"The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘ It is our duty to remain optimists, ’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but , rather , to fight for a better world.
Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994)"
"Horace thus seems to have a more satisfactory understanding of why we should seize the day and what it means to do so than our pub philosopher and hedonist. We need to make the most of today because life is short and this day is one of the few we have, not because today is the only day we have or because we should ignore tomorrow. We need to confine our hopes to what we can achieve in our lifetime, always mindful of the fact that the span of life is not guaranteed. The traditional saying ‘Live each day as though it were your last’ should thus be adapted to ‘Live each day as if it could be your last, but could equally be just one more in your short life.’ And we also need to remember that the probability is that tomorrow will come. The urgency to make the most of today is thus not premised on the unlikelihood of tomorrow coming, but the possibility that it might not and the certainty that at least one tomorrow won’t."
“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.” ~Jeanette Winterson
"What this all means is that if we interpret carpe diem as a crude call to party, a belief that the only thing we should live for is now and damn tomorrow, then it is an inadequate maxim to live by. Moments of pleasure are precious because they pass, because we cannot make them last any longer than they do. This may be a cause for regret, but if all that matters is pleasure then all we can do is regret, and life is ultimately no more than a sad tragedy in which we cannot possess the one thing that has real value. This is too pessimistic, not least because it is not the only way to understand what carpe diem means."
“Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)”
"The problem with the aesthetic is that although we are in one sense tied to the present, in another sense the ‘now’ always eludes us. One no sooner refers to the ‘now’ than that moment recedes into the past. To bastardize a phrase from Gilbert Ryle, we can call this ‘the systematic elusiveness of “now”’. It is this feature of the present which is the source of the dissatisfaction of the guests at Constantine’s banquet. They are all in their various ways ‘dedicated to or ensnared in immediacy’ but that means all that they live for is constantly slipping into the past. They can never keep hold of anything they value, except in memories, which also fade."
"Hence the genuine and potentially fruitful desire to develop ourselves and become the authors of our own being gets hijacked and distorted by the self-help culture, so it becomes a source of anxiety and self-doubt, the futile quest to become a complete allround wonderful person, fully in control of our health, wealth and happiness. It is no longer good enough to strive to become what one desires; one has to become more, to achieve more. To raise a happy family, or live your life pursuing your passion, no matter what recognition you get, should be seen as a success."
"At the same time, because we see this huge menu of books, all promising that we can attain success in all manner of ways, we can feel inadequate with the genuine successes we do have. Consider, for example, the anxiety a person in a long-term relationship can feel. They may well be an excellent life partner. But perhaps they are not a sexual athlete, the world’s best communicator, the possessor of a great body, a domestic god or goddess. In their local bookshop, however, they will be told by book covers that they can and perhaps should be all of these things. This can foster feelings of inadequacy and, perhaps worse still, encourage them to think that, though their partner may well be pretty good, couldn’t they be that little bit better? After all, ‘you’re worth it’."
"But perhaps the biggest danger is the way a culture of self-help fosters both feelings of inadequacy and hopes for unattainable ideals. These books promise so much and they seem to suggest that it is readily attainable. It is simply a matter of doing X, Y and Z. But life is not that easy and we cannot expect foolproof prescriptions for fulfilment and meaningful lives."
With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.
Margaret Mitchell
"For example, they [self-help books] may promise to make you happy. That’s all very well, but happiness isn’t everything and if you make its pursuit your main concern you are unlikely to get it. They may promise you success, but they may focus only on visible success, whereas real success is about inner development. They may promise too much too easily, ignoring the fact that becoming is a kind of struggle. (Though not necessarily always an unpleasant struggle.) They may present self-improvement as a means to an end – recognition, admirers and sunny smiles – whereas it should really be an end in itself. They may promise you can have it all, whereas life inevitably requires hard choices and trade-offs. For instance, one cannot become both a great explorer and the ideal parent. This is not to criticize people who go off adventuring and leave their children in the care of others, since that may well be the best available option for all concerned. It is merely to point out what should be obvious: that making that choice means giving up a good deal of parenting and so is incompatible with the goal of being as good a parent as possible."
"We cannot wriggle out of this [that we have no free will] by appealing to the forms of nondeterministic causation found in quantum theory, where causes do no more than make their effects more or less probable. First, this kind of causation is only found at the subatomic level, so it has nothing to say about what happens with full-sized human beings such as ourselves. Second, it does not allow for free will, because to make a free choice is not to make a random one, or one where the causes leave room for chance in what effects they have. And third, even quantum physicists do not properly understand what is going on in the phenomena they study, so it is highly speculative for others to draw serious metaphysical conclusions from their work."
"But the problem is that we seem to live in a universe where every physical event has a physical cause. Furthermore, there is what is known as the ‘causal closure of the physical domain’, meaning that everything within the physical world is caused by physical events and nothing else. Add to this the fact that all our actions involve physical movements. Even private thoughts involve physical brain events. Put these facts together and a surprising conclusion follows: all our actions must be caused entirely by events in the physical world. And because physical causation is deterministic – which means that causes necessitate their effects in some way – that leaves no room for free will."
"There is another important respect in which inner and outer success are linked. We only become by doing, and some of this doing can lead to tangible achievements. To do well in any field, to win recognition and awards, one usually needs to engage in the struggle to become what one seeks to be. There are always a few exceptional people who stumble into success without really trying. But most of us need to work upon ourselves in order to become what we desire to be. This struggle must itself be worthwhile or else any feeling of success will be elusive. It is a necessary condition of visible success, but public recognition is not what makes it worthwhile. Nevertheless, if it results in outward success, that can be deeply satisfying. Partly, this is because it provides external validation or recognition of what one has become. This can be extremely important for people. Many of us do not feel that our achievements are real until they have been so validated. We would be wise to resist this feeling and learn to value what we are without the need for recognition from others. But no matter how much we try and reduce our dependence on their appreciation, most of us still find such recognition satisfying if it comes, not because it is itself the goal we strive towards, but because it is external evidence that we have become what we sought to become."
We should distinguish at this point between "government" and "state" … A government is the consensual organization by which we adjudicate disputes, defend our rights, and provide for certain common needs … A state on the other hand, is a coercive organization asserting or enjoying a monopoly over the use of physical force in some geographic area and exercising power over its subjects. – David Boaz
“I do have one great hope. It is that with the disappearance of Marxism, we may succeed in eliminating the pressure of ideologies as the centre of politics. Marxism needed an anti-Marxist ideology, so what you had was the clash between two ideologies which were both in a sense completely mad. There was nothing real behind them – only wrong problems. What I hope from the open society is that we will re-establish a list of priorities of the things which have to be done in society.”
Karl Popper, interviewed by Giancarlo Bosetti, in “The Lesson of this Century”.
Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?
-- Neil Postman
"If success is about becoming through doing, it does not, then, just contrast with having once been successful, it also contrasts with once having become something. As Jonathan Rée explains in his perceptive discussion of Kierkegaard, this kind of becoming is a process which can never end. In order to become what we seek to be we need to continue that becoming or we cease to be what we once became."
"If success is about achieving something in the future, where does that leave us once we have succeeded, if we do? Once we get what we want, what point is there left to life? Paradoxically, it would seem that if success is the goal of life, then once we get it we no longer have a reason to live. But how can the meaning of life be that which makes life no longer worth living?"
"Of course, the fact that these characters are tormented by the failure to meet their own ever-shifting criteria for success does not mean that striving for success cannot be the meaning of life. We have, after all, distinguished between success and happiness. Could not our purpose in life be to succeed, to aspire to do better, even though this makes us unhappy? The problem is not that such an approach makes us unhappy, it is that it is self-defeating. If success is a shifting standard, always being set a little higher than where one currently is, then by definition it can never be achieved. The most we could allow is that a few geniuses have had meaningful lives, since they have achieved unqualified success. To say there can be no meaning of life for anyone but these geniuses seems to be to confuse the meaning of exceptional life with the meaning of ordinary life.We should continue with the idea that ordinary life can have meaning unless we have very strong grounds to suppose it cannot."
