Take a feather and tickle a nose. It could be any nose, yours or another’s. What’s the result? Obviously, some sort of reaction occurs. The nerves in the nose sense the swipe of the feather. The brain reacts; if it is your nose, it might twitch or sneeze, but anticipating the action you possibly tolerate, maybe even enjoy the sensation; it might bring back memories or elicit a stream of ideas about noses, nerves, birds, gravity (as in “light as a feather”) or even flight. if it is another’s nose tickled unexpectedly, the reaction might be movement in neck muscles to remove the nose from source of the tickling. And in the brain? Neurons record the experience, filing it in its reference library in the section on enjoyment or displeasure.
Now tickle the nose on a bronze or marble statue. The process is the same, but the nose has no nerves and no complex brain to record the experience. For the you, the tickler, tickling the bronze nose has no personal consequence other than to draw ridicule from a nearby observer who wonders about your sanity.
The objects, both feather and nose are insentient; the statue, however brilliantly it depicts a real human in detail, is emotionally and physiologically inert. In the process, the feather itself is merely an object outside the mind of the tickler and any observer, and the tickled nose on the statue also exists outside the mind. And it doesn’t matter how much the tickler “imagines”: The statue feels nothing and only reacts insofar as the atoms of the feather and the statue interact: Maybe something occurs on an atomic level, but whatever that is, is too “micro” to be perceived in the macro world that the brain experiences through sensations.
For thinkers like Galileo, ** who used the example of tickling the foot of a marble statue to make a point about experience, and like Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Berkeley, reality could be described in terms of what lies inside the mind and what lies outside the mind. Essentially, their thinking was that idea of an object differs from the actual object. If you think of a bronze statue (note how unspecific that condition is), your idea doesn’t have the form of the bronze statue; to put it another way, thinking of a pyramid doesn’t require the thoughts to be pyramidal. In this you’ll realize that the word pyramid evokes the idea of a pyramid. The word is not itself pyramidal. It is not a hieroglyph, and even if it were, it would lack three dimensionality. The same logic applies to a feather and the process of tickling. You acquired the idea of the process described in the opening line of this essay without experiencing—except possibly in imagination or in memory of being tickled—the actual process. As Descartes argued, any word can trigger an idea of what it represents: Elephant, skyscraper, rocket…all become ideas without themselves having the shapes though the mind can picture the shapes.
One of the problems that the above mentioned philosophers centered on was distinguishing between “independent” and “dependent” reality. They wanted—long before The Matrix— to demonstrate if there was, in fact, an external reality outside the mind, that is, outside of ideas. To explain the relationship between the “external” and the “internal,” some of them fell into the trap of circularity: “I have a sensation because an externally existing object causes me to have a sensation that becomes an idea of the reality, a tickled nose on a bronze statue, for example.” (The “problem” continues, marked in the twentieth century by Einstein’s argument against a quantum world in which the act of conscious observation determines reality and for a world in which an objective determined existence lies outside the mind, one that is not dependent upon being observed, such as those as yet unseen galaxies in the most distant part of the universe)
For Berkeley, external existence—all passive objects outside the mind—was dependent on the mind, or to paraphrase him: “If I see no reason for believing,” there is no reason for believing the existence of anything. Although this is a simplification of Berkeley’s philosophy, it lays the groundwork for what we are currently experiencing. Apparently, all political thinking makes “reality” dependent on having a reason for believing in the existence of anything. No public statement is more indicative of Berkeley’s point of view than one made by Congressman Nadler of New York when he was asked on the street about violent riots of Antifa in Portland, Oregon. Nadler said that the riots were a “myth spread only in Washington.” * The question, of course, that this statement begs is this: Are the burned and looted buildings, closed businesses, and injured people mere figments of someone’s imagination? Have they no objective reality because Nadler sees “no reason for believing” and because of that labels them a “myth”?
To understand the “problem” of subjective and objective reality, consider how people from differing political sides see the current world mass migration, such as the past year’s attempt by about two million people to enter the United States. For people along a border region, the objective reality thrusts itself on their minds as they experience the intrusions of migrants. Thus, a rancher in Texas finds himself and his family in “real” danger as trespassers move through the property unchecked. The farmer has a “reason to believe” in the external reality of uncontrolled migration because of its “real” effects on property and maybe even on safety. For those deep within the country and thus far removed from the southern border both physically and empathetically, there is no reason to believe in the reality outside the mind; illegal migration is a hyperbolic figment by a certain segment of society. Its potential dangers and complications, including economic ramifications and public health, therefore, don’t exist.
