I was traveling last week but the yield of photographs was low due to
both weather and the level of daytime activity. The only time I had
avaialble with some interesting visual material was the train ride from
Regensburg Germany back to the Frankfurt airport. It had snowed a wet
snow the night before in Bavaria, so I spent some time capturing images
from the train windows. Nothing great due to conditions, but some
material nevertheless.
In an airport (San Francisco perhaps?) I bought Robert Laughlin’s “A
Different Universe: Reinventing physics from the bottom down”. In it,
Laughlin argues very convincingly on how central emergent phenonmena are
to physics and our difficulties in understanding fundamental aspects of
our world. Since I see emergence as fundamental to explaining the
mind-body duality and free will in a deterministic world, I really
appreciated it. It spurred me on, indirectly I guess, to Read Matthew
Stewarts’s “The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate
of G-d in the modern world”. I’m now most of the way through Stephen
Toulmin’s “Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity”.
I’m having fun in mashing up these two streams: Emergence and
Spinoza/Leibniz. I may revisit my Tinderbox website on some of the
issues in the next few weeks or, alternatively, mix some philosophy back
into the mix here.