"These characters all show how the desire for success cannot be fulfilled if we continually compare our own success with that of those who have had a little bit more. Only the most successful can be satisfied by that approach. Chekhov’s characters ring true. As psychologists have observed, our own sense of self-esteem is largely generated by how we compare ourselves to our peers. Yet we tend to compare ourselves to those apparently doing better than we are,discounting those who are less fortunate. That fosters discontent, since no matter how well placed we are in relation to the population as a whole, we only attend to that portion of it in comparison to whom we are losers."
"According to Sartre, having done something is the only way of knowing that it was in oneself to do it. Sartre wrote that it would not do to say, ‘Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been.’ For Sartre, ‘The genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write?’ Sartre recognizes that this might seem a harsh doctrine: ‘No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of life.’"
‘[Man is] nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’
"Perhaps the greatest obstacle to happiness is the modern myth of happiness itself. If we have an unrealistic expectation of what happiness is we will never feel truly happy, even if we have as much or more than anyone could reasonably hope for. We are in danger of expecting almost as a matter of right those things in life which no one can take for granted. It sounds old-fashioned, and perhaps it is, but we have forgotten how to be thankful for what we’ve got and instead only know how to be resentful about what we haven’t. Our desire for happiness is like a craving that we think can only be satisfied by feeding it more. Yet it is the craving that is the problem."
"Of course, many of us might accept a temporary reduction in strength and even in speed if stretching protected us against injuries, as many of us have long believed that it must. But in multiple large-scale studies of military recruits during basic training, stretching before long marches and runs did not lessen the incidence of overuse injuries. In the largest of these studies, results showed that an almost equal number of soldiers developed lower-limb injuries (shin splints, stress fractures, etc. ), regardless of whether they had performed static stretches before training sessions. Similarly , in the largest study to date of everyday athletes who stretched, almost 1,400 recreational runners aged thirteen to 60-plus were assigned randomly to two groups. The first group did not stretch before their runs, while otherwise maintaining their normal workout and warm-up regimens. The second group did stretch.
Both groups followed their routines for three months. At the end of that time, quite a few of the runners had missed training days due to injury , a predictable result, since running is one of the most injury-plagued sports on the planet. But there was no difference in the final pain tally between the two groups. The same percentage of those who stretched injured themselves as those who didn’t. Static stretching had been a wash in terms of protecting against injury, raising the obvious question: So why in the world do so many of us still warm up by stretching?"
"More surprising, when researchers compared the runners’ flexibility scores to their best times in a 10K road race, those with the tightest, least flexible hamstrings tended to be the fastest. They also had the best running economy , meaning that they used the least energy to go the same distance as other runners. Probably , the researchers concluded, tighter leg muscles allow “for greater elastic energy storage and use” during each stride. Think of a rubber band. If it’s overstretched and limp, it doesn’t snap back when pulled and released. So, too, with your hamstrings: If they’re loose, they don’t efficiently lengthen, shorten, and snap back into place with each stride. To some degree, as an endurance athlete you can be as flexible as Morph, or you can be good."
"Most of us learned how to warm up in grade school , by touching our toes and slowly stretching our muscles, and haven’t changed our routines much since. Science, however , has moved on. In the past decade, a growing number of studies have shown that static stretching not only does not prepare muscles for activity; it almost certainly does the reverse. In a representative experiment conducted a few years ago at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did without stretching. Other studies have found that stretching before exercise decreases strength in the stretched muscle by as much as 30 percent.Weirdly , stretching the muscles in one leg can even reduce strength in the other leg, an effect that can last for up to 30 minutes. In a few key real -world studies, basketball players who stretched before a game were unable to jump as high during play as when they hadn’t stretched."
"For a study published in late 2010, scientists at the Florida State University , in Tallahassee, recruited ten competitive male collegiate athletes and asked them not to stretch during their warm-ups. Many athletes would, of course, balk at that request. A separate, large-scale study of recreational runners, conducted under the auspices of the USA Track and Field Association and also published in 2010, required years to complete, because the researchers couldn’t find a sufficiently large body of runners willing to give up their stretching routines, even in the interest of science. Thankfully , college-age men are, in general , not averse to avoiding physical exertion, even stretching, when they can, and so the ten men signed on.
The researchers brought the volunteers into the university’s exercise physiology laboratory for a series of fitness tests, including measurements of their flexibility , then had them return for two additional sessions. During both, the men ran on a treadmill for an hour . In one session, they prepared for the run by simply sitting quietly for sixteen minutes. In the other , they stretched first, following a scripted sixteen-minute static-stretching routine. Static stretching (which is what most of us mean when we talk about stretching) involves stretching a muscle to its maximum length and holding it for 20 or 30 seconds. After stretching, the men felt more flexible.
But their performance declined, significantly . During the hour-long run, they covered less distance than when they had just sat quietly .They also consumed more calories and oxygen during the run, suggesting that their strides had become less economical , that the running was physiologically harder . The implication, the scientists concluded, was obvious. “Static stretching should be avoided before endurance events, ”they wrote.To which many athletes would respond, if their on going behavior is any indication, with an eye roll and a brush-off."
In this brief excerpt from an interview, Chomsky is asked about the ideas of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. The M.I.T. scholar, who elsewhere has described some of those figures and their followers as “cults,” doesn’t mince words:
“What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.”
The one with the primary responsibility to the individual's future is that individual. – Dorcas Hardy, Director, Social Security System
“He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.” ~Socrates
“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.” ~Charles Bukowski
“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." - Henry David Thoreau
The truth is like a lion.
You don't have to defend it.
Let it loose.
It will defend itself.
- St. Augustine
“I think that all lovers of peace and a civilized life should work to enlighten the world about the impracticability and inhumanity of that famous – or shall I say notorious – 'principle of national self-determination', which has now degenerated into the ultimate horror of ethnic terrorism.
We must fight against such horrors. We must not fall prey to the cynical view that history is just violent and horrible, driven by the lust for gold and oil, for wealth and domination.”
Karl Popper, 'All Life is Problem-Solving'.
[T]he folly of letting in some tyranny to avoid more, has in all ages been fatal to liberty. -- John Taylor
"The concept of “high-intensity interval training, ” or HIIT , is relatively new and quite different from the old-school approach to intervals that most of us remember from high school track. With HIT , you don’t intersperse interval sessions on one day with longer workouts on others.You only do intervals, day after day , finishing the hard work in a matter of minutes. “There was a time when the scientific literature suggested that the only way to achieve endurance was through endurance-type activities, ” such as long, relatively easy runs or bike rides or , perhaps,six-hour swims, says Martin Gibala, Ph.D., a professor at McMaster University in Canada, who’s been at the fore front of HIIT science.
But ongoing research from Dr . Gibala’s lab proves otherwise. In one study (which was the most e-mailed document on the website of the Journal of Applied Physiology for almost two years), Dr . Gibala and his colleagues had a group of healthy college students ride a stationary bike at a sustainable pace for between 90 and 120 minutes. Another set of students grunted through a series of short, strenuous intervals: 20 to 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. “We describe it as an ‘all -out’ effort, ” Dr . Gibala says, which requires straying “well out of your comfort zone. ” After resting for 4 minutes, the students pedaled hard again for another 20 to 30 seconds, repeating the cycle 4 to 6 times (depending on how much each person could stand), “for a total of two to three minutes of very intense exercise per training session,” Dr. Gibala says.
Each of the two groups exercised three times a week. After two weeks, both groups showed almost identical increases in their endurance (as measured in a stationary bicycle time trial ), even though the one group had exercised for six to nine minutes per week, and the other for about five hours each week. Both groups, in biopsies, showed dramatic molecular changes deep within their muscle cells indicating increased physical fitness. In particular , they had far more mitochondria now, the microscopic organelles that allow muscles to use oxygen to create energy . Six minutes or so a week of hard exercise (plus the time spent warming up, cooling down, and resting between the bouts of intense work) had proven to be as good as about 300 minutes of less strenuous exercise for achieving basic fitness.