Thus, one political side, in this instance the Left, sees no reason to “believe”—and therefore, accept—the reality experienced by that Texas rancher because to do so would jeopardize other related beliefs, such as the belief that conservatives are, if not all, at least in the majority, racists and xenophobes. If the Left “believed” like the Right that there is a problem with unchecked mass migration because it has an independent existence—outside the mind—then the entire country would be concerned about the “reality” of unchecked mass migration. But as things stand, the generally Left-leaning media prefer not to accept the phenomenon of mass migration as a reality, or at least as a meaningful reality.
Essentially, we humans are often like Berkeley: There’s no problem if one has no experimental or experiential proof (no personal experience) with the problem. A lack of meaningful experience in this matter might lie at the root of the Left’s inaction on migration. That the Left’s taxes are used to support noncitizens who cross the border illegally just as the Right’s taxes are used to support those same migrants isn’t an objective reality for the Left. Why? Well, it’s a matter of “seeing a reason to believe” and having a personal experience. Once the IRS collects taxes and places them into the general coffers, no one can track an individual’s money. If I go to a store, see an illegal alien, and generously pay for his groceries, I have experienced the spending out of my own pocket. I have a reason to believe in the reality, but in a large country with a third of a billion people and a budget of trillions of dollars, the chances of having such a personal and meaningful experience of spending one’s own money on an illegal migrant are slim at best. That border area rancher in contrast to the Left-leaning journalist in New York perceives a different reality. The rancher has reason to believe in an external reality that imposes itself on his brain whereas the journalist thinks the brain makes the perceived “reality.” It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that if that same journalist were to lose a loved one to marauding MS-13 gang members, the “external” reality would suddenly seem to have an independent existence.
And the same reasoning might apply to the problem identified as global warming or climate change. In the minds of climate-change activists, the external reality is, in fact, a “fact”—i.e., real. It has an independent existence. To those who are deniers, the “alarmists’” reality is internal, and the “reality” is an imposed one insofar as it has “real” physical consequences. Climate-change alarmists point to “reasons to believe,” such as an extended drought in the American Southwest, even though extended droughts have characterized the region for millennia. (Does aridity exist in the semiarid lands, or is it a figment? Does actual rain fall in a tropical rainforest, or is it a figment? Can the mind impose a reality of rain in a desert or a reality of aridity in a rainforest?)
One can also apply the same “reasoning” based on belief to the phenomenon of eustasy. Is sea level rise real and independent of mind? For example, President Obama campaigned on stopping the seas from rising—a process that seems to have been ongoing since the melting of the great ice sheets thousands of years ago—and he must obviously have succeeded in stopping that rise as he promised since he now owns two houses on oceanfront property—one in Hawaii and the other in Massachusetts. That “deniers” point out that the seas have been rising (and falling) for more than three billion years or since seas were subjected to evaporative outflow and river and ice-melt inflow and to vertical movements in the crust because of tectonic activity and isostatic rebound, seems to alarmists to be irrelevant and not a cause for “belief.” (Great Britain is, for instance, “tilting” as I write, rising in the Northwest and sinking in the Southeast, causing sea level to both rise and fall for the island). *** Deniers also point out that the effect of sea level change is enhanced by population growth in coastal areas, a “fact” that makes awareness of sea level a social, and therefore, mental, phenomenon. They also point out that the seemingly objective measurement of a rise of less than 2 mm per year during the first two decades of the twenty-first century would objectively indicate the need for 800 years to pass for a one meter rise—if the world has an objective (i.e., external) existence. Given the past changes in demographics and population centers over the past 800 years, such a rise of three feet is more a mental problem than a physical one. Little remains of coastal communities exactly as it was 800 years ago. The denizens of eight centuries ago are gone, their buildings have decayed, and new people have rebuilt as “reality” has allowed them (Nowhere is this more evident than on the eroding cliffs of Cape Cod, where the Nauset Beach Light had to be moved inland in 1996 lest it fall into the sea). Deniers also might point out that if climate activists were actually concerned about the “real” and mind-independent effects of sea level rise, they would move out of coastal cities because nothing they do will change a rise that they say is “global” and external to the mind.
