h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

jwl

Thanks for that..

Does this mean you are on Chapter Five already? I did not know that other chapters than Chapter One had actually got into Peer Review.. It was suggested to me that each chapter should be processed individually. Perhaps I just do not get the hang of the process.

And I have no recollection of numbering any pages. But I usually give the page refences of any quote- which may apply to the paragraph that you liked. Page 7 seems about right for where it was in Stuart Hall-King's introductory section.

If you go on at this rate I will have to complete 9 and 10 quick-sharp.

Cass

The number one result in google searching your
Modern Lessons from Medieval History is the
Contents Page at A87718927 which lists all
the chapters posted as A-numbers on h2g2.

I read some of the Peer Review comments on the
original entry and assumed they were all now in
PR.

I confess I have been skimming a lot of the data
laden sections that jump around a bit as I mentioned
earlier. And I have been cherry-picking chapters
based on my reaction to their Titles and furthet
cherry-picking on Subheader titles.

Couldn't resist a title like The Common Man All At Sea
or a header like To A God Unknown.


~jwf~

Thanks jwf

I am obviously missing something -- I was expecting some notification that there were comments on my stuff submitted to Peer Review, and was oblivious to the existence of any. Where do I need to go?

Cass

The conversation I read was from November. I found it at the bottom of the Contents Page A87718927 where you first submitted the entry. The thread: http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F22117555?thread=8285494 Only Chapter One seems to be in Peer Review and there is no discussion thread below it. I have nothing to do with Peer Review. Best to discuss the process with some of those who replied in that thread, or on the main Peer Review Forum. ~jwf~

jwf

Thanks for that clarification. It was what I thought was the situation.

I noticed a Peer Review list that rates those pieces as 13% relevant. But my other pieces on the list are only rated at 1 or 2%.. But then people in our family tend to get used to not fitting into the existing pigeonholes and boxes into which other people try to fit their knowledge and understanding.

However- in line with my tangents prescribing a circle image- I believe that our Victorian establishment thinking is now way "out of touch" with modern reality, in spite of all the modifications and minor revisions that people have felt are necessary to bridge the gap between theoretical concept and living reality. Eventually fundamentally new thinking will be required, and not just in science and technology, that have been allowed to set the pace for much of the last hundred years.

Cass

Cass, I've made a comment on part 1, general not specific.

I have not a hope in hell of being able to review the factual content (whether this particular historian actually said that particular item in those words) so I'll be no use to you there.

I'm wondering how many of us could do that (without getting bogged down in side discussions (!) ) ~ there is rather a lot of it and it's on the dry side.



... but you did get me back to PR (for at least one visit)

>> But then people in our family tend to get used to
not fitting into the existing pigeonholes and boxes <<

There's a lot of that around here.

My only advice regarding PR and most other areas of h2g2
where one is exposed to the comments, opinions and tastes
of others is not to take it personally.


~jwf~

Rod

Thanks.. I have replied to your comment..in PR.. Trying to look from a reader's point of view, I did edit to break it up and put more sub-headings. But they do not stand-out and work so effectively as they would do if I had used Guide ML.

I some of my writing I have tried prefacing Chapters with an outline summary of the argument. Would that help? Unfortunately I do not think that I can get away from the fact that what I write is argumentative/essay material rather than mere bland presentation purely for information or interest. My intention is to encourage people to change the world, not feel comfortable in it.

Cass

Headings - if/when it goes as an EGE, it will probably be put into Guide ML anyway, so if you're comfortable with GML then...

As for your second para above ... I'm out of my depth there.

But yet , 'outline summaries'. Hm, there's a thought...

Just moving back to the OP.. This might be an appropriate place to try to fomulate in words something that has been gestating and which may suggest that I am either mad or just willing to think the unthinkable.

1. This thread has already brought up the amazing capacity of the human brain- but also the limited range of our specific species-related senses and perception.

2.Molecular biologists tell us that at a molecular level our physcal being is totally recreated/replaced/regenerated every 7-8 years. Presumably- as in various old religious ideas- "eat this is my body etc"-- by ingesting new molecules as they pass through the food chain.

3. It would be logical to believe that Nature does important parts of this work in the "down time" of sleep, with perhaps a particular emphasis on the "big sleep" which helps us to get through Winter; though generally as the conditions are less conducive to great physical activity Winter sleep may be different to sleep during more active times of the year, which produce greater physical tiredness.

