Will Haiti Be President Obama's Katrina or An Effective Relief Intervention?

Some have complained of a lethargic emergency services response to the terrible Earthquake in Haiti. The response time-content parameters indicated the need for a U.N. Emergency response team something like the 82nd airborne without the military power.  President Obama might have sent quicker emergency response forces such as airborne marines to distribute water bottles, bandages, splints and food if there was a stock of such materials strategically placed around the world.

The President did send 3500 soldiers and 2200 marines along with 300 medical personnel, yet is that enough? It is a pain laying around with broken bones or ruptured organs in trauma for a day or two much less more. This most recent incident should stimulate a better, faster pragmatic instant relief for large disaster force scalable up to a half million victims.

Reading a national geographic article on the evolution and distribution of placental mammals from Gondwanaland to other plate tectonic permutations over the eons it occurs to me that human beings ought to do a little better as primates to respond to global emergencies. I think the evolution of Armageddon on Earth will largely be a human actualization of the will of Satan voluntarily as faithless beings striving and competitive grooming champions better so than opponents. Yet the Brave New World of a Huxleyan-Orwellian Universe shall be with us as humanity practices high entropy economics without concern for a rational conservation of non-renewable resources.

As a first responder President Obama should do better than the Chinese to deliver first aid in quantity to such stricken people. In the long run they need instruction in how to build steel tube geodesic domes with foam insulation that are cheap and able to survive earthquakes. They could also use wind and solar panels yet the world economy is just based on disposability and consumerism and such economic areas of poverty shall be with us for quite a time--what have the Haitians to sell, and how can they overcome their history as the successful Nat Turner revolt fact that freed themselves from Napoleonic rule?

Haiti's long run political problems may have little real hope embedded in the United States, for the economy is based on profit, and for the time being Cuba is the best morsel awaiting development in the non-renewable consumerist economic context ruining America today. The United States is outsourcing it's independence to global elite ownership. Perhaps at least an adequate global civil disaster airlift capability can be formed to bring relief to 50,000 people overnight if necessary. That is quite a challenging task.

An Ecological Economic Topic

Ecological economics is an actual scholastic field of economics that has developed in recent years. It might be considered an existential approach, or an empirical one. Anything that a government does without using its parameters regarding conservation will be less than effective. That is, the remedies might exacerbate the problem.

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Growt...47090/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c

Ecological economics is the best theoretical approach to conserving and utilizing mass and bio-mass. It is necessary to change the value-theory foundations of economics as well. It would be possible to have a better quality of life for all of humanity perhaps while actually decreasing resource use through an increase in efficiency and knowledge about and coordination of global resources. If the end is not to simply make profit from phenomenal resources, but to conserve resources and get as much as possible from renewable resources that is a value that the people of a democracy must apply themselves.

Statistics have been compiled to show that women reduce family size with an increased standard of living after a generation or two, yet in the future an enhanced standard of living will requires an ecological economic approach rather than simply increasing through-put of non-renewable resources. The issue is not just a dialectic between accelerating resource us and consumerism to raise standards of living and subsequent deceleration of population growth to reduce resource over-use.

A government agency needs to be formed to help with the transition to a vast menu of ecologically more efficient methods of resource use. Government ignorance cannot solve the problem, and the present world governments are mostly signed off on corporatism and consumerism without rhyme or reason except profit regardless of environmental cost or the externalities of human quality of life...

That's why I mention the textbook 'Ecological Economics' by Daly and Farley occasionally. People generally don't understand what it is, or how it's parameters are requisite for living on Earth well in the future.

http://www.amazon.com/Ecological-E...-Herman-Daly/dp/1559633123

Population dynamics, resource quantification and so forth are what the discipline of Ecological economics is concerned with.

The logic of population reduction or control within existing economic methods lets us extrapolate that the remaining capitalists, if the population dropped to two billion souls, would simply increase their own consumption and standard of living 400% and more. Increasing living standards without ecological economic reason will tend to deplete resources that are finite.

A stable population, a rectified economic value theory that seeks for the most effective methods of increasing life standards without harm to the ecosystem is unlikely to develop with a government bound up in Wal-Mart and Macy's shopping theory. The effort to address the facts is what the U.S. Government is unwilling to try--at least so far, in its economic theory and practice.

