You may (or may not) be aware of the discovery of many new planets outside our solar system but it has become something of a hot topic.  Universe (that cool blog that recently moved over to ScienceBlogs) had an interesting take on the idea of scale which included the discovery, and  Samuel Arbesman posted an interesting article on what he calls mesofacts that also included the discovery.  He’s right that some things change at a rate that means we just don’t notice them, even things that are important to our continued survival. I blame evolution. We are primed to notice sudden changes —  like the panther that seems suddenly really, really interested in our presence in her and her kits’ personal space. Those kinds of changes make or break our chances for immediate survival and so have taken the lead in our bodies ranking system for what is going to cause a sudden behavioural modifcation (you know like the fight or flight thingy). Often the slow changes (like in climate) do not trigger the hormonal stimulants which jump start behavioural change. After all, a bad harvest or two? We are omnivores, the barley is low? Go eat millet, or the goat, or last year’s walnuts, they last for a long time, even if bitter, and then there’s dandelion greens, it would take a pretty major cataclysm to wipe those suckers out. It is hunger, another kind of hormonal trigger, that causes us to seek out alternate food sources. What it doesn’t do is make us stop acting like giant earth-predators and unbalancing the larger biosphere. That is reason’s role, but it is a newby and apparently not up to the job yet.

As Claire Evans (the writer behind Universe) said, it really is about scale.  She thinks that we are about to experience that wrench that comes with the realization that we are not, in fact, the scale against which the universe developed. And of course what the universe’s non-human scale means is that the things that are most critical to us, the things we think matter the most, almost certainly have no corollary in the vast reaches of all-that-is.

Things like language, mind, awareness, these are human things in that they are the consequence of the evolution of our bodies and the ensuing social change the evolution of our bodies and brains has stimulated (and of course of any other group of creatures that might evolve toward the same evolutionary “goal” of a proactive intelligence capable of rapid learning as a member of a deeply social species). There are so many philosophers that have talked of our capacity for awareness as if it is an attribute worthy of universal acclaim, as if, at bottom, awareness must be a fundamental principle of the universe like mass or the speed of light. This is the power of the meso-world on us. Call it middle earth or midgaard, it is a fantasy universe where things are in fact human-sized and human oriented. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the universe, we do not actually live in middle earth.

Now’s a good time to go watch a short video called The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds.

And that’s just starting with the formation of the earth.  We barely register. In fact the only reason we do is because the creator of the video is human and probably thinks our existence matters. But to be fair I suppose we have made an impact as far as the earth is concerned. Well at least for this particular set of life forms that may well suffer extinction earlier than would have happened without our presence. But extinctions are a regular part of earth history so even this is nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Can you imagine a video “The Evolution of the Solar System in 60 Seconds“? Or “The Evolution of the Universe…”? We wouldn’t be a blip. I mean even the formation of the earth would barely register in the second imagined film.

I sometimes wonder what philosophy would be if we could get outside our middle-earth mindset. And teleology without a human orientation?  That would be fun.  Maybe the universe has been evolving all along toward the mechanisms that make a three toed sloth capable of enormous body temperature variation. Or maybe it is all about bioluminescence. Or the cephlapod ink sac. Or maybe life was just an accident on the way to limestone and the karst lands and their elemental denizens.

Wouldn’t that be fun? — to find out we do inhabit middle earth but that it was created in the image of a set of caves carved by the relationship between water, CaCO₃ and CaMg(CO₃)_2.

Personally I’d rather find out there is no meaning than find out I was an extra in someone else’s drama. That way I can make my own meaning, decide for myself what it all means, and then change my mind depending on how I feel that day. Much more fun, and in keeping with my middle-earth mind.

I mean, really, meaning?  Another of those human qualities that say nothing about the universe, whether big or small. But what else can guide us if not our quest for meaning?

Facts you say? Posh. Tish.

I’ve been thinking about scale and the effects of our middle-earth fixed minds on basic concepts like “substance” better known today as “matter.” And then this morning I ran across Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. So here it is.

Have you ever thought about how the world is from the verb’s point of view? Things are shadowy, unbounded, seriously over-hyped. There is no “there” really, just movement slowed, turned, impelled, dipped and driven.

No go?  Let’s start with the noun’s POV.  There is a tree at the corner of my street. In the morning I leave the house, turn amd lock the door, walk down the alley to the street, negotiating space with raccoons, ravens and occasionally skunks and of course with cars leaving home on their way to work. I round the fence, avoid the concrete ledge at the edge of the sidewalk and make my way down the sidewalk. Then I stop at the corner next to that tree and say good morning to the raven that is almost always sitting in its branches at that time of day. Moving in the world is like that. I am an object moving between objects, along objects, under objects, even through objects (the air, for example.) We define the world that way for good reason, but not for the reason that this is how the world is.  We define the world in this way because it is a successful way of assessing the environment from the point of view of surviving the various objects that may either intend us harm or not notice us as it rolls right through the space we happen to occupy.

