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

I never knew that Berkeley went to America. That explains why the Americans named so many things after him.

Yes, but we pronounce it differently.

I mean, nobody goes to 'bark-ly' university...

And yes, that's in the altered state of California, how fitting...

all states are altered, unless they are not a state... as in a state of not being cannot be altered, but a state of being has to be altered, in order to be, it must be alterable by external stimuli/forces alcohol or caffine works best or LSD of course

In concentrated form, tar water is most familiar in today's marketplace as 'pine oil'.

Used medicinally as a remedy for things like cholera, as 'tar water', it was strongly diluted with boiled water.

A little harsh by present day standards, but preferable to cholera.

I'm glad it worked against cholera.

It is curious how people continue to treat Berkeley as deranged. He used his argument against matter to counter the materialists' argument against God. God, they said, makes no appearance in the world, so we need not believe in his existence. Berkeley pointed out that the same can be said of matter.

The scientists and philosophers of the 18th century had a concept of matter--atoms--that was not like our present buzzing booming confusion, but like a lot of inert billiard balls, buffeted about since the dawn of time. They were supposed to cause appearances, but to be in themselves imperceptible. Berkeley showed up the flaw in that theory.

Kant only partially took Berkeley's argument on board, second-hand through the filter of Hume. Schopenhauer based his "World as Will and Idea" on a limited and misunderstood snippet of Berkeley.

Berkeley's critique still stands, though now we may see it more as a critique of language. Is this statement possible to refute:

>Nothing can exist outside a mind

? Certainly not if you restate it as:

>Nothing can be said to exist outside a mind

--but what is the difference between those statements? Is it a distinction we can really discuss? Pin down? Point to? You can't do much philosophy outside language.

Do read A3472986, it is rather good

Er, 'En arche en o logos'? 'In the beginning was the word'?

"Nothing can be said to exist outside a mind" [Recombentman]

That seems to imply the need for consciousness, which gets us into Phenomenology. Sadly, there's no Guide article on Phenomenology, so this will have to do:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/

I think it's simpler than that. Try:

Nothing can exist without the involvement of a mind

How does that differ from:

Nothing can be said to exist without the involvement of a mind

? It looks like a cheap trick, but then all tricks are cheap tricks. We suppose that the universe existed without awareness until awareness evolved, but what kind of existence is that? An undifferentiated Parmenidean whole, perhaps. A fertile soup.

What Berkeley points out is... sorry got to go. To be continued...

Cheap Trick is one of my favorite '80s bands. "Dream Police" and "Surrender" are two songs that instantly put me in a good mood.

Traveller in Time on his head
"Nothing is the _only_ constant . . .

And 'Centerfold' is a happy song "

"We suppose that the universe existed without awareness until awareness evolved, but what kind of existence is that?' [Recumbentman]

I'm sorry that I spelled your name wrong in my last post.

We're sort of trapped in this universe for a specific period of time, and then who knows what happens? Young people who love science fiction or astronomy imagine trips across the galaxy to discover other worlds. Older people, sensing their own mortality, may have less patience for the idea of taking long trips that they likely won't live long enough to complete.

Now that I'm in my late sixties, I sometimes wonder whether this world and universe are less real than I used to think they were. That star that's 210 light years away and unstable - - it may go supernova any moment, or may already have does so, incinerating all life with 200 light years -- is an unknown quantity that I can't know the final story of. But if it has already gone supernova, and the shock waves of its radiation start to be detected within my lifetime, well, it isn't just my life that will be suddenly over.

Spica is about 250 light years away. But there's also IK Pegasi, another supernova candidate that's only 150 light years away. Fortunately both those are far enough that they're unlikely to be destructive even if they do go >BOOM!<.

What you should worry more about is GRBs, Gamma Ray Bursts. If one goes off and it's pointed right at us, that would be the proverbial IT!

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/03/03/wr-104-a-nearby-gamma-ray-burst/#.Vv02vuIrJjE

The energy of a GRB, produced by a supermassive object undergoing gravitational collapse* or a primordial black hole of substellar mass undergoing Hawking's gravitational decay**, is concentrated in coherant (laser-like) streams coming off the poles with a beam divergence about like that of the ion jets coming off the core of an active galaxy.

So rather than energy declining according to an inverse square law as with a conventional nova or supernova, if one is in the path of the gamma ray beam, the burst may temporarily outshine the entire remainder of the universe, as a supernova will temporarily shine more brightly than the entire galaxy it belongs to.




*The less common type of GRB, typically persisting a few minutes to a substantial portion of an hour, also called a 'hypernova', giving rise to a black hole surrounded by a corolla of pseudo-stellar globules in an elliptical association, rather than a crab nebula-like feature and a neutron pulsar, as with a supernova, or a planetary nebula and a white dwarf, as with a conventional nova.

These don't occur every day.




**The more common type of GRB, typically persisting about 3 seconds, usually located in a galactic halo region where the dark matter is supposed to be.

On the average, several GRBs of this type are detected daily.

Poul Anderson wrote at least two science fiction storys about 'nearby' supernova events.

One had to do with transuranic mining opportunities on objects just barely far enough from the supernova to have escaped vaporization.

The other was the fôundation of his 'Merseian' storys.

OK, to get back from the heat death of the planet to Berkeley's immaterialism...

What Berkeley pointed out was that

>Things simply are what they appear<

Ever since Aristotle there had been this problem with matter: is it what we perceive, or is it something different that *causes* perceptions? All philosophers up to Berkeley, and many after him, got caught in the trap of supposing that there is a world of reality permanently hidden from us. Worst of these was Kant who gagged on Berkeley's pill and created an apparatus of 'Things in themselves' that we can never know about. Schopenhauer similarly took Berkeley's point to some extent but couldn't let go of the habit of matter.

Physicists now speak of mysterious substances like Dark Matter, but with the important difference that they then look for evidence. Evidence is what makes things perceptible. The scientific world has quietly come round to Berkeley's position, yet the popular image of Berkeley is still of a deluded dreamer. Strange.

The whole business of 'life after death' and 'other universes' is built on an illusion, that we are somehow separable from our environment, and that perception doesn't reach all important things.

It does. That's all, folks.

The streets of town were paved with stars,
It was such a romantic affair,
And as we kissed and said goodnight,
A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square

<BB<

I have to take public transit into Boston today, and it's started raining....

Wear an umbrella hat, Paul.

Does anybody remember the brief popularity of umbrella hats? I know it was the late 70s, because I wore one to drive around Ireland in a horse caravan in 1978. It collected stares in Kerry.