I’m now my thoughts

"I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write… I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it."

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me

‘What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life – me, so calm and peaceful?’

The only way to survive in this world

"The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine.

How is it done? By not doing. By dreaming insistently. By performing our daily duties but living, simultaneously, in the imagination. Travelling far and wide, in the geography of our minds. Conquering like Caesar, amid the blaring trumpets of our reverie. Experiencing intense sexual pleasure, in the privacy of our fantasy. Feeling everything in every way, not in the flesh, which always tires, but in the imagination."

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life

‘Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life’

I’m the empty stage

'I’ve created various personalities within… I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays’

They think, therefore they are

Pessoa looks within and whispers, with horror:
 ‘They think, therefore they are.’

Be what I think?

‘Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!’

Each of us is a profusion of selves

"Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways."

I begin because I don’t have the strength to think

"I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit."

Why do we love cinema?

"Why do we love cinema? The final answer is not because it is entertaining but because, to echo Saint Augustine, our hearts are restless. We long for life to make sense. We love it when we find mean- ing. Cinema offers such a catharsis. As the titles roll, we can find an almost transcendent calm."

The ecstasy of mental pleasure

No man yet, on having intercourse with the woman he loves, has been so happy that he went out and sacrificed an ox; nor has anyone ever prayed to die on the spot if he could only have his fill of royal meat or cakes. But Eudoxus prayed to be consumed in flames like Phaethon if he could only stand next to the sun and ascertain the shape, size and composition of the planets; and when Pythagoras discovered his theorem he sacrificed an ox, as Apollodorus records.

~ Plutarch describing the ecstasy of what was then called natural philosophy

The demon causes him to detest the place where he finds himself – and even life itself.

"Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399) conceives acedia* as being demonic. The midday demon (daemon meridianus) is the most cunning of all demons, attacking the monk in the middle of the day, in broad day- light, causing the sun to seem to be standing utterly still in the sky. Things intrude on this state but appear to be completely de- animated. The demon causes him to detest the place where he finds himself – and even life itself.

* Acediacan be roughly translated as ‘boredom’."

The problem of alienation at work

"There might be one way in which social cooperation increases happiness: ‘A great part, perhaps the greatest part, of human happiness and misery arises from the view of our past conduct and from the degree of approbation or disapprobation which we feel from the consideration of it,’ Smith thought. Social cooperation encourages people to conduct themselves admirably and therefore in praiseworthy ways – ‘a job well done’, ‘I was glad to help’ – from which they will gain a sense of satisfaction and, from that, happiness. This might well be so, in an ideal world. However, praiseworthiness does not always receive the praise it deserves. Moreover, at work, say, that which is praised may have little to do with praiseworthiness. For in a world defined by commerce and competition, delivery merits the attention; at work, people are remunerated for what they do, not who they are; qualities that might make someone praiseworthy are likely simply to be ignored or take second place. Hence the problem of alienation at work: it can make you very unhappy."

Consumer Melancholy Syndrome

"The first might be referred to as consumer melancholy syndrome – CMS for short. Though not under that name, it was well articulated by Rousseau, as a result of the identification of happiness with plea- sure. Three unintended consequences of this equivalence cause CMS. First, pleasures only satisfy desires; they do not fulfil them – leaving people sated but sad. Second, people become slaves to these desires and so suffer the unhappiness of that enslavement. Third, this slavish unhappiness is exacerbated, because people find they are not happy even though they think happiness should be their right. ‘Happiness leaves us or we leave it,’ Rousseau despaired."

To crayon or not

"One day, Homer Simpson discovers that he has a crayon in his brain. It nestles between the soft grey folds as snug as a bug in a rug. Any effects the crayon might have are, apparently, negligible. It has been there for many years, ever since, as a child, he attempted to ram an entire box of crayons up his nose; an experiment aborted by a sneeze. Out flew all the crayons, bar this reluctant one. He had not noticed it at all.

Though now he knows about it, he is disconcerted and decides to have the crayon removed. The result is simultaneously amazing and alarming. It is amazing because, after the extraction, he finds himself equipped with new powers of intelligence. His raised appreciation of the world transforms his take on life and, in particular, brings him closer to Lisa, his clever and formerly rather intimidating, daughter. It is alarming because he cannot keep his new perspicuity to himself. What had been hidden from him – poor security at work, the bland- ness of a movie plot-line – now scream out at him as unbearably bad. In the story Homer blows the whistle on both and is ostracised by everyone around him; they don’t want to know about the threat to or the dreariness of life. Everyone, that is, except Lisa, who explains that intelligence has an inverse relationship to happiness: ignorance is bliss. Homer is faced with a choice: live without the crayon or have it put back. Moe, the bartender-cum-surgeon, reinserts it into his brain."

What choice would you have made, if you were in Homer's place? .....................Why?

The pleasure of asking questions

‘One of the greatest joys known to man is to take such a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge. The great pleasure of ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions. The man who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure of dogma, which is the pleasure of answering, is already beginning to stiffen.’
~ Robert Lynd

Exploit the weaknesses of the human minds

"Just as genes for the eye implicitly ‘know’ the laws of optics, so the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge of the human condition, and use it mercilessly to evade the defences and exploit the weaknesses of the human minds that they enslave."

Memes in static societies

"How is this done? The details are variable and not relevant here, but the sort of thing that happens is that people growing up in such a society acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else which amounts to ridding themselves of distinctive attributes and seeking only conformity with the society’s constitutive memes. They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members’ sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others. So they feel pride and shame, and form all their aspirations and opinions, by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society’s memes."

Disable their creativity and critical faculties

"That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place."

The evolution of memes

"Since a person can enact and transmit a meme soon after receiving it, a meme generation can be much shorter than a human generation. And many cycles of variation and selection can take place inside the minds concerned even during one meme generation. Also, memes can be passed to people other than the holders’ biological descendants. Those factors make meme evolution enormously faster than gene evolution, which partly explains how memes can contain so much knowledge. Hence the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life on Earth, in which human civilization occupies only the final ‘second’ of the ‘day’ during which life has so far existed, is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes."

The selfish meme

"Memes are subject to all sorts of random and intentional variation in addition to all that selection, and so they evolve. So to this extent the same logic holds as for genes: memes are ‘selfish’. They do not necessarily evolve to benefit their holders, or their society – or, again, even themselves, except in the sense of replicating better than other memes. (Though now  most other memes are their rivals, not just variants of themselves.) The successful meme variant is the one that changes the behaviour of its holders in such a way as to make itself best at displacing other memes from the population. This variant may well benefit its holders, or their culture, or the species as a whole. But if it harms them, or destroys them, it will spread anyway. Memes that harm society are a familiar phenomenon. You need only consider the harm done by adherents of political views, or religions, that you especially abhor. Societies have been destroyed because some of the memes that were best at spreading through the population were bad for a society. And countless individuals have been harmed or killed by adopting memes that were bad for them – such as irrational political ideologies or dangerous fads."

Meme replication

"The situation faced by memes is utterly different. Each meme has to be expressed as behaviour every time it is replicated. For it is that behaviour, and only that behaviour (given the environment created by all the other memes), that effects the replication. That is because a recipient cannot see the representation of the meme in the holder’s mind. A meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program. If it is not enacted, it will not be copied.

The upshot of this is that memes necessarily become embodied in two different physical forms alternately: as memories in a brain, and as behaviour."

Some jokes were not created by anyone – that they evolved

"In the classic 1956 science-fiction story ‘Jokester’, by Isaac Asimov, the main character is a scientist studying jokes. He finds that, although most people do sometimes make witty remarks that are original, they never invent what he considers to be a fully fledged joke: a story with a plot and a punchline that causes listeners to laugh. Whenever they tell such a joke, they are merely repeating one that they have heard from someone else. So, where do jokes come from originally? Who creates them? The fictional answer given in ‘Jokester’ is far-fetched and need not concern us here. But the premise of the story is not so absurd: it really is plausible that some jokes were not created by anyone – that they evolved."

Happiness is discovered by chance

"Happiness is discovered by chance. But the chance is made by living."

Progress might not promote happiness

"Progress might not promote happiness but can actually undermine it, in three ways. First, progress rests on factors, such as competitiveness, which cause anxiety. Second, it feeds desires, such as acquisitiveness, which cause dissatisfaction. Third, it creates expectations, such as the desire for happiness, which cause disquiet."

We have merely a deceitful and frivolous exterior

‘In the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, politeness and sublime maxims we have merely a deceitful and frivolous exterior: honour without virtue, reason without wisdom and pleasure without happiness,’
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Coalition governments and compromise policies

"Proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies. But compromises – amalgams of the policies of the contributors – have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it. Thus compromise policies shield the underlying explanations which  do at least seem good to some faction from being criticized and abandoned."