Now try to imagine that same set of circumstances from the point of view of “to walk.”  From the verb’s point of view I only happen to embody the movement, just as from my point of view as an object, the space between me and the skunk is incidental to the existence of the skunk and to my own (still unstinky) self. Just as space is considered an emptiness through which objects move and time something measured by the change of objects, so in a world defined from the point of view of a verb, objects would be defined in terms of speed and direction. Objects are empty categories that exist only in that they point to change of direction or rate of speed.

Think about Descartes. For him a corporeal substance is something that has extension. That is, the space it takes up (and moves in) is an empty category that really only exists to point to the existence of the object substance instantiates. To think from a verb’s POV, just turn this on its head.

An odd world, when pondered, yet no more odd than the one where extension (space) is just something that exists to separate objects. Think about the questions these points of view generate. For example, from the noun’s POV the question “what happens when I die” seems a natural. I mean from an object’s point of view an intact boundary seems rather essential to existence. So disembodiment (i.e. the rotting corpse) requires an answer. From the verb’s POV this is not at all the question. Instead, “to walk” would want to explain away entropy in the same obsessive way we want to cling to the idea of existence without embodiment.

When I stopped at the corner, where did “to walk” go?

Then there’s the adjective. But I won’t go there. (Please speculate and let me know what you come up with.)

The reason I’m thinking about this? Thank you for asking. I have been reading Deleuze – his book called The Fold. It seems to me he takes up the verb’s cause, and to me anyway, it explains why Deleuze chose Leibniz as the platform from which he dove into what he calls Baroque philosophy. It also explains why so many people have problems with Deleuze. Nouns, at this point in history, have the field.

More on Deleuze, Leibniz and folds another day.

Verbs rule!

I had enrolled myself in a philosophy class for the term, as is my wont.  I went to the first session but somehow it all went wrong. And I can’t figure out why, but I do know I am going to withdraw.
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Having sort of dissed Pious Nietzsche earlier, I did want to say that my favourite chapter in the book was the one called “Paul’s Revenge.” I am not a Paul fan. Too much feminist religious philosophy for that ever to be the case. (Besides I like my hair and don’t see any need to hide it, and think that if it sets some dude off, then he has a problem not me, and if he makes it my problem, well, there are all kinds of ways to solve that, only some of which include non-violence.)

Having exposed some of my core concepts, let me tell you my favourite passage in the chapter. Benson says, “for Nietzsche, it (pity) is ultimately a disguised form of superiority: ‘To offer pity is as good as to offer contempt’. Precisely in the act of pitying, one places oneself above the one being pitied. thus, pity turns out to be a form of revenge, a way of retaliating against the other.”
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Here’s the sound of me putting a book down…

Yes that’s right. Silence.  I did not throw it. It did not hit the wall. Nevertheless, I will not be able to finish it.

Chapter 10 (the last chapter):

Nietzsche admits to being pious. Even though he calls himself a ‘godless anti-metaphysician’ (a phrase that truns out to be ironic precisely because Nietzsche is not godless), he still believes in truth, which has for millennia been equated with the divine.

That’s the passage that made me put the book down.
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I’ve been struggling to understand the arguments that surround representation in the philosophy of mind. I have several good references but it doesn’t seem to have helped much.  I keep running across words that seem to make absolutely no sense in the context of their use. Of course I realize that this is because the philosopher in question has taken a perfectly good English word and made it do some other work entirely. At best the word is tangentially related to its original use, and in fact that seems to make it worse for me. I read a passage and go — “WTF” does that mean? Then I reread it and realize that I must not really understand what he/she meant by that particular word. Words like “content,” I mean we all know what that means right? Nope.

Irritating.

So yesterday I went to the central public library where I figured they would have introductory texts on a variety of philosophical topics. Yes!

I found a “Representation 101.”  So today I am reading that and making little flash cards with vocabulary. Just like I did when I learned to read French.

Hopefully by the time I finish that I will be able to forgo the WTF experience when reading the other bits and bobs.

I’ve had a couple of bad days. Don’t know why, and, actually, don’t much care, but I do want them to stop.

Work is not hard at the best of times, but it can be really busy, but right now it is slowing down and so the pace is a bit dream-like. Not a good dream, but dream-like.

So after work today I’d had enough for the nonce and thought “where can I go so I will feel better?” I flipped through my inner-file of places-that-I-like-to-go, waiting for the emotional hit that shoots up a big red finger pointing down from my metaphorical sky saying “THIS ONE.” It turned out to be a Chinese-Canadian restaurant (you know the kind that sells standard North American-style rice and noodle Chinese food along with grilled cheese and burger fare.

I took a booth (cracked Naugahyde), ordered tea, and opened my backpack.
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