4. It would follow from all of the above that the molecules in our brain are changing along with all the others, and that, therefore, there is the same process of transfer of personal specifics over to the new molecules so that we appear to be more or less the same and retain much of what we know.

5.But could discarded molecules retain some or part of their information? And when our brains are changing at a molecular level, is it possible that some of the molecules that we are ingesting already carry memory reprints. For they are more than second-hand recycled and, as much of Nature seems to have memory, whether or not it has intelligence.

6. In keeping with the ideas of the Cult of Sensibility of Byron and some of his age the most intensively felt Life experience is Death and next to that near Death; and by definition the molecules that are consumed and pass around the Food Chain are "morbid".

7. In other words many of the images that flash through my mind when I "switch off" and try to sleep at this time of year are not in fact produced by my imagination, but by this physical process, which continues into my sleeping hours producing weird dreams, as my brain tries to marry together its existing material and the new input. And my flashes may come from the totality of all Life experience.


Mad or not?

It is an idea that would very much chime in with Ancient Hindu wisdom that argued that for peaceful people and peaceful societies it was necessary to be vegetarian, and ideally vegan- consuming only those things that Nature produces specifically for the Food Chain and require no taking of Life, not even vegetable.

Cass

That also makes me think of Aldous Huxley's argument in "Doors of Perception. Heaven and Hell" .. Aldous Huxley's poor eyesight had ruled out a career in Biology like his illustrious grandfather and eminent brother, but he clearly felt qualified to put forward ideas about the relationship between Biology and human experience.

His thesis was that "modern man" was losing his roots because of the change in his brain chemistry. In all previous ages winter had been a time of (a) compulsory fasting as meagre stocks of food were managed and (b) a major change in the diet to feature much more heavily grains, nuts, pulses etc.

Huxley noted that historically, in mundane life and in customs and rituals, such changes were associated with revelations that put humankind in touch with a much greater reality associated in Western Culture with the ideas about Heaven and Hell as places of transcendental existence that was often obsured by the command of material reality over our senses at other times of the year. e.g. we often fail to notice the Moon shining during the daytime, especially in bright summer sunshine, but the Moon and stars are always there.

Cass

Your molecular theory in Post 110 is far from mad
(except to skeptical 'prove-it-with-science' types)
and is as you say similar to insights in early Hindi.

Hard to go any further with the discussion since it
is by definition a subjective experience - we could
never establish a baseline any scientist would accept.

You also mention some possible differences between winter
and summer sleep. Here they'd have to acknowledge the fact
of hibernation, the fact of dietary variance. Maybe we could
get them wondering if a measurable factor like latitude played
into it at all.

Happily, I live at 45 degrees latitude so I am already in a
state of relative balance and am quite aware that winter does
produce a deeper longer sleep simply because it is possible
and desirable to ignore the outside whirled. But I'd say that
summer is the better time for the healing and regenerative
aspects, again as you say, because it is a more active season
generally.


~jwf~

jwf

Thanks for that.. Re scientific sceptical types, my wife is very much into homeopathy and you may well have seen the analyses that have found at the degree of dilution that homeopathy uses there is no longer any physical trace of the substance being diluted as a remedy.

But- as I wrote earlier- scientific instruments since at least the telescope and microscope have made it possible to see things that could not be seen before.

And after all "matter" is energy with Stephen Hawkin maintaining that everything in the whole universe could be condensed down by Black Holes etc into something the size of a pea.

Cass

*However*...we don't need special instruments to see effects on disease. Whether or not extreme dilutions monkey around in as yet unknown ways at the sub-molecular level (although, frankly, I doubt it), they have consistently failed to do what they're purported to do at the macro level. It isn't so much a case of our not having looked in enough detail. Every time we *have* looked, the gross effect homeopathy is supposed to cause ain't there.

A recent controversial book 'The End if Illness'
by Dr David B Agus proposes that medicine has lost
its way since it started staring into a microscope.

By focusing on the microscopic for causes and cures
of diseases we have lost sight of the health of the
whole body.

Many cases can be made that Specialisation has caused
the downgrading of many human activities so it seems
reasonable to examine if this is what's happening in
the medical sciences.

Dr Agus makes the case quite nicely in an interview
on John Stewart's `The Daily Show` and clips of that
are online but any I could link`would be available
only in Canada.