I read recently that scientist have found that primates aren't especially socially bright. observations of primates have found that those that believe they would lose a fight tend to groom the proto-champ chimps. That may be why pro sports is regarded so highly rather than amateur participation sports. The entire social approach to economics as a kind of super-bowl with better goodies for the champier chimps better than those for the rest who do the grooming isn't concerned with optimalization of resource use, or the pervasive increase of intelligence as a value.

Philosophically, scientific facts about the total state of eco-resources are known to be absent from economic planning except as concerns particular resources such as oil. There is no invisible hand able to substitute for an invisible brain in capitalism such that the world's resources would be used most efficiently and for the highest human value within capital markets without government set parameters.

It would be a good thing if science could simply advance such intelligence that humanity would not need to design its life on Earth a little better. Perhaps energy from extra dimensions can be found--who can say that string theories extra dimensions have the same temperature as that of this cold Universe, or even that they run on the same time scale? Because science so far has simply provided data that is applied sprawling all akimbo in the economic and empirical realms if at all, an agency should be formed to empirically regard actual environmental resources with the goal of using them without losing them. It is a challenging and necessary task to avoid the gloom of doom.

Existing economic methods apply post hoc controls in reaction to damage. A priori optimal use of existing resources that doesn't lose them through use is demanded as a response to the resource challenge. It is the lack of philosophical thought about value theory, and failure to regard the well being of others with as much importance as our own that the economic structure fails to support human general advance in an effective empirically cognizant time paradigm.

The Ecological Economist Magazine

The economist is a ubiquitous British publication with a significant pro-globalist position. I regard that as neither good for the global environment or the economics of the United States.It would be good if an Ecological Economics on-line publication issued to make alternative ecological economic knowledge of a more theoretical and applied side available on contemporary issues. The number of topics to write on is nearly limitless.

With the same old economics paradigm dominating American attention it is consistent that the same global corporatist policies swamp the capital with bad ideas.

Potentiality and Actuality

This neo-Aristotelian paradigm of potentiality and actuality seems an example of what Russell named 'categorical errors'. Scholastic method has faded away a bit to be supplanted with analytic philosophy enough that it is reasonable to use W.V.O. Quine's ontological relativity as a way of recognizing that many of our questions pertain to our cognitive constructions rather than to things-in-themselves.

The lexical ontology wherein potential and actuality exist are word-referents corresponding to human use. There are some things in the 'empirical' experience with more reinforcement of object referent terminology than others. It is not a Platonic form that we are searching for in trying to define actuality or potential philosophically. It is not reasonable to suppose that actuality or potentiality necessarily exist outside of a word-game paradigm.

That existence is actual is plain enough--one must stipulate an axiom or two. Our effort moves toward an increasing awareness of what actually is as well as what actually 'works'. The effort discover what actually is of course has a simultaneous philosophical course of exploration along with the cognitive effort directed toward the given Universe. If the Universe is actually a ten dimensional hologram instead of physical dimensions there is a potential to discover that. The knowledge of what is true may or may not be known. Our opinion as Socrates pointed out may be true opinion. Our beliefs that our opinions are true may have the same effect on personal epistemology regardless of their veracity. About questions of life and values that are not immediately subject to inference through scientific method it takes some time to learn.

It is possible to move out of the analytic language paradigm whereby we answer questions logically and make the error of assuming that our abstract constructions model the physical realm invariably--logical validity is more a matter of tautaulogy or satisfaction of logical equation than observational report.

In the practical realm such as Pierce sought after the inflation of the Universe had in potential all that would ever become as this Universe so far as we know--there may be unknown extra-dimensional contributions or alteration after, or before all. The infinite nature of space-time in all directions permits knowledge and inference of a finite realm that reaches human cognition through a glass darkly.

While quantum uncertainty exists in order that the freedom of dimensions of temporality and structure may occur--duration of unit quanta of a Universe in variegated intervals inclusive of scale are meaningful for being comprise a simultaneous being and potential.

