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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 26, 2014 - 09:41pm PT
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Um...the earth's climate and atmosphere have been anything but constant, Blue. From mass extinctions caused by super volcanoes to Snowball Earth - it's gone all over the place since the earth first formed.
Life never threatened the planet? Well - maybe the 'the planet' - just other life. The first plants produced the oxygen that nearly wiped out all methanogens - who likely dominated the biotic landscape before plants evolved. Plants completely transformed earth by pumping huge amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere (where previously there was only trace amounts) - which oxidized enormous amounts of surface minerals - which changed the chemistry of the oceans, which...you get the idea. Plants also changed the planet's albedo, water, and CO2 cycle - massively altering the climate. And - they made it possible for animals to evolve - further massively altering the planet and its oceans.
PS - plants take in CO2 and H2O and poop O2, not the other way around.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 26, 2014 - 09:54pm PT
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^^^ Are you arrogantly proposing that under the right conditions, with the right materials EVERYTIME Life will spawn and grow from a plant into an animal, and into a consciously questioning Loving organism?
And that Life on Earth has lived and died more than once??
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 26, 2014 - 10:03pm PT
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Never mind. I'm not stoned enough for a Blueversation.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 26, 2014 - 10:14pm PT
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^^^Cheers!
i jus got a "Diamond Pick" anyway!
i'm gonna go dig up some gold ore.
Jim Brennan sez it'll help me think faster.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 27, 2014 - 05:18am PT
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Tvash makes good points, Blue, and he has a lot of data on his side.
Arrogance is an evaluation by a self-reflecting animal. Would the lamb say a tiger is arrogant?
Strictly speaking, what is and what should be cannot be connected. They are two completely different categories of declarations.
It seems to me that if you have respect for “what God has wrought,” then you must take it all in as it is. If you have respect for what Man has wrought, then you can play God.
Be well, and Merry Christmas.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 27, 2014 - 07:38am PT
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Randisi: Perhaps you might be interested in this essay by Michel Serres, . . . .
Ah, the French . . . .
Reading modern [sic] French philosophy is like trying to walk in a swimming pool of honey. It can be sweet, you initially think you can see through it, but it’s slow and difficult to get anywhere in it.
As a favor returned, I would recommend Michel Callon back at you. I would most enthusiastically recommend a book that Callon helped Bijiker, Hughes, and Pinch with: “The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology,” Cambridge (1987). I relied upon their ideas on my dissertation on the social construction of embryonic markets.
Cheers.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 27, 2014 - 07:49am PT
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I did not write anything off. I have tried. My comments were based on my (poor, no doubt) reading of more than one French philosopher. I appreciate their views.
de gustibus non disputantum . . . even for philosophy.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 27, 2014 - 08:38am PT
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I read the article you pointed us at. Should I have read more?
EDIT: Yes he is not deigned a postmodernist. I understand. In a way, he wants to find a middle path between science and the humanities. In the end, he and the rest *want* to believe that there is something finally definable at the bottom of everything.
I know this is wrong, but all French philosophers (to me) read Cartesian. It's the style and tone of their writing. Even Rousseau.
Kindly note I am not arguing with you.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 27, 2014 - 09:07am PT
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some of us enjoy both and dont worry about it
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Dec 27, 2014 - 12:14pm PT
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I get this feeling jgill would like to see my climbing credentials. :)
That's OK. You keep the thread lively when it threatens to go moribund.
;>)
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 27, 2014 - 06:59pm PT
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Randisi: Funny, that's not at all what he thinks or believes.
Sure it is. That’s what almost every philosopher on the earth who lived thinks. If he thought there was nothing underneath everything, then he wouldn’t have to write all those words. There’d be no argument to put forward.
I can’t say how important it is to be able to read or hear people talk and understand the object of a conversation rather than paying too close attention to words. Every philosopher who refers to definitions (and Serres does often in his article) is referring to something that is discrete, knowable, definable, graspable. Words won’t do it—ever.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 27, 2014 - 07:24pm PT
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for Serres the foundation of all things lies more or less in Anaximander's apeiron, the boundless indefinite or in more modern terms, a kind of chaos.
