Simply Right

Lots of opinions and evidence going into the COP30 Climate Summit. I don't need to add to the noise; but I will say one thing. It would be nice if we could just do the right thing. 

I recall years ago, asking advice of someone I trusted who said "when in doubt, do what is kind". Great. Every ethical dilemma reduced to one simple rule.

The thing is, simple doesn't work. When you do what is kind to someone whose pension fund is invested in oil, sooner or later someone's home burns in a wildfire, or their children are washed away in a flood, or their crop fails. Kindness here and now has hidden costs elsewhere and later.

Doing the right thing requires good evidence to go with the ethics, and it's complicated. Doing the simple thing is just irresponsible.

*****************

What Did Bill Gates Really Say About Climate Change?: CBC News, Nov 6, 2025

Climate Inaction Claiming Lives: WHO quotes Lancet Report, Oct 29, 2025

Climate Minister on Canada's Climate Goals: CBC News, October 31, 2025

COP30 Climate Summit Needs a Power Shift: David Suzuki Foundation, Nov 6, 2025
Bracing For Climate Catastrophe: Just Have a Think, July 2025

Ghost Pumpkins

What's wrong with orange?

Orange is great, OK, but why not white? White pumpkins were developed independently by several growers late last century, just the latest interesting variation of a crop that has been cultivated for maybe 8000 years. White pumpkins are a fine example of "it is what it is until we mess with it". Of course 8000 years has seen a lot of changes in pumpkins,  color, size, shape, etc. But it didn't start with farmers. Mutation and selection has been going on for some 3.7 billion years here on Earth before farmers had a say, and during that time evolution produced about five billion species of which 8.7 million survive including us. We arrived late, or maybe we are still arriving. I mean it continues; it's still messing with us, mutations every generation. We may yet evolve, or we may join the extinct majority. But we have a say in what happens next.

To summarize:

It is what it is
until we mess with it and it messes with us;
but we have a say in what happens next.

IIWII-UWMWI-AIMWU-BWHASIWHN

There. I made it as simple as I can. I'm done. The rest is up to you.

IIWII-UWMWI

I have been thinking (again) how we make up explanations for our experience and then discover that they don't quite work.

While this is on my mind, Ethan Siegel offers a new essay entitled Yes, Reductionism Can Explain Everything In The Whole Universe. He rejects emergence as magic.

I'm guessing that he would reject Bob Doyle's Information Philosophy which explains emergence as new information that appears with the association of objects. For example, a hydrogen atom is, by itself, spherical, while two hydrogen atoms forming a molecule together have new attributes related to their combined shape: direction, vibration, rotation, etc. None of that is magic. The evidence is real and explicable.

However, at the most complex levels of aggregation such as the human body, explanations remain speculative and predictions uncertain. The trillions of cells in a human body generate consciousness, emotion, concepts, values and intention; but the explanation of how that happens is elusive.

New ideas look a bit like magic until the evidence demands we change our thinking. Remember the EPR paradox, objecting that quantum entanglement violates the local realism of causality? Remember Einstein's "spooky action at a distance". Reductionism works because when it doesn't work we change how we are thinking. Our understanding of the universe is emergent.

Knowing how Doyle and Siegel disagree might keep us from getting stuck in one worldview or the other. Hmmm. Emergence can be understood reductively and reductionism works because it is emergent.

I got started on this idea in the previous note.

We belong to a self-organizing system that sees itself through our eyes, understands itself through our thoughts, emerges from our actions.

Too many words. How about this.

We are intentionally active components of a recursively emergent reality.

Big words. Let's get it down to one syllable per word.

It is what it is
until we mess with it.

I know, it also messes with us. Recursion changes everything. But it's getting too complicated. That's the best I can do...for now.

It needs a song and a story with talking animals and an acronym for when we type with our thumbs.

IIWII-UWMWI

Not quite there. I will work on it.

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Renewables in South America: Just Have a Think, Oct 19, 2025

CO2 Levels in the Atmosphere: CBC News

Solution or Problem

I've had a fever. Now I can't taste anything. Can't tell excellent broccoli quiche from oatmeal porridge. If what follows is in poor taste, or if I am not making sense, please make allowances. I blame it on the virus.

Just now, I'm working on a meme, which may go viral if I let it out of the laboratory. Here goes.

