End of year thoughts!

Another unit of life comes to an end - but is it an end? We think in terms of years that are eeked out by the movement of our lonely cosmic planet about our equally lonely sun.

These revolutions of our homely orb are marked by seasonal changes in weather that remind us of time passing.

After a cold December, the thaw has set in and the wet winds of winter return. Life, at its nadir, struggles to survive. The birds, of all kinds, seek out food to keep alive. All, who can, hibernate.

I often think that the word 'hibernate' and 'Hibernia', the latin name for our isle, are two of a kind. In Hibernia, in winter, we struggle to survive, and given a chance, we would all seek a place to sleep away the odious winter.

The wind howls and the rain beats against the windows. The days are darkly short and cold. The colour grey persists.

The return

The follow up philosophical work of fiction to 'The Island' (www.desgreene.com) is called 'The Return' and is partially complete.

In it I have developed further my ideas on the role and influence of modern science on the state of philosophy as it is today and its importance to our everyday lives.

I hope to have it available for download in the new year.

We are not alone - death of solopsism?

The recent discoveries of other earth-like planets in our galaxy have made the likelihood of finding other life more than probable.

The paradigm has truly shifted.

What does this mean for humanity?

How will this shape the course of human history?

These are questions I hope to treat in the sequel to 'The Island' called 'The Return'.

There is an exciting philosophical landscape waiting to be explored with the aid of this new paradigm.

Virtual Particles

The curious concept of particle physics and quantum field theory, virtual entities, are the briefest temporal existences in the cosmos. Other aspects of existence trump them in being briefer but alas are not separate existences in themselves. The frequency of a virtual photon is of necessity such as to provide a period inferior to that of the photon itself but is only an aspect of that virtual photon.

This raises the concept of a negative infinity or the idea of an absolute zero. Heisenberg rules out such absolutes in terms of the Uncertainty Principle. The absolute vacuum of quantum theory far from being empty is awash with virtual entities with vanishingly small temporal existences. The negative infinity reveals an infinite world of the infinitesimal.

What does this new world view portend for the philosophical outlook of humanity. Should our innate fear of nothingness be replaced by the warmth of the never ending virtual sea of the vacuum?

These virtual worlds are realms only recently revealed to us via the great scientific endeavours culminating in the current Large Hadron Collider project at CERN. Philosophy has new doors being opened for it by science. Only a few intrepid explorers have ventured to enter this brave new world.

Escher's Stairs

I always thought that this was an original Escher creation but was amazed to find that it was in fact the father of Roger Penrose (Road to Reality) who was the original creator;

Goodreads Debate

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/350886-philosophy-of-science?order=d&page=1

Try this link for a good debate on the philosophy of science.

String Theory

String theory in its many formulations has yet to make predictions about reality. It not alone posits a greater than four dimensional spacetime but sees our actual living spacetime as only one of almost countless possibilities - all of which exist.

For the last twenty or so years, the best minds in theoretical physics have dedicated their whole energies to developing the many string theories that have emerged.

The increasingly bizarre paradigms of their world have not been critiqued by the world of philosophy. Why has this been the case given the revolutionary hypotheses being set before us?

That string theory may turn out to be a theoretical wrong turning for physics should not make philosophers happy in their passivity.

Pascal's Pensees

On holiday took the opportunity to peruse Pascal's Pensees and found there a total antipathy to science as a route to truth - this from one of the great mathematical minds!

I was disappointed yet felt that there was genuine depth to the revelatory metaphysics of this great man. In ways he was enlightened before his time and many of his ideas sit well alongside modern quantum theory - this is surely by chance since the science of the day was more mechanically deterministic. However it shows that his thinking went deeper than the level of his mathematics.

Who is the modern day Pascal?

New book of poetry

Download free from http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13583

Elegy to Mac

Lest we forget!

The Island - proving most popular download!

It's great to see a more obscure and difficult work like 'The Island' being the most popular download for 'Read an eBook Week'.

I hope those who can struggle through its depths will be amply rewarded.

There is so much out there for us all...

Read an eBook week

From March 7th to 13th it is 'Read an eBook Week'

My ebooks on www.smashwords.com/profile/view/desgreene will be free!!!! for the week.

Enjoy!

New Philosophical Novel

"The Island" is my latest novel dealing with my interest in the linkage of philosophy and modern science - mainly quantum theory.

It is available on www.amazon.com and I'd welcome any reviews or comments whatever!

Cogito, ergo sum!

The modern equivalent might be "I blog, therefore I am virtual." Virtual reality has displaced objective reality for millions of lonely souls (souls in the greater non-religious sense).
The virtual presence will long outlive the physical objective presence. There is no virtual death - just a long stasis of presence that is unchanging but still there to those who happen upon it.
Perhaps we need a type of virtual death (or for those who want to ape reality even more closely, virtual suicide or even virtual murder).
The virtual world is still in its infancy and the thought of death seems so far off.

UFO

2 am left the Bulman bar and walked up the road from Summercove to Kinsale. It was a clear moonlit night and the air temperature was below zero but the air was completely still on this the first few hours of 2010.
After walking for some minutes I noticed something in the sky and looked up. What I saw was beyond belief. A bright orange globule shape was moving at a fast constant velocity across the sky. It was oval in shape and was about a third of the size of the moon. It made no noise but moved across the sky at a constant height and as it passed away in the distance after maybe three or four seconds it became a small star like white speck and then disappeared.
My wife who was with me saw it all too. As it almost disappeared I gestured to a passing couple to look and they too saw the speck.
I spent some time today checking the internet to see if there were any other reports of strange sightings but there were none.
I am one of the most skeptical of people and am not one to embrace the non-normal but this was weird in the extreme.
The UFO sites on the internet are mainly of dubious quality or just plain loony and not for a moment would I want to be associated with such stuff. Yet the experience forces me to report same in some form and to try and understand the source or origin of the object.
A possible explanation could be a meteorite entering the atmosphere at a very low angle of approach causing it to heat up and glow. The fact that it didn't descend to the horizon and turned white as it got smaller may mean that it passed through our atmosphere and escaped again to space - a near miss event??
I am still trying to seek explanations.