'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

Should I be a smart-ass and disprove Carl Sagan? Ahh, I will resist the urge this time.

Eve'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.

– Anonymous

'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

Should I be a smart-ass and disprove Carl Sagan? — Lionino

Yes please.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

— BR

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

— BR — Mikie

That would depend on the definition of stupid would it not.

According to some dictionaries:
Stupid, adj

• Lacking or marked by lack of intellectual acuity
• Lacking intelligence
• In a state of mental numbness especially as resulting from shock
• Devoid of good sense or judgment

:up:

Stupidity, n. Habitual refusal to think (i.e. maladaptive judgment or conduct); H. Arendt's "banality" ...

*

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

Yep that is a good definition, stupid people fail to use the intelligence and education they were given, regardless of the level they are at.

But the blame for stupidity cannot be laid upon the educational systems, when they fail to do their job properly the product is ignorant people.
Stupidity is a personal choice or habit disease picked up from other stupid members of society.

Courage. That is the enabling virtue. All the other virtues are empty without courage. — Cornel West

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

All true emancipatory politics has to have a universal dimension in it. It doesn't mean you renounce your particularity, but you somehow read your particularity as a sign of what is wrong in our universality itself. — Slavoj Žižek

'All bad art is the result of good intentions' — Oscar Wilde

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

Good one. I deeply miss Sagan. With Chomsky on his way out, I’m running out of heroes.

“Who’ll be my role model, now that my role model is gone, gone…He ducked back down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl.” — Paul Simon

:cool:

A carrot usually works better than a stick

@Agree-to-Disagree :up:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/881459

"If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand."
---Gotthold Lessing

Not necessarily because I would do the same, but because I think that encapsulates the human struggle in matters of philosophy. And not out of humility, but more the opposite. Presumably, Socrates told his disciples the Truth about the futility of pursuing knowledge, but Plato went off pursuing anyway. Cant blame him. It's what we do. We displace the "God given"* Truth with our constructedKnowledge.
*I don't mean scripture nor revelation. I mean we are already the Truth. Like every organism, the Born Truth.

AND

"Not the wind, not the flag. It is the mind that is moving!"
---Huineng, the 6th Chinese Patriarch of Chan

For reasons which I cannot disclose. And I mean literally cannot; not, "not at liberty to".

"And I have no cause for complaint on the grounds that God has not given me a greater power of
understanding or the natural light which God gave me is no greater than it is; for it in the nature of a finite intellect to lack understanding of many things, and it is in the nature of a created intellect to be finite. Indeed, I have reason to give thanks to him who has never owed me anything for the great bounty that he has shown me, rather than thinking myself deprived or robbed of any gifts he did not bestow."

- Descartes

The Metaphysical Meditations and the Discourse are chock full of great quotes. Let's add to that:

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.

:cheer:

Indeed.

Great quote. :cheer:

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

Some more quotes I like from Descartes' Discourse:

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.

I was drowned,
I was washed up and left for dead
I fell down
to my feet and saw they bled, yeah yeah
I frowned
at the crumbs of a crust of bread
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I was crowned
with a spike right through my head — Mick & Keef

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

Easter? :sweat:

Forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today. — Lawrence Krauss

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

We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.

— some say Kurt Vonnegut, but I’m not sure.

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

— Aldous Huxley

There's something about the terminally online which forces them to never be able to concede. They need to constantly lie, play word games or resort to semantics.

— Youtube comment.

Humans don't fight over territory and food. They fight over imaginary stories in their minds. — Yuval Noah Harari

Humans don't fight over territory and food. They fight over imaginary stories in their minds. — Yuval Noah Harari

Sure, but we do everything based on imaginary stories in our minds.

This from the Wikipedia article on tychism.

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