Interestingly, both alarmists and deniers are like and unlike Berkeley because they pick and choose which realities are associated with “reasons to believe” and which are “experiential.” If subjective mind rules, an emotion like fear might determine how seriously alarmists consider the “climate change reality,” whereas indifference might characterize the seeming nonchalance of the deniers who find the threat rather unimportant in the scheme of everyday living. In the world of political divisions, subjectivity and objectivity are perched on a sea saw much like tilting England, where sea level is falling in the Northwest as it rises in the Southeast.
Convinced, it seems, that global warming is anthropogenic, the current President closed the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office in the belief that Americans should eliminate carbon emissions “to save” the planet. At the same time he saw no reason to stop the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline as though the carbon emissions from a Russian source differed from the emissions from Canadian and American sources. What would Berkeley think? Can the mind “make reality” because it has a “reason for believing”? Will the atmosphere know the difference in carbon because it comes from one source rather than from another? Does carbon dioxide have a mind-independent existence in the United States but a mind-dependent existence in Russia?
Are there undeniable objective realities? Does burning the same amount of oil and natural gas from a different country produce the same amount of warming that Canadian and American fossil fuels produce? Does President Berkeley think that closing the Keystone Pipeline while opening Nord Stream alters external reality? Stop for a moment to consider the atmosphere as an analog of Galileo’s statue and anthropogenic carbon emissions as Galileo’s feather.
Does the atmosphere, unlike the marble or bronze statue, “feel” the carbon feather with a sensitivity that distinguishes between sources? And if it can distinguish as an objectively existing “external” reality—a “statue” that feels—does the atmosphere actually and mind-independently respond by heating up? And if it does so, is the degree of heating arguable? Finally, if the heating is an objective reality will it take a geometric, exponential, or logarithmic path? Alarmists suggest the reasons for accepting the reality of climate change—that is, warming—lies in either a geometric or exponential rise, whereas deniers suggest the reasons for downplaying climate change—that is, warming—is that it will follow a logarithmic path (in other words, a doubling of carbon dioxide will not produce a doubling of heating).
As a result of his belief, President Berkeley has reason to accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming and that he can act to eliminate as many climate “feathers” as he can to prevent any further tickling. But he has at the same time asked Opec, Venezuela, and even Russia to produce more fossil fuels.
Ah! Poor President Berkeley. What’s he to do? He has a “reason to believe” in an “objective reality” defined by mass media, people like John Kerry, and greenies, but in acting, he has demonstrated a reason to believe the very opposite as evidenced by his acceptance of foreign fossil fuels. It just makes me wonder whether or not a statue feels a feather, whether or not either the feather or the statue has a mind-independent existence, or whether or not everything “out there”—that is, everything external—has an independent existence.
Makes me wonder: Have I imagined writing this essay? Are you, my unseen reader, real?
*YouTube under the title: Jerry Nadler thinks the rioting in Portland is a “myth."
