SAL RESTIVO'S BLOG: THE SOCIOLOGICAL COGITO

  BIG BRAINS GO BUST: HOW EXISTENCE MAKES SMART PEOPLE DUMB   The ultimate question, philosophers tell us, can be posed in two ways: Why is there anything at all? Why is there “something” rather than “nothing?”   Apparently some people think that if you string a bunch of words together and put a question mark at the end you have constructed a question. Not so fast. Here is a good example of why thinking should have stop signs. Already deluded by Mormonism, Jim Holt drives his delusion further by tackling a non-question. Something can come out of nothing in a specific quantum mechanical sense, but sometimes - notably in human discourse - nothing can come out of nothing. I don't mean to be rude, but surely you're joking Mr. Holt, and Mr. TED!!   https://lnkd.in/gpyn2Hb8 Don’t let it be said that those know-it-all physicists could ever turn their backs on the Big Questions of life, the universe, and everything.   So of course they have answers...

  Over the course of my career I've come up with a number of innovative concepts.  For example, I identified two phobias: subanimaphobia is the fear that there is a life after death.  Subsubanimaphobia is the fear that there is a life after death and it's just like the life you're living now forever.   The Recurrence Theorem helps explain the ease or difficulty we experience when traveling from one place to another locally, regionally, or internationally.  Each arena of behavior has a recurrence index which tells how similar or different it is from other arenas.  Basically, we are able to go from room to room, home to street, school, or work, and travel locally, regionally, and internationally because the structures we encounter tend to be roughly at least identifiable, accessible, and not obstructions to our actions.   Buildings, entrances and exits (doors), windows, stairs, escalators, elevators, stores, hospitals, public transportation, st...

       New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks and University of Chicago graduate (BA) has written a great deal in the public arena and now has revealed his spiritual evolution from agnostic to man of faith.   Faith came to him, he writes, through “numinous experience...moments of awe and wonder...”   He writes about moments of transcendence at the foot of a New England mountain and at Chartres Cathedredal in France.   I have stood at the foot of a mountain in New England, and in fact lived on a mountain in Vermont; and I’ve visited and written about the cathedral at Chartres.   I can imagine what Brooks must have felt at these times, but being as I am anchored to the earth I cannot be driven to awe and wonder as numinous experiences.   They did not open up vast mysteries for me as they did for Brooks.   He explains this in terms of “the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something j...

  I have called many times for an index of GDDP (Gross Domestic Disproduct) to measure the human and natural wastes that accompany the production of goods and services measured by Gross Domestic Product.   This could help offset the fact that we go stumbling along producing goods and services with no thought to the limits of natural resources. Remembering Jimmy Carter, we remember how he urged Americans to limit individual power consumption: “TURN OFF LIGHTS,” he said.   This is an example of what I call the law of marginal futulity.   Suppose we do turn off ights in our individual homes; who is going to turn off the lights in Las Vegas?   Who is even going to imagine that the lights of Las Vegas are the tip of the ice berg of our problem with assigning values and costs to using resources? Jimmy Carter’s Complicated Environmental Legacy, By Nitish Pahwa https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/12/jimmy-carter-death-environmental-legacy-cli...

  My friend Jo Boaler at Stanford posted this on LinkedIn:I have always appreciated the reporting of the Guardian newspaper in the UK. This is their analysis of recent events.I am writing to you on an ominous day for America, and for the world.Last night, in his victory speech, Donald Trump called the free press "the enemy camp". Intimidating words. But we believe that, as journalists, we can't afford to be intimidated. We have a duty to tell the truth about the man the United States has just elected as president - a man who tried to overturn a democratic election the last time he was in office, whose supreme court appointees gutted women's reproductive rights, who calls climate change a hoax, who falsely claims mass deportations will solve our economic problems, who threatens jail for his political opponents, who lies reflexively and shamelessly, and whose second administration imperils our democracy, freedoms and planet.I replied:I experienced the ...

I write this just weeks away from my 84th birthday. I don’t know that I’m more aware of my coming departure from this so-called life than I was when I was ten. I was surely aware of my ultimate fate before that. My grandmother had died when I was 8, and I have a vague recollection of learning that one of my schoolmates at about that time had been struck by lightning and killed. But I was ten when my mother found me curled up in a fetal position in the bed she shared with my father crying. She asked me what was wrong and I said “I don’t want to die.” My mother’s response was curious on reflection. She was essentiallly uneducated, an immigrant from southern Italy, and an untutored Roman Catholic who had populated our Brooklyn apartment with pictures and statues of saints and had hung crosses on the walls. Thinking back, I would have thought that she would have comforted me by pointing out that when I died I would go to heaven where I would live forever with all of my family and ...