Along these lines, Judy, did you read The New Yorker article about the two philosophers whose careers have focused on the mind-body problem?
"Two Heads: a marriage devoted to the mind- body problem," by Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, February 12, 2007. I tried googling it, but apparently it was not included among the articles The New Yorker publishes online. I could find blog entries and the first 1,000 words, but not the entire article. To be honest, I could not follow most of the discussion. From what I could understand, there's some overlap between it and the issues below. --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Really, really good article in today's NY Times > magazine on current cosmological theory, just > beautifully written. Excerpt: > > ...Since the invention of the telescope four centuries ago, > astronomers have been able to figure out the workings of the universe > simply by observing the heavens and applying some math, and vice > versa. Take the discovery of moons, planets, stars and galaxies, > apply Newton's laws and you have a universe that runs like clockwork. > Take Einstein's modifications of Newton, apply the discovery of an > expanding universe and you get the big bang. "It's a ridiculously > simple, intentionally cartoonish picture," [cosmologist Saul] > Perlmutter said. "We're just incredibly lucky that that first try has > matched so well." > > But is our luck about to run out? [Nobel physicist George] Smoot's > and Perlmutter's work is part of a revolution that has forced their > colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever > known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we > have always assumed it to be the material that makes up you and me > and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in > all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest 96 percent of the > universe is ... who knows? > > "Dark," cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the > ultimate semantic surrender. This is not "dark" as in distant or > invisible. This is "dark" as in unknown for now, and possibly forever. > > If so, such a development would presumably not be without > philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. > Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as "the ultimate > Copernican revolution": not only are we not at the center of > anything; we're not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest > of everything. "We're just a bit of pollution," Lawrence M. Krauss, a > theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel > on cosmology in Chicago. "If you got rid of us, and all the stars and > all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and > everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We're > completely irrelevant." > > All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. > But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been > that at least now we would have a deeper simpler understanding of > the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. > But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new > knowledge then? It's a question cosmologists have been asking > themselves lately, and it might well be a question we'll all be > asking ourselves soon, because if they're right, then the time has > come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the > night sky, we're seeing the universe. > > Not so. Not even close.... > > > > http://tinyurl.com/3bdbd5 >