**This is what Galileo wrote in The Assayer (1623):
“Suppose I pass my hand, first over a marble statue, then over a living man. So far as the hand, considered in itself, is concerned, it will act in an identical way upon each of these objects; that is, the primary qualities of motion and contact will similarly affect the two objects, and we would use identical language to describe this in each case. But the living body, which I subject to this experiment, will feel itself affected in various ways, depending upon the part of the body I happen to touch; for example, should it be touched on the sole of the foot or the kneecap, or under the armpit, it will feel, in addition to simple contact, a further affection to which we have given a special name: we call it “tickling.” This latter affection is altogether our own, and is not at all a property of the hand itself. And it seems to me that he would be gravely in error who would assert that the hand, in addition to movement and contact, intrinsically possesses another and different faculty which we might call the 2 “tickling faculty,” as though tickling were a resident property of the hand per se. Again, a piece of paper or a feather, when gently rubbed over any part of our body whatsoever, will in itself act everywhere in an identical way; it will, namely, move and contact. But we, should we be touched between the eyes, on the tip of the nose, or under the nostrils, will feel an almost intolerable titillation—while if touched in other places, we will scarcely feel anything at all. Now this titillation is completely ours and not the feather’s, so that if the living, sensing body were removed, nothing would remain of the titillation but an empty name. And I believe that many other qualities, such as taste, odor, color, and so on, often predicated of natural bodies, have a similar and no greater existence than this.”—Translated by A. C. Danto (1954) and available online in full at https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/galileo Accessed June 11, 2022
*** The rising and subsiding of Earth’s crust isn’t limited to landmasses. Ocean floors also rise and sink in response to seafloor spreading, magma chamber infilling and volcanism, and redistribution of mass—An oceanic volcano, for example, subsides: thus, the younger Hawaiian islands are higher standing than the older islands, like Midway, and coral atoll formation is the product of the same kind of subsidence. Here’s just one of many abstracts I might have posted in this regard:
“The most significant vertical movements of the oceanic crust in the Central Atlantic are characteristic of transverse ridges confined to transform fracture zones. These movements are also recorded in some local depressions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) and in older structures of deep-sea basins. The amplitude of such movements substantially exceeds that related to the cooling of lithospheric plates. Vertical movements can be driven by various factors: the thermal effect of a heated young MAR segment upon a cold plate, thermal stress, thermal energy released by friction in the course of displacement of fault walls relative to each other, serpentinization of the upper mantle rocks in the transform fault zone, and lateral compression and extension. The alternation of compression and extension that arises because of the nonparallel boundaries of the transform fracture zone and the unstable configuration of the rift/fracture zone junction was the main factor responsible for the formation of the transverse ridge in the Romanche Fracture Zone. The most probable cause of the vertical rise of the southern transverse ridge in the Vema Fracture Zone is the change in the spreading direction. In general, the fracture zones with active segments more than 100 km long are characterized by extension and compression oriented perpendicularly to the main displacement and related to slight changes in the spreading configuration. It is impossible to single out ambiguously the causes of vertical movements in particular structural features. In most cases, the vertical movements are controlled by several factors, while the main role belongs to the lateral compressive and tensile stresses that appear owing to changes in the movement of lithospheric blocks in the course of MAR spreading.” — A. A. Payve, 2006 Vertical tectonic movements of the crust in transform fracture zones of the Central Atlantic. Geotectonics 40(1):25-36.
Online at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227319081_Vertical_tectonic_movements_of_the_crust_in_transform_fracture_zones_of_the_Central_Atlantic Accessed June 11, 2022.
Now tickle the nose on a bronze or marble statue. The process is the same, but the nose has no nerves and no complex brain to record the experience. For the you, the tickler, tickling the bronze nose has no personal consequence other than to draw ridicule from a nearby observer who wonders about your sanity.
The objects, both feather and nose are insentient; the statue, however brilliantly it depicts a real human in detail, is emotionally and physiologically inert. In the process, the feather itself is merely an object outside the mind of the tickler and any observer, and the tickled nose on the statue also exists outside the mind. And it doesn’t matter how much the tickler “imagines”: The statue feels nothing and only reacts insofar as the atoms of the feather and the statue interact: Maybe something occurs on an atomic level, but whatever that is, is too “micro” to be perceived in the macro world that the brain experiences through sensations.
For thinkers like Galileo, ** who used the example of tickling the foot of a marble statue to make a point about experience, and like Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Berkeley, reality could be described in terms of what lies inside the mind and what lies outside the mind. Essentially, their thinking was that idea of an object differs from the actual object. If you think of a bronze statue (note how unspecific that condition is), your idea doesn’t have the form of the bronze statue; to put it another way, thinking of a pyramid doesn’t require the thoughts to be pyramidal. In this you’ll realize that the word pyramid evokes the idea of a pyramid. The word is not itself pyramidal. It is not a hieroglyph, and even if it were, it would lack three dimensionality. The same logic applies to a feather and the process of tickling. You acquired the idea of the process described in the opening line of this essay without experiencing—except possibly in imagination or in memory of being tickled—the actual process. As Descartes argued, any word can trigger an idea of what it represents: Elephant, skyscraper, rocket…all become ideas without themselves having the shapes though the mind can picture the shapes.