Sadly, those six minutes had to hurt."
"There is a catch. The person who is likely to benefit the most from increasing exercise time is probably not you, but instead your pudgy uncle Clarence or that pasty kid next door who’s never met an online orc he couldn’t slay . “The greatest health benefit from exercise comes from getting up off the couch, ” says exercise physiologist Timothy Church, Ph.D. , a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center , in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who has studied exercise dosing extensively.
“Everything after that is incremental .”The health benefits of activity follow, in fact, a breathtakingly steep curve at first. “ Almost all of the mortality reductions are due to the first 20 minutes of exercise, ” says Frank Booth, Ph.D. , a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri and much-cited expert on exercise and health. “There’s a huge drop in mortality rates among people who haven’t been doing any activity and then begin doing some, even if the amount of exercise is quite small . ” In a recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality conducted by scientists at the University of Cambridge and others, the authors found that in general a person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began to meet the current exercise guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate activity per week, compared with someone who didn’t exercise.
If , however , someone almost tripled that minimum level , completing about 90 minutes a day of exercise four or five times a week, the researchers wrote, his or her risk of premature death dropped still further, but only by another 4 percent."
"Conveniently, as it turns out, caveman-like hunts were probably conducted at a walking speed, anyway . When researchers recently followed a group of modern-day African hunters on a long, slow pursuit of their prey, the average speed was 3.8 miles per hour, a walking pace.“This notion that all humans were born to run is unscientific, ” says zoologist Karen Steudel , Ph.D. , of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who’s conducted a number of comparative studies of the evolution of human and animal locomotion. “The evolutionary record makes it clear that humans are born to be active, ” she adds. Sitting in one place wasn’t an effective survival strategy when big cats and mammoths were around and food was mobile. “That’s all we know for sure at the moment, ” she continues. “But ideas can change with new discoveries. Check back in a month.”"
"But in this study , running was not the most efficient human stride, not by a long shot. It didn’t matter whether a runner landed on his toes,the balls of his feet, or his heels. Running just wasn’t fuel efficient, the data showed. Walking was. By a sizeable margin, walking, especially when the athletes landed first with their heels, was the most physically economical way for human beings to move. This estranges us from much of the animal world. Gazelles rarely walk and don’t do it well . They bound madly , landing on their toes. But humans seem built to plod.“We are remarkably economical walkers, ” the authors concluded. “We are not efficient runners. We consume more energy to run than the typical mammal our size.”"
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
"A mathematical theorem can be proved, yet remain forever uninteresting. And an unproved mathematical conjecture can be fruitful in providing explanations even if it remains unproved for centuries, or even if it is unprovable. One example is the conjecture known in the jargon of computer science as ‘ P ≠ NP’ . It is, roughly speaking, that there exist classes of mathematical questions whose answers can be verified efficiently once one has them but can not be computed efficiently in the first place by a universal (classical ) computer.(‘ Efficient ’ computation has a technical definition that roughly approximates what we mean by the phrase in practice. ) Almost all researchers in computing theory are sure that the conjecture is true(which is further refutation of the idea that mathematical knowledge consists only of proofs). That is because, although no proof is known ,there are fairly good explanations of why we should expect it to be true,and none to the contrary . (And so the same is thought to hold for quantum computers. )"
"Consequently , the reliability of our knowledge of mathematics remains forever subsidiary to that of our knowledge of physical reality . Every mathematical proof depends absolutely for its validity on our being right about the rules that govern the behaviour of some physical objects, like computers, or ink and paper, or brains. So, contrary to what Hilbert thought , and contrary to what most mathematicians since antiquity have believed and believe to this day , proof theory can never be made into a branch of mathematics. Proof theory is a science: specifically , it is computer science."
Situations (many of them tragicomical) where the left column is mistaken for the right one
Table of Confusion
GENERAL
Luck - Skills
Randomness - Determinism
Probability - Certainty
Belief, conjecture - Knowledge, certitude
Theory - Reality
Anecdote, coincidence - Causality, law
Forecast - Prophecy
MARKET PERFORMANCE
Lucky idiot - Skilled investor
Survivorship bias - Market outperformance
FINANCE
Volatility - Return (or drift)
Stochastic variable - Deterministic variable
PHYSICS AND ENGINEERING
Noise - Signal
LITERARY CRITICISM
None (literary critics do - Symbol
not seem to have a name
for things they do not
understand)
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Epistemic probability - Physical probability
Induction - Deduction
Synthetic proposition - Analytic proposition
"Regrettably, some people play the game too seriously; they are paid to read too much into things. All my life I have suffered the conflict between my love of literature and poetry and my profound allergy to most teachers of literature and "critics". The French poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious)."
"At the cost of appearing biased, I have to say that the literary mind can be intentionally prone to the confusion between noise and meaning, that is, between a randomly constructed arrangement and a precisely intended message. However, this causes little harm; few claim that art is a tool of investigation of the Truth - rather than an attempt to escape it or make it more palatable. Symbolism is the child of our inability and unwillingness to accept randomness; we give meaning to all manner of shapes; we detect human figures in inkblots. I saw mosques in the clouds announced Arthur Rimbaud the 19th-century French symbolic poet. This interpretation took him to "poetic" Abyssinia (in East Africa), where he was brutalized by a Christian Lebanese slave dealer, contracted syphilis, and lost a leg to gangrene. He gave up poetry in disgust at the age of 19, and died anonymously in a Marseilles hospital ward while still in his thirties. But it was too late. European intellectual life developed what seems to be an irreversible taste for symbolism - we are still paying its price, with psychoanalysis and other fads."
"Whether a mathematical proposition is true or not is indeed independent of physics. But the proof of such a proposition is a matter of physics only . There is no such thing as abstractly proving something, just as there is no such thing as abstractly knowing something. Mathematical truth is absolutely necessary and transcendent , but all knowledge is generated by physical processes, and its scope and limitations are conditioned by the laws of nature. One can define a class of abstract entities and call them ‘proofs’ (or computations), just as one can define abstract entities and call them triangles and have them obey Euclidean geometry . But you can not infer anything from that theory of ‘ triangles’ about what angle you will turn through if you walk around a closed path consisting of three straight lines. Nor can those ‘proof ’ do the job of verifying mathematical statements. A mathematical ‘ theory of proof s’ has no bearing on which truths can or can not be proved in reality , or be known in reality ; and similarly a theory of abstract ‘ computation ’ has no bearing on what can or can not be computed in reality ."
"So, there is nothing mathematically special about the undecidable questions, the non-computable functions, the unprovable propositions. They are distinguished by physics only . Different physical laws would make different things infinite, different things computable, different truths – both mathematical and scientific – knowable. It is only the laws of physics that determine which abstract entities and relationships are modelled by physical objects such as mathematicians’ brains, computers and sheets of paper."
"It also follows that almost all mathematical statements are undecidable: there is no proof that they are true, and no proof that they are false. Each of them is either true or false, but there is no way of using physical objects such as brains or computers to discover which is which . The laws of physics provide us with only a narrow window through which we can look out on the world of abstractions."
"Another example was in geometry . For centuries, no clear distinction was made between its status as a mathematical system and as a physical theory – and at first that did little harm, because the rest of science was very unsophisticated compared with geometry , and Euclid’s theory was an excellent approximation for all purposes at the time. But then the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who was well aware of the distinction between the absolutely necessary truths of mathematics and the contingent truths of science, nevertheless concluded that Euclid’s theory of geometry was self -evidently true of nature. Hence he believed that it was impossible rationally to doubt that the angles of a real triangle add upto 180 degrees. And in this way he elevated that formerly harmless misconception into a central flaw in his philosophy , namely the doctrine that certain truths about the physical world could be ‘ known a priori ’ – that is to say , without doing
science. And of course, to make matters worse, by ‘ known ’ he unfortunately meant ‘justified’ ."