Pretty words. Interesting terms. Do they say anything of the definitive brain, or eyeball?
i've not read Serres. Maybe you could elaborate on your relationship?
are you in china right now?
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Dec 27, 2014 - 07:39pm PT
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JL mentioned the physicist David Bohm a page or two ago. His concepts of implicate and explicate orders are intriguing, if perhaps a tad too metaphysical for me.
The de Broglie–Bohm theory, also known as the pilot-wave theory, Bohmian mechanics, the Bohm or Bohm's interpretation, and the causal interpretation, is an interpretation of quantum theory. In addition to a wavefunction on the space of all possible configurations, it also postulates an actual configuration that exists even when unobserved (Wiki)
Some sort of guiding equation seems to underlie the unfolding of the explicate from the implicate, and a fundamental premise is the existence of the whole before the parts. Spacetime emerges as an explicate rather than being more or less axiomatic.
Curious and complicated.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 27, 2014 - 08:26pm PT
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I was actually thinking about this while jotting in my notebook out in the desert:
Man is the first species that is capable of "artificially" changing his actions. We can choose whether or not to obliterate our surrounding ecosystem. Blow up any mountain. Overfish any fishery. Grow grain in the west with 100 years at most left in the Ogallala Aquifer, which helps to feed the world. None of our actions are sustainable.
There isn't a mountain that we can't blow up, a river that we can't damn, a forest that can't be scalped, or even now changing the atmosphere in a bad way. How do we survive this technological adolescence? Science and technology may help, but they won't stop the population from growing at that exponential rate.
When I was born, the planet had just over 3 billion people on the it. Now, 50 years later, there are over 7 billion humans. We are no longer seriously affected by the main law of evolution: natural selection. We have cured the worst diseases and people live several times longer than they did 1 million years ago, when 30 was old.
There was a time when Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence, and it is genetic. Now they can live full lives and have children who carry that deadly gene. Same goes for Polio, Tuberculosis, Milaria, influenza, and many infectious diseases. We have, through technology, eliminated many of the diseases which held population in check for millions of years. If that were suddenly taken away, it would cause a huge shift in consumption.
Now all we can do is have fewer children. It would sure be easier on our non-renewable resources if we still had a world population of 3 billion..or even less. Humans are now outside of many laws of nature. Our crop growing is incredibly efficient, and U.S. grain output feeds people around the world due to transportation efficiency.
There remain technologically inferior areas where the old diseases still keep population in check. Africa has a fairly low rate of population growth, for example, but they have lots of children. They have much lower life expectancies, though.
The whole point is that humans have figured out ways around some of the most brutal rules of mother nature. It is H. Sapiens vs. everyone else, and everyone else, with some exceptions, is losing.
Now some of you may think that this explosion of population is great. More souls for Jesus. The cold reality is that our population growth rate is exponential, and it is the nature of exponential functions to grow out of control.
What do we do? The US is 5% of the world's population yet uses 25% of its resources. We are top dog and are stealing more than our fair share. Or we just buy those resources, like oil or copper or many other necessities in our modern lives.
The only solution that I see is to end this silly tribalism, institute a stronger world government that splits the pie fairly, and for two generations, have a one child policy, like China did. It is that or we face resource wars and great famines.
If there were a farmer, and we were his cattle, it would be easy to control. However, we have made ourselves the most special of all of Earth's species.
This is very messy business to get into. We, where even the poor are fat, will have to get by with less. Others will get more. We don't really NEED much of what we have.
To implement this you have to rid ourselves of selfishness: the one trait that has made us grow like weeds. Selfishness leads to all sorts of technological advances through competition, and it is the way the world currently works.
If anyone has a polite way to address these problems that don't sound like a bunch of commies have taken over, please speak up. We do have the choice of living in luxury while others starve, ya know. We practice it daily.