One of the problems that the above mentioned philosophers centered on was distinguishing between “independent” and “dependent” reality. They wanted—long before The Matrix— to demonstrate if there was, in fact, an external reality outside the mind, that is, outside of ideas. To explain the relationship between the “external” and the “internal,” some of them fell into the trap of circularity: “I have a sensation because an externally existing object causes me to have a sensation that becomes an idea of the reality, a tickled nose on a bronze statue, for example.” (The “problem” continues, marked in the twentieth century by Einstein’s argument against a quantum world in which the act of conscious observation determines reality and for a world in which an objective determined existence lies outside the mind, one that is not dependent upon being observed, such as those as yet unseen galaxies in the most distant part of the universe)
For Berkeley, external existence—all passive objects outside the mind—was dependent on the mind, or to paraphrase him: “If I see no reason for believing,” there is no reason for believing the existence of anything. Although this is a simplification of Berkeley’s philosophy, it lays the groundwork for what we are currently experiencing. Apparently, all political thinking makes “reality” dependent on having a reason for believing in the existence of anything. No public statement is more indicative of Berkeley’s point of view than one made by Congressman Nadler of New York when he was asked on the street about violent riots of Antifa in Portland, Oregon. Nadler said that the riots were a “myth spread only in Washington.” * The question, of course, that this statement begs is this: Are the burned and looted buildings, closed businesses, and injured people mere figments of someone’s imagination? Have they no objective reality because Nadler sees “no reason for believing” and because of that labels them a “myth”?
To understand the “problem” of subjective and objective reality, consider how people from differing political sides see the current world mass migration, such as the past year’s attempt by about two million people to enter the United States. For people along a border region, the objective reality thrusts itself on their minds as they experience the intrusions of migrants. Thus, a rancher in Texas finds himself and his family in “real” danger as trespassers move through the property unchecked. The farmer has a “reason to believe” in the external reality of uncontrolled migration because of its “real” effects on property and maybe even on safety. For those deep within the country and thus far removed from the southern border both physically and empathetically, there is no reason to believe in the reality outside the mind; illegal migration is a hyperbolic figment by a certain segment of society. Its potential dangers and complications, including economic ramifications and public health, therefore, don’t exist.
Thus, one political side, in this instance the Left, sees no reason to “believe”—and therefore, accept—the reality experienced by that Texas rancher because to do so would jeopardize other related beliefs, such as the belief that conservatives are, if not all, at least in the majority, racists and xenophobes. If the Left “believed” like the Right that there is a problem with unchecked mass migration because it has an independent existence—outside the mind—then the entire country would be concerned about the “reality” of unchecked mass migration. But as things stand, the generally Left-leaning media prefer not to accept the phenomenon of mass migration as a reality, or at least as a meaningful reality.
Essentially, we humans are often like Berkeley: There’s no problem if one has no experimental or experiential proof (no personal experience) with the problem. A lack of meaningful experience in this matter might lie at the root of the Left’s inaction on migration. That the Left’s taxes are used to support noncitizens who cross the border illegally just as the Right’s taxes are used to support those same migrants isn’t an objective reality for the Left. Why? Well, it’s a matter of “seeing a reason to believe” and having a personal experience. Once the IRS collects taxes and places them into the general coffers, no one can track an individual’s money. If I go to a store, see an illegal alien, and generously pay for his groceries, I have experienced the spending out of my own pocket. I have a reason to believe in the reality, but in a large country with a third of a billion people and a budget of trillions of dollars, the chances of having such a personal and meaningful experience of spending one’s own money on an illegal migrant are slim at best. That border area rancher in contrast to the Left-leaning journalist in New York perceives a different reality. The rancher has reason to believe in an external reality that imposes itself on his brain whereas the journalist thinks the brain makes the perceived “reality.” It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that if that same journalist were to lose a loved one to marauding MS-13 gang members, the “external” reality would suddenly seem to have an independent existence.
And the same reasoning might apply to the problem identified as global warming or climate change. In the minds of climate-change activists, the external reality is, in fact, a “fact”—i.e., real. It has an independent existence. To those who are deniers, the “alarmists’” reality is internal, and the “reality” is an imposed one insofar as it has “real” physical consequences. Climate-change alarmists point to “reasons to believe,” such as an extended drought in the American Southwest, even though extended droughts have characterized the region for millennia. (Does aridity exist in the semiarid lands, or is it a figment? Does actual rain fall in a tropical rainforest, or is it a figment? Can the mind impose a reality of rain in a desert or a reality of aridity in a rainforest?)
