Moushka Helping with the Project

My Summer Project

I've started working on a paper to submit to SAAP (the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy), which is going to have their annual conference in Portland (just down the road, sort of) in March. The paper is due September 1.

SAAP Call for Papers

So I am--if with some hesitancy--dipping my toe back in the world of academia, if as an "independent scholar"--that phrase freighted with so much baggage. My prediction, though, is that independent scholarship will soon be more the norm than the exception. So, really, I'm ahead of the times.

Turkeys

I've let the blog languish somewhat. I thought I'd share some "wildlife" I encounter in my daily perambulations.

Crazy for Wagner

Georg Solti conducting, a little crazier than usual.

A Sliver of Consciousness

On Friday I attended the George Lakoff lecture at the University of Oregon.

The basic theme--cognitive schemata, frames, and metaphor theory applied to the current landscape of American politics--is the one he's devoted himself to largely supplanting his work in linguistics for the last decade. Given that, I got more from the talk than I expected.

One claim he made is not so surprising yet still provocative: that 98% of our behavior is unconscious.

If this be true (and, give or take quibbles about the exact percent, the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, etc., it is likely to be) then what is the use? Why try to figure out the meaning of life, or the meaning of anything, if even a good answer applies to only two percent of our behavior?

The key is the role of consciousness in the formation and modification of habit. Though most of our behavior, the relatively or completely unconscious part, is habitual--William James noted the important role of consciousness in modifying our habits.

As such, that 2% comes with an important modifier effect. It can, successively over the course of time, shape a much larger amount of unconscious habit. That is the scope of our freedom, and our responsibility.

Have we given up on space?

Spaced Out - Aeon Magazine

I was more a child of the 80s than the author's 70s; but on the other hand, I was raised more on older science fiction novels than contemporary science fiction movies.

It does seem like we've largely given up the explorer's impulse--one that still seemed part of the geekier side of the culture into the 80s, or even into the 90s with the popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But there's no talk now about going boldly. It almost seems...with the second space shuttle disaster, we turned out the lights and shut the door on that era.

Have we no more tolerance, let alone appetite, for risk? Then we have entered the senescence of our species.

Science, Speculative Philosophy, and the Expansion of Experience

In a previous post I noted Alfred North Whitehead's definition of speculative philosophy. In this post I ask the question: given that speculative philosophy is a creative endeavor, what is its relationship to science?

I've posed this question to somebody in a much better position to offer an insightful answer. But until he gets the chance to respond, I'll share a thought of my own.

Whitehead himself spent most of his career as a mathematical physicist, with philosophy as a side interest that he didn't write much about until fairly late in life. Pierce, responsible for his own works of speculation (though not set forth nearly so systematically as Whitehead) studied chemistry, worked in geodesy, and thought of himself primarily as a mathematician and logician. Both knew and respected science, and had a keen sense of when they were venturing beyond it.

Reprising Whitehead's quote from the previous post:

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. (p. 3)

Science has greatly expanded the number and scope of the elements of our experience that Whitehead refers to. Observationally, we can look much farther into space with our telescopes. To smaller levels with our microscopes. To different ranges of the spectrum of light with our various detectors.

Also added to our experience are the understanding of relationships that scientists have worked out from the range of things they have seen. These days, we "see" apples falling under the influence of gravity, whereas in the past they were seen to be returning to the earth because they were also composed of earth.

While we acknowledge how incredibly expanded our experience is because of what science gives us, we shouldn't forget the narrowing it also involves. If an observation or experiment cannot be replicated, science cannot work with it. Usually this will simply mean that the observer or experimenter was mistaken, and we should accept this as the default assumption that will be correct in most cases.  But it is at least theoretically possible that it was a truly one-of-a-kind experience, never to be repeated.

Whitehead and Peirce were wise enough to recognize the possibility of such experiences. (William James went further, rushing to embrace them.)

If speculative philosophy is to answer to our experience: in the modern era, science provides most of this experience. It's possible that our current understanding of that expanded experience will undergo minor or even major revision--the history of science displays page after page of examples. So it's OK for speculative philosophy to go not just beyond but also against current science. But it must recognize that it does so on borrowed coin. The number of claims that it makes in the face of science, and the length of time it maintains those contrary claims, constitute a debt upon which interest compounds rapidly.