The voters are not a fount of wisdom

"In this view, any interpretation of the democratic process as merely a way of consulting the people to find out who should rule or what policies to implement misses the point of what is happening. An election does not play the same role in a rational society as consulting an oracle or a priest, or obeying orders from the king, did in earlier societies. The essence of democratic decision-making is not the choice made by the system at elections, but the ideas created between elections. And elections are merely one of the many institutions whose function is to allow such ideas to be created, tested, modified and rejected. The voters are not a fount of wisdom from which the right policies can be empirically ‘derived’. They are attempting, fallibly, to explain the world and thereby to improve it. They are, both individually and collectively, seeking the truth – or should be, if they are rational. And there  is an objective truth of the matter. Problems are soluble. Society is not a zero-sum game: the civilization of the Enlightenment did not get where it is today by cleverly sharing out the wealth, votes or anything else that was in dispute when it began. It got here by creating  ex nihilo . In particular, what voters are doing in elections is not synthesizing a decision of a superhuman being, ‘Society’. They are choosing which experiments are to be attempted next, and (principally) which are to be abandoned because there is no longer a good explanation for why they are best. The politicians, and their policies, are those experiments."

Rational decision-making

"Rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out- argued, refuted and abandoned. During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest."

Because I say so

"Bad philosophy has always existed too. For instance, children have always been told, ‘Because I say so.’ Although that is not always intended as a philosophical position, it is worth analysing it as one, for in four simple words it contains remarkably many themes of false and bad philosophy. First, it is a perfect example of bad explanation: it could be used to ‘explain’ anything. Second, one way it achieves that status is by addressing only the form of the question and not the substance: it is about who said something, not what they said. That is the opposite of truth-seeking. Third, it reinterprets a request for true explanation (why should something-or-other be as it is?) as a request for justification (what entitles you to assert that it is so?), which is the justified-true-belief chimera. Fourth, it confuses the nonexistent authority for ideas with human authority (power) – a much-travelled path in bad political philosophy. And, fifth, it claims by this means to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism."

In the end there’s only death

"Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end there’s only death."

To inhibit you from seeing yourself as a buffoon

"Cognitive biases are predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. You and everyone else come into the world preloaded with these pesky and completely wrong ways of seeing things, and you rarely notice them. Many of them serve to keep you confident in your own perceptions or to inhibit you from seeing yourself as a buffoon. The maintenance of a positive self-image seems to be so important to the human mind you have evolved mental mechanisms designed to make you feel awesome about yourself."

But every man I ever met was terrified of getting old

"People think that when you’re young you go out and have fun, and only later do you start to think about death. But every man I ever met was terrified of getting old. They worried all the time about how old they were. They get obsessed about it when they’re quite young—I’ve seen twenty-five-year-olds worried about getting old—and it just gets worse."

In a café called Zarathustra

It’s always the same old shit of course,
The eternal return, et cetera,
And here I am eating raspberry mousse
In a café called Zarathustra.

Motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure

"Most of the people Bruno had encountered in his life had been motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure—if one includes in the definition those narcissistic pleasures so central to the esteem or admiration of others. And thus different strategies are adopted, and these are called human lives."

I’m useless

“I’m useless,” he said resignedly. “I couldn’t breed pigs, I don’t have the faintest idea how to make sausages or forks or mobile phones. I’m surrounded by all this stuff that I eat or use and I couldn’t actually make a single thing—couldn’t even begin to understand how they’re made. If industrial production ceased tomorrow, if all the engineers and the specialist technicians disappeared off the face of the earth, I couldn’t do anything to start things over again. In fact, outside the industrialized world, I couldn’t even survive; I wouldn’t know how to feed or clothe myself, or protect myself from the weather. My technical competence falls far short of Neanderthal man. I’m completely dependent on my society, but I play no useful role in it. The only thing I know how to do is write dubious commentaries on outdated cultural issues. I get paid for it, too, well paid—much more than the average wage. Most of the people I know are exactly the same.”

Be calm, my pain

"Be calm, my pain, and venture to be still.
You clamored for the Night; it falls; is here:
The city shrouds itself in blackest chill,
Brings peace to some, to others fear.
’Neath Pleasure’s lash, the grim high executioner,
Mortal souls, that vile and worthless throng,
Reap grim remorse amidst the abject ceremony,
Pain, take my hand; let us now along . . ."

When you work in something like teaching

"When you work in something like teaching, every year seems the same. The only things that mark out your life are visits to the doctor and watching the kids grow up."

Desire is a source of suffering, pain and hatred

"Any philosopher, not just Buddhist or Christian, but any philosopher worthy of the name, knows that, in itself, desire—unlike pleasure—is a source of suffering, pain and hatred. The utopian solution—from Plato to Huxley by way of Fourier—is to do away with desire and the suffering it causes by satisfying it immediately. The opposite is true of the sex-and-advertising society we live in, where desire is marshaled and blown up out of all proportion, while satisfaction is maintained in the private sphere. For society to function, for competition to continue, people have to want more and more, until desire fills their lives and finally devours them."

See the value of seizing the day

"We can see the value of happiness while accepting that it is not everything, which will make it easier for us at those times when it eludes us. We can learn to appreciate the pleasures of life without becoming slaves to appetites which can never be satisfied. We can see the value of success, while not interpreting that too narrowly, so that we can appreciate the project of striving to become what we want to be as well as the more visible, public signs of success. We can see the value of seizing the day, without that leading us into a desperate scramble to grasp the ungraspable moment. We can appreciate the value in helping others lead meaningful lives, too, without thinking that altruism demands everything we have. And finally, we can recognize the value of love, as perhaps the most powerful motivator to do anything at all."

Be a philosopher but

‘Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.’
~ David Hume

Not a simple recipe for contentment and satisfaction

"The simplicity of the conclusion is also deceptive because what is simple is not always easy or obvious. It is straightforward enough to say that life can be worthwhile in itself, particularly if it is a life with a balance of authenticity, happiness and concern for others; one where time is not wasted; one which engages in the ongoing work of becoming who we want to be and being successful in those terms. But putting this all into practice is difficult. Indeed, it carries with it a risk we saw when looking at success, namely that we will set ourselves an unrealistically high standard and end up being dissatisfied with life as a result. The sobering truth is that life involves ongoing struggle. One can understand what the elements of a meaningful life are, but they do not provide a simple recipe for contentment and satisfaction."

To challenge the power others seek to exert over us

"But the simplicity of the conclusion should not detract from its significance. The mere fact that life’s meaning is available and potentially evident to all is a major challenge to those who see themselves as the guardians of life’s significance: the priests, gurus and teachers who would have us think life’s meaning is beyond ordinary mortals. To challenge this view is to challenge the power others seek to exert over us by their claims to special knowledge."

To confront and accept the limits of human understanding

"The humanist, who sees this life as providing the only available source of meaning, accepts all this, just as she accepts the claims of morality without transcendental support and the existence of mystery without seeing it as a place-holder for the divine. The transcendentalist, in contrast, wants what is of value in life to be underwritten by a high order. Love isn’t good enough unless it is all conquering and can triumph even over death. Morality is not morality if it is rooted only in human life. Mystery is intolerable if it merely reflects the limits of human understanding. The transcendentalist’s desire for something more is understandable, but the humanist’s refusal to succumb is, I believe, a sign of her ability to confront and accept the limits of human understanding and, ultimately, human existence."

Source of great elation and joy

"It is not, then, true that love shows the rationalist-humanist approach to be misguided. Rather, it exemplifies the limits of human powers to understand and master life, which any adequate humanist account of the meaning of existence must accept. But it also shows something profound to which humanism can make claim. Love is not immortal or invincible. Sadly, it is not true that all you need is love. Love, like life, is valuable, but fragile and subject to no guarantees. It is fraught with risk and disappointment, as well as being the source of great elation and joy."

Love can pass us by

"Love also requires us sometimes to seize the day. Because love is valuable and opportunities to find it relatively rare, we are fools to let chances for real love pass us by or delay reconciliation with estranged friends or family we still have strong feelings for. Of course, this line of reasoning has been used as a mere seduction technique, from the eloquent lines of Andrew Marvell’s metaphysical poems to the clumsy chat-up lines uttered in bars and clubs. But the line is only effective because it reflects a truth that haunts us: too much caution, and love can pass us by."

How can or does life mean something to us?

"However, the attempt to argue that the whole idea of ‘a meaning of life’ is incoherent stumbles when it comes to the meaning of ‘meaning’ which concerns the importance something has, as in ‘it means a lot to me’. It is precisely here that life can and does have meaning. It doesn’t have meaning in itself, from a neutral perspective. But it means something to us. The question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ may well not fit comfortably with this interpretation, but the question ‘How can or does life mean something to us?’ certainly does. The question is thus one about why life is of value to us, why we think it to be important and worth living. This is a perfectly coherent question."