One can also apply the same “reasoning” based on belief to the phenomenon of eustasy. Is sea level rise real and independent of mind? For example, President Obama campaigned on stopping the seas from rising—a process that seems to have been ongoing since the melting of the great ice sheets thousands of years ago—and he must obviously have succeeded in stopping that rise as he promised since he now owns two houses on oceanfront property—one in Hawaii and the other in Massachusetts. That “deniers” point out that the seas have been rising (and falling) for more than three billion years or since seas were subjected to evaporative outflow and river and ice-melt inflow and to vertical movements in the crust because of tectonic activity and isostatic rebound, seems to alarmists to be irrelevant and not a cause for “belief.” (Great Britain is, for instance, “tilting” as I write, rising in the Northwest and sinking in the Southeast, causing sea level to both rise and fall for the island). *** Deniers also point out that the effect of sea level change is enhanced by population growth in coastal areas, a “fact” that makes awareness of sea level a social, and therefore, mental, phenomenon. They also point out that the seemingly objective measurement of a rise of less than 2 mm per year during the first two decades of the twenty-first century would objectively indicate the need for 800 years to pass for a one meter rise—if the world has an objective (i.e., external) existence. Given the past changes in demographics and population centers over the past 800 years, such a rise of three feet is more a mental problem than a physical one. Little remains of coastal communities exactly as it was 800 years ago. The denizens of eight centuries ago are gone, their buildings have decayed, and new people have rebuilt as “reality” has allowed them (Nowhere is this more evident than on the eroding cliffs of Cape Cod, where the Nauset Beach Light had to be moved inland in 1996 lest it fall into the sea). Deniers also might point out that if climate activists were actually concerned about the “real” and mind-independent effects of sea level rise, they would move out of coastal cities because nothing they do will change a rise that they say is “global” and external to the mind.
Interestingly, both alarmists and deniers are like and unlike Berkeley because they pick and choose which realities are associated with “reasons to believe” and which are “experiential.” If subjective mind rules, an emotion like fear might determine how seriously alarmists consider the “climate change reality,” whereas indifference might characterize the seeming nonchalance of the deniers who find the threat rather unimportant in the scheme of everyday living. In the world of political divisions, subjectivity and objectivity are perched on a sea saw much like tilting England, where sea level is falling in the Northwest as it rises in the Southeast.
Convinced, it seems, that global warming is anthropogenic, the current President closed the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office in the belief that Americans should eliminate carbon emissions “to save” the planet. At the same time he saw no reason to stop the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline as though the carbon emissions from a Russian source differed from the emissions from Canadian and American sources. What would Berkeley think? Can the mind “make reality” because it has a “reason for believing”? Will the atmosphere know the difference in carbon because it comes from one source rather than from another? Does carbon dioxide have a mind-independent existence in the United States but a mind-dependent existence in Russia?
Are there undeniable objective realities? Does burning the same amount of oil and natural gas from a different country produce the same amount of warming that Canadian and American fossil fuels produce? Does President Berkeley think that closing the Keystone Pipeline while opening Nord Stream alters external reality? Stop for a moment to consider the atmosphere as an analog of Galileo’s statue and anthropogenic carbon emissions as Galileo’s feather.
Does the atmosphere, unlike the marble or bronze statue, “feel” the carbon feather with a sensitivity that distinguishes between sources? And if it can distinguish as an objectively existing “external” reality—a “statue” that feels—does the atmosphere actually and mind-independently respond by heating up? And if it does so, is the degree of heating arguable? Finally, if the heating is an objective reality will it take a geometric, exponential, or logarithmic path? Alarmists suggest the reasons for accepting the reality of climate change—that is, warming—lies in either a geometric or exponential rise, whereas deniers suggest the reasons for downplaying climate change—that is, warming—is that it will follow a logarithmic path (in other words, a doubling of carbon dioxide will not produce a doubling of heating).
As a result of his belief, President Berkeley has reason to accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming and that he can act to eliminate as many climate “feathers” as he can to prevent any further tickling. But he has at the same time asked Opec, Venezuela, and even Russia to produce more fossil fuels.