"What Achilles can or can not do is not deducible from mathematics. It depends only on what the relevant laws of physics say . If they say that he will overtake the tortoise in a given time, then overtake it he will . If that happens to involve an infinite number of steps of the form ‘move to a particular location’ , then an infinite number of such steps will happen. If it involves his passing through an uncountable infinity of points, then that is what he does. But nothing physically infinite has happened."
"Do you see what Zeno did there? He just presumed that the mathematical notion that happens to be called ‘infinity’ faithfully captures the distinction between finite and infinite that is relevant to that physical situation . That is simply false. If he is complaining that the mathematical notion of infinity does not make sense, then we can refer him to Cantor, who showed that it does. If he is complaining that the physical event of Achilles overtaking the tortoise does not make sense, then he is claiming that the laws of physics are inconsistent – but they are not . But if he is complaining that there is something inconsistent about motion because one could not experience each point along a continuous path , then he is simply confusing two different things that both happen to be called ‘infinity’ . There is nothing more to all his paradoxes than that mistake."
I wish, I were big enough, like Einstein, to do what he did on one occasion. A hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner was organised for him to speak, and leaders of America in all fields, particularly in the field of science, were invited to hear the great man. When his turn came, he rose and said:'I've nothing to say,' and sat down. You can imagine the consternation, quite apart from the wasted cost of the dinner! Realising the frightful effect his remarks had on the audience, Einstein got up again and said: 'When I've something to say, I'll let you know.'
-- Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata
Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
-- Daniel Dennett
If the law recognizes a “minority right,” by implication there must be a majority right. If there are majority and minority rights, rights are not equal. The basis of our society is individual rights. The law is supposed to afford equal protection. -- Bryan L. Berson
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing . I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things . . . It doesn't frighten me . “
—Nobel laureate Richard Feynman
"This may mean that people who don't get enough dopamine in their brains seek out drugs or other such means to get a 'high.' Dopamine probably plays a key role in pro-social behavior. People with the altruism gene may do good works because they get more of a thrill out of their good works."
"I often wonder if an insistence upon being right might have physiological similarities to other addictions, including possible genetic predispositions? We all know others (never ourselves) who go out of their way to prove a point, seem to derive more pleasure from final answers than ongoing questions, and want definitive one-stop-shopping resolutions to complex social problems and unambiguous endings to movies and novels. In being constantly on the lookout for the last word, they often appear as compelled and driven as the worst of addicts. And perhaps they are. Might the know-it-all personality trait be seen as an addiction to the pleasure of the feeling of knowing?"
"To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue ... To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued. hustled, beaten up, garroted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed. sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonoured. That is government, that is its justice and its morality!"
"They 'lay their hand on the spring there is in society, and put a stop to its motion'. Their tendency is to perpetuate abuse. Whatever was once thought right and useful they undertake to entail to the latest posterity. They reverse the general propensities of man, and instead of suffering us to proceed, teach us to look backward for perfection. They prompt us to seek the public welfare, not in alteration and improvement, but in a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors, as if it were the nature of the human mind always to degenerate, and never to advance."
~ Godwin
"But while government was intended to suppress injustice, its effect had been to perpetuate it by concentrating the force of the community and aggravating the inequality of property. Once established, governments impede the dynamic creativity and spontaneity of the people."
"There is of course a difference between the State and government. Within a given territory, the State remains while governments come and go. The government is that body within the State which claims legitimate authority to make laws; it also directs and controls the State apparatus. It follows certain procedures for obtaining and using power, based in a constitution or on custom. Tucker defined the State as a 'monopoly of government' in a particular area, and government as an 'invasion of the individual's private sphere'."
"While society is invariably a blessing, they accept that the State is an artificial superstructure separate from society. It is an instrument of oppression, and one of the principal causes of social evil. They therefore reject the idealist view put forward by Rousseau that the State can express the General Will of the people. They will have none of the Hegelian mysticism which tries to see the State as the expression of the spirit of a nation. They do not believe that it forms a moral being or a body politic which is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. They look through its mystifying ceremony and ritual which veil its naked power. They question its appeals to patriotism and democracy to justify the rule of the ruling minority. They do not even accept the liberal contention that the State can be considered a centre of sympathy and co-operation in certain areas ."
“Kropotkin in his study of the origins of the State argues that the Roman Empire was a State, but that the Greek cities and the medieval city republics were not. In European nations, he argues, the State barely dates from the sixteenth century when it took over the free towns and their federations. It resulted from a 'Triple-Alliance' of lords, lawyers and priests who dominated society . They were later joined by the capitalists who continued to strengthen and centralize the State and crush free initiative. The people in the mean time were persuaded to co-operate with the process and grew accustomed to voluntary servitude. “
“Of all sad word of tongue or pen, ‘civilization’ is the saddest. A man who goes about the world grows very sparing in its use. If he judge by what remains, the Dark Ages reached a higher level of civilization than our own…he must needs ask himself why civilization, if that is in truth what we are fighting for, seemingly moves backward.”
-Douglas Reed, A Prophet at Home, 1941 Reed was a distinguished Brit author and journalist.
“The State emerged with economic inequality. It was only when a society was able to produce a surplus which could be appropriated by a few that private property and class relations developed. When the rich called on the support of the shaman and the warrior, the State as an association claiming supreme authority in a given area began to emerge. Laws were made to protect private property and enforced by a special group of armed men. The State was thus founded on social conflict, not, as Locke imagined, by rational men of goodwill who made a social contract in order to set up a government to make life more certain and convenient.”
You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms...
Anna Akhmatova
"Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.”
— Karl Hess
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.
- Thomas Jefferson
“By taking advantage of the window of time required for processing incoming sensory data before outputting it as perception, discordant brain time and "external " time are realigned to allow for perception to create a seamless world of "now." It has been estimated that the brain routinely can smooth out the discrepancies by backward projection of the second image by as much as 120 milliseconds. According to this bizarre but necessary neurophysiology, "being in the moment " is a virtual recipe that steals from both the recent past and the immediate future.“
“This aberration in the fabric of perceived time has been hotly argued as representing everything from evidence for noncausality to intention preceding awareness. But the explanation needn't be deeply philosophical. This coordination of inputs is an everyday occurrence. If you bump into a door, the sensory inputs from your nose reach the brain sooner than those from your big toe, yet you perceive hitting the door with your entire body all at once. The brain adjusts for these time lags. When I tap my foot, the motor movements are felt to be synchronous with my foot striking the ground. The length of time that it takes the sensation of my foot hitting the ground to reach the brain and be processed is not apparent. Without such adjustments, the varying delay between sensory inputs would create a kaleidoscopic sense of time, a present that is spread out over time ( a "thick" present) , as opposed to an instantaneous "now."”
“Hitting coaches stress "keeping your eye on the ball. " Some say that you can see the ball to within a few feet of the plate ; others believe you can see the ball strike the bat . No matter ; what is peculiar is that such images would not reach consciousness until after the swing has been made and the ball is already on its way out of the park or in the catcher's mitt . If the brain did not somehow compensate and project the image of the approaching baseball backward in time, you would see the ball approach the plate after you had already hit it. “
“We experience a feeling of knowing without any accompanying thought, as is seen with mystical experiences and brain stimulation studies. Any interpretation or explanation of this feeling occurs after the experience . A common contemporary example is a profound spiritual "sense of oneness " followed by the interpretation that this "moment " represented a divine revelation. “
In life, so much depends on the question "Do you see what I see?" That most basic of queries binds human beings socially. . . . Having one's perceptions go uncorroborated can make one feel peculiarly alone in the world. . . . marooned on my own private island of navy blue c's, dark brown d's, sparkling green 7's and wine-colored v's. What else did I see differently from the rest of the world? I wondered. What did the rest of the world see that I didn't? It occurred to me that maybe every person in the world had some little oddity of perception they weren't aware of that put them on a private island, mysteriously separated from others. I suddenly had the dizzying feeling that there might be as many of these private islands as there were people in the world.
