Epoch of Homo Sapiens

Chicken on the Loose

    Great Apes who have the homo sapiens collection of genes, can easily be chased back 250,000 years. Our divergence from the rest of the Great Apes occurred about half a million years ago which would have been toward the end of the geological epoch called the Pleistocene which consisted of 25 ice ages and lasted about two and a half million years.

   By the end of the Pleistocene (only 11,000 years ago) much of the mega-fauna, giant flightless birds, huge meat eating bears, mammoths and for some reason giant sloths were no longer existent, and here one argument for their disappearance are tool makers who could make fire and make an even bigger deal about going all alpha around hunting down and grilling meat.

    Our current Epoch or Age, it's a little early to think of 11,000 years  as much more than a hiccup of some sort, is already being called The Holocene, which rather ominously means wholly new time. It began with the end of the Neolithic, or when non-nomadic-farming started to become this period referred to as Civilization, or city dwelling. At the moment we are already in what the enthusiasts would like to call The Anthropocene, or the Age of Man.

   Meanwhile the less self absorbed have already given the Holocene three subdivisions. The first is Greenlandian, 11,000 to about 8,000 years ago, characterized by quite dramatic retreat of ice and rising sea levels. The second is Northgrippian, ended about 4,000 years ago, it got especially warm and good for farming. The third subdivision is the Meghalayan, its main characteristic is an extended period of drought that caused the Bronze Age collapse.  

Time?

Another Sunset, how many more!

      Schopenhauer informed his readers and anyone who listened that the present was the only reality, past and future didn't exist, it wasn't real. Nietzsche, as an example, when it was his turn to be a callow youth was much enamored of Schopenhauer's understanding of will, but he came to the understanding that the old man was too pessimistic, too weak and cowardly to properly embrace the world.

    For Nietzsche a robust mind needed a past and future, the present alone just wasn't enough for a "will to power." Nietzsche was a classical philologist, he was ancient languages and texts. Amongst other things Schopenhauer wrote about the Philosophy of mathematics and logic.

    "So what."

     So what indeed, my fellow Puddle Duck. The answer from my side is that linear thinking will always require a trinity to give it curve, slope and touches of humanity so it might flourish in the answerlessness of the present. Non-linear thinking patterns easily tolerate a single eternal present. 

    Plato made the claim that once the orbits of all the planets returned to their original equilibrium that would constitute the end of a Perfect Year and the beginning of the next perfect year. The issue of how many of our 'so called' years made up an astrological Perfect Year, remained deeply in doubt. Around four hundred years after Plato died Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman Orator and statesman, suggested that Plato's Perfect Year was twelve thousand nine hundred and fifty four of our 'so called' years.

    And here you have to remember that Roman property owning Stoics were generally of the opinion that their perceived order, beauty and perfection of the universe, as well as the occasional actual appearance of the Gods in history suggested that the Gods were Real. Meanwhile back in what remained of Athens, Plato's Perfect Year had taken itself into the assumption that because the universe returned to an equilibrium before embarking on the next Perfect Year the movement and placement of the stars at any one time could be used to predict the future, or what would happened next.

    "What is the point of time."

    Good one. Don't let anyone try to tell you they know what time is. My own position is as unsound as anyone else's. It divides in a more than pompous ass manner somewhere between the disagreement the self important Saint Augustine of Hippo had with Mânâ Rabba of the Mandaeans about the end times and the General Relativity of post classical physics

   Manichaeism reckoned that when you died if you'd been bad you just disappeared into nothing and good riddance, but if you were good your dust would enter the heavens and for the remainder of time you'd be a star, none of this rising from the dead that so appealed to Saint Augustine.

    Einstein's successors still grapple with time. Of their ideas, spacetime makes time more like a navigation point in space. For General Relativity, outside a closed system there is no time - the universe is a closed system. Quantum Physics, the subatomic, views time as a background parameter which is used to track how quantum states change.

   It does seem to me that much further than Physics our Tech Bros cannot go. And yet maybe the magic boxes that come from them will exact from us people the sort of faith that built pyramids.

The monopoly of the Profit Motive

Footwear

    I was a callow youth back when adult judgement was considered respectable. Those were the days when the claim that a split atom would result in free electric for everyone was gospel, pipe smoking voices would go into the conviction that doctors are more valuable than miners, that the dawn of civilization was the Neolithic and any suggestion that the Soviets were experimenting with a machine that would replace the stenographer was absurd.

    In 1983 the United States Government delivered report called A Nation at Risk which warned of a 'tide of mediocrity.' It asked 'reformers' to look at ways to boost academic performance. In the next seven years it became all about the person, self esteem, and the promotion of 'short, positive statements that students and teachers repeat to build confidence, reduce negative self-talk, and create a supportive learning environment.' Then, around 2004 or there about, My Space, Facebook and the waterfall from hell started prowling around feasting on self esteem to the point were even a cat could tell lies about itself.

    It wasn't the soviets who made the machine that would replace the stenographer it was the tragic monopoly of the profit motive.

In the Beginning was the word. Question for Realism?

Dandelion

     The question of realism in the way we think about stuff is a whole bunch of hoo-ha that preys on the difference between what is inside our mind and outside our mind. Of course there is a difference, damn right that chair is real, the Bear in the forest chops down trees or whatever. And yes we people can make things appear real that aren't real, likewise we can make things unreal that are real. 

    Here, in this paragraph, I'll dwell a while on the fate of my soul before suggesting the answer to the direct and irritating question "Do things exist independent of the mind?" is "Yes and No." All of which fails to ask the central question for Realism which is "What relationships are we exploring when we think?"

   Do we invent in our minds a morality informed by social reasons, or are there moral sentences that actually express propositions which refer to objective physical features of the real world? Are there mind independent aesthetic facts! Is Beauty real. And indeed there is a New Age tint to the ideas which emerged from physics and lean into the understanding that a collapsing wave may put our will in direct connection with a universal real. This quantum level entanglement is not so far away from the cause and effect of Descartes who wondered how a non-physical mind causes a physical body to move.

   The "think therefore I am" emotional dependencies that allow minds to cling to increasingly frail myths, are well exemplified by the arguments advanced by the likes of Victorian Naturalist, Aquarium Designer and Adventist Phillip Henry Gosse, who, as slowly the fossil and geological record suggested the world might have been a little more than 6000 years old and might not have been created in six short days and nights.

   The real of spiritual, it's a Protection Racket.