Instead of a realm of forms with incomplete, broken units and the perfect actualized materially, there is an experience of processes and events with temporal forms. If we want to know with Plato and Plotinus if eternal forms exist that points to The One for us as it did for those philosophers even if we use the non-mystical Hubble to view a deep field of galaxies 13.2 billion years of age some 600 to 800 billion years post inflaton commencement and read ideas of physical theorists regarding the Universe before a fraction of a centimeter bottleneck/near singularity

Pre-Big Bang Universe and Uncertainty--comments

[____]; I thought I would reply as well, having some experience with another paradigm for lint recently. I have less experience with uncertainty theory not being a physicist, yet I like it anyway. 

If light is a wave then a sampling of it at a given place or speed would be just a section of the wave and hence it would have determinist characteristics in relation to how and where the 'snapshot' was made. Quanta in relative motion, rather than arrested in a strong, weak, nuclear or gravity protocol as may other quanta, skip the criterion of determinism a little better, relatively speaking.

Light and other particles have a deeper composition such as quarks, and may exist in extra-dimensions. I think present math theories for strong theory can posit as many as 256 extra dimensions, and so the appearance of mass-energy in various configurations by human observers in this particular Universe may be doubly representational--of our own deterministic scale as physical beings in these dimensions with a certain level of complexity, and from the aspects of extra-dimensional waveforms reduced to appear in these four apparent dimensions. Not all of the discrete quanta comprising a given wave-particle quanta need necessarily manifest in our four dimensions. Present graviton investigations consider such matters.

There is also the issue of dimensions and of there nature. In big bang theory the Higgs Field named for Peter Higgs is a kind of substrate underwriting the order of appearance of the quanta of this universe. The reason I mentioned that is because of the idea of dimensions and there relation to mass-energy before, during and after space-time and it's temporal order of appearance. In some ways I think that David Hume's ideas about causality as simply an association of concurrent or sequential events that isn't necessarily an accurate description of how, what or why things actually observed are--may apply to quantum physics. The quantum protocols work as investigation tools rather than as absolute things-in-themselves.

Yet I strayed off course from commenting about dimensions and there relation to mass energy. Perhaps dimensions might be compared to D.N.A. forms with interesting structure like the human genome, and differ as do the base molecules and proteins forming D.N.A. differ. Quarks as the fundamental quanta in this Universe are even so not the essential construction unit, and dimensional configuration and complexity is neither. The potential for formation of dimensional constructions in a given universe arises perhaps in the perturbative vacuum before the big bang.

If there is a dimensionless perturbative vacuum into which virtual particles appear, there may be dimensionlessness with or without space.

Dimensions may form theoretically akin to the way crystalline structures grow in complexity with more than four dimensions. If the basic endowment of energy has no dimensions, but is something like an omnipotent field of potential reduction into dimensions--its higher order or pre-eminent order may be able to surpass light speed or other protocol relationships of created mass-energy within the given boundary configurations of this created Universe.

That mass-energy may concentrate such as at a singularity, does not imply that there is a minimal reduction in scale. What force would prevent the deconstruction of mass from reducing itself in scale? There are metaphysical points of interests that philosophers can make on borrowed physical paradigms coupled with logic and necessity. The metaphysics regarding the nature of The One that Plotinus wrote about in The Enneads is a useful place to consider a theistic Universe or not. One may posit the nature of The One comprising zero-dimensional, zero scale omnipotence existing before the Big bang in relation to all possible Universes as subsets within then mind of God, or simply logically inquire into the nature of mass-energy existing before the Big Bang with logical transcendence of all contingent physical manifestations by some initial existent quanta of all quanta.

So that was about all I had to write on this topic for now. I suggest reading Maurizio Gasperini's 2008 book 'The Universe Before the Big Bang' for a quality exposition of string ideas in the pre-big bang Universe structure.

U.S. Government Should Add a Department of Ecological Economic Science

The national and global ecosystem is in the midst of the Holocene mass extinction. It is the sixth known mass extinction in planetary history. The U.S. Government does little to reconcile the economy to the salient facts of mass extinction endangering the future viability of human life on the Earth. Also the present economic methods are a net deficit creating phenomenon.

The U.S. Government should create a new federal Department with a cabinet level director that would research and apply ecological economic scientifically rational methods in the United States regarding sustainability, renewability and the elimination of species extinction. Presently politicians are functionally clueless on ecological economic procedures. By the end of this century Edmund Wilson speculated that as many as half of the existing species will be extinct. Human life is part of a complex and interrelated biological web that enables life to exist. The reduction of species also reduces the prospects for human survival, yet I like wild-life just because its a living thing, and thats a good enough reason not to exterminate it.

