Is Consciousness Everywhere? Will that one be on your list? Out of MIT Press. Just asking, not 'axing'. You already know my take on this...

Goff and Godfrey-Smith are gaining traction. The first supports something called panpsychism, the latter, not so much. I am with the latter, although not in his intuition of where consciousness lies. I don't dispute the evolution of consciousness, you see. To get HERE, as humans, there had to be a 'where', from whence all this began. Godfrey-Smith's notion of gradualism is, to my mind, another way of saying natural selection: there is a feather's weight of difference. I contend panpsychism is a hoax. And, now, dualism and materialism are archaic modes of looking at things. We need to move on. Think better. Try harder. Where is consciousness? It is where you find it.
This ,will, no doubt, ruffle feathers. good.

我读的上一本书是安迪·威尔的《万福玛利亚计划》。一名宇航员醒来后发现自己失忆了，他的队友都死了，他想找到人生的目标。这是《火星救援》(the Martian)作者的硬科幻小说，这部小说启发了一部电影，也许未来的火星人就在我们中间。

I am no fan of space. We would do better investing in Earth, our failing ecology, and climate than indulging space fantasy. I like Weir's style, however, and share an interest in science, if not fanaticism. The book is a nice romp through Weir's previous tropes where characters science the crap out of their out of this world problems to enact nail-biting rescues and redemption. Very timely.

这里的哲学问题是同一性和意义。格蕾丝，主角，在最不可能的地方找到了他的目标。他不是詹姆斯·t·柯克，但他的世界和我们的一样岌岌可危。这是一本又好又快的读物。

I'm looking forward to other picks. Happy Summer!

Great show...

One of the sorrows of the pandemic has been the forbidding sacrifice of future snow days to digital learning. Kids are under attack by electronic separation from nature and each other. The pandemic has made this worse.

One of the reader suggestions in the sidebar was already on my bookshelf, but I hadn’t read it until I came across the mention in the sidebar here. I’m nearly through it now if sleep deprived– if I can get some sleep tonight, I will finish it soon. Here is a section from it as a teaser.

我记得我上八年级时，有一个特殊的下雪天，那是一个人进入童年和成年的分水岭。一夜之间下了将近一英尺的雪，接着是狂风和刺骨的寒冷。早晨，世界一片寂静，明亮得令人眩目。我儿时的伙伴现在都是十几岁的少年，他们对睡觉比雪更感兴趣，但我无法抗拒一个改变了的世界的前景。我裹上羽绒和羊毛，走了出去。我感到肺里的空气很刺鼻。树木发出嘎吱嘎吱的声音，发出一种奇特的呻吟声，表示寒冷刺骨。我吃力地走下山坡，朝我们房子下面的小溪走去，发现树枝上有一点红色:一只雄性红衣主教蜷缩在没有热气的阳光下。我朝那棵树走去，令我吃惊的是，那只鸟似乎没有听到我说话。我继续靠近它，然后又厌恶又着迷地意识到，它已经被固定在它生命的栖木上了，就像自然历史博物馆里的一个玻璃眼标本。 It was as if time had stopped in the woods, allowing me to see things that were normally a blur of motion.

Back inside that afternoon, savoring the gift of unallocated time, I heaved our big world atlas off the shelf and lay sprawled on the floor with it. I’ve always been drawn to maps; good ones are labyrinthine texts that reveal hidden histories. On this day, I happened to open the atlas to a two-page chart showing the boundaries of time zones around the globe—the kind with clocks running across the top, showing the relative hour in Chicago, Cairo, Bangkok. The pastel colors on the map ran in mostly longitudinal stripes except for some elaborate gerrymanders like China (all one time zone) and a few outliers, including Newfoundland, Nepal, and central Australia, where the clocks are set ahead or back relative to Greenwich Mean Time by some odd noninteger amount. There were also a few places—Antarctica, Outer Mongolia, and an Arctic archipelago called Svalbard—that were colored gray, which, according to the map legend, signified “No Official Time.” I was captivated by the idea of places that had resisted being shackled by measures of time—no minutes or hours, wholly exempt from the tyranny of a schedule. Was time there frozen like the cardinal on the branch? Or simply flowing, unmetered and unfettered, according to a wilder natural rhythm?

多年后，出于巧合或宿命，我终于在斯瓦尔巴群岛完成了地质学博士学位的实地考察。我发现，在某些方面，它确实是一个超越时间或超越时间的地方。冰河时代还没有放松它的控制。不同时代的人类历史遗迹——17世纪鲸脂肪制作师丢弃的鲸骨，叶卡捷琳娜大帝时期俄罗斯猎人的坟墓，德国空军一架轰炸机被撕裂的机身——散落在大片贫瘠的苔原上，仿佛是一场精心策划的展览。我还了解到，斯瓦尔巴群岛“没有官方时间”的说法实际上是由于俄罗斯人和挪威人之间一场琐碎而长期的争论，争论的问题是在那里遵守莫斯科时间还是奥斯陆时间。但在很久以前的那个下雪天，我暂时从日常生活中解放出来，处于成年的边缘，但仍舒适地呆在父母的房子里，我瞥见了一种可能性，在那里，时间是不确定的，没有变化的——在那里，人们甚至可以以同样的自由穿梭于过去和现在之间。我隐约预感到未来的变化和损失，希望那完美的一天能成为我永久的家，我可以冒险离开，但总能发现一切都没有改变。这是与时间复杂关系的开始。

Prologue – Timefulness - Marcia Bjornerud

I’m not sure who suggested that, but I am glad they did. Thanks for the pointer. So many books on my shelf would go completely unread if I didn’t have an occasional poke. Reading through the night is one of my favorite summer pastimes. All I need is a worthy book like this to do it.

If no one else will go… I will offer one more in light of the rebroadcast and final week of Summer 2021.

To read is to have been taught. To write is to have learned. A second language is a gift to the student and to the second culture who teaches. No computer will ever be able to decipher language without instruction. No human can figure out their own lives without a bit of nourishment, encouragement, and freedom. This is a story about a boy who attempts to figure out his life from an unlikely start. Fortunately for us, it is in America that he writes.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong

Many paragraphs are koanish. Each word is a knife to spread preserves on the brain and to cut misconceptions from your conscious.

Where does identity, sexuality, and liberty spring? Vuong contemplates these philosophical questions in near-contemporary time with his first novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The book is divided into three unnamed parts that could be summarized as life, love, and loss.

There is violent and sexual content in this book that is not for everyone. It was a challenging read for me and one I would not do twice without the need or good cause.

Recently I read Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex in preparation for a Philoso?hy Talk show that has since been canceled. There is much to learn from Ocean's book regarding the issues fleshed out in Srinivasan's work regarding the politics of desire. Novels are perhaps the best for this subject matter as very little scientific information is available.

You could cut up each page of Ocean's book into paragraphs, paste them on your wall and throw a dart to hit on some pithy thought. The first chapter reads as concatenated poetry. This book makes you think.

与斯里尼瓦桑的观点相反，Vuong的性经验几乎没有共通之处。海洋在这幅画上画了大量的图画，帮助读者接受这些问题，并质疑你的先入之见，如果没有其他的话。

I found this book on the top shelf parents section in a children's bookstore while a friend shopped for gifts. It is about a boy. It is for grown-ups only. Learning comes from unexpected places every time, even within our own lives and brains.

这是一本极好的具有挑战性的读物。除了过去和现在，兰、罗丝或麦的生活还会变成什么样子?罗申的下一本书会写些什么呢?希望这位伟大的诗人和小说家有更大的牧场。