Ah! Poor President Berkeley. What’s he to do? He has a “reason to believe” in an “objective reality” defined by mass media, people like John Kerry, and greenies, but in acting, he has demonstrated a reason to believe the very opposite as evidenced by his acceptance of foreign fossil fuels. It just makes me wonder whether or not a statue feels a feather, whether or not either the feather or the statue has a mind-independent existence, or whether or not everything “out there”—that is, everything external—has an independent existence.
Makes me wonder: Have I imagined writing this essay? Are you, my unseen reader, real?
*YouTube under the title: Jerry Nadler thinks the rioting in Portland is a “myth."
**This is what Galileo wrote in The Assayer (1623):
“Suppose I pass my hand, first over a marble statue, then over a living man. So far as the hand, considered in itself, is concerned, it will act in an identical way upon each of these objects; that is, the primary qualities of motion and contact will similarly affect the two objects, and we would use identical language to describe this in each case. But the living body, which I subject to this experiment, will feel itself affected in various ways, depending upon the part of the body I happen to touch; for example, should it be touched on the sole of the foot or the kneecap, or under the armpit, it will feel, in addition to simple contact, a further affection to which we have given a special name: we call it “tickling.” This latter affection is altogether our own, and is not at all a property of the hand itself. And it seems to me that he would be gravely in error who would assert that the hand, in addition to movement and contact, intrinsically possesses another and different faculty which we might call the 2 “tickling faculty,” as though tickling were a resident property of the hand per se. Again, a piece of paper or a feather, when gently rubbed over any part of our body whatsoever, will in itself act everywhere in an identical way; it will, namely, move and contact. But we, should we be touched between the eyes, on the tip of the nose, or under the nostrils, will feel an almost intolerable titillation—while if touched in other places, we will scarcely feel anything at all. Now this titillation is completely ours and not the feather’s, so that if the living, sensing body were removed, nothing would remain of the titillation but an empty name. And I believe that many other qualities, such as taste, odor, color, and so on, often predicated of natural bodies, have a similar and no greater existence than this.”—Translated by A. C. Danto (1954) and available online in full at https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/galileo Accessed June 11, 2022
*** The rising and subsiding of Earth’s crust isn’t limited to landmasses. Ocean floors also rise and sink in response to seafloor spreading, magma chamber infilling and volcanism, and redistribution of mass—An oceanic volcano, for example, subsides: thus, the younger Hawaiian islands are higher standing than the older islands, like Midway, and coral atoll formation is the product of the same kind of subsidence. Here’s just one of many abstracts I might have posted in this regard:
“The most significant vertical movements of the oceanic crust in the Central Atlantic are characteristic of transverse ridges confined to transform fracture zones. These movements are also recorded in some local depressions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) and in older structures of deep-sea basins. The amplitude of such movements substantially exceeds that related to the cooling of lithospheric plates. Vertical movements can be driven by various factors: the thermal effect of a heated young MAR segment upon a cold plate, thermal stress, thermal energy released by friction in the course of displacement of fault walls relative to each other, serpentinization of the upper mantle rocks in the transform fault zone, and lateral compression and extension. The alternation of compression and extension that arises because of the nonparallel boundaries of the transform fracture zone and the unstable configuration of the rift/fracture zone junction was the main factor responsible for the formation of the transverse ridge in the Romanche Fracture Zone. The most probable cause of the vertical rise of the southern transverse ridge in the Vema Fracture Zone is the change in the spreading direction. In general, the fracture zones with active segments more than 100 km long are characterized by extension and compression oriented perpendicularly to the main displacement and related to slight changes in the spreading configuration. It is impossible to single out ambiguously the causes of vertical movements in particular structural features. In most cases, the vertical movements are controlled by several factors, while the main role belongs to the lateral compressive and tensile stresses that appear owing to changes in the movement of lithospheric blocks in the course of MAR spreading.” — A. A. Payve, 2006 Vertical tectonic movements of the crust in transform fracture zones of the Central Atlantic. Geotectonics 40(1):25-36.
Online at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227319081_Vertical_tectonic_movements_of_the_crust_in_transform_fracture_zones_of_the_Central_Atlantic Accessed June 11, 2022.
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