-jwf-

jwf and Edward

I maintain that the analytical approach of Cartesian Science, while offering the advantage of breaking things down into component parts and examining them in artificial and contrived situations- often for living things 'post mortem'- has favoured only one form of advancement in human understanding.

It is now accepted that the other strand of thought as manifest by the wholeness of Gilbert White in his "Natural History of Selborne" is a necessary balance. White, while he paid local people for dead specimens, he largely tried to observe life living in the round. He is now recognised as the "father of ecology" and was I believe one of the first to postulate the vital role of the earthworm..

In terms of our economic and social systems the consequences of trying to replicate "post mortem" situations by depriving people of their full humanity and fitting them into "top down" power-systems has had catastrophic consequences.

Re the work on homeopathy- in a culture obsessed with external power and its interventions- just as any move away from Statism towards autonomy is suspect, so is any medical approach that does the same.

I personally am not a believer in Homeopathy. Perhaps fortunately I have not as yet had to be a true believer in any form of medicine. But there is some logic in the thesis that if you want living things to really pay attention then extreme quietness is often much more effective than noise- a fact that I exploited both as a teacher and occasionally in live musical performance. Try whispering in the presence of a dog.

The basic principles of Homeopathy go back [in my understanding] to the Eighteenth Century age of the "Worship of Nature" and a belief that we should harness the forces of Nature wherever possible.

And it does seem to be logical to argue that some symptoms at least that we suffer when we are not well are produced by the way that our body is trying to fight off the illness. So the idea of the homoepathic remedy is to choose a substance that tends to produce those symptoms, and to "send a whispered" message, repeated as necessary, to encourage the body to continue the fight.

Few remedies, however, seem to be truly symptom specific. For homeopathy is (as I understand it) incredibly indivualistic and recognises that no two people will necessarily react the same way either to the same disease, or successfully fight off any disease in the same standard way.

So my chief quarrel with it as a medical idea- given the availability of more conventional medicine- is that treatment is incredibly labour intensive as each homeopath tries to understand each patient at the deepest possible level searching for the Holy Grail of the "constitutional remedy" out of the hundreds, perhaps thousands in the "Materia Medica"- I have never counted- that goes right to the heart of the constitutional well-being of that specific individual.

Most of these conditions really make it difficult to apply normal scientific methods of research and enquiry to homeopathy.

By the way are you both aware of the anti-vaccination movements of the late-nineteenth century that protested over the violation of the rights of the individual, especially those living sensible and healthy lives, when laws were passed that made it compulsory to have disease-derived material injected into everyone "for the greater good".

Cass

Eppure non si muove.

Cartesian or not, statist or not, it don't make nobody better. That's the main thing, surely?

Edward the Bonobo

Well people feeling that things are making them feel better does not necessarily prove anything..

In fact a basis of scientific theory is that nothing is ever proved, merely that hypotheses have not been disproved..

As I say I am not a believer, but I do know people who do feel that homeopathy has made them feel better.. My wife at one time when she was studying it quite intensively actually had some patients who came to her over several years, and she often gets asked for remedies by friends who have felt her recommendations have been useful, including our current neighbour who is a GP.

We might both agree, perhaps, that almost all systems of medicine have aspects of "faith-healing" in them: and sometimes conventional medicine solutions are just so intrusive that it is understandable that people might wish to try something that may be ineffective but harmless.

But a GP friend of ours from our younger days realised that what so many of his patients really wanted in this modern "non-Society" was just someone that they could have a real conversation with. And first consultations in homeopathy are usually at least an hour. As I say uneconomic, since the homeopath then really needs to spend hours researching and reflecting.

Cass

Correction taken. I'll concede that homeopathy works as well as any placebo - and that's not necessarily negligible.

Edward the Bonobo

Well I do notice that some of the classic things that happen in homeopathy are not unlike some of the things that Eighteenth Century quacks used to say when things were not turning out as planned. But modern scientific "medicine men" also usually offer no guarantees and "hedge their bets".. They know that occasionally "the condemned man" does not die as predicted. Medicine is not an exact science.

Anyway- I only used homeopathy as a lateral thinking illustration of the way that possibly the slightest scrap of molecular reality might still carry some "memory".. I saw a programme in which homeopathic remedies were tested and found to be- to all measurable purposes almost pure water- but it was suggested that perhaps the water contained some kind of imprint or memory.

All just thrashing around with that idea that I thought I would finally articulate this morning. What I need is a brain expert- or perhaps another brain.

Cass