PHIL 3345. Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, bio-medical ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "Keep your health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the firmament." William James
When I was diagnosed [with ALS], one of the first questions I asked in a journal entry was, "Can I discover peace of mind, even if this disease destroys my body?" That inquiry has been a guiding light for me the past 13 years. "The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness," by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, has real-life stories I could relate to, providing insights which have helped illuminate the path for me to live longer, and be grateful and content."
POSTSCRIPT. It was pleasing to receive a group email from Dr. Evins of the Honors College, at semester's end, thanking all the faculty participants for their contributions to the Mental Health semester series. These remarks in particular gratified:
"...It was a really really really good series, thanks to all the wonderful presenters. Truly excellent... Phil touched on so much. He brought the classics and the wisdom of the ages directly to the students in one meta Philosophy lecture. It was powerful. The students will have much to say about the many points he touched on in his lecture. And also about going outside to walk the dog :) ...Also, Tom stood up for cat culture as personal therapy, balancing out Phil very nicely. (My husband is an Epictetus guy. I myself brought Epictetus home from both Phil and Tom.)"
Cat culture? Well, whatever works.
MTSU Honors Lecture Series Spring 2024, here are the links to videos from each lecture; some videos are better than others depending on who was there to be the videographer!, but much was, happily, captured:
The point isn't longevity, it's to feel good today and plan to feel good again tomorrow. And to know you'll be ready, whenever the time comes, to rejoin Russell's great ocean of "universal life" (which really you're already doing). The point is to "live long and prosper" right now.
'Oppenheimer,' My Uncle and the Secrets America Still Doesn't Like to Tell
…"Oppenheimer" is a movie about a singular genius, an extraordinary collaboration and a turning point in history. But it's also a lesson in applied physics: the way a lone catalyst may trigger a chain reaction whose impact cannot be predicted or controlled. J. Robert Oppenheimer's greatest triumph set into motion forces that brought about his downfall. An innovation designed to make the world safer in the long term made it manifestly more dangerous. And in subsequent atomic tests through the postwar years, many Americans were deliberately exposed to radiation, to see what the blast and its aftermath would do to them...
It has been four years since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
In 2022 Ed Yong wrote that the U.S. "made none of the broad changes that would protect its population against future pathogens, such as better ventilation or universal paid sick leave." He predicted that America will "continue to struggle against infectious diseases in part because some of its most deeply held values are antithetical to the task of besting a virus."
Given troves of data about genes and cells, A.I. models have made some surprising discoveries. What could they teach us someday?
...“I think these models are going to help us get some really fundamental understanding of the cell, which is going to provide some insight into what life really is,” Dr. Quake said.
Having a map of what’s possible and impossible to sustain life might also mean that scientists could actually create new cells that don’t yet exist in nature. The foundation model might be able to concoct chemical recipes that transform ordinary cells into new, extraordinary ones. Those new cells might devour plaque in blood vessels or explore a diseased organ to report back on its condition.
“It’s very ‘Fantastic Voyage’-ish,” Dr. Quake admitted. “But who knows what the future is going to hold?”
Today, and for the next few weeks, my wife is chronologically older than me. She might need to hear what Maria Popova and Simone de Beauvoir say about time's arrow… (And happy birthday to WJ, 182 today.)
"…There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion." Simone de Beauvoir
When asked about living with [ALS, Lou Gehrig's ] disease, he told an interviewer that he was "happier now" than before he became ill. "Before, I was very bored with life. I drank a fair bit, I guess; I didn't do any work . . .When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything that one does have."
I'm reading Daniel Dennett's memoir "I've Been Thinking", which begins with the near-death experience that generated my favorite written testimonial of natural gratitude.
"ON OCTOBER 24, 2006, I WAS RUSHED BY AMBULANCE from my office at Tufts University to the emergency room at Lahey Clinic, where doctors discovered the problem: the inner and outer layers of my aorta had come apart—an aortic dissection—and I could die at any moment if the blood from my heart burst out into my chest cavity. The day before I had been in Mackerel Cove on Swan’s Island in Maine on my sailboat, Xanthippe. This was the last cruise of the season, joined by my Swedish friend Bo Dahlbom and his son Fredrik, and as I slowly pulled on the heavy anchor line I felt a slight pain in my chest, reminding me of the pain I had felt seven years earlier when I’d had a “silent heart attack” that had led to a triple-bypass operation. We sailed back to Blue Hill in a stiff headwind, moored the boat, took off the heavy sails, put the inflatable dinghy on the roof of my car, and went back to the farm, before I made a quick trip to the local hospital, where I was told I had not had a heart attack but should see my cardiologist as soon as I could. The next day we drove to Tufts, where I asked the department secretary if she had any Tylenol, and she wisely called the ambulance instead.
