'Spirit' comes from the Latin word 'to breathe.' What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. — Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
– AnonymousEve's disobedience warped reality, changed the laws of physics, changed the genomes of some herbivores so much that they turned into carnivores, spawned harmful bacteria and viruses, and turned the sun from a spiked yellow ball with a baby's face on its center into a nuclear reactor that powers Earth's ecosystems but also gives you cancer.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
— BR — Mikie
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. — Milan Kundera
To trust life or to take it into your own hands is a hard decision. Do you trust the wind or do you want to be the tornado? — Some guy on Quora
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes — an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. — Carl Sagan
@Agree-to-Disagree :up:A carrot usually works better than a stick
I believe however to have dedicated enough time to languages and also to reading the old books, to its stories and fables. It is almost like traveling, talking to men of other centuries. It is good to know some things about the customs of other peoples, so that we may judge ours more aptly, as not to think that anything that is against our ways is ridiculous or absurd, which those that have seen nothing often think.
taking a dim view of what he described as the Wittgensteinian “thought police” (owing to the Orwellian tendency on the part of some Wittgensteinians to suppress dissent by constricting the language, dismissing the stuff that they did not like as inherently meaningless) — SEP on Lakatos
My third maxim was to endeavour always to master myself rather than fortune, to try to change my desires rather than to change the order of the world, and in general to settle for the belief that there is nothing entirely in our power except our thoughts, and after we have tried, in respect of things external to us, to do our best, everything in which we do not succeed is absolutely impossible as far as we are concerned. This alone seemed to me to be sufficient to prevent me from desiring anything in future which I could not obtain, and thereby to make me content. For as our will is naturally inclined to desire only those things which our intellect represents to it as possible in some way, it is certain that if we consider all external goods as being equally beyond our power, we shall not feel any more regret at failing to obtain those which seem to be our birthright when deprived of them through no fault of our own, than we shall for not possessing the kingdoms of China and Mexico; and by making a virtue out of necessity, as the saying goes, we shall no more desire to be healthy when we are ill or free when we are in prison, than we do now to have bodies made of matter as incorruptible as diamonds or wings to allow us to fly like birds.
Fables make us conceive of events as being possible where they are not; and even if the most faithful of accounts of the past neither alter nor exaggerate the importance of things in order to make them more attractive to the reader, they nearly always leave out the humblest and least illustrious historical circumstances, with the result that what remains does not appear as it really was, and that those who base their behaviour on the examples they draw from such accounts are likely to try to match the feats of knights of old in tales of chivalry and set themselves targets beyond their powers.
Among the first of these was the realization that things made up of different elements and produced by the hands of several master craftsmen are often less perfect than those on which only one person has worked. This is the case with buildings which a single architect has planned and completed, that are usually more beautiful and better designed than those that several architects have tried to patch together, using old walls that had been constructed for other purposes.
The first was to obey the laws and customs of my country, and to adhere to the religion in which God by His grace had me instructed from my childhood, and to govern myself in everything else according to the most moderate and least extreme opinions, being those commonly received among the wisest of those with whom I should have to live.
And although there may be as many wise people among the Persians and the Chinese as among ourselves, it seemed to me that the most useful thing to do would be to regulate my conduct by that of the people among whom I was to live; and that for me to know what their opinions really were, I had to take note of what they did rather than what they said[...]
And I chose only the most moderate among many opinions which were equally widely received, as much because these are always easiest to practise and likely to be the best (excesses all being usually bad) as to wander less far from the true path in case I should be wrong, and that having followed one extreme, it transpired that I should have followed the other.
For although every man is indeed bound to procure the good of others insofar as it is within his power, and we are, in the true meaning of the word, worthless if we are of no use to anyone else, yet it is also true that our efforts have to reach out beyond the present time, and that it is acceptable to omit doing things which might bring some benefit to our contemporaries, when this is done in order to bring greater benefit to our grandchildren.
We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know. — Daniel Kahneman, d. 2024
If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be? — Frans de Waal, d. 2024
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.
Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.
Philosophy is to science what pigeons are to statues.
There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.
The mind is the effect, not the cause. — Daniel Dennett, d. 2024
In his theory of tychism, Peirce sought to deny the central position of the doctrine of necessity which maintains that "the state of things existing at any time, together with certain immutable laws, completely determine the state of things at every other time." One of the principal arguments of the necessitarians is that their position involves a presupposition of all science. Peirce attacks this idea asserting: "To 'postulate' a proposition is no more than to hope it is true." Thus an avenue is opened up allowing the entry of chance as a fundamental and absolute entity. — C.S. Peirce
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.