- Synesthete Patricia Duffy
“The general concept of modularity is a powerful tool for generalizing how the brain functions, including the formation of our thoughts. The feeling of knowing is universal, most likely originates within a localized region of the brain, can be spontaneously activated via direct stimulation or chemical manipulation, yet cannot be triggered by conscious effort. These arguments for its inclusion as a primary brain module are more compelling than those postulated for deceit, compassion, forgiveness, altruism, or Machiavellian cunning. One can stimulate the brain and produce a feeling of knowing; one cannot stimulate the brain and create a politician. “
The word "module" brings to mind detachable, snap-in components, and that is misleading. Mental modules are not likely to be visible to the naked eye. . . . A mental module probably looks more like road kill, sprawling messily over the bulges and crevasses of the brain. Or it may be broken into regions that are interconnected by fibers that make the regions act as a unit.
- Steven Pinker
“Each neuron is like a termite . It cannot contain a complete memory or hold an intelligent discussion. There are no super neurons, nor is there a master plan contained within each neuron. Each neuron's DNA provides general instructions for how a cell operates and relates with other cells; it does not provide instructions for logic, reason, or poetry. And yet, out of this mass of cells comes Shakespeare and Newton . Consciousness, intentionality purpose, and meaning all emerge from the interconnections between billions of neurons that do not contain these elements. Termites are to termite mounds as single neurons are to the mind. Primary modules provide the bricks and mortar,the secondary association areas build the house, and yet more complex interactions are necessary to call this building home. “
“A classical example of emergence is how termites with their tiny brains are able to construct huge mounds up to twenty-five feet in height. No termite has a clue how or why to build a mound ; its brain isn't large enough to carry the information. There are no termite engineers, architects, or critics ; all termites are low-level laborers operating without blueprints, or even a mind's eye notion of a termite mound . Yet the mound is built. Somehow the inter action of lower-level capabilities produces a higher-level activity.”
The real cost of the state is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don't exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The state has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.
-- Frederic Bastiat
“Networks aren't localized like a spot of rust on a fender. They aren't separable into their component parts any more than a cake can be reverse engineered into eggs, sugar, flour, water, and chocolate . These networks are the brain. “
“But the world's smartest AI consultant cannot tell him in advance why the ANN acted as it did. There is no underlying program or algorithm that contains a reason. The process depends upon the entire set of interrelationships, none of which are fixed. One cannot extract a piece of the network for independent observation any more than you can pull out a single strand of a Persian rug and infer what the rug's pattern might be. “
“The hidden layer, a term normally considered AI jargon, offers a powerful metaphor for the brain's processing of information. It is in the hidden layer that all elements of biology (from genetic pre- dispositions to neurotransmitter variations and fluctuations) and all past experience, whether remembered or long forgotten, affect the processing of incoming information. It is the interface between incoming sensory data and a final perception, the anatomic crossroad where nature and nurture intersect. It is why your red is not my red, your idea of beauty isn't mine, why eyewitnesses offer differing accounts of an accident, or why we don't all put our money on the same roulette number. “
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.– Milton Friedman
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. -- Blaise Pascal
Essentially everything that the brain does is accomplished by the process of synaptic transmission .
— Joseph LeDoux , Synaptic Self
The behavioral neurologist Antonio Damasio sums up our present state of ignorance.
"Deciding what constitutes an emotion is not an easy task, and once you survey the whole range of possible phenomena , one does wonder if any sensible définition of emotion can be formulated, and if a single term remains useful to describe all these states. Others have struggled with the same problem and concluded that it is hopeless."
The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap . The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit . Once you've gotten the rabbit , you can forget the snare . Words exist because of meaning . Once you've gotten the meaning , you can forget the words . Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so that I can talk with him ?
— Chuang - Tzu (c 200 B.C.E.)
“Most commonly as the result of a birth injury and developmental abnormalities, and occasionally due to a tumor, a patient can develop a particular form of epilepsy—a complex partial seizure. These spontaneous electrical discharges from temporal lobe-limbic structures characteristically produce a transient (seconds to minutes) alteration or clouding of consciousness, often associated with the intrusion of other mental feelings—déjà vu, dread, fear, and even religious feelings such as those described by Dostoyevsky. Their intensity varies from brief lapses in awareness to a complete loss of consciousness and major convulsions. The frequency also varies greatly. Some patients have very few seizures that are completely controlled with medication ; others less fortunate can experience upwards of several dozen seizures per day despite maximal medication. “
“Volunteers undergoing intravenous ketamine infusions (an anesthetic molecularly similar to the street drug PCP or angel dust), frequently experience a profound clarity of thought . One subject described "a sense of understanding everything, of knowing how the universe works." Such descriptions are quite similar to those who've had "near-death experiences" from a cardiac arrest or an anesthetic complication ; indeed, there may be a common mechanism of action. Lack of adequate brain oxygen characteristically triggers the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate. Under normal conditions glutamate binds to NMDA receptors ; in excessive amounts it is neurotoxic and facilitates neuronal death. In an attempt to prevent this cell death, the oxygen-deprived brain also releases protective chemicals that block the effect of glutamate on NMDA receptors . Ketamine has a similar NMDA receptor-blocking effect. So does MDMA (Ecstasy) , another psychoactive drug known to produce feelings of mental clarity. It is now believed that this blocking of the NMDA receptor is responsible for the clinical picture of a near-death experience . “
“In the following ether-induced example, another subject confirms the power of the mystical experience to feel as if a greater knowledge than objective evidence : "In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I understood them . This was what it had all meant, this was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. . . . I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate."”
“Chemical activation of mystical states is as old as the most ancient psychedelic. William James described the phenomena with several anesthetics—chloroform, ether, and nitrous oxide . The following chloroform-induced mystical experience is a good example of a chemically induced cognitive dissonance : The knowledge that the mystical experience is a result of mundane chemistry does not negate the nagging (and lingering) sense of the certainty of God's existence . Note also that chloroform evoked the sensations of purity and truth without any reference to any specific idea or thought.
I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the anesthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to return, and the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. . . . Think of it. To have felt purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. Yet, this question remains. Is it possible that the inner sense of reality . . . was not a delusion, but an actual experience? Is it possible that I felt what some of the saints have said that they always felt, the undemonstrable but indisputable certainty of God?”
“James's description is perfectly straightforward—with mystical states, people experience spontaneous mental sensations that feel like knowledge but occur in the absence of any specific knowledge. Felt knowledge. Knowledge without thought . Certainty without deliberation or even conscious awareness of having had a thought . “
It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in your head . The accomplishment is to make sure that it is telling you the truth .
— A patient describing a near-death experience
“Mr. C, an elegant retired art dealer, was hospitalized overnight with a small stroke. The next morning, he felt well and was discharged. Within moments of returning home, he phoned my office in a panic . He was certain that his favorite antique desk had been replaced by a cheap Levitz reproduction . "Hurry over and see for yourself. " He lived near my office; I dropped by at lunchtime. The desk in question was a massive eighteenth-century Italian refectory table that took up most of his den . It could easily seat a dozen; just lifting it would require a minimum of several men . And it was far too wide to fit through the doorway without removing the French doors . I quickly pointed out the impossibility of someone sneaking in, moving out the desk, and substituting a fake. Mr. C shook his head . "Yes, I admit that it is physically impossible that the desk has been replaced . But it has. You have to take my word for it. I know real when I see real, and this desk isn't real. " He ran his hand along the grain, repeatedly fingering a couple of prominent wormholes . "It's funny, " he said with a puzzled expression . "These are exact replicas of the holes in my desk. But they don't feel the least bit familiar. No, " he announced emphatically, "someone must have replaced it." He then delivered the cognitive checkmate : "After all, I know what I know."”
