Barely mid-morning. You both are at McD's on
Kings Mill Road near I-71 and Kings Island. You had your walk as did Carol and
for the last two days did your exercises at home also. It is supposed to be
another hot and humid day. Carol bought two drinks (large and medium) and two
chocolate chip cookies (fresh out) for three dollars. Life is good, right, orndorff?
- Amorella
One wouldn't think a little thing like
this would make a difference, three bucks versus four, for instance, but it is
a nice little pleasant surprise in the life of a day; at least from our
perspective. (1033)
Thus it appears your values are partially
based on economics? - Amorella
I
feel economics forces are among the most powerful social forces in our world.
We work to make money to feel (if not to be) that we (our families) are more
secure with it than without it; and that we value education for the same
pragmatic reason. Economic security is right up there with health, education
and welfare.
So, do you consider individual economic
security to be a human right? - Amorella
1044 hours. I do. I haven't thought
about economics before in this specific sense but I like to think of our
species as one family in perhaps the broadest of perceptions. We, as a species,
are naturally built to beget children, thus biology peaks all cultural
differences -- so the human family should also peak all cultural differences in
my opinion.
Your statement above is bothersome to you. -
Amorella
It is because if this were a rule of
international law the individual family would have equal 'rights' as 'cultural'
rights, i.e. each individual culture would equal an entire culture. That
doesn't sound fair or just. Individual rights should not equal group/cultural
rights.
Carol is on page 462 of Brown's Low
Pressure. - Amorella
Good, back to the real world.
Compromise is a necessity. I think of Hegel.
** **
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher,
one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of
reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important
precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.
Hegel
developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", of Absolute Idealism to account in an
integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the
subject and object of knowledge, psychology, the state, history, art, religion
and philosophy. In particular, he developed the concept that mind or spirit that
manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately
integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the
other. Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and
freedom, and between immanence and transcendence.
Thought: Freedom
Hegel's thinking can be
understood as a constructive development within the broad tradition that
includes Plato and Kant. To this list one could add Proclus, Meister Eckhart,
Leibniz, Plotinus, Jakob Boehme, and Rousseau. What all these thinkers share,
which distinguishes them from materialists like Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas
Hobbes, and from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard freedom or
self-determination both as real and as having important ontological
implications, for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on freedom is what
generates Plato's notion (in the Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus) of the soul as
having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. While
Aristotle criticizes Plato's "Forms", he preserves Plato's
cornerstones of the ontological implications for self-determination: ethical
reasoning, the soul's pinnacle in the hierarchy of nature, the order of the
cosmos, and an assumption with reasoned arguments for a prime mover. Kant
imports Plato's high esteem of individual sovereignty to his considerations of
moral and noumenal freedom, as well as to God. All three find common ground on
the unique position of humans in the scheme of things, known by the discussed
categorical differences from animals and inanimate objects.
In his discussion of
"Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle's On the Soul as "by far the most
admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this
topic". In his Phenomenology of
Spirit and his Science of Logic,
Hegel's concern with Kantian topics such as freedom and morality, and with
their ontological implications, is pervasive. Rather than simply rejecting
Kant's dualism of freedom versus nature, Hegel aims to subsume it within
"true infinity", the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff),
"Spirit", and "ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian
duality is rendered intelligible, rather than remaining a brute
"given."
The reason why this subsumption
takes place in a series of concepts is that Hegel's method, in his Science
of Logic and his Encyclopedia, is to begin with ultra-basic concepts
like Being and Nothing, and to develop these through a long sequence of
elaborations, including those mentioned in the previous paragraph. In this
manner, a solution that is reached, in principle, in the account of "true
infinity" in the Science of Logic's chapter on "Quality",
is repeated in new guises at later stages, all the way to "Spirit"
and "ethical life", in the third volume of the Encyclopedia.
In this way, Hegel intends to
defend the germ of truth in Kantian dualism against reductive or eliminative
programs like those of materialism and empiricism. Like Plato, with his dualism
of soul versus bodily appetites, Kant pursues the mind's ability to question
its felt inclinations or appetites and to come up with a standard of
"duty" (or, in Plato's case, "good"), which transcends
bodily restrictiveness. Hegel preserves this essential Platonic and Kantian
concern in the form of infinity going beyond the finite (a process that Hegel
in fact relates to "freedom" and the "ought"), the
universal going beyond the particular (in the Concept), and Spirit going beyond
Nature. And Hegel renders these dualities intelligible by (ultimately)
his argument in the "Quality" chapter of the "Science of
Logic." The finite has to become infinite in order to achieve reality. The
idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity so the subjective and objective must
achieve synthesis to become whole. This is because, as Hegel suggests by his
introduction of the concept of "reality", what determines
itself—rather than depending on its relations to other things for its essential
character—is more fully "real" (following the Latin etymology of
"real": more "thing-like") than what does not. Finite
things don't determine themselves, because, as "finite" things, their
essential character is determined by their boundaries, over against other
finite things. So, in order to become "real", they must go beyond
their finitude ("finitude is only as a transcending of
itself").
The result of this argument is
that finite and infinite—and, by extension, particular and universal, nature
and freedom—don't face one another as two independent realities, but instead
the latter (in each case) is the self-transcending of the former. Rather
than stress the distinct singularity of each factor that complements and
conflicts with others—without explanation—the relationship between finite and
infinite (and particular and universal, and nature and freedom) becomes
intelligible as a progressively developing and self-perfecting whole.
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
Offline - Hegel
** **
You were pumped
re-reading the above because it reminded you of your mind at work when reading
Hegel and others noted above (on your own) back in your Otterbein College (now,
once again a University), days. - Amorella
1122 hours. I have not changed my
thinking so much over the years. Strange, how that is.
