Truisms
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2009There are a lot of folk who think they have a handle on how to communicate science to the general public, and a lot of folk, mostly scientists, who think nobody else does. But I was reading Carl Zimmer's twittering today, about Rebecca Skoot getting a column gig for a new magazine devoted to issues of interest to women, Double X. It hit me that science journalism is not dying, it is having to adapt to a new business model.
Traditional media made its money from advertising and sales. It used a broadcast model of publishing - a single source (the printing presses or the transmitters) to many…
evolvingthoughts | March 20, 2009I am rather old fashioned, which is unsurprising since most of what I read dates from before the invention of the transistor. But I think that one can disagree with someone else without needing to call him an idiot:
This is exactly why idiots like Matthew Nisbet, who continually call for reining in of harsh criticism of religiously motivated solecisms, are floridly misguided. People can bitch about "New Atheism" all they want or they can raise their chins off their chests and actually look around at the world. The best possible way to combat atrocities of all kinds is to drag their…
evolvingthoughts | February 13, 2009Truism 6: Apart from physical kinds like basic particles, everything is in flux
Scholia: If we know things, we know them as temporary objects. An "object" is thus something within which change doesn't trigger a change of equivalence class.
We know changing things by knowing the rate of change, and the rates of change in rates of change (second order derivatives) and so on.
Commentary: Heraclitus set the western philosophical project going by asking if we could step in the same river twice. This set up the problem solved by Plato with his eternal forms (eideai) and Aristotle with his…
evolvingthoughts | January 18, 2009Truism 5: One is only required (by our language games) to justify moral claims one or two levels
Scholium*: Justifying moral claims is a language game in Wittgenstein's sense, but only in a philosophical language game do we justify the justifications. That is why many people prefer to make God the source of morality.
Scholium: All moral claims are founded on duties, not utilities
Scholium: Moral duties and rules encode past utilities
* I'm going to use this term now instead of "corollary" (see comments to Truisms 4)
evolvingthoughts | January 4, 2009This was brought to my attention by a reader on the alt.fan.pratchett group in response to an evangeliser there. Below the fold, it really asserts how I think of death (and identifies me thus as an Epicurean).
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and…
evolvingthoughts | December 30, 2008Truism 2: Nobody does anything they don't want to, on balance
Corollary: Everything we want to do has a neurological foundation
Discuss
evolvingthoughts | December 29, 2008As an academic philosopher, one often finds it more interesting to discuss or debate the ideas of others than to assert what one believes to be true. This is because everybody has ideas they believe to be true, but few have managed to argue for them in any way, and philosophy is all about the arguments. But I keep finding that nobody really holds all the views I do but me, and I can't be bothered arguing for most of them, because individually they have already been argued for by others. Then it hit me - why bother? I have intelligent readers - make them do the work. So I resolved to set out…