One of the little-known side effects of open-heart surgery is ministrokes caused by debris from the operation clogging up the capillaries in the brain, and my cardiologist explicitly warned the surgical team that since my mind was my life, they should strive to avoid turning me into a “pumphead”—the ugly term heart surgeons use in private for those whose brains are damaged by the heart-lung machine. After the operation, before they removed me from the machine, they reversed the flow of blood to my brain, sending it into the veins and out of the arteries, hoping to flush out any debris that was about to disable my res cogitans, my thinking thing (my brain, not, as Descartes would have it, a distinct and immaterial substance). So I’ve been brainwashed, quite literally. Did it work? As soon as I could sit up in my hospital bed after the operation I got out my trusty laptop and wrote a short piece to see if I still had my marbles. It was put on Edge.org, where it attracted a lot of attention. What do you think?
Thank Goodness! (November 2, 2006)
There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder..."
My friend Daryl's friend and former colleague at W.Carolina, on dogs and the culture wars. What a strange world, dogs' AND ours…
Dogs are where we project our "fantasies about what we want — either who we want to be or what we want the world to look like," said Katharine Mershon, a professor of religion and philosophy at Western Carolina University who studies the role of dogs in American society.
Dr. Mershon told me how dogs had become a focal point for tensions in her rural Appalachian town: Her local NextDoor was filled with arguments about whether leaving hunting dogs to roam about freely, slightly underfed and living mostly outside, constituted abuse. This was an argument, ostensibly about dogs, that was actually about gentrification and the place of newcomers to impose their values on local life.
At points in my conversations with Dr. Gabrielsen and Dr. Mershon, we discussed the poet, philosopher and animal trainer Vicki Hearne. "Dogs are domesticated to, and into, us," Ms. Hearne wrote in her 1986 book "Adam's Task." "And we are domesticated to, and into, them."
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/opinion/dogs-culture-wars.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare My Year of Being Very Online About Dogs
"Hold a rock next to a flower and you're probably confident you know the difference," Green writes. "But since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things." https://theatln.tc/auxkhAiW
For more than 40 years, Mississippi had one of the strictest school vaccination requirements in the nation, and its high childhood immunization rates have been a source of pride. But in July, the state began excusing children from vaccination if their parents cited religious objections, after a federal judge sided with a "medical freedom" group.
Today, 2,100 Mississippi schoolchildren are officially exempt from vaccination on religious grounds. Five hundred more are exempt because their health precludes vaccination. Dr. Daniel P. Edney, the state health officer, warns that if the total number of exemptions climbs above 3,000, Mississippi will once again face the risk of deadly diseases that are now just a memory.
"For the last 40 years, our main goal has been to protect those children at highest risk of measles, mumps, rubella, polio," Dr. Edney said in an interview, "and that's those children that have chronic illnesses that make them more vulnerable." He called the ruling "a very bitter pill for me to swallow."
Mississippi is not an isolated case. Buoyed by their success at overturning coronavirus mandates, medical and religious freedom groups are taking aim at a new target: childhood school vaccine mandates, long considered the foundation of the nation's defense against infectious disease...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/us/politics/mississippi-childhood-vaccine-mandates.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare 'Medical Freedom' Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates
According to a new study, living cells outnumber stars in the universe, highlighting the deep, underrated link between geophysics and biology.
What’s in a number?
According to a recent calculation by a team of biologists and geologists, there are a more living cells on Earth — a million trillion trillion, or 10^30 in math notation, a 1 followed by 30 zeros — than there are stars in the universe or grains of sand on our planet.
Which makes a certain amount of sense. The overwhelming majority of these cells are microbes, too small to see with the unaided eye; a great many are cyanobacteria, the tiny bubbles of energy and chemistry that churn away in plants and in the seas assembling life as we know it and mining sunlight to manufacture the oxygen we need to breathe.
Still, it boggled my mind that such a calculation could even be performed. I’ve been pestering astrobiologists lately about what it means. Could Earth harbor even more life? Could it have less? How much life is too much?
“The big take-home is this really sets up Earth as a benchmark for comparative planetology,” Peter Crockford, a geobiologist at Carleton University in Ottawa and the lead author of the report, which was published last month in the journal Current Biology, said in an email. The finding “allows us to more quantitatively ask questions about alternative trajectories life could have taken on Earth and how much life could be possible on our planet.” ...
"…Your happy childhood is no guarantee of the same for your kid, especially if they will grow up on a planet that will be warmer by nearly three degrees Fahrenheit. But you can reflect on the contributions that your parents made to that happiness and seek to emulate them. You can feel reasonably confident that the secure attachments you formed and the gentle guidance you received in childhood will be passed on like family heirlooms.
An unhappy childhood provides a trickier data set..."