Sci-American Article on the Mass Extinction and Possble Steps to Arrest It



Science means knowledge and philosophy means love of wisdom--so is it wise to be reticent about promoting a new U.S. Department of Ecological Economics to Avert Mass Extinction?

Ethics, social philosophy, politics and science may be considered disciplines for philosophers to consider, yet if the abstract considerations haven't any relation to the world of applications of theory is the knowledge relevant as philosophy? Mustn’t the love of wisdom be founded upon the ability to understand and address issues in the world more so than in construction of a priori systems of symbols?

It perhaps isn't requisite for a philosophy of science with credibility to have a Lovelockian Gaia world-view paradigm of life.Yet neither is it reasonable to omit life on Earth as a unity that should not be reduced in quality or quantity without a good reason

While politicians and those practicing Darwinian versions of capitalism (It is possible to delimit capitalist criteria such that it serves the people of a democracy as well as capitalists. Capitalism in-itself does not evolve the highest, most intelligent or useful social structure)have insufficient scientific intelligence regarding the state of world ecosystems, the ecosystems continue to be abused and species extirpated. Philosophers of science should add as a fundamental instructional goal the present Earth paradigm of eco-decline and possible remedies. Some have written that the ecosystem is the economy. Others have developed Ecological Economic text books to help teach the basics of an economic policy founded within criteria of habitat and species conservation with a different value theory foundation cognizant of the worth of environmmental services to humanity.

A philosophy of science program that does not include the topic of the value of life would seem to miss the woods for the trees I think. A way that axiology can be brought into government economic planning with a change from a gold or consumerist standard to a conservation and sustainability basis is a challenge for discovery. Several recognize the inertia if ecological amorality prevalent in global business. Without philosophical direction the programmatic construction of synthetic scientific and economic theory politically formed may not soon develop.

In the enlightenment era scientific and philosophical elites did at least provide books read by at least some of the politically empowered class. In modern America economic over-specialization and the globalization of corporatism has driven many ordinary citizens far from opportunities to meaningfully support ecological economic reformation in the nation. A federal Department of Ecological Economic Science might be able to create a politically empowered organization that has a plethora of ecological economic prospects ready to go for the administrative and congressional branches of government. In the present structural phenomena concentrated wealth may adversely affect the motivation to change existing methods of business with ecologically deleterious practice.

On Words, Objects and Cosmology

Question 1--'Do you think ideas and language exist? Do they exist in the level of things we can kick, or punch? I think not. In what sense do ideas, and language exist?'


I will write about this below--yet not answer your questions directly. I suggest reading W.V.O. Quine's Philosophy of Logic or Strawson's 'Individuals'. I like the fact that Quine wrote 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and devastated the philosophy of empiricism's premises about Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction. He returned language to a more reasonable basis of being in mind referring to experienced objects. About the nature of objects I tend to agree with Bishop Berkeley and yet modernize that to a pragmatist criterion wherein words refer to units of experience. Experience and all other concepts are human concepts that exist within a sentient continuum, yet so do our perceptions of the moon and stars. All in turn may exist within a universal force field of quanta or virtual particles--yet even those membranes or waves of zero dimensions and other nominal quanta are interpreted by reason and sensation. 

Thus a statistical representation of words and 'objects'is customary--words are a kind of way of mapping experience.

Question 2-'In what sense is "information" used in M-theory, or some other physical theory? Do you have any examples? How is information physical?'


These are good and yet difficult questions to answer. I have written a little upon each elsewhere, and so am naturally reluctant to reiterate the same material. They are topics that can use quite a bit of reading and thought. Luckily for me I was able to read a text on 'The Art of Reasoning' by Kelly and that led int the philosophy of logic. Recently I read W.V.O. Quine's 'Ontological Relativity' that was given at the Dewey lectures at Harvard. Quine died about the year 2000, and was one of the best of 20th century philosophers.


He wrote a lot about logic and the nature of language. I tend to agree with his ideas about words and their relation to thought. Words within sets of words as abstract groups or organizations and structures receive a meaning value by the user and of course social inheritence. It is equally possible to construct a language such as a math or computer language with nominal or no meaning, yet there may be an implicit bias within human nature to give meanings to words or unit symbols based on environment and effectiveness.