“Ms. B, a twenty-nine-year-old grad student hospitalized for an acute viral encephalitis ( a viral inflammation of the brain) complained : "Nothing feels real. I am dead. " The patient refused any medical care . "There is no point in treating a dead person, " she insisted. Her internist tried to reason with her. He asked her t o put her hand on her chest and feel her heart beating. She did, and agreed that her heart was beating. He suggested that the presence of a pulse must mean that she was not dead. The patient countered that, since she was dead, her beating heart could not be evidence for being alive. She said she recognized that there was a logical inconsistency between being dead and being able to feel her beating heart, but that being dead felt more "real" than any contrary evidence that she was alive.
Weeks later, Ms. B began to recover ; eventually she no longer believed that she was dead. She was able to make a distinction between her recovered "reality" and her prior delusions, yet she continued to believe that it must be possible to feel one's heart beat after death. After all, it had happened to her. “
“Mr. A , a seventy-six-year-old retire d World War II veteran with a five-year history of disabling knee pain from X-ray-documented degenerative osteoarthritis was assigned to the placebo group (sham surgery in which general anesthesia was given, superficial incisions were made in the skin over the knee, but no actual surgical repair was performed) . After the procedure, Mr. A was in formed that he had received sham surgery ; the procedure was described in detail. Nevertheless, he dramatically improved ; for the first time in years he was able to walk without a cane. When questioned, he both fully understood what sham surgery meant and fully believed that his knee had been fixed.
"The surgery was two years ago and the knee has never bothered me since. It's just like my other knee now. I give a whole lot of credit to Dr. Moseley. Whenever I see him on the TV, I call the wife in and say, 'Hey, there' s the doctor that fixed my kneel'"
“Kurt Wise, with a B.A. in geophysics from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D . in geology from Harvard, where he studied under Steven Jay Gould, and a professorship at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, writes of his personal conflict between science and religion.
I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible. . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science. . . . If all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.”
“Festinger and his associates described a cult that believed that the earth was going to be destroyed by a flood. When the flood did not happen, those less involved with the cult were more inclined to recognize that they had been wrong. The more invested members who had given up their homes and jobs to work for the cult were more likely to reinterpret the evidence to show that they were right all along, but that the earth was not destroyed because of their faithfulness.”
When dealing with the state, we need certain rules, not grey areas — the less discretion the better. But the state doesn't like certainty. There is an obvious advantage to vagueness for the government. It keeps everyone living in a state of fear. The arbitrariness of it all makes us nervous and constantly aware of who or what is in charge.
But to what end? It's not like [the free market], where rule ambiguity is concocted with the final goal of serving us. When the state creates legal ambiguity — and it does so with deliberation — it is for the purpose of allowing them to trap us, tax us, coerce us, keep us on edge and living in fear.
-- Jeffrey Tucker
“Within on e day of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, Ulric Neisser, a psychologist studying "flashbulb" memories (the recall of highly dramatic events), asked his class of students to write down exactly how they'd heard about the explosion, where they were, what they'd been doing, and how they felt. Two and a half years later they were again interviewed. Twenty-five percent of the students ' subsequent accounts were strikingly different than their original journal entries. More than half the people had lesser degrees of error, and less than ten percent had all the details correct. (Prior to seeing their original journals, most students presumed that their memories were correct.) “
“With blind sight, we see the disconnect between knowledge and awareness of this knowledge as being related to a fundamental flaw in our circuitry. This broken connection cannot be restored either through conscious effort or stilling of the mind—the problem is not within our control . “
“First, let's trace the pathway of the "unseen " light. Some fibers from the retina proceed directly to the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe. But other fibers bypass the region responsible for conscious "seeing" and instead project to subcortical and upper brain stem regions that do not produce a visual image. These lower brain areas are primarily concerned with automatic, reflexive functions such as fight-or-flight. Quickly approaching or looming objects cause the body to swing the head into position so that the eyes can examine the threat . An immediate reflexive action has clear evolutionary benefits over more time-consuming conscious perception and deliberation. In the broadest sense, you could say that these subcortical regions "see" the threat without sending a visual image into awareness.”
“A t a deeper level, most of us have agonized over those sickening "crises o f faith " when firmly held personal beliefs are suddenly stripped o f a visceral sense o f correctness, Tightness, or meaning. Our most considered beliefs suddenly don't "feel right. " Similarly, most o f us have bee n shocked t o hear that a close friend or relative has died unexpectedly, and yet w e "feel" that he is still alive. Such upsetting news often takes time t o "sink in." This disbelief associated with hearing about a death is an example of the sometimes complete disassociation between intellectual and felt knowledge.“
“Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”
“The feeling of certainty we have when we know something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this feeling of knowing seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us ; we cannot make it happen.“
"War is the culmination of convergent commercial and political interests. Wars are fought by soldiers, but they are produced by businessmen and politicians."
-General George Patton
“Scientific explanations cannot possibly depend on how we choose to label the entities referred to in the theory. So anthropic reasoning, by itself, cannot make predictions.”
“Naked singularities appear in some speculative theories in physics, but such theories are rightly criticized on the grounds that they cannot make predictions. As Hawking once put it, ‘Television sets could come out [of a naked singularity].’ It would be different if there were a law of nature determining what comes out – for in that case there would be no infinite regress and the singularity would not be ‘naked’. The Big Bang may have been a singularity of that relatively benign type.“
The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is the most debilitating to the person who bears it.
Katherine Graham
“We all have emotional needs: the need to love, to be loved, to be accepted, to feel a sense of accomplishment, to feel a sense of self-worth, to feel important, to feel needed, to protect ourselves, to attain status in our own eyes and in the eyes of others, to be secure. These needs, in turn, conceal other emotions: love, hate, fear, jealousy, anger, guilt, greed, hope, loyalty. The emotions are fragile and sensitive. They are easily tampered with and they are easily manipulated. A person who knows how to appeal to our emotions can deceive us, manipulate us, and get us to accept as true that which is untrue.”
“His tongue Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low; To vice industrious , but to Nobler deeds Timorous and slothful; yet he pleas' d the ear
—Milton, Paradise Lost , II
“It is a natural human tendency to be subjective rather than objective and that the untrained mind will usually take the path of least resistance. The path of least resistance is rarely through reason.”
"Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they 'belong with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations."
“people:
. tend to believe what they want to believe.
. tend to project their own biases or experiences upon situations.
. tend to generalize from a specific event.
. tend to get personally involved in the analysis of an issue and tend to let their feelings overcome a sense of objectivity.
. are not good listeners. They hear selectively. They often hear only what they want to hear.
. are eager to rationalize.
. are often unable to distinguish what is relevant from what is irrelevant.
. are easily diverted from the specific issue at hand.
. are usually unwilling to explore thoroughly the ramifications of a topic; tend to oversimplify.
. often judge from appearances. They observe something, misinterpret what they observe, and make terrible errors in judgment.
. often simply don't know what they are talking about, especially in matters of general discussion. They rarely think carefully before they speak, but they allow their feelings, prejudices, biases, likes, dislikes, hopes, and frustrations to supersede careful thinking.
. rarely act according to a set of consistent standards. Rarely do they examine the evidence and then form a conclusion. Rather, they tend to do whatever they want to do and to believe whatever they want to believe and then find whatever evidence will support their actions or their beliefs. They often think selectively: in evaluating a situation they are eager to find reasons to support what they want to support and they are just as eager to ignore or disregard reasons that don't support what they want.
. often do not say what they mean and often do not mean what they say.”
The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but a swindling futurity on a large scale.
– Thomas Jefferson
“We need to explain why the changing moral Zeitgeist is so widely synchronized across large numbers of people; and we need to explain its relatively consistent direction. It spreads itself from mind to mind through conversations in bars and at dinner parties, through books and book reviews, through newspapers and broadcasting, and nowadays through the Internet. Changes in the moral climate are signalled in editorials, on radio talk shows, in political speeches, in the patter of stand-up comedians and the scripts of soap operas, in the votes of parliaments making laws and the decisions of judges interpreting them.”
