Scandinavia, 2010. Flying to Bergen, then trains to the Sognfjord. A series of ferries up to Balastrand & Sogndal, then to the Geirangerfjord, ร lesund and Molde. Ferry to Trondheim, then train into Sweden, via Ostersund to Stockholm.
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Mary the super-scientist
Further musings written in 2010 on philosophy of mind – on Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument, or Mary the super-scientist.
The Thought Experiment
Mary is a great scientist of vision, but is born without the ability to see the colour red. She gets to learn everything about the physics and physiology of seeing red, and understands everything physical about the process of seeing red including all the associated brain states. Eventually doctors manage to operate upon her and restore her ability to see the colour red. Does she not acquire a new fact upon experiencing the colour red? If something is added, then she must have acquired new facts, something beyond the physical.
- You know all the physical facts about the brain and construct a model
- This model of the brain acts less than the mind
- The mind is more than the brain
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The Chinese Room
These are some musings written in 2010 on the subject of John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument.
A man has no knowledge of Chinese, only English. He is locked in a room, and follows a series of written instructions in English for the manipulation of Chinese characters. An appropriate series of instructions will allow him to converse in Chinese, even though he has no understanding of Chinese at all.
Continuing a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010.
Sadly I never finished writing up the full account of the trip, including walking all the way to the west coast, being surprised while using the bathroom in a hotel in Evisa, and getting stranded at a tortoise sanctuary due to train strikes.
The end of the trip coincided with the Icelandic volcano eruption, which meant my planned flight back from Geneva was cancelled. I ended up stranded in Geneva for about a week, kindly accommodated by my good friend who was working on the LHC there, before the air and French rail strikes cleared enough for me to get home.
I do, however, still have the photos taken during the trip. Here they are with some brief explanations:
Continuing a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010. Some of this information may be outdated!
This was the last day I had to explore the environs of Corte before heading on my extended hike to the west coast via the mare e mare Nord – out of several alternatives, I figures I could not visit Corte without also seeing the reputedly spectacular Restonica gorge.
My guide warned me that although breathtaking, during summer the accessibility of the gorge by car means it can get crowded with tourists unwilling to walk – traffic jams even develop, spanning the narrow road which weaves the 15km through the length of the gorge from Corte to the bergeries de Grotelle. But during early spring the trip up the gorge to the high mountain lakes, Melu and Capitellu, promised to be very worthwhile.
I was mesmerised by some photos I had seen of the lakes, seemingly sunk like craters in the high mountains and shrowded in mist. They looked rather mysterious and alluring, and should be very atmospheric if there are few other tourists about.
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Hiking Day 1 – The Arch of Corte
Continuing a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010. Some of this information may be outdated!
As described in the last post, there are a whole bunch of good hikes you can do from your base at Corte. Combine this with Corte being the most well connected town in the region in terms of transport and the local hotels and facilities (as well as the fact that Corte is a proper town, interesting in its own right, unlike – for example – Vizzavona) makes it an excellent base for exploring the area.
I had two days before my big hike west over the Corsican watershead, one of which would be spent walking the Restonica valley and seeing lakes Melo and Capitello.
One my first day, however, I decided to break myself in with an “easy” walk. Based on some upside-down logic which escapes me now, for some reason I decided that a hike up to a local landmark, the Arch of Corte (or Arcu di u Scandulaghiu as you’ll sometimes see it). I also decided to do the walk with a full pack to test whether I was up to lugging all my stuff dozens of kilometers over the mountains. For some strange reason I failed to grasp that a vertical kilometer of ascent can hardly be described as an “easy start”.
Continuing a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010. Some of the links are now unfortunately dead – you might try the wayback machine.
Before I had to decide whether I wanted to commit myself to an attempt to hike the western side of the Mare a Mare Nord from Corte to the west coast, I had two days in Corte to see the local sites and hike the local trails. Corte is a great base for walking trips, and based on my research – particularly the experience of these American guys, who walked the whole of the Nord in summer some years ago; these guys from the UK who give good summaries of the hikes they did in Calvi and Corte as part of an organised walking holiday; and corsica.forhikers.com, which contains lots of useful bits of information (albeit with much more geared towards the GR20) – I could happily spend a week there, walking a different route every day and not getting bored. Including short trips on the Michelline train to, for example, Vizzavona, I came up with a good number of tempting places to explore over these two days.
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Corsica by Train
Continuing a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010. This post describes my journey by train all the way to Corsica.
I set off for Corsica on the morning (early morning) of April 8th. I’d been a bit nervous about the UK rail strikes affecting the eurostar, but they’d been put on hold and now my only concern was the weather and my inevitable paranoia about losing my passport before I’d even set off.
Eurostar is brilliant.
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Hiking Corsica: Planning Travel
The first in a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010. This post describes my process of planning the journey overland to Corsica. Note that much of the information on booking tickets is now very outdated, though Man in Seat 61 remains excellent.
After I’d booked what I could and prepared myself with fleecy clothes, a survival bad, 2 kg of chocolate and other incongruous stuff, the next stage was getting to Corsica.
Flying?
I’m not really a huge fan of flying. It doesn’t exactly bother me – I quite enjoy the takeoff and landing, as they’re the only really exciting bits – but it always feels like the least interesting way to travel. Even by coach, with all its amusing associated challenges (how long can I go without drinking/going to the toilet) gives you a proper sense of movement and the feeling you’re travelling through a landscape. I’ve taken to thinking of planes as really slow, dull teleporters: you get on, sit in a rather featureless tube for a few hours, then step off and bang!: you’re immediately in another country, with a different climate.
This was written back in 2009. Some of the references are out of date, and the insights seem more commonplace now. I can’t tell if that’s because they’ve been borne out by time, or that they were obvious all along.
Backgammon is an ancient game, perhaps the oldest in the world.
Despite the fact that the inner workings of the game โ the rules of checker movement โ are obviously of human invention, the obscurity of their providence and their sheer simplicity almost makes them akin to natural physical laws, applying themselves to the minimalistic universe of the backgammon board.
Like the physical world, too, backgammon might seem to us to behave as an intractable mixture of determinism and randomness. Reports of games very similar, but presumably genetically unrelated, to backgammon being played by native people in the New World by the first European explorers might suggest that backgammon-like games represent a natural class of game to emerge from the mathematics of probability and position.
Because the study of this world โ the science of backgammon โ may be pursued for both fun and (gambling) profit, it too has a long history. And curiously, this natural philosophy follows a similar path to investigations of the broader universe.