Friday,

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, everybody, particularly members of the home church,

 

I am looking forward to seeing you all this Friday.  So many discussions dropped from last spring. 

1.       Greg Harmon’s Object-oriented Ontology.  Dave West mentioned this last Winter, just before I left, as a possible cure for my addition to Peirce.  And then I proposed that we read it in some sort of a co-ordinated way over the summer.  But then I fell down on the job. A local reading group with some members of the diaspora joining us for conversations, here? Or perhaps we could just all agree to read it in the next few weeks and discuss it on the Friam list? 

2.       Peirce:  Well then, there’s Peirce himself.  A couple of you incautiously proposed that we might read some Peirce together.  I have a good collection picked out, one composed of different texts, from different stages of his career,  on the same subject collected in chapters.  Peirce is an acquired taste, and I am not holding my breath until this happens, but I would do anything I could to facilitate it.

3.       Hearing, Hearing Loss, Aging.  As a psychologist this fascinates me.  As people around me age, I hear more and more people with hearing aids saying things like, “I heard what you said but I couldn’t make it make sense.”  The implication is that some parsing function is missing and that amplification, even differential amplification, is never going to restore normal hearing.   I gather that we might have new blood in the group to address this problem.

4.       Space-time? While I was packing, Mike Daly asked us to have a look at a new article by a physicist doubting … space-time? I can’t now find that message on my hard drive.  Did we flog that horse sufficiently, or do we need to beat on it some more. Perhaps Mike could resend the article? I need help with some ruminations on [social] power.  I think (and I am a Darwinian, remember) that Freud had it backwards and that power accumulation and display is the most fundamental human motive.  I know this isn’t a VERY original idea, but there is something original about the way it is running around in my head these days that I am trying to flesh out.  It has to do with Dionysian and Apollonian mating strategies.   

 

5.       On a much less lofty note, I ran out of disk space during my spring-summer in the M.I.B. and I now have crucial files scattered all over the universe, Carbonite, two old hard drives, one new 2T peripheral, and the hard drive on this machine.  Does anybody on this list know of anybody in Santa Fe who, for not TOO much money, would sit with me and help me rationalize my data storage?

It’s going to be great to see you guys again.  

 

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

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