Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Homocentric Universe

Just So Stories

WE JUST BICKER OVER THE DESIGNER:

PODCAST: Samuel Wilkinson — What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence (Skeptic, 3/04/24)

With respect to our evolution, nature seems to have endowed us with competing dispositions, what Wilkinson calls the dual potential of human nature. We are pulled in different directions: selfishness and altruism, aggression and cooperation, lust and love.

By using principles from a variety of scientific disciplines, Yale Professor Samuel Wilkinson provides a framework for human evolution that reveals an overarching purpose to our existence.

Wilkinson claims that this purpose, at least one of them, is to choose between the good and evil impulses that nature has created within us. Our life is a test. This is a truth, as old as history it seems, that has been espoused by so many of the world’s religions. From a certain framework, Wilkinson believes that these aspects of human nature—including how evolution shaped us—are evidence for the existence of a God, not against it.

Homocentric Universe

THE PRIMACY OF tHE oBSERVER:

The surprising origins of wave-particle duality (Ethan Siegel, 2/20/24, Big Think)


One of the most powerful, yet counterintuitive, ideas in all of physics is wave-particle duality. It states that whenever a quantum propagates through space freely, without being observed-and-measured, it exhibits wave-like behavior, doing things like diffracting and interfering not only with other quanta, but with itself. However, whenever that very same quantum is observed-and-measured, or compelled to interact with another quantum in a fashion that reveals its quantum state, it loses its wave-like characteristics and instead behaves like a particle.

Homocentric Universe

TRYING TO BUILD WITHOUT A FOUNDATION:

Free Will, Pragmatism, And The Things Best Left Unsaid (David Kordahl, 2/26/24, 3Quarks)

Though William James’s pragmatism is a variety of empiricism, it’s easy to see why it never caught on among natural scientists. (The physicists I’ve read who gesture toward pragmatism instead cite Charles Sanders Pierce, who was himself a mathematician and natural scientist.) Most natural scientists are motivated to discover something about the objective, mind-independent properties of nature, not just relations between human concepts, constrained by our environment.

Pragmatism stipulates that we recognize scientific theories as human tools, levers that we use to augment our possibilities. We should adopt whatever theories prove most helpful. To reproduce another emphasized maxim of James: “Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”

Reason fails at the first hurdle, when it can not establish that anything is mind-independent.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

MORALITY IS THE CONTROL OF EMOTION:

Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Race (ARNOLD KLING, FEB 23, 2024, In My Tribe)

In thinking about The End of Race Politics, a new book by Coleman Hughes, I came up with a description of the race debate using the metaphor of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. I assign a stance to each of the three symbols.

Rock is individualism. Treat people as individuals, not as members of a race.

Paper is equalitarianism. Treat differences in average outcomes by race as evidence of unfairness.

Scissors is realism. Explain differences in average outcomes by race by appealing to heredity and culture.

In the game, paper covers rock, scissors cuts paper, and rock breaks scissors. Translating from the metaphor, the most compelling argument against individualism is equalitarianism. The most compelling argument against equalitarianism is realism. And the most compelling argument against realism is individualism. […]

The problem with individualism (Rock) is that people intuitively find inequality offensive. If we treat people as individuals, and the resulting outcomes are unequal by race, this will not be acceptable. The unequal outcomes will be viewed as a sign that something is wrong with our society.

The problem with equalitarianism (Paper) is that it requires people to deny, implicitly or explicitly, that average differences by race in inherited or cultural characteristics can be significant. The realists want to confront the equalitarians over this.

The problem with realism (Scissors) is that it uncages the demon of racial stereotyping and prejudice. The individualists will insist that we should pay attention to differences across individuals, not differences across races.

Just So Stories

CAIN WON:

Hunter-gatherers were violently wiped off the map by farmers, DNA reveals (Bronwyn Thompson, February 12, 2024, New Atlas)

Researchers from Sweden’s Lund University analyzed skeletons and teeth found in what is now Denmark, and found that 5,900 years ago, the region underwent a swift and total population change. Prior to this, Danish Mesolithic people of the Maglemose, Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures – genetically related to other Western European hunter-gatherers – were prominent inhabitants. But when Neolithic farmers arrived, an abrupt shift can be seen in DNA records, with next to no genetic contribution from the local hunter-gatherers.

