Michael Flynn's Blog, page 24

Good Friday

This aye night.


And so whose fault was it?  According to the Council of Trent, yours and mine:
"Reasons Why Christ Suffered""Furthermore men of all ranks and conditions were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. Gentiles and Jews were the advisers, the authors, the ministers of his passion: Judas betrayed him, Peter denied him, all the rest deserted him. ... In this guilt are involved all those who fall frequently into sin; for, as our sins consigned Christ the Lord to the death of the cross, most certainly those who wallow in sin and iniquity crucify to themselves again the Son of God, as far as in them lies, and make a mockery of him. This guilt seems more enormous in us than in the ancient Jews, since according to the testimony of the same Apostle: if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; while we, on the contrary, professing to know him, yet denying him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on him.”
-- Catechism of the Council of Trent, XVI cent.

Getting Sheepish Over Something Fishy

Stranger Things, Horatio

In the Stone House

A sneak peek at a work in progress: "The Journeyman: In the Stone House," which features the continuing adventures of Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironarm, begun in "The Journeyman: On the Shortgrass Prairie" and which culminated in the novel Up Jim River.

I'm taking a palette-cleansing break from The Shipwrecks of Time and have recently been in communications over a possible collaboration.  More on the latter if and when.
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What's the Matter With Matter

diueduedueA reader at the Auld Blogge on LiveJournal who goes by the caligosian name haunterofmists has engaged in an extended conversation on form, spinning off the orthodox reaction to Nagel's Darwinian heresy, the gist of his questions, like the fogs he haunts, appeared inchoate. Suspecting that the disagreement -- if there even was one -- was due to terminological slippage over the centuries, TOF will here endeavor to lay out as best he can his understanding of the nature of natures.

The first thing to note is that "natural" has taken on a fuzzier meaning in the Late Modern ages, encompassing something like "it happens due to physical causes."  The Late or Post Modern thus is unable to grasp why a baseball thrown by a pitcher exhibits unnatural motion while one falling off a shelf exhibits purely natural motion.  It has to do with "natures" as opposed to Nature.Read more » Follow the link and Leave all comments at The TOFSpot.

On the TOFSpot

Enough Irony to Stuff the Mills of Pittsburgh

The Meaninglessness of Matter

Sometimes people are so wed to their beliefs that they cannot even read what others say to the contrary.  Consider this comment made by someone called Jeffrey Shallit (Recursivity) on a snippet by Ed Feser. Shallit bills himself as a "professor," but does not say what he professes.  However, his blog is headlined "Recurrent thoughts about mathematics, science, politics, music, religion, and..."  Few enough are those posting on mathematics who are not themselves mathematicians, so we will suppose that to be the case here.

Now the Feser passage on which he preaches is:

"Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes."

which he found quoted on an Intelligent Design website. His incisive critique ran as follows:

Only a creationist could be so utterly moronic. While Feser and his friends are declaring it impossible, real neuroscientists and neurophilosophers are busy figuring it out.

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Tabclearingday

Quote of the DayWithin the educational system, the nature of little boys is met with an urgency, severity and unrelenting violence that rivals any hagiographical story of a desert monk chastising his nature with penance and prayer.  If the educational system attacked concupiscence and the sense appetites with the same intensity that they presently attack masculine irascibility, aggression, and lack of ability to sit still and pay attention, then within five years we would have ten million six year old boys living in the wilderness on the top of fifty foot poles.
-- James Chastek, The American StudentScience Kicks the Creationist DogRead more »

The Wreck of The River of Stars

Tor has brought out a trade paperback edition of The Wreck of The River of Stars. This was the critical and literary success that disappeared in the sales figures.  It is not everybody's cup of tea.  Some have been disappointed it was not an action-adventure or that it was too literary, had too much characterization.  Others found the omniscient narrator, rare within the SF genre, hard to follow.  But others rather liked it.  Not enough others, but still.  You now have another chance.

The book is also available as an Audible audiobook and as a Kindle.  Also on Barnes&Noble in book and nook.

Some reviewer comments:

"Flynn's fully realized characters, easy mastery of technical detail, and meticulous, consequential style perfectly matches the theme of this long, dense, spellbinding, brilliant work."
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Read more »

Peggy Lettermore

and I defy anyone to disagree.

Three New Posts

A Darwinist Mob?




Hitting the Nagel on the head

The New Republic, a magazine evidently inspired by an H.G.Wells essay of the same name, has published an essay entitled "A Darwinist Mob Goes After a Serious Philosopher," by Leon Wieseltier.  Immediately (you guessed it) a Darwinist mob went after him in the comment section.    All the while blinking incredulously saying What Darwinist mob?  We don't see no Darwinist mob!  Nobody here but us chickens.

What most of the commenklatura seemed to miss was that Wieseltier's essay did not concern itself with whether Darwinism per se is true or false - the answer is clearly 'yes' - but with the crypto-religious reaction of the Darwinistas to the whiff of heresy sniffed out from Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos. Now Nagel is one of the top philosophers of consciousness in the modern world and he is adamantly opposed to religion.  It is not that he thinks the existence of God is wrong, but that he hates and fears the whole idea that God exists.  This would seem to put him on the side of the angels (in a manner of speaking) insofar as readers of TNR are concerned.Read more »6. The Faint Smile of Gustav SorgenssonJumping ahead of the Fierce Combat of Ogier the Dane, Schultzi the Beast and the odd bonding of Wilma and Carole, as well as sundry other bits and pieces adding foreboding for conditions in Milwaukee, we rejoin Frank as he visits Sorgensson in Aachen.  We have skipped over a precis of his journey down the Rhine, an encounter in Karlsruhe with an American student there, and his discovery of a letter by the Bardi factor he finds in the Landesarchiv which hints at what the Peruzzi Manuscript was all about.  He is now meeting Sorgensson.
     Gustaf Sorgensson was a big man across the shoulders, who wore his hair clipped short in a manner fast passing out of style.  His hands were big and when he clenched them knuckles stood out like boulders from the earth.  A short, boxed beard covered, without quite concealing, an old scar.  His most marked feature, however, was his eye patch.  The scar ran up across his cheek and under the patch. 

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This applies especially to your lower back