'Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie's Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia.'"

Read more here...

Pandora's Galaxy and the 2009 Top Ten Astronomy Photos

"Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…"

Taken from Letters of Note, a note on Tesla:

In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as 'counting codes'. Having just detected cosmic radio signals for the first time, Tesla immediately believed them to be attempted communications from an intelligent life-form on either Venus or Mars, and later said of the experience, 'The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another'.

The next year, Tesla was asked by the Red Cross to predict man's greatest possible achievement over the next century. The letter below was his reply.




Read on for the transcript...