vol VII: Notes

1982

[Notebook: Poesis DB 3]

[Sunday 17 January 1982 - Saturday 23 January 1982]

[page 4]

Sunday 17 January 1982

"May fearsome reptiles dwell in thee"

Monday 18 January 2003

Tuesday 19 January 2003

[page 5]

Wednesday 20 January 2003

Thought becomes convoluted. Attempts to reduce experience to simple generalizations always fail because experience is so complex. One is confined to a snapshot, whose edges join on to infinity, whose time is an instant in an endless flow. One cannot try to comprehend. Strength in art is to imply what is unsaid, to avoid artificial completeness, like the detective story where everything ties up in the end. In reality nothing is finished, it is but a step in the process. We identify steps, birth, marriage, death, but these are of little significance.

Minds integrated into noosphere but maintaining full freedom, full self determination.

Start reading Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Phenomenon of Man. Teilhard de Chardin

Toward omega - once we have all knowledge of physical Universe, it will be effectively "spiritualized" ie in human intelligible form. In due course there will be little to

[page 6]

understand but our own creations - the hard Universe will have hardly any meaning.

Teilhard de Chardin preface: p 31 Speaks as though science, philosophy, and theology, are different types of knowledge. Seems no ground for this - software is software if it works and can be verified OK.

Thursday 21 January 2003

Friday 22 January 2003

Saturday 23 January 2003

Copyright:

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Dawkins, Richard, Climbing Mount Improbable, W. W. Norton & Company 1997 Amazon editorial review: 'How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of "slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants" -- a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins's great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.'  Amazon   back

Feynman, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. . . . In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.'  Amazon   back

Greene, Graham, A Sort of Life, Bodley Head 1971 Amazon customer review: Greene is a master of understatment and restraint. This book is a lovely if self-effacing coming-of-literary-age memoir that is fun and reader friendly. It's invaluable for its precious glimpses into the vanished world of the 10's and 20's England. Full of curious detail too: I didn't know that Greene was related to R.L. Stevenson for example. The book ends just around the time of his first literary success. I don't know if there are any further memoirs but I wouldn't mind reading them.' Uncle Borges  Amazon   back

Hofstadter, Douglas R, Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic/Harvester 1979 An illustrated essay on the philosophy of mathematics. Formal systems, recursion, self reference and meaning explored with a dazzling array of examples in music, dialogue, text and graphics.  Amazon   back

Hofstadter, Douglas R, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, Basic Books, HarperCollins Publishers Inc 1997 Amazon: 'In the fall of 1537, a child was confined to bed for some time. The French poet Clément Marot wrote her a get-well poem, 28 lines long, each line a scant three syllables. In the mid-1980s, the outrageously gifted Douglas R. Hofstadter- il miglior fabbro of Godel, Escher, Bach - first attempted to translate this "sweet, old, small elegant French poem into English." He was later to challenge friends, relations, and colleagues to do the same. The results were exceptional, and are now contained in Le Ton Beau De Marot, a sunny exploration of scholarly and linguistic play and love's infinity. Less sunny, however, is the tragedy that hangs over Hofstadter's book, the sudden death of his wife, Carol, from a brain tumor. (Her translation is among the book's finest.)  Amazon   back

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Future of Man (translated by Norman Denny) , Borgo Press 1994 Amazon product description: 'Pierre Teilhard De Chardin was one of the most distinguished thinkers and scientists of our time. He fits into no familiar category for he was at once a biologist and a paleontologist of world renown, and also a Jesuit priest. He applied his whole life, his tremendous intellect and his great spiritual faith to building a philosophy that would reconcile Christian theology with the scientific theory of evolution, to relate the facts of religious experience to those of natural science. The Phenomenon of Man, the first of his writings to appear in America, Pierre Teilhard's most important book and contains the quintessence of his thought. When published in France it was the best-selling nonfiction book of the year.'  Amazon   back

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man, Collins 1965 Sir Julian Huxley, Introduction: 'We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of the Phenomenon of Man.'   Amazon   back

Papers

Gaston, Kevin J, "Valuing Common Species", Science, 327, 5962, 8 January 2010, page 154-155. 'Aldo Leopold's dictum that "To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering" has been oft repeated in the context of environmental management. The argument is beguilingly simple. In the absence of a detailed understanding of what each species does in an ecosystem, it would be foolish to allow the loss of any one of them. It is the precautionary principle writ large and, given its enormous ramifications for the ways in which people interact with the natural world, ecologists have spent much intellectual energy, time, and resources in determining whether it has a strong empirical basis. Indeed, some of the best-known recent ecological experiments have examined the consequences of varying the numbers of species in a small area on ecosystem function. This focus assumes that the importance of retaining Leopold's cogs and wheels lies mostly in the differences between them. However, a growing body of work on common species underlines that having sufficient copies of some key pieces may be equally, and perhaps often more, important.. back

Hirose, Kei, "Deep Mantle Properties", Science, 327, 5962, 8 January 2010, page 151-152. 'The lower mantle extends from 660 to 2890 km below the surface of the Earth. The rocks and minerals of the deep mantle are not accessible in nature, except those occurring infrequently as inclusions in diamond. However, they can be synthesized and examined at the relevant high pressure and temperature conditions in the laboratory. Recent such experimental investigations, as well as theoretical calculations, have suggested that the properties of lower-mantle minerals vary with increasing depth much more than was previously thought. On page 193 of this issue, Irifune et al. (1) report that iron (Fe) partitioning between the two main lower-mantle constituents, iron–magnesium silicate perovskite (Pv) and iron–magnesium oxide (ferropericlase, Fp), indeed changes in a natural mantle composition for conditions corresponding to depths below 1100 km. The results have profound implications for predicting the properties and dynamics of the deep mantle.'. back

Horvath, Philippe Horvath, Rodolphe Barrangou, "CRISPR/Cas, the Immune System of Bacteria and Archaea", Science, 327, 5962, 8 January 2010, page 167-170. 'Microbes rely on diverse defense mechanisms that allow them to withstand viral predation and exposure to invading nucleic acid. In many Bacteria and most Archaea, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) form peculiar genetic loci, which provide acquired immunity against viruses and plasmids by targeting nucleic acid in a sequence-specific manner. These hypervariable loci take up genetic material from invasive elements and build up inheritable DNA-encoded immunity over time. Conversely, viruses have devised mutational escape strategies that allow them to circumvent the CRISPR/Cas system, albeit at a cost. CRISPR features may be exploited for typing purposes, epidemiological studies, host-virus ecological surveys, building specific immunity against undesirable genetic elements, and enhancing viral resistance in domesticated microbes'. back

Links

Aquinas 165, Summa I, 28, 1: Are there real relations in God?, 'Reply to Objection 4. Relations which result from the mental operation alone in the objects understood are logical relations only, inasmuch as reason observes them as existing between two objects perceived by the mind. Those relations, however, which follow the operation of the intellect, and which exist between the word intellectually proceeding and the source whence it proceeds, are not logical relations only, but are real relations; inasmuch as the intellect and the reason are real things, and are really related to that which proceeds from them intelligibly; as a corporeal thing is related to that which proceeds from it corporeally. Thus paternity and filiation are real relations in God.' back

New Matilda, Independent news, analysis and satire, 'Launched in August 2004, newmatilda.com is an Australian website of news, analysis and satire. Believing that robust media is fundamental to a healthy democracy, newmatilda.com is fiercely independent — it has no affiliation with any political party, lobby group or other media organisation.' back