‘The meaning of life’ is incoherent

"There is, however, another way of trying to challenge the idea that life must have meaning. That is to claim that life is not the kind of thing that can have meaning, and so the whole idea of ‘the meaning of life’ is incoherent."

Those who have suffered less must have missed out on something

"But perhaps because suffering costs us so much, we feel the need to place a kind of premium on it. We don’t like to think that our past suffering was in any way unnecessary or could have been avoided, for that would be to accept that life has been worse than it might otherwise have been for no further benefit. We think those who have suffered less must have missed out on something. It would pain us too much to simply accept that they have been more fortunate than us."

Learning through suffering

"In the same way, it is often through suffering that we learn. But it is far better if we can learn without suffering, or learn from the suffering of others (without making others suffer, of course). However, some people take the fact that suffering is often the route to learning to mean that suffering is somehow essential to all learning, or that the person who learns by suffering has necessarily learned more than the person who has learned without suffering. While in general this may be true, it is by no means always true. Many people suffer and never learn. Others learn quickly and avoid the need to suffer altogether."

Losing your self

"Freeing your mind by losing your self does not seem a fruitful path to finding meaning in life. Even if it is true that in one sense the self is an illusion, this gives us no reason to try and dismantle the apparatus that makes the existence of the self possible. Temporarily losing a sense of self also seems to be, ultimately, a way of satisfying the self, and so any technique that delivers this loss of ego has to be judged on whether its effects are a desirable part of a meaningful life. Permanently losing a sense of self is otherwise known as death."

I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer

“Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.
Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”
—FROM PRIMO LEVI : IF THIS IS A MAN (1959)

To narrow our minds

"The idea that an open mind is important above all else is so prevalent that any suggestion that some narrowing is essential might be seen as heresy. But it is the only way. Do you treat the claims of Branch Davidians and other fringe Christian cults as seriously as you do the claims of the world’s major faiths? When you hear someone has claimed the end of the world is nigh, do you always thoroughly check them out to see if they are right? I hope not. We narrow our minds not just to avoid wasting mental energy but because we have to."

Because life just isn’t long enough

"All this is true. But what follows from it? What cannot follow is that we have to assume all alternative viewpoints are equally valid until we have thoroughly examined them for ourselves and proved otherwise. This is a policy we cannot follow. They are just too many belief systems in the world, too many explanations offered as to why we are here and how we ought to live. How would one set about trying to examine the truth of all of them from within, refusing to be satisfied with what to insiders would seem a superficial understanding? It can’t be done because life just isn’t long enough. Some of these alternatives actually demand a lifetime of practice, which means you could ‘try out’ no more than one anyway."

What we cannot talk about

"There are those who say that meditation can give us a form of knowledge which cannot be expressed in words. In which case, as Wittgenstein said, ‘What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.’ I confess myself to be a sceptic, and this scepticism is bolstered by the fact that since words cannot express what this enlightenment is supposed to be like or of, I have no grounds on which to judge whether I should give it a go myself. After all, similar promises are made of many and varying forms of spirituality. They usually also stress that it takes many years to achieve this illumination. But then what reasons could I be given to make me choose one way over another and dedicate years of my life to the pursuit of something I know not what it is? It can only be that I am impressed by the effect it seems to have on others and have good reason to want to be like them and to think that I can be like them. Personally, however, I tend to find that the kind of detachment many such people have seems smug, self-righteous and alienating."

The person who endures hardship to help others

"The person who endures hardship to help others shows considerably more disregard for their own welfare than a person who lives smiling and at peace in a monastery or commune. Whichever way you look at it, this is about satisfying the self, not lessening concern for it. It may be a worthwhile form of life, but it must be seen for what it is."

These historicists are afraid of change

"Such considerations suggest the possibility that these historicists are afraid of change, and that they cannot accept the idea of change without serious inward struggle. It often seems as if they were trying to comfort themselves for the loss of a stable world by clinging to the view that change is ruled by an unchanging law. (In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the theory that the changing world in which we live is an illusion and that there exists a more real world which does not change.)"

Although only a few may originate a policy

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.
—PERICLES OF ATHENS

Know how to rank beliefs

"Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause."

Your new car and eternal happiness

"This prediction error works as follows. You are about to buy a new car. It is going to change your life, elevate your status, and make your commute a vacation. It is so quiet that you can hardly tell if the engine is on, so you can listen to Rachmaninoff’s nocturnes on the highway. This new car will bring you to a permanently elevated plateau of contentment . People will think , Hey, he has a great car, every time they see you. Yet you forget that the last time you bought a car, you also had the same expectations. You do not anticipate that the effect of the new car will eventually wane and that you will revert to the initial condition, as you did last time. A few weeks after you drive your new car out of the showroom, it will become dull . If you had expected this, you probably would not have bought it .
You are about to commit a prediction error that you have already made. Yet it would cost so little to introspect!"

Psychopaths rally followers

"Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one’s own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge—we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers."

It is not that he was ahead of his time

"Montaigne is quite refreshing to read after the strains of a modern education since he fully accepted human weaknesses and understood that no philosophy could be effective unless it took into account our deeply ingrained imperfections, the limitations of our rationality, the flaws that make us human. It is not that he was ahead of his time; it would be better said that later scholars (advocating rationality) were backward."

He introspects, introspects, and introspects

"Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgment . Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot , yet has the rare guts to say “I don’t know.” He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit , and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion."

One single institution cannot aggregate knowledge

"For Hayek , a true forecast is done organically by a system, not by fiat . One single institution, say, the central planner, cannot aggregate knowledge; many important pieces of information will be missing. But society as a whole will be able to integrate into its functioning these multiple pieces of information. Society as a whole thinks outside the box. Hayek attacked socialism and managed economies as a product of what I have called nerd knowledge, or Platonicity—owing to the growth of scientific knowledge, we overestimate our ability to understand the subtle changes that constitute the world, and what weight needs to be imparted to each such change. He aptly called this “scientism.”"

They no longer make geniuses like that

"Poincaré became a prolific essayist in his thirties. He seemed in a hurry and died prematurely, at fifty-eight ; he was in such a rush that he did not bother correcting typos and grammatical errors in his text , even after spotting them, since he found doing so a gross misuse of his time. They no longer make geniuses like that—or they no longer let them write in their own way."

Winner-take-all

"Every time I see a T-shirt bearing the picture of the modern icon Albert Einstein, I cannot help thinking of Poincaré—Einstein is worthy of our reverence, but he has displaced many others. There is so little room in our consciousness; it is winner-take-all up there."

The solution exists

"The information that the solution exists is itself a big piece of the solution."

The wise one

"It is often said that “is wise he who can see things coming.” Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away."

Forecasting by bureaucrats

"Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making."

Wise man lives as long as he should

"Living is not the good, but living well. The wise man therefore lives as long as he should, not as long as he can. He will observe where he is to live, with whom, how, and what he is to do. He will always think of life in terms of quality, not quantity. If he encounters many vexations which disturb his tranquillity, he will release himself. He will do this not only in an extreme exigency, but as soon as he begins to suspect Fortune he will look about him carefully to determine whether he ought to have done. He will consider it of no importance whether he causes his end or merely accepts it, whether late or early. He does not shrink as before some great deprivation, for not much can be lost from a trickle. Dying early or late is of no relevance, dying well or ill is. To die well is to escape the danger of living ill...

Just as I choose a ship to sail in or a house to live in, so I choose a death for my passage from life. Moreover, whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse....A man’s life should satisfy other people as well, his death only himself, and whatever sort he likes is best."

~ Seneca

The shock of its birth

"Our civilization—a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humaneness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind. This civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth—the transition from the tribal or ‘closed society’, with its submission to magical forces, to the ‘open society’ which sets free the critical powers of man. The shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism. What we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself."

The art of prophecy

“The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.”

~ Mark Twain

You cannot ignore self-delusion

"You cannot ignore self-delusion. The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together—the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge. Next , instead of the range of forecasts, we will concern ourselves with the accuracy of forecasts, i. e. , the ability to predict the number itself."

The critical examination of our theories

"There is only one element of rationality in our attempts to know the world: it is the critical examination of our theories. These theories themselves are guesswork. We do not know, we only guess. If you ask me, 'How do you know?' my reply would be, I don't; I only propose a guess. If you are interested in my problem, I shall be most happy if you criticize my guess, and if you offer counterproposals, I in turn will try to criticize them.'"

Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final

"It thus leads, almost by necessity, to the realization that our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement; that our knowledge, our doctrine, is conjectural; that it consists of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths; and that criticism and critical discussion are our only means of getting nearer to the truth. It thus leads to the tradition of bold conjectures and of free criticism"

They are all presented as restatements of the true sayings

"In this way all changes of doctrine - if any - are surreptitious changes . They are all presented as restatements of the true sayings of the master, of his own words, his own meaning, his own intentions ."

New ideas are heresies

"In all or almost all civilizations we find something like religious and cosmological teaching, and in many societies we find schools. Now schools, especially primitive schools, all have, it appears, a characteristic structure and function. Far from being places of critical discussion they make it their task to impart a definite doctrine, and to preserve it, pure and unchanged. It is the task of a school to hand on the tradition, the doctrine of its founder, its first master, to the next generation, and to this end the most important thing is to keep the doctrine inviolate. A school of this kind never admits a new idea. New ideas are heresies, and lead to schisms; should a member of the school try to change the doctrine, then he is expelled as a heretic. But the heretic claims, as a rule, that his is the true doctrine of the founder. Thus not even the inventor admits that he has introduced an invention; he believes, rather, that he is returning to the true orthodoxy which has somehow been perverted."

Specialization may be a great temptation for the scientist

"Specialization may be a great temptation for the scientist. For the philosopher it is the mortal sin."

How the need for workers were met

"But this sort of chaotic mistreatment was not reserved only for prisoners. At crucial moments of the civil war , the emergency needs of the Red Army and the Soviet state overrode every thing else, from re-education to revenge to considerations of justice. In October 1918, the commander of the northern front sent a request to the Petrograd military commission for 800 workers, urgently needed for road construction and trench digging. As a result , “a number of citizens from the former merchant classes were invited to appear at Soviet headquarters, allegedly for the purpose of registration for possible labor duty at some future date. When these citizens appeared for registration , they were placed under arrest and sent to the Semenovsky barracks to await their dispatch to the front . ” When even this did not produce enough workers, the local Soviet—the local ruling council —simply surrounded a part of Nevsky Prospekt , Petrograd’s main shopping street , arrested every one without a Party card or a certificate proving they worked for a government institution , and marched them off to a nearby barracks. Later , the women were released, but the men were packed off to the north : “not one of the thus strangely mobilized men was allowed to settle his family affairs, to say goodbye to his relatives, or to obtain suitable clothing and footwear. ”"

Without mercy , without sparing

“Without mercy , without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin . . . let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie—more blood, as much as possible . . . ”
~ Krasnaya  Gazeta

People were to be sentenced not for what they had done

"From the very earliest days of the new Soviet state, in other words, people were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were."

The story of your life was your own

"In fact , reading the accounts of those who survived both , one is struck more by the differences between the victims’ experiences than by the differences between the two camp systems. Each tale has its own unique qualities, each camp held different sorts of horrors for people of different characters. In Germany you could die of cruelty , in Russia you could die of despair . In Auschwitz you could die in a gas chamber , in Kolyma you could freeze to death in the snow . You could die in a German forest or a Siberian waste-land, you could die in a mining accident or you could die in a cattle train . But in the end, the story of your life was your own."

Ins and outs of Gulag

"Although arrests were constant , so too were releases. Prisoners were freed because they finished their sentences, because they were let into the Red Army , because they were invalids or women with small children , because they had been promoted from captive to guard. As a result , the total number of prisoners in the camps generally hovered around two million , but the total number of Soviet citizens who had some experience of the camps, as political or criminal prisoners, is far higher . From 1929, when the Gulag began its major expansion , until 1953, when Stalin died, the best estimates indicate that some eighteen million people passed through this massive system. About another six million were sent into exile, deported to the Kazakh deserts or the Siberian forests. Legally obliged to remain in their exile villages, they too were forced laborers, even though they did not live behind barbed wire."

The Gulag civilization

"Contrary to popular assumption , the Gulag did not cease growing in the 1930s, but rather continued to expand throughout the Second World War and the 1940s, reaching its apex in the early 1950s. By that time the camps had come to play a central role in the Soviet economy . They produced a third of the country’s gold, much of its coal and timber , and a great deal of almost every thing else. In the course of the Soviet Union’s existence, at least 476 distinct camp complexes came into being, consisting of thousands of individual camps, each of which contained anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands of people.The prisoners worked in almost every industry imaginable—logging, mining, construction , factory work, farming, the designing of airplanes and artillery —and lived, in effect , in a country within a country , almost a separate civilization .The Gulag had its own laws, its own customs, its own morality , even its own slang. It spawned its own literature, its own villains, its own heroes, and it left its mark upon all who passed through it , whether as prisoners or guards. Years after being released, the Gulag’s inhabitants were often able to recognize former inmates on the street simply from “the look in their eyes. ”"

Success and luck

"A successful person will try to convince you that his achievements could not possibly be accidental , just as a gambler who wins at roulette seven times in a row will explain to you that the odds against such a streak are one in several million, so you either have to believe some transcendental intervention is in play or accept his skills and insight in picking the winning numbers. But if you take into account the quantity of gamblers out there, and the number of gambling sessions (several million episodes in total), then it becomes obvious that such strokes of luck are bound to happen. And if you are talking about them, they have happened to you."

Entertaining obligations

Many people seem to entertain the view that, other people are for the purpose of their entertainment; to listen to them when they have something to say, to go along with their activities, whatever they may wish to do at a given time period in their lives, to mold their lives according to their momentary whims; and if the other person does not oblige then they invoke the moral and ethical responsibilities of humans towards other humans (well, more specifically, themselves) (more like moral blackmailing).

Why can’t people find entertainment in themselves, in their solitude? There is nothing wrong with group activities, if all participants are there of their own accord, their own will and not forced into it in the name of moral obligations for keeping relationships.

To believe that they are indestructible

"Not necessarily. Consider the following: of all the colorful adventurers who have lived on our planet , many were occasionally crushed, and a few did bounce back repeatedly. It is those who survive who will tend to believe that they are indestructible; they will have a long and interesting enough experience to write books about it . Until, of course …"

Statistics are invisible

"Our neglect of silent evidence kills people daily. Assume that a drug saves many people from a potentially dangerous ailment , but runs the risk of killing a few, with a net benefit to society. Would a doctor prescribe it? He has no incentive to do so. The lawyers of the person hurt by the side effects will go after the doctor like attack dogs, while the lives saved by the drug might not be accounted for anywhere. A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient ."

The unseen cemetery of invisible consequences

"Governments are great at telling you what they did, but not what they did not do. In fact , they engage in what could be labeled as phony “philanthropy,” the activity of helping people in a visible and sensational way without taking into account the unseen cemetery of invisible consequences."

Moral responsibility for every endangered species

"The stability of species. Take the number of species that we now consider extinct . For a long time scientists took the number of such species as that implied from an analysis of the extant fossils. But this number ignores the silent cemetery of species that came and left without leaving traces in the form of fossils; the fossils that we have managed to find correspond to a smaller proportion of all species that came and disappeared. This implies that our biodiversity was far greater than it seemed at first examination. A more worrisome consequence is that the rate of extinction of species maybe far greater than we think—close to 99.5 percent of species that transited through earth are now extinct , a number that scientists have kept raising through time. Life is a great deal more fragile than we have allowed for. But this does not mean we (humans) should feel guilty for extinctions around us; nor does it mean that we should act to stop them—species were coming and going before we started messing up the environment . There is no need to feel moral responsibility for every endangered species."

We need to see the cause

"The fund-management industry claims that some people are extremely skilled, since year after year they have outperformed the market . They will identify these “geniuses” and convince you of their abilities. Every year you fire the losers, leaving only the winners, and thus end up with long-term steady winners. Since you do not observe the cemetery of failed investors, you will think that it is a good business, and that some operators are considerably better than others. Of course an explanation will be readily provided for the success of the lucky survivors: “He eats tofu, ” “She works late; just the other day I called her office at eight P.M. …” Or of course, “She is naturally lazy. People with that type of laziness can see things clearly. ” By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the “cause”—actually, we need to see the cause."

Cemetery of the failed

"Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail , fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26. 95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success. The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There maybe some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck . Plain luck ."