~ Richard Dawkins
“American ideological psyche reveals a number of assumed theoretical and philosophical preconditions, congruent with the identified prominent underlying myths of modernity. Chiefly, that happiness is: a concept or a state to which humankind can aspire; that it is something to be pursued and is both object-like, and elusive, requiring capture; and those seeking it must take self responsible, proactive and decisive steps towards securing it.”
People come up to me and say: “What’s wrong?” Nothing. “Well, it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile!“ Yeah? You know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone?
~ Hicks
“New myth systems are born when the old dogmas hurt people too much”
“Herzberg argues that societal myths are not maintained necessarily by intellectual reasoning, but rather by the emotional support and sense of stability they can provide. This assumes that human nature is neither static nor universal, but collectively formulated within discrete pockets, reflecting “the social orders people inhabit” (Bakan). Myths are thus very significant: first, in terms of the ideological support, they offer the frameworks and actions of a society; and, second, for the reciprocal, emotive attachment adherent individuals have for them. They provide a unified synergy of internal reasoning and meaning, regardless of any external logical inconsistencies they may bear, for the human agent as they navigate the world around them.”
“In Work and the Nature of Man , Frederick Herzberg provides valuable and interesting insights into the formation of the ideological and thematic foundations of societies. He suggests that every society must inevitably establish myths about themselves in order to sustain political, organizational and social institutional structures, which become necessarily elevated to the position of “societal canon” and are “willingly accepted even though patently misleading””
“He describes them as being quite specifically modern, American demands, all of which have been rendered “perfectly explicit, conscious and socially acceptable.” As a consequence of the sheer volume of similarly motivated individuals who crave such states of being, Miller identifies relatively few negative consequences or stigma associated with desiring good health, looks and financial security in mainstream mid-twentieth-century culture. He then asks his reader to imagine collecting a similar catalogue of typical desires from other peoples or at other times: “from Neanderthal men or the Tartar hordes.” Astutely concluding that people often have trouble believing their own peculiar, established longings for popularized commodities or comportments of behavior are socially determined and “learned” rather than “universal and inevitable””
“We want people to like us. We do not want to be ugly ... We want money. We want to own things in which we can take pride.”
“We do not want to be fat. We do not want to smell bad. We want healthy children, and we want to be healthy ourselves.”
“These are proven demands of the market place. Never mind whether it’s good to want such things, or whether we even have a right to want them. The point is that these are the things people in America work for, spend money on, devote their lives to.”
~ George A. Miller
All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.
~ Marx
"It is better to live alone, there is no companionship with a fool; let a man walk alone, let him commit no sin, with few wishes, like an elephant in the forest."
Buddhist proverb - The Dhamapada.
“Contemporary Anglo-American society is awash with political, organizational and individual efforts to be happy. It is extant across the realms of: governmental debates and mandates, employment policies and management consultancy advice, news stories, television fiction and documentaries, psychology, self-help courses, and even school classrooms. This widespread cultural momentum towards happiness is a culmination of events that have transpired over the past circa three hundred “Industrialized” years since the Age of Enlightenment. Throughout this period up to the modern day, happiness has come to be defined as: pursuable and attainable, able to be measured scientifically and provided by legislation, spiritual, practicable, located within the individual and attainable in correlation with the surrounding capitalistic structure. Whereby a focus on one’s individual, hedonistic happiness is now morally defensible, and in accordance with what have become commonly accepted societal norms. This leads to the denouement of this book that, following on from the popularized coinage of Homo economicus(The Economist Online, ) and even Homo siliconvalleycus(Thrift, h: ): modern humankind is presently aspiring toward the neologistic genus of Homo happicus.”
“How prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies; how slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls!”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“To speak of the Roman-numeral system as controlling us in order to get itself replicated and preserved may sound like relegating humans to the status of slaves. But that would be a misconception. People consist of abstract information, including the distinctive ideas, theories, intentions, feelings and other states of mind that characterize an ‘I’. To object to being ‘controlled’ by Roman numerals when we find them helpful is like protesting at being controlled by one’s own intentions. By that argument, it is slavery to escape from slavery. But in fact when I obey the program that constitutes me (or when I obey the laws of physics), ‘obey’ means something different from what a slave does. The two meanings explain events at different levels of emergence. “
“Conversely, advocates of highly immoral doctrines almost invariably believe associated factual falsehoods as well. For instance, ever since the attack on the United States on September , millions of people worldwide have believed it was carried out by the US government, or the Israeli secret service. Those are purely factual misconceptions, yet they bear the imprint of moral wrongness just as clearly as a fossil – made of purely inorganic material – bears the imprint of ancient life. And the link, in both cases, is explanation. To concoct a moral explanation for why Westerners deserve to be killed indiscriminately, one needs to explain factually that the West is not what it pretends to be – and that requires uncritical acceptance of conspiracy theories, denials of history, and so on. “
“In the case of moral philosophy, the empiricist and justificationist misconceptions are often expressed in the maxim that ‘you can’t derive an ought from an is’ (a paraphrase of a remark by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume). It means that moral theories cannot be deduced from factual knowledge. This has become conventional wisdom, and has resulted in a kind of dogmatic despair about morality: ‘you can’t derive an ought from an is, therefore morality cannot be justified by reason’. That leaves only two options: either to embrace unreason or to try living without ever making a moral judgement. Both are liable to lead to morally wrong choices, just as embracing unreason or never attempting to explain the physical world leads to factually false theories (and not just ignorance). “
“Experience provides problems only by bringing already-existing ideas into conflict. It does not, of course, provide theories.”
“There is no inconsistency in having multiple explanations of the same phenomenon, at different levels of emergence. Regarding microphysical explanations as more fundamental than emergent ones is arbitrary and fallacious. … The world may or may not be as we wish it to be, and to reject good explanations on that account is to imprison oneself in parochial error. “
“Third, the very idea of a cause is emergent and abstract. It is mentioned nowhere in the laws of motion of elementary particles, and, as the philosopher David Hume pointed out, we cannot perceive causation, only a succession of events. Also, the laws of motion are ‘conservative’ – that is to say, they do not lose information. That means that, just as they determine the final state of any motion given the initial state, they also determine the initial state given the final state, and the state at any time from the state at any other time. So, at that level of explanation, cause and effect are interchangeable – and are not what we mean when we say that a program causes a computer to win at chess, or that a domino remained standing because is a prime. “
“He asks whether the mind can consistently be thought of as affecting the body – causing it to do one thing rather than another, given the all-embracing nature of the laws of physics. This is known as the mind–body problem. For instance, we often explain our actions in terms of choosing one action rather than another, but our bodies, including our brains, are completely controlled by the laws of physics, leaving no physical variable free for an ‘I’ to affect in order to make such a choice. Following the philosopher Daniel Dennett, Hofstadter eventually concludes that the ‘I’ is an illusion. Minds, he concludes, can’t ‘push material stuff around’, because ‘physical law alone would suffice to determine [its] behaviour’. “
‘There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.’
~ Einstein
“Indeed, psychological research into happiness suggests that the keys to contentment are stable and loving relationships, good health and a certain degree of financial security and stability. These can be enjoyed by those whose most intellectual interest is Who Wants to be a Millionaire? just as easily as by avid readers of Proust or Wittgenstein, if not more so. …So the philosophers’ ‘ratiocentric’ bias – placing reason at the heart of human nature – may simply reflect their own interests and priorities, not those of the human race.”
‘The concept of happiness is such an indeterminate concept that, although every human being wishes to attain it, he can still never say determinately and consistently with himself what he really wishes and wills.’
