What, Why & How do we Know ?
Just received three books in time for some holiday reading, all ordered locally via The Guisborough Bookshop. Mentioned all three in passing already. Trivium 21c by Martin Robinson is focussed on the Trivium of three complementary ways of knowing, called here Grammar, Dialectic & Rhetoric. The point being that a complete worldview needs all three. … Continue reading “A Little Holiday Reading – Robinson, Rovelli and Carroll”
Interesting to see today’s news on standardisation of units of measure, that time, distance and mass are now to be unified through the Caesium clock with application of the speed of light (c) and Planck’s constant (h). (Hat tip to Jim Al-Khalili on Twitter). Fascinating article in itself, however yet more evidence that the accepted standard … Continue reading “Carlo Rovelli – A Fresh Spin on Fundamental Physics”
Interesting review of Carlo Rovelli’s latest “Reality Is Not What It Seems” by Michael Brooks in the New Statesman. In my own review of Rovelli’s introductory work “Seven Brief Lessons“, I felt compelled to add a footnote to ensure readers understood he was peddling a minority view in Quantum Loop Gravity. Interesting in Brooks’ review of Rovelli’s latest, he highlights the well … Continue reading “Carlo Rovelli is right, in the sense that …”
I’ve been largely offline for a week visiting Florence, and in fact did very little reading whilst I was away. Florence was too fascinating. So, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swan” and “Antifragile“ and Simon Blackburn’s “Truth” and “Hume“ remain incomplete and un-reviewed despite enjoying the gist I’d already gleaned from all four. Their styles could … Continue reading “Physics Moves in Mysterious Ways – Carlo Rovelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons””
Interesting set of unrelated conversations throwing-up unexpected connections in the past week. After the recent exchange on pan-psychism ended with Massimo Pigliucci conceding …. I like res informatica. a bit less speculative than panpsychism. — Massimo Pigliucci (@mpigliucci) January 6, 2019 …. I found in my reading of Mumford in connection with Russell’s metaphysics as … Continue reading “Dual Aspect Monism”
I said, when reading Aldous Huxley back in 2007, that I was having trouble seeing the wood for the trees – what specific points Huxley was making – even though it was already a given that some kind of perennial philosophy is what we are dealing with in real life. Since before then my approach is … Continue reading “Perennialism”
Quite normally these days, headlines deliberately mislead – it’s called click-bait – and so often these days “Multiverse” is that click-bait. Total bollox, but it sells clicks. Trouble is, when it’s the headline, it’s very hard to tell if the piece itself is saying anything useful that may or may not depend on any multiverse … Continue reading “More Multiverse Bollox”
This is just a holding post. Already in my previous post on Carlo Rovelli, I was overdue a fuller review. Since then I’ve been reading Sean Carroll, and finding myself reading backwards, from the index of key topics and chapter headings. The reality is that every current philosophical physicist I read, I find enormous implicit … Continue reading “The Matrix Cometh”