The cemetery symbol

Cemetery, of what purpose is that piece of land? Is it for the dead, but of what use is to them, the atoms, the molecules, that once constituted a conscious being? None whatsoever. The cemetery is there to serve us, the still living. The tomb stones, the raised structures, flowers, visitors; they are there to numb the pain of living with the knowledge, the premonition, of our own demise, departure, into the void; by giving us a toy of reassurance, that we would, too, be remembered, honored and visited; as if the rectangular, concrete structure is us. Is it too hard to imagine, while visiting a grave, while attending a funeral, ourselves, switching places with the dead, as an act of mental simulation, the imagination? The fear and panic of total oblivion; the cemetery, it pats us reassuringly, that it would not be the case. The delusions that we erect, opiates self administered. People would come and talk to us, pouring out their hearts, of how badly life is treating them after us. It is there to remind us of our refusal to let our grip go, mentally, while we live and observe others die, right and left, of life and living; refusal to accept our oblivion. It is the final symbol of our narcissistic love for life, ourselves, our refusal to accept our mortality. It is a placebo for the slowly dying, death being the chronic disease of life, parasite to the experience of living.

Do chimps perceive other minds?

"Now , determining whether a chimp has thoughts about others’ thoughts is a rather tricky research question . But Povinelli had some ingenious ways of going about it . For example, in a famous series of experiments published as a monograph titled What Young Chimpanzees Know about Seeing (1996), Povinelli trained his group of seven apes to come into the lab one at a time, reach their arms through a hole in a Plexiglas partition , and beg for a food reward from one of two human experimenters. There were two holes, one in front of each of the two experimenters, respectively . If the chimps reached out to person A, then person A would hand them the treat . If the chimps reached out to person B, person B would give it to them instead. But the chimps got only one choice between these two experimenters before the next trial began and the chimp next in line made its own selection .

After the animals got the gist of this simple game, the real experiment began . The rules remained the same—again , reach through one of the holes to get that person to fetch your treat—but now when the chimp entered the lab, it saw one of the experimenters wearing a blindfold, or with her back turned, her eyes closed, or even wearing a bucket over her head. The other experimenter , meanwhile, had her eyes wide open and was watching the chimp attentively .

If you’re thinking like an experimental psychologist , then the purpose of the study should at this point be jumping out at you . Povinelli hypothesized that if chimpanzees have a theory of mind, well then they should quite clearly pick the person who can see them over the one who can’t . After all , picking the unsighted experimenter would leave the chimp without its prize because—being unable to see the chimp’s gesture toward her—this person can’t possibly know she has been chosen . The point is that to avoid making the wrong choice, the animal must take the perspective of the person , or at least attribute the mental state of “not seeing” to her.

Povinelli and his coauthor , Timothy Eddy , surprised almost every one when they found that the chimps failed to show a preference between the two experimenters. By contrast , in a similar game, even two-year-old children showed a clear preference for the sighted person . Other cleverly designed studies followed, by both Povinelli and others, all presumably showing that , contrary to what we had been led to believe by the “visual rhetoric” of those Goodall-esque documentaries, chimps aren’t entirely like us after all ; in particular , they lack a theory of mind and fail to reason about what others see, know, feel , believe, or intend."

Social Neanderthals

"Neanderthals occasionally scooped out a depression for the fire, but only rarely lined the pit with stone, or built the hearth in any significant way . And the hearths were not predictably centered in the living area; they were in fact rather haphazardly placed…Neanderthals appear not to have sat around their fires for storytelling, or ritual, keeping the fire intense, and using it as the metaphorical center of the social group. If Neanderthals did not , or could not , maintain shared group attention for purely social purposes, then their lives were very different from our own.
~ Frederick Coolidge and Thomas Wynn - The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (2009)"

The difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal

“The difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal is…one of degree and not of kind”
~ Darwin

Diminishing other people’s humanity

"On some occasions other people’s souls stare out at us so vividly that our thinking is tilted heavily toward seeing them as richly experiential agents like ourselves. On other occasions, however , such as when relations with our neighbors grow sour or during periods of intense sociopolitical turmoil and violence, we’re vulnerable to diminishing other people’s humanity , objectifying other human beings as mere “disgusting” or stock bodies."

Poor lad, so he existed too!

Yesterday , when they told me that the assistant in the tobacconist’s had committed suicide, I couldn’t believe it . Poor lad, so he existed too! We had all forgotten that , all of us. We who knew him only about as well as those who didn’t know him at all. We’ll forget him more easily tomorrow . But what is certain is that he had a soul, enough to kill himself . Passions? Worries? Of course. But for me, and for the rest of humanity , all that remains is the memory of a foolish smile above a grubby woolen jacket that didn’t fit properly at the shoulders. That is all that remains to me of someone who felt deeply enough to kill himself , because, after all there’s no other reason to kill oneself.
~ Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet (1916)

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again.”
~ Sylvia Plath -  “Mad Girl’s Love Song”  (1953)

The tragedy of sexual intercourse

“The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul .”
~ William Butler Yeats

Singular bubble of consciousness

“To have to face the fact of being oneself—one self , this self and none other , this secret packet of phenomena, this singular bubble of consciousness. Press up against each other as we may , and the bubbles remain essentially inviolate. Share the same body even , be joined like Siamese twins, and there still remain two quite separate consciousnesses.”

Gorgias dilemma

"Yet for all his eloquence, there was something that pestered Gorgias throughout his life. In spite of his inimitable ability to domesticate language so that even the most elusive of concepts would play like docile animals at his every command, he was frustrated by the fact that even a wordsmith such as he couldn’t effectively communicate his innermost experiences to another listener in a way that perfectly reflected his private reality . Dressed up in language and filtered through another person’s brain , one’s subjective experiences are inevitably transfigured into a wholly different thing, so much so that Gorgias felt it fair to say that the speaker’s mind can never truly be known . Thoughts said aloud are mutant by nature. No matter how expertly one plumbs the depths of subjective understanding, Gorgias realized to his horror , or how artistically rendered and devastatingly precise language maybe, truth still falls on ears that hear something altogether different from what exists in reality ."

Natural selection’s most successful hoaxes ever

"Or , just maybe, you will come to acknowledge that , like the rest of us, you are a hopeless pawn in one of natural selection’s most successful hoaxes ever—and smile at the sheer ingenuity involved in pulling it off , at the very thought of such mindless cleverness."

I include my body in my causa-sui project

"I do not exist to be used as an instrument of physical procreation in the interests of the race; my individuality is so total and integral that I include my body in my causa-sui project."

Your own father

"You cannot become your own father until you can have your own sons; and natural-born sons would not do, because they do not have "the qualities of immortality associated with genius. ""

The uniqueness of the genius

"The uniqueness of the genius also cuts off his roots. He is a phenomenon that was not foreshadowed; he doesn't seem to have any traceable debts to the qualities of others; he seems to have sprung self-generated out of nature. We might say that he has the "purest" causa-sui project: He is truly without a family, the father of himself."

'Empty is the argument of the philosopher

'Empty is the argument of the philosopher by which no human disease is healed; for just as there is no benefit in medicine if it does not drive out bodily diseases, so there is no benefit in philosophy if it does not drive out the disease of the soul.'
~ Epicurus

The happiness religion

"This new [secular] religion , as happiness has, in certain ways, become as though a faith: with political, corporate and social institutions acting as churches, certain advocates and gurus as ministers, and, vitally, one’s self the god."

'A man's master

'A man's master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave.'
~ Epictetus

My grief is unbearable

"The great Persian king, Darius, was bemoaning to the noted Greek philosopher Democritus the loss of his wife. After more conventional means of appeasing the king failed, Democritus challenged the king to find three persons in the whole of his great kingdom who had never suffered from grief and to inscribe their names on to the tomb of his departed wife. This once done, he promised to bring his queen back to life. When Darius could not name three persons, Democritus thereafter laughed heartily at the great king for thinking that he alone suffered such grief and undeservedly so."

Jinnah - out-manoeuvring of his opponents

"Jinnah's main concern during this period was to bring Hindus and Muslims together politically. He felt this would ensure him a more secure place in India's public life. He worked hard to see that the coming annual sessions of both the Congress and the League took place in Bombay. To create the right atmosphere for unity he persuaded the President-elect of the League Mazhar-ul-Haque to take the lead and extend a hand of friendship to the Hindus. For this move Jinnah received wholehearted support of the Congress but some sections of the League were strongly opposed to it for they feared that it would destroy the independence and importance of their organisation. Despite Haque's assurance that there was no question of the League merging with the Congress, Hasrat Mohani and others mounted a virulent attack on Jinnah. They denounced him as an agent of the Hindus. They said he neither looked nor behaved like a Muslim nor did he speak their language; they accused him of lacking in knowledge of the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet. How could such a Muslim speak on their behalf, they asked. Haque was aghast at the intensity of their attack; it was followed by violent demonstrations against Jinnah. In the commotion Haque adjourned the meeting; this was then held the following day behind closed doors at the Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay. Jinnah mobilised his supporters and managed to get a resolution passed authorising the President of the League to appoint a committee to formulate a scheme of political and administrative reforms in collaboration with the Congress. It was to be then jointly presented to the British. In the game of power politics he was able to show that he could easily out-manoeuvre his opponents."

