Geez, what if MTG sees this?
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Havenât read this yet.
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From DECEMBER 2002. So Iâm guessing that this was not a revolution in Ripperology.
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My favorite in Ripperology is They All Love Jack, mostly for how Robinson tears into the cops. His candidate for the Ripper was a priggish popular music hall composer, Michael Maybrick, brother to another famous candidate, James Maybrick, whose wife Florence Maybrick was convicted of poisoning with arsenic.
Like all of Ripperology itâs difficult to hold up Robinsonâs book as definitive, but itâs a hell of a great read, and Robinsonâs contentions are lurid and comprehensive. James Maybrick had apparently been addicted to various mind-altering poisons for years, Michael led the charge to have Florence railroaded for Jamesâ death, everyone involved (including all the higher-ups at Scotland Yard) was a Mason, and Michael Maybrick may have been a kind of early telecommunications hacker-wizard.
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Yeah, featured for Halloween.
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But not just any ichthyosaur was lost. The three-foot-long âfish lizardâ was the first complete fossil of the animal ever collected, and it was most likely discovered by Mary Anning, a trailblazing English paleontologist.
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I swear, before I read this, I did not know the origin of the gemstone jet. I really only started reading it because itâs written by Bob Colacello, who worked with Andy Warhol.
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Hrm⌠It is amazing how frequently spiritualists will use the laymanâs half-remembered understanding of quantum physics to give mysticism a veneer of science.
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From the Wikipedia article about animism, which I read before I read & posted the above:
Other usage[edit]
Science[edit]
In the early 20th century, William McDougall defended a form of animism in his book Body and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism (1911).
Physicist Nick Herbert has argued for âquantum animismâ in which the mind permeates the world at every level:
The quantum consciousness assumption, which amounts to a kind of âquantum animismâ likewise asserts that consciousness is an integral part of the physical world, not an emergent property of special biological or computational systems. Since everything in the world is on some level a quantum system, this assumption requires that everything be conscious on that level. If the world is truly quantum animated, then there is an immense amount of invisible inner experience going on all around us that is presently inaccessible to humans, because our own inner lives are imprisoned inside a small quantum system, isolated deep in the meat of an animal brain.[109]
Werner Krieglstein wrote regarding his quantum Animism:
Herbertâs quantum Animism differs from traditional Animism in that it avoids assuming a dualistic model of mind and matter. Traditional dualism assumes that some kind of spirit inhabits a body and makes it move, a ghost in the machine. Herbertâs quantum Animism presents the idea that every natural system has an inner life, a conscious center, from which it directs and observes its action.[110]
In Error and Loss: A Licence to Enchantment,[111] Ashley Curtis (2018) has argued that the Cartesian idea of an experiencing subject facing off with an inert physical world is incoherent at its very foundation and that this incoherence is predicted rather than belied by Darwinism. Human reason (and its rigorous extension in the natural sciences) fits an evolutionary niche just as echolocation does for bats and infrared vision does for pit vipers, and isâaccording to western scienceâs own dictatesâepistemologically on par with, rather than superior to, such capabilities. The meaning or aliveness of the âobjectsâ we encounterârocks, trees, rivers, other animalsâthus depends its validity not on a detached cognitive judgment, but purely on the quality of our experience. The animist experience, and the wolfâs or ravenâs experience, thus become licensed as equally valid worldviews to the modern western scientific one; they are more valid, since they are not plagued with the incoherence that inevitably crops up[colloquialism] when âobjective existenceâ is separated from âsubjective experience.â
These are the types of info-silos I get caught in. Earlier today, it was members of the Lost Generation in Paris, after - for SOME reason I donât remember, I looked up âTropic of Cancerâ by Henry MillerâŚand it escalated from there.
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I havenât dug into this, but it really feels like begging the question⌠it assumes quantum effects require a consciousness to happen, and from there it concludes that consciousness must be everywhere and in everything. Adding the idea that consciousness itself is due to conscious effects seems a bit paradoxical.
But before wandering down those paths, it might make sense to try to find ways to test whether a conscious observer is required? The dual-slit experiment and related experiments, for an easy example, seem to come to the same result whether a person is viewing it while it is run or not⌠and even if that result isnât determined until a person views it, it always (so far as Iâm aware) comes out the same no matter how many times itâs run or who views the result. Why, then, should we assume that conscious observation is not only required to create the result, but even has an active influence on the result?
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But of course the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound, whether thereâs any human around to hear it or not; of course, any other life thatâs in the forest will hear and feel the vibrations it makes when it hits the ground.
Am I close?
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I suppose the better question would be, if two asteroids collide in orbit, does it create vibrations in the tenuous gas clouds surrounding them?
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Whatâs the distance between atoms, compared to the wavelength of the sound? If the former is bigger that the latter, I donât see how the vibrations could propagate.
OTOH, the collision will cause ripples in spacetime, but I donât think LIGO is sensitive enough to detect it.
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