I don't want to get to far off track on the road to digressions here. Obviously when writing about words one might use a few thousand--and others have done so better making a judicious rationing of language desirable here. Word sets and our ontology or largest world view about things is expressed in malleable words sets. Circularity is one of the basic features of word meanings. Such as one defines green as a color perhaps by saying its a combination of red and blue colors, most words get meaning with definition references to other words as well as the environment experienced. The words 'physical' and 'existence' are such words.


We ask if something is physical, and assume a familiar definition. Perhaps it may be defined in comparison to something not physical--yet what is that? There are good books on quantum mechanical phenomena available for us non-mathematicians to read, and good books such as 'Why Beauty Is Truth' on the history of the mathematical concept of symmetry especially developed in algebra and useful in M-Theory and multi-dimensional experimental construction; it is apparent that at the largest and smallest levels of being the quantum construction is indefinate.


What is smaller than quarks?, where did virtual particles arise--why did space-time and physical causality arise at all from a vacuum field before the big bang? What are loops, strings, quarks and virtual particles in a macro-spatial field of quantum uncertainty?


There are so many questions about The One before the big bang and before the pre-big bang vacuum field arose: why did uncertainty exist to start with, why did quantum superposition and uncertainty in a monistic waveform download into a temporal condition? For may way of thinking I quickly get to the sort of questions that the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus brought to being in his 54 tractates named 'The Enneads'. It isn't necessary to leave the topic in what seems persently to some to be a vague mysticism.


It is possible to get book named 'The Essential Plotinus' used online for a dollar or two plus shipping. Its a good way to get what Russell thought to be the writing of the philosopher with the most kind nature in the history of philosophy (if you read Russell's History of Western Philosophy). Gasperini's book The Universe Before the Big Bang' is totally worth the reading for a briefing on that topic.


Mind exists as a physical field. Self awareness is a very specialized construction in that physical field including quarks, uncertainty and all of the very ponderable topics of beauty and complexity we might expect. Becuase we are not cerrtain due to the infinity of what the ultimate nature of anything is, with such Godelian and Cantorian limits to knowledge of things such that there is always more beyond our grasp, we are left to consider things as events--even Christians may consider cerrtain events as meaningful. Relationships may be meaningful for themselves to sentient beings. Sentience may comprise an evolved level attaining to a spiritual self-awareness of being.


I am sort of hurrying to a conclusion here--there are quite a few topic one might bring in or allude to such as Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Mind' that consider the subject or aspects of it from other points of view--the historical context of many philosophical ideas from Hume to Heidegger might be thought to occur within contemporary contexts of social politics and knowledge as well. So I will skipa lot of that and return to the ideas I am concerned with here about information or intelligence within a monistic pre-big bang field, and perhaps consider that for myself.


I agree with the ideas of Plotinus on the nature of The One...God requires no dimensional extension--yet that concept might seem vague without reading that math book mentioned above that helps to understand about the advance from linear to quadratic equations and higher literals led to multi-dimensional graphs and extra dimensional arrays. Those scaler fields (fields of adjustable scale) are tools for modern cosmology. It seems almost logical today that God would not require dimensions for-himself any more than space-time. They are temporal things or segments of some eternal wave that contains all potential quanta.

Regardless of how we go about it the words or terms used to say that things exist (ist means 'to be' in Germanic languages and also have roots in Sanskrit and the proto Indo-European language, so ex- ist may mean to remove or stand back and look at being initially) within our own ontologies. IIt is useful to examine a little our assumptions about what words mean. Analytic philosophy of the 20th century renormalized language and metaphysics a little in philosophy through logic and linguistic analysis to actually determine what particular words means, or refer to. Then we can find that some words are given more meaning ojectively through use than they actually have in fact. 


Words and even knowledge are sort of virtual tools like lights in the darkness we carry to illuminate the non-sentient Universe around us of which we are part. The spiritual is the intelligent aspect of experience that rises above the deterministic forces set into being long ago before the big bang--at least a little. It is possible to ponder the waveform, transcending super quanta of God just as rather comparatively silly assuming beings doing our best to learn about all His marvelous works.