Hello world! I’m a Washingtonian born and bred, have a B.A. in philosophy with a minor in English from Whitman College of same state, but was unable to enter the job market due to an unfortunate series of events related to libel and stalking which spanned more than a decade and probably should have resulted in some new laws on the books. Instead I ended up on the wrong medication with some hardcore symptoms that no one had much inclination to seriously address, in jail for 13 terrible months (why the BLEEP didn’t anyone post my cheap bail?), at a…
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of modern life is its specialization. There are as many hobbies as individuals to pursue them, as many different products as citizens to purchase them, as many job descriptions as employees to practice them, as many working financial models as successful businesses, and as many subcultures as can be realized. The sectors of society, to the extent that they are logistical, orient around maxing out the mind’s capacity for encompassing existence’s diversity, stretching the boundaries of thought towards assimilating as much information as possible, and differentiating our modes of behavior to any extent which proves…
Physicists have theorized that a wave moves both forward and backward in time, the retarded and advanced wave respectively. This concept can be applied to account for the famous double-slit experiment, in which electrons are emitted with a device and absorbed by a florescent detector recording their final position.
Almost immediately after the first retarded “wave” leaves (paradoxically from the absorber side, just as lightning originates from the ground, induced by the emission charge that is comparable to a thunder cloud), the complementary advanced wave arrives, then the two interfere to produce a new retarded wave in the forward direction…
Brainstorm 1:
A graphene nanotech compartment containing small samples of atoms or molecules is inserted into a graphene tube. Graphene is harder than diamond, nearly nonmagnetic, and only one carbon atom thick.
A fast triplet reaction sensor array resembling magnetoreception mechanisms is aligned to the outer walls of the chamber, sensitive enough to register magnetic fields of the molecules inside through the chamber walls, with perhaps a sealing apparatus at the insertion end to which further sensors are attached for 360 degrees of pattern recognition.
The magnetic field pattern is then translated and amplified into a digital signal sent to…
Sketch 1:
Pilot wave theory envisions matter as consisting in particles whose paths of motion are guided by supradimensional waves. Collapse models describe particles as resulting from mechanisms of condensation within a global wave. Can we combine the idea of supradimensional waves with that of particularization as a concentrated wave to derive an image of reality adequately represented by the square of the wave function?
Imagine a topographical map with waves flowing as peaks and valleys. Think of this as the architecture of our spacetime universe, the mutating square of the wave function. As waves travel around and contours morph…
Etiologies of early humans were mythical, the world populated by spiritual entities, including humans who used spells, incantations, ritualized acts of all sorts to summon, supplicate and grapple with causality from out of mystical ideation and a mechanistic ignorance punctuated by technical insight into the solution of practical difficulties. A human being could adroitly design a hunting spear and at the same time believe supernatural spirits determined one’s fate in every venture. …
The function of mating and birthing is obviously reproduction, sustaining the existence of an organism’s species and passing along traits that made reproduction possible. It is easy to see the kind of advantage reproduction enables: a nonreplicating bacterium can be outnumbered one to a million in less than a day. The eukaryotic (multi-celled) lineage evolved its structural template via three stages of symbiosis indicated by the relatedness of microorganism lineages to eukaryote genetic material. First, a single-celled organism from phylum Archaea with a particularly efficient genetic system was engulfed by another prokaryote, becoming the nucleus. Then bacteria…
a. The history of genetics
At the end of the last ice age, roughly 10,000 B.C.E., humans began intensively cultivating plants into crops and domesticating animals. Agriculture and livestock breeding selected a modest set of desirable traits such as caloric content, palatability and medicinal value, while animal husbandry improved strength, stamina, appearance and behavioral profile in dogs, cats and additional quadrupeds for purposes such as companionship, packing, herding, guarding, tracking, retrieving and aesthetic form. Since this selective breeding took place over many millennia, general trends were not examined with any comprehensiveness or much integration until life science commitments began to…
a. The concept of biological evolution
‘Evolution’ in biology is a general term for the understanding we have of how reproduction in organic life works. The core insight, obvious enough to be almost instinctive, is that offspring are related to their parents, and traits of lineages can be selected for, mixed and matched predictably, on purpose by mating choices. Saying it is one thing and comprehending it a different ballpark entirely, moving up to the major leagues so to speak. We of course have engaged in selective breeding for millennia, often at the expense of quality of life and adaptability…
As psychology and neuroscience progress, theory rapidly expands in its capacity to model and predict mental phenomena, but while practical for the field of medical treatment and instructive as we attempt to make our knowledge of the world and our place in it more profound, this growth in mechanistic explanations has only deepened the mystery surrounding interiors of consciousness. Philosophy has termed components of this internal domain ‘qualia’, the perceptual elements or qualitative contents of experience as contrasted with conventionally physical matter, and they have proven highly intractable to rational analysis, even the rigorous empiricism of science. Why is the…
Chapters from the book Standards for Behavioral Commitments: Philosophy of Humanism, and more!