Anyone read these, any or all of of Pratchett? Thoughts? — Amity
I liked Pratchett. I don't read much fantasy, but I found his style and humor appealing. I was introduced to Pratchett by a college buddy who was a big fan. Later I was gifted a set of audiobooks and I would often fall asleep while listening to them in bed :) (not because they are boring, it's just that audiobooks have this effect on me) — SophistiCat
Many of the books have reappearing characters and places, so it probably helps to read those in sequence, but it's not essential. — SophistiCat
The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck — fdrake
The phrase "the road less travelled" is from a poem by Robert Frost - "The Road Not Taken." It is ironic that the Peck used this quote because Frost meant it ironically. It is not meant as a paean to a life of non-conformity but rather a wry comment on how we look back on our lives and try to show how we are masters of our fate. — T Clark
The poem masquerades as a meditation about choice, but the critic William Pritchard suggests that the speaker is admitting that “choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had ‘perhaps the better claim.’” In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions.
In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision.
To me the poem suggests recognition of determinism - that many little things make all the difference in the courses of our lives. — wonderer1
a woo based belief in free will — wonderer1
Are you saying that free will doesn't exist - that it's somehow a alllusion to mysticism or the supernatural? — T Clark
I don't see it that way. Sometimes it makes sense to act as if ours and others' behaviors are the result of outside influences and sometimes it makes sense to act as if we are in control. — T Clark
Free will vs. determinism is a metaphysical issue. Its not about facts - true or false. — T Clark
Surely someone has read this book here. — Lionino
[Kant] saw clearly that the forms of apprehension available to us are determined by pre-existing structures of the experiencing subject and not by those of the object apprehended, but he did not see that the structure of our perceiving apparatus had anything to do with reality. In... the Critique of Pure Reason he wrote:
If one were to entertain the slightest doubt that space and time did not relate to the Ding an sich but merely to its relationship to sensuous reality, I cannot see how one can possibly affect to know, a priori and in advance of any empirical knowledge of things, i.e. before they are set before us, how we shall have to visualize them as we do in the case of space and time.
Kant was obviously convinced that an answer to this question in terms of natural science was categorically impossible. In the fact that our forms of ideation and categories of thought are not, as Hume and other empiricists had believed, the products of individual experience, he found clear proof that they are logically inevitable a priori, and thus not 'evolved'.
What a biologist familiar with the facts of evolution would regard as the obvious answer to Kant's question was, at that time, beyond the scope of the greatest of thinkers. The simple answer is that the system of sense organs and nerves that enables living things to survive and orientate themselves in the outer world has evolved phylogenetically through confrontation with an adaptation to that form of reality which we experience as phenomenal space. This system thus exists a priori to the extent that it is present before the individual experiences anything, and must be present if experience is to be possible. But its function is also historically evolved and in this respect not a priori. — Lorenz - Behind the Mirror
I think the most compelling idea in the book is there there is a direct continuity between the "cognition" of the earliest animals and the cognition of complex animals such as us. — T Clark
Like that? — Pantagruel
Immortality by Milan Kundera. — javi2541997
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