You are home. Post. - Amorella
Another
late lunch, this time at Penn Station; now you are waiting for Carol at
Kroger's on Tylersville.
1550 hours. I think it would be better
for me to just begin Pouch 21 and see what you come up with, play it by eye and
ear otherwise the dialogue and thoughts will sound stilted. A summary to date
would be good, or at least it seems like it would be good. Personally I would
like to be filled in right along with any other reader.
This makes sense. Let's get to it. -
Amorella
2052 hours. I have done nothing. Carol
came to the car at the moment I wrote 'Amorella' above. We came home. I read
the new Consumer Reports, cereal for supper, the news and last night's episode
of "Broadchurch" on BBC.
Earlier you posted an article from BBC
Science on Facebook and received a response from Lori B., a former student.
Here is the article:
**
**
News Science and Environment
8 August
2013 Last updated
at 12:19 ET
Resurrected protein's clue to origins of life
By Simon Redfern
Reporter, BBC News
New reconstructions of ancient
proteins have provided clues to the habitat and origins of life on Earth.
The resurrected protein is
thought to have existed almost four billion years ago in single-celled
organisms linked to the earliest ancestor of all life.
The protein survives in the
extreme environments of high acidity and temperature expected on early Earth
and, intriguingly, also Mars.
Spanish and US scientists
reported their study in the journal Structure.
Gene sequences in a protein
called thioredoxin, taken from a wide variety of modern organisms, were
analysed and placed in an evolutionary context - locating them on a
molecular-scale tree of life - to chart their progression from their primordial
forms.
First, computer analysis was
used to determine how modern genetic sequences developed from original codes,
so the ancient DNA sequences in the protein from as far back as four billion
years ago could be determined.
Ancestral
code
They then used modern bacteria
to convert the ancient gene sequences into a chemically active protein that
could be measured to determine its molecular structure and the properties of
the ancient protein.
The thioredoxin protein is an
enzyme, which can break sulphur bonds in other molecules and has a number of
metabolic functions in cells. It is shared by almost all life on Earth, from
the simplest bacteria to complex animals including humans, indicating that the
ultimate single-celled ancestor of all life on Earth would also have had the
gene.
Prof Eric Gaucher of Georgia
Tech, US, helped with the ancestral gene sequence reconstruction and commented:
"A gene can become deactivated by as few as one or two mutations.
"If our ancestral
sequences were incorrectly inferred by having a single mistake, that could have
led to a dead gene. Instead, our approach created biochemically active proteins
that fold up into three dimensional structures that look like modern protein
structures, thus validating our approach."
The group used molecular clocks
to date the evolutionary branches back in time and linked them to geological
changes in Earth's environment.
Changes in the protein's length
appeared to occur in fits and starts, with its helix structure suddenly
lengthening at the point that cells started to develop a nucleus (the
transition from prokaryote to eukaryote), paving the way for higher life.
The results suggest that
biological systems might evolve at the molecular level in discrete jumps rather
than along continuous pathways, as has been suggested from studies of the
evolution of species.
Hell on
Earth
The group studied how well the
ancient thioredoxin coped with heat, and found that it survived temperatures of
more than 110 C, as well as being stable in acidic environments.
"We have looked at a
number of gene families now, and for all of them, we find the most ancient
proteins are the most thermally stable. From this, we conclude that ancient
life lived in a hot environment," Prof Gaucher told the BBC.
The early Earth was a hostile
environment for life. It was hellish, and the first geological eon on Earth is
termed the "Hadean" after Hades, the ancient Greek god of the
underworld. Before four billion years ago it is thought that Earth suffered
heavy bombardment from meteorites. It is likely that any atmosphere that
survived was hot and possibly acidic four billion years ago.
The ancient protein's
properties indicate that it may have been adapted to that environment. It
shares features with "extremophiles" - bacteria found today in
extreme environments like hot springs and even at depth within Earth's crustal
rocks.
It may be that the only life
that survived that heavy bombardment were the forms that could cope with high
temperatures and energies, like this ancient protein.
Alien
resurrection?
Another intriguing possibility,
although not discussed in this study. is that the ancient protein came to Earth
having formed at an earlier time on another planet.
In particular, recent evidence
from Nasa's Curiosity rover suggests that Mars may well have been a more
conducive place for life to develop than Earth during the first 500 million
years of the Solar System, before four billion years ago.
Many Martian meteorites have
landed on Earth, with our planet acting like a local gravitational vacuum
cleaner.
"Four billion
years ago Mars was a much a safer place than Earth. Maybe we have resurrected
Martian proteins. Maybe the last universal common ancestor (the first life)
formed on Mars and transferred to Earth," commented Prof Sanchez-Ruiz.
Selected
and edited from: -.bbc.- news/science-environment-23591470
**
**
2105
hours. What is interesting is that Lori B. feels that the Bacteriophage-T4 is a type of virus that could have originally come from a meteorite.
I
find this type of material fascinating. I have never read these specifics
before and the photograph (if that is what it is) gives my imagination the
sense of 'alien' life even if it isn't.
The point here is that you are adapting a
strategy that allows you to mimic in your imagination, a concept of what alien
life could be. This is not authenticity, but for you it replicates it as far as
writing a fiction is concerned. Certainly it is felt heartansoulanmind-wise as
a plausibility and is not really that much different than writing about flying
a 1979 Cessna Centurion which you have not, but you sat in the pilot's seat of
one once at one of the famous Dayton, Ohio Air Shows. - I see no reason this
cannot work its way into an eventual fictional piece in a Pouch segment in book
two. Why not? - Amorella
Fiction is the only way to set up such plausibilities in my head.
It is a necessity. - Amorella
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