~ Kant
“Schopenhauer wrote, ‘Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure.’ Most other philosophers, however, have made some kind of distinction between pleasure as a temporary state of excitement or enjoyment, and happiness as a more enduring condition. So the pleasure of eating a fine meal lasts only as long as the meal does, whereas the happiness of a contented person persists in quiet moments. It makes sense to look at someone who is sleeping and say, ‘There lies a happy person,’ but it usually makes no sense to say, ‘There lies someone experiencing pleasure.’ Happiness is thus more of a ‘background’ condition, while pleasure is a fleeting experience which occupies the foreground of our experience.”
“Many of us have a tacit understanding that being happy is the most important thing in life: ‘I don’t care what they do just as long as they’re happy.’ But it also suggests that happiness is elusive and perhaps not the be-all and end-all: the parents who say they only want their children to be happy are usually disturbed if this happiness seems to be found by working as a stripper, drug dealer or loan shark. So happiness is important but it’s not everything; it’s worth having but hard to possess. No wonder that the pursuit of happiness seems to be so difficult and its role in the meaning of life so unclear.”
“There does seem to be a widespread, if not universal, human urge to achieve transcendence. Life seems unsatisfactory when it concerns only our individual existence. This urge must be recognized and, if it does represent a need, that need has to be addressed. But it is also an urge that can lead us astray. We cannot assume that just because we feel this desire, it can be satisfied. And even if it can, we don’t want to end up embracing a way of life or body of belief just because it seems to offer the satisfaction we seek, when on closer examination it may turn out to rest on a mistake. Indeed, I would suggest that much of the appeal of ‘new age’ ideas is based on their promise of something transcendent, since the ideas themselves are largely nonsense.”
“If the advancement of the species is considered the ultimate purpose of life, we become like ants in a colony. We have a collective purpose, but individually only a few of us – the ‘queens’ – are vital. Squash any one of us and the colony carries on regardless. We gain a collective purpose at the price of removing any importance for us as individuals.”
“The idea that life’s meaning requires us to give up our own individuality is an interesting one. In this case, however, though it is possible to see the psychological attraction of the kind of transcendence promised, it is much harder to see why the species is of such value that we should give our all to it. The species may be something that transcends us, this does not necessarily make it more valuable than us. So making the object of our concern the species would seem to be misguided, for what is valuable about the species is not to be found at the level of the species itself, but at the level of its individual members. We should care for human beings, not the abstraction ‘humankind’.”
“A species, however, is not sentient. It has no feeling, consciousness or intellect. Its individual members do, of course, but as a whole it does not. There are those who suggest that things such as species and ecosystems have a kind of collective consciousness, but this is no more than speculation and pretty wild speculation at that. The question therefore must be asked: why should we think ‘the good of the species’ is something valuable in itself, so valuable that furthering it can provide life with meaning? The species itself, lacking in sentience, would seem to be indifferent to its welfare. We can care about it, but why we would want to care about it more than we do about its individual members is puzzling. If we do so, we risk ending up with the kind of situation portrayed in George Orwell’s satire Animal Farm, in which ‘somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer’.”
“Helping others cannot therefore be the meaning of life itself. But it is essentially tied to the meaningful life, because it is premised on the notion that life can be a good in itself. If this is true for one it is true for all, and so we have reasons for helping others. Altruism is thus not the source of life’s meaning but is something that living a meaningful life requires. We just need to remember that the purpose of helping others is to bring them benefits, not to engage in charity for charity’s sake.”
“This shows why it is sometimes right and proper to sacrifice our own interests. But it doesn’t show that sacrificing our own interests to help others is the most desirable thing. The ideal is that everyone, including oneself, enjoys a good quality of life. And so the ideal is one where helping others isn’t necessary. That is not to deny that there are times when one’s own quality of life is worth sacrificing, just that it would indeed be a sacrifice. To think otherwise – that helping others lies at the core of life’s meaning – is to contradict the values that one’s altruism is committed to promoting.”
“Altruism, if successful, would defeat its own purpose. This paradox has a psychological counterpart in what is often called the ‘culture of dependency’. This is any situation where there is a helping relationship and where the dynamic of aid leads to a situation where either party, or both, in the relationship comes to depend on its continuation. It is most evident in situations where people come to rely on voluntary or state aid, but it can also work the other way around: carers can come to need those they care for in order to give them a role or a sense of importance or value. When this happens, the carers – contrary to their explicit intentions – actually don’t want those they help to become independent. This is clearly a pathological state of affairs and though its extent should not be exaggerated, it is not unusual. It does, however, vividly illustrate how seeing altruism as the source of life’s meaning can distort our vision of what life should be and make us lose sight of the fact that altruism is most successful when the need to help is removed, not sustained.”
The farther you go...the harder it is to return. The world has many edges and it's easy to fall off.
Anderson Cooper
The beauty of life is nothing but this, that each should act in conformity with his nature and his business.
~ Fray Luis de Leon
“And third, we would be foolish to be entirely satisfied by people’s claims about their own lives. After all, people claim to be fully content doing all sorts of things: selling drugs, being porn stars, living in monasteries, running paper factories, dropping out and tuning in. We can’t follow all their recommendations, so we need to consider whether their kinds of lives do actually provide meaning for us.”
“Doubts like these can arise when we think more generally about the place of altruism in the meaningful life. When asked what the purpose of life is, many will say that we are essentially here to help others. This is what allows us to break free of the pointless cycle of eating to live, living to work and working to eat. By helping others we escape the narrow and limiting concerns of our own private existence and partake in the greater good of helping those outside it. But when helping others becomes the source of meaning for our own lives, does helping others merely become a means of helping ourselves?”
“Another reason is that it is not clear how the meaningfulness of life is affected by duration. More of something of value can be more valuable, but if something is worthless in the first place, how can increasing its quantity transform it into something worth having? An eternal life might turn out to be the most meaningless of all. What would be the point of doing anything today if you could just as easily do it tomorrow? As Albert Camus put it in The Plague, ‘The order of the world is shaped by death.’ The very fact that one day life will end is what propels us to act at all.”
“Life is simply meaningless, no refusal to accept that fact on our part can render it meaningful.”
There is no glorious way to die for an individual. Death is the robber of everything.
“In order to be honest and consistent we need to avoid these errors. If we think that a life without any difficulties and worries lies in the future we are mistaken. We need to recognize the fragility of good fortune and the impermanence of things. But do we have the courage and honesty to take life for what it is and make the most of it? Or do we fear that if we do so it will prove to be a disappointment?”
I'm not interested in money, I just want to be wonderful.
Marilyn Monroe
‘If you are distressed by any external thing, it is not this thing which disturbs you, but your own judgement about it. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.’
~ Marcus Aurelius
“The person who sacrifices too much enjoyment of life to serve the purpose of future wealth and security is thus making the mistake of overestimating the extent to which his future life will be better than the one he could have now.Being wealthy may make life a bit better but not so much better that it is worth sacrificing years of one’s life to work for.This is even more important when it comes to personal relationships,which are consistently highlighted by psychologists as being important for personal happiness. Neglecting friendships for work is almost inevitably a poor tradeoff in terms of life satisfaction,since they are precisely the kind of thing which cannot simply be bought once one has become sufficiently wealthy.How many marriages and partnerships have been put under strain or even ruined by one partner spending so much time at work that they neglect their relationship?”
Life is not about goals, they get achieved (or you else, if you don’t achieve them, you get to be labeled as a loser (and it would be really bad if you yourself stick that badge on your chest)) and then you need to find another one, and another one, till you end, drop down dead. Goals are distractions, distractions to keep you from that feeling when you are between having finished one goal and are looking for another one, that period of purposelessness; and that feeling, that state of mind, is what life is under all those blankets we cover it with. Its purpose less, no matter what you make yourself believe. That intoxication you get from drenching your life running after them goals, do get off of you sometime, taking away with it the delusion of importance and purpose those goals of yours were supposed to provide for you, and those are the times you confront the bare life, the naked life, and you realize that life is cheap, you are cheap, and all those phony values, they don’t stick that well to life, fall off pretty well soon and you need to constantly search for the glue to stick them back on.
