Peter Godfrey-Smith's Blog, page 3

16. Back On the Pipe

The “Pipeline” dive site in Nelson Bay, Australia, has been central to the underwater dimension of my life for nearly a decade (my first dive there seems to have been in August 2013). The site has recently been battered, however, by two years of hostile weather and other problems. I’d not tried to dive there since December 2020, until a few weeks ago, with some tredidation about what I’d see, I walked down the steps (the steps that open the book Metazoa) once again.

The site is much reduced, n...

105. Cockatoo News

Between April and late August last year (2021), I watched a pair of rose-breasted cockatoos, also known as galahs (rhyming with “alarm”), doing what looked like the preparation of a nest in a tree down behind our house. The first post I did about them is here. It includes a record of combat with other parrots. That post was followed by this one, and another.

Initially they came and went a lot, then appeared to definitively move in, and then suddenly disappeared, some time in late August.

I thin...

104. Unexpected

2022 has been a bad year for diving all over my usual Australian sites so far, with torrential rain, storms, and floods. The water became been so bad that the Weedy Sea Dragons, usually safe at 10 meters or so, have seemed imperiled. And a majestic, by all accounts, but nematocystically challenging swarm of jellyfish hung for weeks around Sydney.

At the end of this dismal period, one day last month I went down to Cabbage Tree Bay, Manly, not to swim but to see some friends. To my surprise, the ...

103. A Post to House my 2021 AAP Keynote About Materialism

In July 2021 I gave a remote keynote lecture at the Australasian Association of Philosophy‘s annual conference.

The talk was called “The Development and Plausibility of Materialism.” It looked at the recent history of materialist (/physicalist) philosophies, from 1950 or so to the present, and spent some time on developments at the University of Sydney. At the end of the talk I move from the history of these ideas to a consideration of why it’s reasonable to believe a view of this kind.

I was an...

102. Food

Linked here is a long essay about food, farming, and vegetarianism. It’s based on talks I gave a few years ago, and on an earlier write-up of those talks (which I also posted here). Both the talks and the essays are a response to a reading of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, and Singer’s argument that if one seriously cares about the moral side of our relationships with animals, one must become a vegetarian (or something very close to one). I’m still thinking about the problem, still continual...

101. Tritonia in Spongeland

Tritonia sp. [carijoa], an as-yet-undescribed species of nudibranch, is an animal I look for, prize sightings of, follow on its voyages, while diving at Nelson Bay.

In an earlier post about the species, I noted that I’d tried to get a good photo of one for the book Metazoa – this is one of few marine animals who figure significantly in the book that I never managed to adequately photograph, before publication. This is partly because they’re so tiny – often around rice-grain scale, occasionally ...

100. Regeneration

It’s been a while now since the Australian fires of 2019-2020. The summers between have been cooler and quieter. This post is a photographic essay, longer than other posts on this site, and the photos are from 2020. They record the immediate aftermath of a fire, and subsequent regeneration, in an area in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

I went up along Hat Hill Road in January, a few weeks after the peak of the destruction. The entire area was covered in grey ash, and hot spots were still sm...

99. Spider Rider

A brief episode, occurring on a tiny scale.

The spider-like animal in the middle of the photo is a blue-knee sea spider. Sea spiders are not exactly spiders, but they are probably moderately close, in evolutionary terms, to land spiders – arachnids. This species is common and the photo above is a pretty poor one, but there’s something to see if one looks closely. Right on top of the spider, as if riding in a saddle, is another animal, wearing (or comprising?) a slender grey tube with three tent...

98. Adieu, Galahs

Not much happens in this post; in fact, it’s about something not happening, or ceasing to happen. For much of this year – from the first days of April through to the end of August – I watched a pair of galahs (rose-breasted cockatoos, Eolophus roseicapilla) working on a nest in a tree hollow quite near our house. I saw, I think, something close to their very first arrival, as galahs don’t usually come through here much, and in those first days they had to engage in a series of quite serious bat...

97. Another Bower

A few weeks ago I was out walking and heard, from some undergrowth, a peculiar sound – a sliding coo – that I’ve learned is one of the calls of a Satin Bowerbird. I stopped, peered in, and saw, for the first time, a bowerbird constructing a bower.

A bower tends to have a pair of gently curved parallel walls, made from twigs and stems of various kinds. The twigs are placed and adjusted carefully, and, I read, a “mixture of chewed vegetable matter and saliva” is used to paint the bower’s walls. (...