Jinnah and public

"Subsequently during his election campaigns he cultivated the Muslim voters belonging to different sections. All of them were much appreciative of his sincere efforts for the welfare of the community. Jinnah was courteous and considerate to them but not easily accessible to anyone on a personal basis. He always kept the public at arm's length; he was happy to plead for them but did not want to mingle with them. Once one of his colleagues requested him to shake hands with people at receptions. Jinnah was irritated: "If I shake hands with one I shall have to shake hands with all. And there is no time for that.""

Jinnah–The opportunist

"Despite his resolute opposition to the introduction of separate electorate for the Muslims, Jinnah did not hesitate to take personal advantage of it and contested the election to the Viceroy's Executive Council from the reserved Muslim constituency of Bombay and got himself elected. The voters disregarded his opposition to reservation and were carried away by his brilliant advocacy at the bar and his arresting personality. He was the first non-official Muslim to sit on the Viceroy's Executive Council in 1910."

Jinnah–condemnation of the provision of reserving separate seats for the Muslims

"However despite the protest by the Congress, the provision for separate electorate for the Muslims was made by the British in the Indian Councils' Act of 1909. In the twenty­ fifth session of the Congress at Allahabad in 1910, Jinnah moved a resolution condernning the provision of reserving separate seats for the Muslims, especially in its application to municipalities, district boards and other local bodies. He said it would sow the seed of division between the Hindus and the Muslims and keep them politically apart."

Jinnah’s animosity towards League

"The Aga Khan. who was elected as the first President of the League, pointed out subsequently that Jinnah was "our doughtiest opponent in 1906". He had publicly denounced the League's . communal move. In the words of the Aga Khan, "Jinnah came out in bitter hostility towards all that I and my friends had done and were trying to do". He opposed the League's stand of favouring separate electorate for the Muslims and described it "as a poisonous dose to divide the nation against itself ". He collaborated with the Congress and actively worked against the Muslim communalists, calling them enemies of the nation. He had been much influenced by the speeches of Naoroji, Mehta and Gokhale whom he adored. Naoroji as Congress President had emphasised the need for "a thorough union of all the people" and pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to "sink or swim together. Without this union, all efforts will be in vain," he added. Jinnah was in full agreement with this view. He deprecated the contrary separatist policy advocated by the League."

Jinnah and question of separate electorate for Muslims

"The Muslim leadership of that time was, however, not in tune with Jinnah's unqualified nationalism. They did not like the idea of uniting with the Hindus without obtaining the maximum safeguards for the Muslims. They carved out a separate political path for the community. On October 1, 1906, over fifty Muslim leaders from all over India met the Viceroy Lord Minto in a deputation and presented him a memorandum incorporating their special demands. In his reply the Viceroy assured them that ". . . I am as firmly convinced as I believe you to be that any electoral representation in India would be doomed to mischievous failure which aimed at granting a personal enfranchisement regardless of the beliefs and traditions of the communities composing the population of this continent." Minto assured them of separate electorate which goaded them to form the All-India Muslim League in Dacca on December 31, 1906. Jinnah reacted strongly against it. He organised, along with a few friends, a countermove in · · Calcutta at the same time to warn the Muslims not to succumb to the British policy of "divide and rule" which was being endorsed by the newly formed League. He said it would eventually harm the Muslims and deprive them of participation in national life."

Jinnah: Opposition to All-India Muslim League

"The partition of Bengal by the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, had led to violent agitation in the province; it had also spread to other parts of India. Muslims favoured the divide since they were in a majority in the Eastern part but Jinnah took a stand against it. He stood solidly by the agitating Hindu Bengalis and denounced Lord Curzon for his unpatriotic action which had generated discord between the Hindus and the Muslims. Strangely, in 1947, he was the person mainly responsible for partitioning Bengal on the ground that Hindus and Muslims could not be lumped together. They needed separate homelands, free from the domination of each other. In 1906 Jinnah even refused to join the All-India Muslim League, founded in Dacca as a counter force to the Congress. But much later, he made the same League the instrument for dividing India and lorded over it as its supreme leader for almost a decade from 1937 to 1947. Earlier Jinnah used to be, in fact, horrified at the sycophancy exhibited by the Muslim aristocrats to the British and publicly opposed the need to form the League. He criticised its leaders for the hostility they displayed against the Hindus and the divisive stand they took in politics."

Jinnah’s dislike for Sir Syed Ahmad Khan

"Jinnah too felt more comfortable with the westernised Parsis than the orthodox Muslims involved in politics especially since they were guided by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan whose politics he disliked. He was particularly disturbed with their subservient attitude to the British rulers. He found the Congress, which the Syed opposed bitterly, more to his liking."

Early Jinnah and Indian Muslims

"Along with law, political developments in London also began to interest Jinnah. He admired the British for their sense of fair play and their adherence to the democratic system. All through those years Jinnah showed no interest in the Muslims ·of India or the difficulties they faced. In fact their loyalist stance. in politics appalled him. He was then all for the Congress; its non-communal, nationalistic stand enthused him. In private conversation he often bitterly criticised Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the pre-eminent Muslim leader, for his opposition to the Congress and for his exhortation to the Muslims to keep away from it. That is why in the early twenties when the Muslims started a movement for turning the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, founded by the Syed at Aligarh, into the Muslim University, Jinnah took no part in it, condemning it as a sectarian move to which he refused to subscribe."

Jinnah and the great law givers

"Many years later, when Jinnah was anointed Quaid-i-Azam (or the Great Leader) by his Muslim followers in the late thirties, he gave a different reason for his choice of Lincoln's Inn. He said it was because he saw a portrait there of Prophet Muhammad in the company of great law makers. The occasion was a reception to felicitate him which was organised by the Bar Association of Karachi; "I joined Lincoln's Inn," Jinnah declared, "because there, right at the entrance, I saw a picture of the Prophet included among the great law givers of the world." In fact there is no such picture in Lincoln's Inn. What is more shocking is that Jinnah did not know that any representation of the figure of the Prophet is strictly prohibited in Islam. Books showing any such depiction have been burnt by zealous Muslims. But by then Jinnah had cast such a spell on the Muslims that they overlooked his heretical pronouncement without even a murmur of protest. There is a fresco in Lincoln's Inn painted by G.F. Watt depicting great law givers; in these, some Pakistanis have recently discovered a figure which they claimed represented Prophet Muhammad, but it bears not the slightest resemblance to him as he has been described in the Books of Traditions. This was only a contrived attempt to justify Jinnah's statement."

M.A. Jinnah

"At the time of seeking admission to Lincoln's Inn, Jinnah wrote in his application the family name ''Jinnahbhai". Although he had changed it to Jinnah in the school register, his passport carried the name Jinnahbhai. He was not comfortable with it; it did not fit into the western style which he was so keen to adopt. Hence just before he was called to the bar he wrote a letter to the masters of the Bench of Lincoln's Inn, requesting them to change his name from Mohammed Ali Jinnahbhai to M.A. Jinnah. After some hesitation, relying on the entry in the school register, his request was granted. The document of qualification, therefore, bore the corrected name, as he desired. And so he became M.A. Jinnah ever since."

Jinnah: early education

"Jinnah's date of birth as given by his father in the application for admission to the primary school was October 20, 1875; in the school register he was named Mohammed Ali, son of Jinnahbhai. After a few years, his aunt Manubai Peerbhai who resided in Bombay took Jinnah under her wing; she got him admitted first to Gokuldas School and later to the well­ known Anjuman-i-Islam. He was however not serious about his work at school and spent a great deal of time wandering in the affluent and elegant areas of south Bombay where the British had built some magnificent Gothic buildings. He also enjoyed going to the beach with friends rather than attending classes at school. The result was that his father grew apprehensive about his future; he brought him back to Karachi and admitted him in the Sind madrasa. But Jinnah's indifference to formal education persisted. Fin-ally he was sent to the elitist Christian Mission High School where he became so anglicised that he soon changed his name in the school register to Mohammed Ali Jinnah discarding the "bhai" from his father's name. It however remained Jinnahbhai in other records. He arbitrarily altered his birth date to December 25 in order to coincide it with the birth of Jesus Christ. Even the missionary school could not make him overcome his aversion to studies and he dropped out without appearing for the final matriculation examination."

Jinnah’s religiosity

"Muslim children are taught to read the Quran in Arabic at a very young age; they also learn many verses from it by heart; they are taught to pray namaz and to fast during the month of Ramadan by the time they turn seven. Jinnah could neither read the Quran, nor did he say his prayers nor fast in Ramadan. Even in the heyday of his communal leadership he said his prayers only on the occasion of Eid, and that too, merely as a demonstrative gesture. He did not perform the Haj either which is one of the cardinal articles of the Islamic faith."