Humans are now almost exempt from the rules of evolution, but we could easily change that. Everyone get DNA tested for genetic diseases and then get a license to have children. It will happen someday.
We are literally screwing (sexually) ourselves into the ground, and anyone who thinks that the whole world will start cooperating on a level playing field, as Christ himself described, then you know more than I do.
I see these as the big problems which humanity faces. Yeah, we have science types and spiritual types, but if you put us all together in a room, we would probably get along fine.
However, many religions make a point of procreating as much as possible. They aren't the real bogeymen here, though. It is through and through the way our species is growing. We are getting too big for our planet.
I'm gonna write a story one day and title it "Three Dollar Gas."
That is all anyone cares about in their daily lives.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 27, 2014 - 08:40pm PT
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We have cured the worst diseases and people live several times longer than they did 1 million years ago, when 30 was old.
You haven't cured jack sh!t.
And your life span has decreased, not increased from your mental speculated 1 million years ago .....
You do not have full independence to do what you like.
Try it and you will see and you will fail ......
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Dec 27, 2014 - 08:54pm PT
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Randisi, I’m finding some of your notions a bit … muddled.
Mike said that, “In the end, he (Serres) and the rest want to believe that there is something finally definable at the bottom of everything.”
You countered, “Funny, that's not at all what he thinks or believes. Where did he say that?”
Then you somewhat answered your own question with: “For Serres the foundation of all things lies more or less in Anaximander's apeiron, the boundless indefinite or in more modern terms, a kind of chaos.
If you are going to assert that Serres most definitely DID NOT avouch some definable thing or phenomenon – however chaotic or ordered – at the bottom of everything, then it is a slippery slope to claim said “foundation” was more or less Anamimander’s aperiron.
Why?
Granted, there are various modern takes on this aperiron, but many modern scholars promote a standard view: That Anaximander's apeiron is a kind of reservoir, or matrix, of matter which surrounds all generated things.
One counter to this is that Anaximander's apeiron is not physically separate from generated stuff, but was conceived as identical with the succession of generated things.
Put differently (by one scholar), “this view replaces the standard separatist view of Anaximander's physics with a monistic view: the everlasting deity which is the apeiron is one with the endlessly repeated alternation of generated things.”
We could argue terms and meaning ad nauseum, but however you shake it – that the old Greek’s aperion IS stand-alone from generated stuff, and is selfsame WITH the flux of arising things, or an everlasting deity is itself the aperiron, or (fill in the blank), you are, by dint of your own examples, stuck with some phenomenon “at the bottom of everything.”
What Mike is suggesting is - that from which all stuff is generated – otherwise known as emptiness.
That is decidedly NOT a French flavor. Never has been. A couple of the old Krauts had a taste for it, but the Frogs (from Merleau-Ponty on down) - not so much.
JL
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 27, 2014 - 08:57pm PT
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^^^sounds like you got ur head level on your walkabout!
Good'ay Mate!
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 27, 2014 - 09:34pm PT
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are you in a hurry Randisi?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 27, 2014 - 09:52pm PT
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His ideas were influenced by the Greek mythical tradition and by his teacher Thales (7th-6th century BC). Searching for some universal principle, Anaximander retained the traditional religious assumption that there was a cosmic order and tried to explain it rationally, using the old mythical language which ascribed divine control on various spheres of reality. This language was more suitable for a society which could see gods everywhere; therefore the first glimmerings of laws of nature were themselves derived from divine laws.[8] The Greeks believed that the universal principles could also be applied to human societies. The word nomos (law) may originally have meant natural law and used later to mean man-made law.[9]
wiki
Thank You Randisi for pointing me in this direction.
i learned alot, even from this one paraghraph.
i much like where it brings up "Anaximander retained the traditional religious ass umption that there was a cosmic order..".
it astounds me that even back in 500AD Man was calling for a planned universe. And just Natural for another Man to say, "No it ain't!"
Ever since its been Sciences job to prove the universe is confused..
Or Lucky?
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