Tracing the DNA timeline, the researchers could see that the hunter-gatherers had been swiftly wiped out by the late Stone Age, in what they suspect was a very bloody and very thorough takeover.

Homocentric Universe Music

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES:

J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Cosmic Music of the Beginnings: The Inklings expressed interest in ancient mythologies that described the creation of the world through music. (Robert Lazu Kmita, February 6, 2024, European Conservative)

However, the theological theory about music that is most similar to Tolkien’s vision presented in The Silmarillion (in “Ainulindalë,” “The Music of the Ainur”) is that of the extraordinary medieval saint and prophetess, St. Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098-1179). As Barbara Newman has shown in her introduction to the critical edition of the musical work Symphonia armonie celestium revelatione (Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations), Hildegard asserts that God is the creator of music, while “the ultimate unmusical spirit was the devil.”

In one of her letters, Hildegard claims that, before committing the Original Sin, Adam’s voice had exceptional musical qualities: “In his voice was the sweetness of every harmonic sound, and of the whole art of music.” Upon hearing the music sung by Adam, the devil, terrified and filled with envy, recalls the beauty of God’s celestial hymns that he had heard before the fall. What follows, we know from the biblical text. From Hildegard’s vision, we learn about music of divine origin and about the fallen angel, who, unable to bear it, wanted to replace the divine harmony with his own musical creation.

The music of the Inklings
The closest of friends, Tolkien and Lewis, showed in some of their literary writings a special preference for a kind of doctrine about the creation of the world that can be named the ‘musical cosmogony.’ This might be a fitting and proper name for those ancient mythologies, including some mentioned above, that describe the creation of the whole world through music.

Beauty is objective

Homocentric Universe

HUBBLE HUMBLING:

After 2 years in space, the James Webb telescope has broken cosmology. Can it be fixed? (Ben Turner, 12/22/23, Live Science)

But over the past decade, an alarming hole has been growing in this picture: Depending on where astronomers look, the rate of the universe’s expansion (a value called the Hubble constant) varies significantly.

Now, on the second anniversary of its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has cemented the discrepancy with stunningly precise new observations that threaten to upend the standard model of cosmology.

The new physics needed to modify or even replace the 40-year-old theory is now a topic of fierce debate.

“It’s a disagreement that has to make us wonder if we really do understand the composition of the universe and the physics of the universe,” Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University who led the team that made the new JWST measurements, told Live Science.

Relax, son, no one thought we understood.

Just So Stories

LIBERTARIANISM FOR THE PRETENTIOUS:

Robert Sapolsky is Determined to be Wrong (Richard Cocks, 12/12/23, Voegelin View)

In episode 693 of the podcast Modern Wisdom, Sapolsky, brought up an Orthodox Jew, reveals that at the age of fourteen he realized categorically that determinism is true, there is no purpose, and that there is no God. This bleak conclusion has never left him. This is the kind of age where one might consider the possibility that one’s parents and other people are actually robots and that solipsistically, one could be the only conscious actual human; whether other people are really seeing the same colors as you, and so on. Such puerile speculations normally recede into oblivion. Not for Sapolsky.

It’s like letting that teen reading of Atlas Shrugged determine your adulthood.

Homocentric Universe

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Your Very Own Consciousness Can Interact With the Whole Universe, Scientists Believe (Susan Lahey, OCT 18, 2023, Popular Mechanics)


To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.

Just So Stories

SECOND MOST:

Humans may be the most powerful evolutionary force on Earth (Matthew Wills, 12/07/23, Big Think)

“Anthropogenic” is a key word of our time. It means caused by, and/or originating with, humans. It’s generally used to refer to climate change. But anthropogenic warming isn’t the only thing we’re collectively causing here on earth. Humans have become a major evolutionary force. In fact, we may be the most powerful evolutionary force going. We are driving rapid evolution—contemporary evolutionary change—in other species at rates that seem to be faster than anything else in history, barring the five great mass extinctions of earth history.

we flatter ourselves.

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