Paradox Point

  The grand old duke of York He had a million quid He gave them to someone he never met For something he never did.

Why Truth?   Letter to friends and family, first written on November 20, 2017:   On this, my 68 th birthday, I ask your indulgence to consider a dangerous philosophical question: Why truth? - and related questions:   Why justice? Why honor? Why honesty? Why integrity?   - and so on. Why not their opposites: falsehood, tyranny, dishonor, lies and corruption? I am not arguing in favor of those opposites; I shall leave that to Mr. Trump and his gang of dupes, collaborators and crooks. I am for truth, justice, honor, honesty and integrity, but I’d like to hear some reasons why. I question truth because I love it. Trump and his gang have plenty of reasons for the lies that they love; though in truth those reasons are not reason; they are madness; for “why reason?” is another question in play here. Why reason? Why not madness? Truth, justice, etc. all support each other; they argue for each other; but so do falsehood, tyranny, etc. The form...

               In Praise of Vermin   I write this essay in praise of all those critters that survive despite all mankind’s best efforts to exterminate them. I do so out of respect. So kudos to weeds, pests and plagues! Tough enough to take us on! Here’s to dandelions, crabgrass, poison ivy, poison oak, and kudzu! Here’s to roaches and flies and fleas and mice and rats! Here’s to Asian carp, tiger mussels, raccoons and coyotes! I think it the height of hypocrisy for us humans to complain of invasive pests. It’s no easy thing to be an invasive pest; you need some advantage. Raccoons have hands, rats have colonies. Invasiveness requires adaptability, as we well know, being invasive pests ourselves.           I praise vermin and weeds because they prove that life’s vitality exceeds ours; so a natural history beyond ours is guaranteed. I take comfort in this reflection. The raccoon’s hand proves...

             In Praise of Down-Tech             I define “down-tech” as “doing high-tech work with low-tech tools”. Down-tech economizes on tech; its converse is “up-tech”; doing low-tech work with high-tech tools. I also call up-tech “uppity-tech”,   “hype-tech”, or “absolute technology”.           The virtues of down-tech are simplicity, familiarity, security, and liberty. Down-tech requires ingenuity, invention, hard work, and care; the personal virtues of independence. In contrast, up-tech rewards dependency, laziness, and neglect; the price it asks for these fashionable vices is complexity, alienation, and conformity.           Down-tech is crash-resistant. It is denied the system’s luxuries, but spared its catastrophes. A hand-powered typewriter doesn’t need a power line, but the Internet’s funct...

                 Gaia’s Revenge   There is a global baby bust in progress. Birth rates are falling across the world. The reproduction rate is less than replacement all over the developed world. It is still above replacement in Africa but will fall below it soon. Therefore the population of the world will peak before the end of this century, somewhere above 8 billion, and then fall. Why is this happening? I speculate that the baby bust is caused by ecological distress transmitted to humans via price signals. A rising population urbanizes; in the city, children are expensive, but not useful, so demand for them falls. The biosphere is shutting down human reproduction, and is doing so via market mechanisms. That is “Gaia’s Revenge”. The Gaia-triggered, market-mediated disinclination to breed manifests in many ways, depending on the culture. In East Asia, young adults take a Daoist path, and allow themselves to lose at reprod...

The Law of Cosmic Coolness     I have noticed a curious phenomenon: namely, that the coolest technology of an era is regarded as oddly resembling the real reality of that era’s universe. This is a result in meta-science, the science of science. I call it the Law of Cosmic Coolness. For instance: when clocks were high-tech, then the universe was clockwork. When nuclear bombs were freshly invented, then the universe started with a Big Bang. (Some of the same individual physicists worked on both.) Now computers are highest tech, so all the cool kids say that the universe is made of information, and may even be a simulation. From this law of scientific metaphor, I predict that when the Green New Deal kicks in, we will learn that the universe is recycled, and sustainably self-powered. When biotech hits its stride, the universe will be revealed as recombinatory. Eventually we will discover that the universe is a quantum computer. Science is ruled by metaphor, for so is...