Me and my “pal” Stephen Hawking

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

No, we were not really pals, but, in a TLS [Times Literary Supplement] review for the July 27, 2018 issue, we are buds, of a sort.

The review by Tim Crane of Rowan Williams book Being Human: Bodies, minds, persons [SPCK, PB] had this quote from Williams (in his book):

“Stephen Hawking’s remark that human beings are ‘chemical scum on an average sized planet, orbiting around a very average-size star, in the outer suburb of a one of a million galaxies’” goes to the heart of my recent musings here, musings that Bryan Sentes finds wanting.

The review [Page 12 ff.] zeroes in on Williams thinking about consciousness, reviewer Crane opening that thinking to scrutiny.

(Rowan Williams is a former Archbishop of Canterbury.)

The review is a pastiche of references to philosophical reductionism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

(I know I’m casting pearls before swine here but there it is.)

Crane writes, pertinent to Stephen Hawking’s remarkably acute statement, “Any complex phenomenon can be described and explained in many ways for different purposes … No serious debate is advanced by saying that human beings are ‘chemical scum’. [sic] Presumably the only point of saying this is to stress the cosmic insignificance or even utter worthlessness of human life. But our existence might be significant without being cosmically significant.” [TLS, Page 12]

I assume that Bryan Sentes would agree with reviewer Crane’s assessment.

Reviewer Crane pushes forward by questioning Williams statement “… any intellectual strategy that gives you permission to ignore some level of legitimate description is morally deeply dangerous.”

Crane rebuts: “It is hard to know what Williams has in mind here. Science explains by modeling or idealizing, by abstracting away from features which are real and which it acknowledges are real. William’s view seems to be that for this reason alone, science is morally dangerous. This cannot be right.” [ibid]

Crane notes that Williams tempers his view that theology is where one may counter Reductionism: “…when it comes to personal reality, the language of theology is possibly the only way to speak well of who we are and what our humanity is like.”

Thus, my insertion into the UFO topic, queries about ETs and God, is not as farfetched as some might think.

Williams, as Crane notes, even makes a sly reference to Jacques Derrida’s thinking, which I often note here: “speaking changes things.” [ibid, Page 13]

I’m not sure whether my real pal, Bryan Sentes, is a reductionist or far from it. He is so abstruse sometimes, throwing everything into the debate pot, often to support his what I see as obtuse affection for Kant and users of psychedelics.

Ufology is not inclined to get into such wavery discussions that I try to propose here, but there are a few who can contend, intellectually with my (sometimes errant) musings: Bryan Sentes, of course, The Anomalist’s Bill Murphy and Christian Savia, Dr. Dee, Zoam Chomsky, and some others.

But, overall, heady debate, as that created by Stephen Hawking’s prescient overview or ideas floated by reviewers of intellectual tomes can be edifying and even open the door to an explanation of what UFOs are or what Ufology should be.

Just a hope….

RR