Specter of Reason

A short improvisation with unexpected weirdness. It's an unusally busy time at work, and will remain so for the next month and a half; during which time I also need to finish my masters thesis.  So I have no time for other intellectual pursuits.  I still have a little time for the piano here and there, so . . . I might make a regular weekend thing out of these music uploads, classical, jazz and otherwise.  We'll see.

I'm relearning lots of classical music I used to play.  I'm a bit rusty, but a lot is coming back to me quickly.  Today I recorded myself playing Chopin's Minute Waltz . . . twice.  The two recordings are very different, but maybe work in different ways. Take 2: Take 1: I plan on recording and uploading lots more Chopin and also some Mozart and Beethoven, when I have more time to polish them.  Maybe some Liszt eventually.  It'll be a while before I try to tackle any Prokofiev.

A lot of fans and critics of American literature get annoyed when Herman Melville's Moby Dick is summarized as a revenge story.  There's an irony here.  True, thanks to film adaptations, Captain Ahab's mad desire for revenge is often and wrongly believed to be the main theme of the novel.  However, I think there is a revenge story at the heart of Moby Dick-- not Ahab's revenge against the whale, but the whale's revenge against civilized man.  The truth is, Moby Dick is just as maniacal as Ahab, if not more so, and it's Ishmael's coming to terms with this mad whale that leads the narrative. Ahab is perhaps the greatest whaling captain of all time, and thus the strongest, most revered emblem of whaling itself, which had been recognized as mankind's greatest industry.  (Melville twice reminds us of Edmund Burke's 18th-century praise of whaling as an unequaled industry, and he describes at length and speculates about the many great purposes of whaling....

Here are two self-made music videos I've just uploaded to YouTube. I've gone the last five or six years without a piano.  I finally got one a couple weeks ago, and today it was tuned.  Hence the first video.  I often play classical, but today I was in a jazzy mood.  (I recorded this using the memo function on my iPhone. The background noise is courtesy of my daughters.) The second video is a bit unusual for me.  I got an iPad last year and experimented with Garage Band software one weekend.  The recording on this video is the result.  I tried to spice it up with photographs I took in America, Poland and Czech Republic between 2005 and 2006.  (btw, I never got around to trying to do more with Garage Band or any other music software, and I'm not so eager to try again, but I enjoyed making this.)

Adam Yauch was an inspiration, and I hope he remains an inspiration after his death.  The CNN obituary features  a video from 2009 , when Yauch and Ad-Rock announced that Yauch had cancer.  And--and this really gets me--Yauch apologized to his fans for having to cancel shows.  He was sincerely sorry.  The man had just found out he had cancer, and he was getting ready to go into surgery, and he apologized with humility and good humor.  The world needs more such people. I remember going with my mom to pick up my older sister at a Beastie Boys concert during their controversial  Licensed To Ill tour in the mid-80s.  The concert wasn't quite over when we arrived and I was able to catch a glimpse through the doors of the Sunrise Music Center in Sunrise, Florida.  It was wild to my pre-teen eyes and ears.  I was an instant fan. Looking back, their beginnings were certainly immature and irresponsible, even though their music was in...

As devoted as I am to defending philosophy and philosophers against unjust criticism, I'm not opposed to poking fun at philosophers from time to time.  Here's proof:  a humorously scathing review of Colin McGinn's new book, The Meaning of Disgust . This may be the most entertaining review of a philosophical work I've ever read.  Here's the bottom line, from the review: For the rest of us—those who actually care about disgust, or aesthetic emotions, or scholarship at all—the book is bound to disappoint. “Who can deny the mood-destroying effect of an errant flatus just at the moment of erotic fervor?” [McGinn] writes. McGinn’s book is just such a flatus, threatening to spoil an exciting intellectual moment for the rest of us. Sometimes with books, as with farts, it’s better to just hold it in.

I don't want to keep posting about this, but I have to comment on  this video , from February this year, featuring a discussion between Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins. A few minutes in, the notion of "something from nothing" is raised, and Dawkins discusses it in relation to evolutionary theory:  He says Darwin's Origin of Species showed the world how you can get the appearance of intelligent design from simple genetic material and the non-cognizant laws of physics, and while that isn't quite "something from nothing," it's pretty close.  (Of course, you need a suitable environment for the genetic material, too, but whatever.) Krauss' response is bizarre.  He says Dawkins isn't giving Darwin enough credit--that Darwin did in fact show that you can get something form nothing.  Dawkins disagrees and clarifies that, no, it's not actually nothing .  You do need some conditions before natural selection can take off.  That's obvious...

Seinfeld , one of the most successful shows in television history, was purportedly about nothing .  Of course that was never true.  The show was about a few people with consistent personality quirks, a bit narcissistic and socially challenged (and challenging). Still, people like to say it was "about nothing," not taking the word too literally. When physicist and outspoken atheist Lawrence Krauss talks about the scientific concept of nothing , he isn't literally talking about nothing, either.  In his view, if nothing is a scientifically legitimate concept, then it refers to something measurable.  You can quantify it somehow.  I agree.  Science deals in the quantifiable and measurable, after all.  It does not deal in that which cannot, in principle, be measured one way or another.  Yet it's plain as day that, if you can measure some x , then x does not equal nothing .  If you can measure it, it isn't nothing.  And so we must admit ...

I acknowledged physicist Sean Carroll's take on the Krauss debacle in my last post, and I was tempted to critique it at the time, but decided that doing so required a new post.  This is that post. Carroll is critical of Krauss, but he also tries to defend him by putting his work in context.  He says the physics Krauss is talking about does have something to add to "the atheism vs. theism popular debate."  I find that unlikely, and Carroll's argument offers a good opportunity to explore why. According to Carroll, quantum field theory shows that you don't need a Creator in a complete cosmological model of the universe.  Of course, we're talking about a complete and coherent scientific model of the universe.  But did we need quantum field theory to show us that?  Hardly. Does quantum field theory actually show it, even?  To do that, wouldn't it have to have an empirically definable notion of a Creator? Furthermore, is Carroll suggesting that you ...

Why do public atheists like Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss denigrate philosophy without apparently realizing how philosophically poor and unsophisticated their arguments are, and how much better they would fare by taking philosophy seriously? There seems to be a lot of support for this combination of arrogance and ignorance in the atheist community.  Everybody thinks they know how to think about difficult philosophical concepts.  Everybody has an opinion on philosophy, but hardly anyone has the patience, charity or education to speak about it authoritatively. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them from pretending. I complained about the cult of personality back in 2010, when Harris was selling his book on morality, and again recently , after he arrogantly assumed an authoritative aptitude on the issue of free will.  Isn't it odd that Harris, who seems to think rigorous attention to philosophical argument and scholarship is beneath him, is so eager to publicly debate a...