Jinnah; change of sect

"No one knows when Mohammed Ali Jinnah was born; there are no reliable records to testify to his date of birth. The Karachi Municipality did not maintain a register of births and deaths until 1876; Jinnah was supposed to have been born in the city in or about 1870. His father belonged to the Khoja community which owes its allegiance to the Aga Khan. This sect is technically Shiite but observes several Hindu ceremonies and customs. In fact even their prayer or their manner of praying does not strictly conform to Islamic precepts; there is a vast difference not only between them and the dominant Sunnis but also other Shiite sects notably the Asnasharis who regard the Aga Khani beliefs and practices as being at variance with theirs. Until recently the orthodox Muslims of various schools did not recognise Aga Khani Khojas as true Muslims. Jinnah therefore did not have a purely· conventional Islamic background and hence in order to get "proper religious acceptance among the generality of Muslims, he changed his sect' much later and became an Asnashari."

Facts are sacred

"Facts are sacred; comment is free."
~ C.P. Scott

The damning argument against Pakistan

"The damning argument against Pakistan is that it took a community spread through out the subcontinent, chopped it into several communities, gave it first one country and then two and left the others dangling in mid-air. People, who once possessed the culture, customs and history of a whole subcontinent were left with neither a nation nor an idea of themselves as a community. Pakistan was a double disaster for the Muslims in India: first they lost their sense of coherence and political strength in the Indian union along with their leadership and middle classes which migrated to Pakistan by the thousands; secondly, they were forever damned in India for having voted for Pakistan and broken the unity of India."

~ Akbar Ahmed (Pakistan's former High Cornmissioner to the United Kingdom)

Jinnah Gandhi comparision

"Jinnah, Gandhi’s greatest adversary, was a complex figure, and their relationship was full of strange paradoxes. Jinnah came from the same part of India as Gandhi, shared his language and culture, and was a lawyer like him. His family were first-generation Hindu converts. ‘Jinnah’ was a Hindu name and reflected the fairly common practice among Hindu converts of retaining part of their original name. Like Gandhi, Jinnah too adored Gokhale and regarded him as his political mentor. Like him, Jinnah had spent many years abroad. And although they worked out very different responses to India, both alike retained an outsider’s perspective. Neither of them was intimately familiar with Indian history or his own religious tradition. Unlike Gandhi, Jinnah was not religious and strongly disapproved of the introduction of religion into politics. He had married a much younger Zoroastrian girl, enjoyed alcohol, and had no objection to pork. He knew Gandhi’s charm and manner of establishing personal relationships, and carefully insulated himself against them. He spoke to him in English rather than their native Gujarati, shook hands with him rather than using the traditional Indian form of greeting with folded palms, and addressed him formally as ‘Mr Gandhi’ in preference to the more respectful ‘Gandhiji’. Gandhi, who had succeeded in winning over or at least commanding the deepest respect of almost all his opponents, including such strong-minded leftist leaders as Subhas Bose and M. N. Roy, failed before a man who was closer to him in many respects than his other opponents."

People have little idea how little glorious war is

“People have little idea how little glorious war is; it is organized murder , pillage and cruelty , and it is seldom that the weight falls on the fighting men —it is on the women , children , and old people…. ”

A person could love one book

"A person could love one book , at most a few—beyond this was a form of promiscuity. Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it , getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it . Montaigne was asked “why” he and the writer Etienne de la Boétie were friends—the kind of question people ask you at a cocktail party as if you knew the answer, or as if there were an answer to know. It was typical of Montaigne to reply, “Parce que c’était lui, p arce que c’était moi” (because it was him and because it was me)."

Hope is a currency for few

"When you look at the empirical record, you not only see that venture capitalists do better than entrepreneurs, but publishers do better than writers, dealers do better than artists, and science does better than scientists (about 50 percent of scientific and scholarly papers, costing months, sometimes years, of effort , are never truly read). The person involved in such gambles is paid in a currency other than material success: hope."

Those who claim that they value process over result

"However, those who claim that they value process over result are not telling the whole truth, assuming of course that they are members of the human species. We often hear the semi-lie that writers do not write for glory, that artists create for the sake of art , because the activity is “its own reward. ” True, these activities can generate a steady flow of auto satisfaction. But this does not mean that artists do not crave some form of attention, or that they would not be better off if they got some publicity; it does not mean that writers do not wake up early Saturday morning to check if The New York Times Book Review has featured their work , even if it is a very long shot , or that they do not keep checking their mailbox for that long-awaited reply from The New Yorker. Even a philosopher the caliber of Hume spent a few weeks sick in bed after the trashing of his masterpiece (what later became known as his version of the Black Swan problem) by some dim-thinking reviewer—whom he knew to be wrong and to have missed his whole point .

Where it gets painful is when you see one of your peers, whom you despise, heading to Stockholm for his Nobel reception."

Hell is other people

"Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right , yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel , no Shnobel . “How was your year?” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.
Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people."

Selfishness

Usually when someone talks negatively about selfishness, he means selfishness of/in others towards him (excluding his own, which he cannot/does not observe/perceive of course, as being acts of selfishness towards others).

Not talking is an effortful activity

For many, not talking is an effortful activity.

We feel the sting of man-made damage

"Terrorism kills, but the biggest killer remains the environment , responsible for close to 13 million deaths annually. But terrorism causes outrage, which makes us overestimate the likelihood of a potential terrorist attack—and react more violently to one when it happens. We feel the sting of man-made damage far more than that caused by nature."

One death is a tragedy

“One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. ”
~ Stalin

The very nature of randomness lies in its abstraction

"We learn from repetition—at the expense of events that have not happened before. Events that are non repeatable are ignored before their occurrence, and overestimated after (for a while). After a Black Swan, such as September 11, 2001, people expect it to recur when in fact the odds of that happening have arguably been lowered. We like to think about specific and known Black Swans when in fact the very nature of randomness lies in its abstraction."

Confidence

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1. Confidence
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1.1. Well, I am not so confident about, this whole, being confident, thing.
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1.1.1. Specifically this confidence;"Freedom from doubt; belief in yourself and your abilities"

  1.1.1.1. Belief? Knowing that we are capable of holding onto wrong assumptions; belief in what?

    1.1.1.1.1. This whole belief in yourself thing, reeks of stubbornness.

      1.1.1.1.1.1. Stick to your held beliefs, no matter what the reason says.

      1.1.1.1.1.2. Stubbornness in your ignorance and not making/keeping room for the fact that you maybe wrong , even if for once in a while. That at least the possibility of being wrong exists.

    1.1.1.1.2. Haven't we been wrong in the past?

      1.1.1.1.2.1. Can't we still be wrong (about many things)?

  1.1.1.2. Freedom from doubt? Is it wrong to be an skeptic?

    1.1.1.2.1. Confidence in our knowledge?

      1.1.1.2.1.1. That what we know is infallible?

      1.1.1.2.1.2. That we ought to stick to the notion that we are capable knowing the ultimate truths, without all the mental pollution (the biases, the fallacies)?

1.1.2. We are told (and expected) to "be confident" (to show/exude confidence), at many situations.

  1.1.2.1. It is one thing for someone to show confidence (the peacock behavior)

    1.1.2.1.1. It is another thing to fall for it

      1.1.2.1.1.1. To look for candidates that have chests thrust out, stiff necks and speak in voice coming from deep down the throat.

        1.1.2.1.1.1.1. The confident soldiers

          1.1.2.1.1.1.1.1. Give us a task and we shall not question and plunge headlong.

            1.1.2.1.1.1.1.1.1. Suitable aren't such folks for the ones who desire these confident soldiers.

      1.1.2.1.1.2. To like and encourage such people, such behaviour

        1.1.2.1.1.2.1. To mistrust, to discourage, to look down upon, the humble folks.

  1.1.2.2. All the confidence building books, talks, seminars. The stuff sells.

    1.1.2.2.1. It feeds on the notion that people with doubt are sick, weak and useless.

      1.1.2.2.1.1. That thinking about your thoughts is a wastage to time,

        1.1.2.2.1.1.1. That one ought to take pride in his mental arrogance, stubbornness.

        1.1.2.2.1.1.2. That an examined life is for the losers, the unsuccessful.

  1.1.2.3. Stick to your guns no matter what.

  1.1.2.4. Not to doubt our mental prowess

    1.1.2.4.1. Black swans do not exist, since we have never encountered one.

    1.1.2.4.2. Not to show hesitancy (by thinking of other possibilities)

    1.1.2.4.3. Not to challenge ourselves with self re-examination

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1.2. What is so degrading about being humble?
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1.2.1. Living with the possibility that we may not be all knowing.