Science involves us engaging with the unknown, which is almost everything since we don't actually know much. Let's be scientific. Let's go with the evidence and keep our ideas out of it. Can't be done. Making sense of the evidence involves finding analogies with things we already understand, as in that book I read recently, "Waves in an Impossible Sea" by Matt Strassler. Here we see science groping for metaphor, making the evidence fit our ideas and adjusting ideas to fit the evidence. It is no longer just about the evidence. It becomes a metareality in our thoughts. We intended to keep ourselves out of it... and then didn't.

Science wants to avoid getting lost in metaphor. The metaphors most used in science are objective and materialistic in an effort to suppress human motives and biases and keep things "real". But it's hard to let go of an idea that works when you discover that it doesn't work. Remember the EPR paradox, Einstein, Podalsky and Rosen objecting to quantum entanglement violating the local realism of causality? You don't remember. You don't do physics.

OK, biology. Everybody does biology. Ever had an ulcer? Remember the early scientific resistance to the idea of bacteria as the cause of gastric ulcers? Remember "It's all in your head, so just relax, stop worrying and get better"? Well, if bacteria are involved, that's a new idea in our heads. Then we use antibiotics to control the bacteria and fix the ulcer. So our heads are either part of the problem or part of the solution. Our metareality has real consequences altering reality.

Here's the current version of my meme.

We belong to a self-organizing system that sees itself through our eyes, understands itself through our thoughts, emerges from our actions.

Still needs work. There is certainly more to reality than us, but for sure we are part of it. Are we part of the solution or part of the problem?

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I Went To Space and Discovered an Enormous Lie: Ron Garan, Big Think.

The 50th anniversary of Quirks and Quarks.

The Big Bang Doesn't Mean What It Used To: Ethan Siegel, Big Think

The Battle For American Energy Supremacy: Just Have a Think, October 12, 2025.

What's For Lunch

 I've got a virus this week. Not much writing going on here. I offer instead a link to an article on ProgressiveChristianity.org.

From the Gospel to Science: Fergus McGinley

Yes, I agree with much of what Fergus wrote,
but to be consistent
I added my own comment to his article.

The title of this note may leave you wondering.
Science might give a detailed description of what's for lunch, down to the macronutrients and trace elements. Religion might make it an occasion for gratitude, connection, conversation and responsible behaviour. Either without the other would be incomplete. In fact there are probably many other perspectives that could lend meaning to lunch: health, climate change, plastic pollution, food waste, rampant obesity...

How Diet Affects Climate Change: Dana Ellis Hunnes, UCLA

In Other Words

I had another teaching dream last night. I was working on a chemistry lesson plan that started off with activation energy and wound up with the energy-entropy dynamic that underlies all life on earth. I awoke from a suffocation episode to find my face pressed into the pillow. Right! You have to breathe or entropy will get you. There may be some truth in dreams.

Writing is a waking dream,
groping through preconscious fog,
making sense of nonsense,
finding meaning,
choosing words in solitude.
And then the same idea surprises
as it all appears elsewhere
in other words.
Maybe that strange thought was true.

*****************

Liminal Spaces, Your Brain's Secret Laboratory: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Big Think

Make Meaning

You may have noticed me
going on about meaning:
The Meaning of Meaning
The Meaning of Life
To Look at Dust
and so on.

Life emerges from the void.
Meaning emerges from life.
Life goes on
sustained and changed by meaning.
We who make meaning
may avoid the dreaded tipping points...

But then perhaps it's all a waste of time.
Click the X,
leave meaning as what it meant,
say what's been said,
live as we lived
ignoring forest fires, floods and famine,
denying chaos while the planet dies...

Or find new words that work.

Make meaning.
Have a say.
Keep it all alive.

The Greatest Con Job: CNN Politics

Where Do We Come From? Ethan Siegel, Youtube 

Absurdist or Existentialist: Jonny Thomson

Malthusianism: Wikipedia

Current World Population: Worldometer

Ocean Acidification: CBC News, Sept 24, 2025

Extinction: Wikipedia

Arctic Sea Ice: Just Have A Think, Sept 21, 2025

Carbon Capture: Just Have A Think, Sept 28, 2025

Cutting Emissions: CBC News, Sept 28, 2025