  1.2.1.1. Why is uttering "I don't know for sure" so difficult, so below our dignity?

Could it be that fables and stories are closer to the truth

"The problem of over causation does not lie with the journalist , but with the public. Nobody would pay one dollar to buy a series of abstract statistics reminiscent of a boring college lecture. We want to be told stories, and there is nothing wrong with that—except that we should check more thoroughly whether the story provides consequential distortions of reality. Could it be that fiction reveals truth while non fiction is a harbor for the liar? Could it be that fables and stories are closer to the truth than is the thoroughly fact-checked ABC News? Just consider that the newspapers try to get impeccable facts, but weave them into a narrative in such a way as to convey the impression of causality (and knowledge). There are fact-checkers, not intellect-checkers. Alas."

Chaos of human experience

"Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel , a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience. ”"

Chaos of human experience

"Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel , a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience. ”"

Evolutionary computing

"In 1995, for instance, the engineer John Koza used evolutionary computing to design a low-pass filter, a device that can cut off sounds above a certain frequency. Koza chose 2, 000 cycles a second as his cut off. After 10 generations, his computer produced a circuit that muffled frequencies above about 500 cycles and only completely extinguished them above about 10, 000. After 49 generations, it had created a circuit that produced a sharp drop-off at 2, 000 cycles. Natural selection had created a design for a seven-rung ladder made out of inductors and capacitors. The same design had been invented in 1917 by George Campbell of AT&T. The computer, without any direction from Koza, had infringed on a patent ."

Genetics of racism

"Out of 25, 000 or so genes in the human genome, an estimated 6, 000 genes exist as different versions (known as alleles). The distinctions that we conventionally use to divide the species into races – skin color, hair, and the shape of faces – are controlled by only a few genes. The vast majority of variable genes do not respect so-called racial boundaries. There is far more variability within any given population of humans than between populations. If all the humans on Earth were wiped out except a single tribe in a remote New Guinea valley, the survivors would still preserve 85 percent of the genetic variability of our entire species."

The greatest deception

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions"

- Leonardo da Vinci

The old boy beamed up on me

"I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of the speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his . To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep , but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up , open an eye and cock a baleful glance at me! Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the earth, provided no new source of heat was discovered . That prophetic utterance refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold ! the old boy beamed up on me."

~ Ernest Rutherford

I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape

“If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. ”

~ Huxley

I have done my best to sweep away this vanity

“It is not I who seek to base Man’s dignity up on his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity. ”

~ Huxley

From so simple a beginning

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that , whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ”

~ Charles Darwin

Light will be thrown on the origin of man

“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. ”

~ Charles Darwin

Evolution of eye

"Likewise, there was no need for an eye to pop out of an animal’s head all at once. Invertebrates such as flatworms have nothing more than nerves with endings coated in light-sensitive pigments. Some crustaceans have eyes that consist of little more than a layer of pigment coated by a membrane. Over time, this membrane could separate from the pigment and begin to act like a crude lens. With small alterations, such an eye could turn into the precise telescopes that birds and mammals use. Because a little eyesight is better than none at all , each new step along the way would be rewarded by natural selection."

Origin of Species is a deeply defensive book

"Origin of Species is a deeply defensive book , written by a man who had quietly listened for years to other scientists scoff at evolution, and had imagined them scoffing at him as well . He addressed their objections one by one. If old species gradually turned into new species, then why were animals so distinct from one another? Darwin’s answer was that competition between two similar species would tend to drive one of them extinct , so that the animals alive today would be only a scattered selection of all the species that had ever lived.

But shouldn’t we be able to see these intermediate forms as fossils? Darwin reminded his readers that fossils, by their nature, could provide only a few fragments of life’s history. In order to become a fossil , a carcass had to be properly buried in sediment , turned to rock , and then avoid destruction by volcanoes or earthquakes or erosion. Those chances are abysmally low, and so a species, which once included millions of individual animals, might be known from a single fossil . Gaps in the fossil record shouldn’t be a surprise – they should be the rule. “The crust of the earth is a vast museum, ” Darwin wrote, “but the natural collections have been made only at intervals of time immensely remote. ”"

It is like confessing a murder

"I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work, and I know no one individual who would not say a very foolish one. I was so struck with the distribution of the Galápagos organisms , etc., that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact which could bear any way on what are species . I have read heaps of agricultural and horticultural books , and have never ceased collecting facts . At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced ( quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not ( it is like confessing a murder ) immutable… I think I have found out ( here’s presumption !) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends . You will groan , and think to yourself, “on what a man have I been wasting my time and writing to .” I should , five years ago , have thought so ."

~ Charles Darwin – letter to  Joseph  Hooker

Intellectuality is the only aim in the world

“It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. People often talk of the wonderful event of intellectual Man appearing – the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful…. Who with the face of the earth covered with the most beautiful savannas & forests dare say that intellectuality is the only aim in the world?”

~ Charles Darwin

One second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity

“A bad earthquake at once destroys the oldest associations: the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid; one second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never have created. ”
~ Charles Darwin

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

"Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves ;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass ,
Move on the mud , or pierce the watery mass ;
Then as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume."

~ Erasmus Darwin - The Temple of Nature

Darwinian “cold bath”

"By taking the Darwinian “cold bath, ” and staring a factual reality in the face, we can finally abandon the cardinal false hope of the ages – that factual nature can specify the meaning of our life by validating our inherent superiority, or by proving that evolution exists to generate us as the summit of life’s purpose. In principle, the factual state of the universe, whatever it may be, cannot teach us how we should live or what our lives should mean – for these ethical questions of value and meaning belong to such different realms of human life as religion, philosophy, and humanistic study. Nature’s facts can help us to realize a goal once we have made our ethical decisions on other grounds – as the trivial genetic differences among human groups, for example, can help us to understand human unity once we have agreed on the unalienable rights of all people to life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Facts are just facts, in all their fascination, their pristine beauty, and, sometimes, their unfortunate necessity (bodily decline and mortality, as the obvious example), and ethical rectitude, or spiritual meaning, reside within other domains of human inquiry."

Let us hope that what Mr. Darwin says is not true

A famous legend (perhaps even true) from the early days of Darwinism provides a good organizing theme for understanding the centrality and importance of evolution both in science and for human life in general . A prominent English lady, the wife of a lord or a bishop (yes, they may marry in the Church of England), exclaimed to her husband when she grasped the scary novelty of evolution: “Oh my dear, let us hope that what Mr. Darwin says is not true. But if it is true, let us hope that it will not become generally known!”

Evolution of language

"Natural selection has also shaped some human genes that appear to control particular kinds of thought . Take language. Our capacity to learn a language shows some signs of being a hard-wired instinct . That suggested that genes shaped language, and yet at the time scientists didn’t know of a single language-linked gene. Now they have one. It was discovered in a family in London who suffered a hereditary difficulty with both speech and grammar. In 2002 British scientists announced that the family members who had language problems all carried a mutant form of a gene they called FOXP2. Brain scans later revealed that people who carry mutant forms of FOXP2 have less activity in a language-related region of their brain called Broca’s area.

Scientists then compared human FOXP2 to the version carried by other mammals. Obviously, FOXP2 does not produce a capacity for language in other species. But in a 2005 experiment with mice, scientists showed that it influences animal communication. Mouse pups with only one working copy made far fewer cries to their mother. Those without any working copies made no cries at all .

A comparison of silent and non-silent substitutions revealed that FOXP2 has undergone intense natural selection in humans. Scientists were even able to estimate when that natural selection took place: less than two hundred thousand years ago. That just so happens to be around the time our species first emerged. These results hint that full blown language was a late-arriving skill and has only evolved relatively recently in the hominid lineage."

Broken genes

"Some of the most striking examples of these broken genes come from our noses. All mammals carry several hundred genes for producing receptors on nerve endings in the nose. These genes evolved through accidental duplications. When a single gene became two, both genes at first encoded the same receptor. But then a mutation struck one of them, changing the receptor’s ability to catch odors. If the receptor did a worse job with the mutation, natural selection tended to delete the gene. But in some cases the mutation caused the receptor to catch a new odor molecule, expanding the smells the mammal could detect . Over millions of years, this process gave rise to a huge family of odor receptor genes.
 
In mice, dogs, and other mammals that depend heavily on their sense of smell , almost all the copies of these genes work properly. But in chimpanzees and humans, the majority of odor receptor genes are defective. They can’t make a receptor at all . Scientists generally agree that these mutant genes must have accumulated in our genomes because ancient apes were evolving to rely less on their noses and more on their eyes. As a result , chimpanzees and humans share a strange legacy of our common ancestry: broken genes."