Robert Wright just had a discussion with Sam Harris. As academics they give a sober view of enlightenment.

Is Buddhism True?: A Conversation with Robert Wright

Yogis seem to be metaphysical idealists of a sort. The common folk are limited to the material transmutations by instrumental science and the works of reason. Yogis claim to traverse space and time (the Veil of Illusions) as if the universe was a manifestation of the mind of Atman, the primordial being at the core of all things. Ideas manifest as matter. But what limits their miracles to such silly displays I don't know, unless how they appear to us is dependent on whether or not we are able to receive them on their terms.

All phenomena is secondary to Atman, which includes the instrumentality of thinking. Atman precedes or exists outside or is the source of Maya in some way.

My favorite mystic meme:

"God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

Put your demons to work. Make them curtsy to you as you curtsy to your boss.

Self Censored :-x (This is not a joke thread or this thread IS NOT a joke).

Bands like this are one of several reasons that the midwest remains "flyover land". — Bitter Crank

To be continued, the Noumenous Bird Theme (The Musical):




Why did the thinker ignore the bird?

Because he was

(a) a statue
(b) an idea
(c) an image
(d) a word
(e) a bird

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist

It isn't an empirical bird.

We can't all be smart, funny, coherent and planning toward progress like T Clark. But you can laugh if you try.



Uncontrollable laughter is far worse than depression though, if you ask me.

God's parrot laughs and says "I heard that Bohr. If I believe that I don't know what hasn't been rolled yet, I will deign to play with myself. "

J.L. Borges epigram to his short fiction, The Library of Babel, is from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

“By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters…”

The search for this sentence in Burton's book at least shows that this actually appears in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and is not made up by Borges like so many folks have said.

Best to avoid both works and go take a walk in the woods with your girlfriend or boyfriend, like I would if I had one.

What those walks in the woods might bring to the understanding of the variations of love letters and melancholy, one can only imagine.

Existential Comics

Why did Kim Jong Un execute the man in the Chinese Room experiment?

(a) Because he suspected the man was bilingual.
(b) Because the man couldn't translate Chinese into Korean fast enough.
(c) Because the man's sister tried to cross the border.
(d) Because the man was exposed to politically dangerous semantic content.
(e) Because Kim Jong Un's blood sugar was too low.
(f) Because the Chinese Room experiment was a state sponsored exercise in torture always preceding death.

Ellen is Frank's first child. Sophia is the youngest. How much do you really know about Frank?

Far Side Style

After reading Schopenhauer's seminal work "The World as Will and Idea" Frank decided he would show Schopenhauer his seminal work.

"Hi Art. This is my daughter, Sophia."

Kant, who happens to be in the bar for some anomalous non-reason, sees DesCartes raising a stein to his lips, runs over and grabs the stein out of DesCartes hands.

After taking a sip Kant adjusts his waist coat and clears his throat, then announces loud enough that everyone else in the bar can hear him:

"Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. I am the dying man."

DesCartes' face turns redly redder, grabs the stein back, and says loud enough so that everyone else in the bar can hear him: "I drink to forget that I am. "

Frank, who is not and will never be a philosopher, watches from a barstool, easily amused.

Enough with this Quine monkey business.

How many lightbulbs does it take to light a bulb?

Depends on whose bulb is being lit.

How much friction does it take to ignite a wet piece of wood?

Find out.

This thread is turning violent. Good thing our bodies aren't in the same space.

A Panda bear rents a room at the Mandalay Bay hotel. He eats, shoots and leaves.

What translation of the Tao Te Ching is that from?

Daniel Dennett's humorous slogan for contemplating Darwinian cultural evolution:

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.

I don't know about you, but I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain a s a sort of dungheap in which the larvae of other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational diaspora. It does seem to rob my mind of its importance as both author and critic. Who's in charge, according to this vision -- we or our memes? — Dennett

A joke is just a comedian's way of making comedians of us all.

A comemian is only understood through the performative devices of its comemedy.

It's more like a sad story with a thread-dependent context than a joke, I guess. Like the one about a disabling monster who amuses video gamers in a simulated trial of violence and self neglect.

A joke tries to persuade its disabled human about how to convey itself to other humans but the joke's owner has lost its keys in a dark ally and is preoccupied.

The joke says to its human "you don't need that comfy bed in that apartment which you feel you can't afford not to pay, just sleep on the street."

The joke laughs at its human, "Frank would've told me at the right time and place in the right order without a hiccup. "

"Always you and your Frank" the human says.

Nietzsche is walking along a street in Turin we he sees a cart driver whipping a unicorn.

He embraces the horse and whispers in its ear : "Sometimes horses don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."

It's very short. I remember reading it, and being like :s 'why have I just read this?' — Augstino

Story of my life. I remember working my job and was like :( why am I doing this.

J.L. Borges fictions, if nothing else, his Library of Babel.

The Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges is not typically classified as a philosopher, but in his short stories he has given philosophy some of its most valuable thought experiments, most of them gathered in the stunning collection Labyrinths. Among the best is the fantasy -- actually, it is more a philosophical reflection than a narrative -- that describes the Library of Babel. — Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

I wish I could see the Library of Babel through Dennett's mind.

Books on my kindle that I may read and reread eventually:

Finite and Infinite Games

Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol in the Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges by Carter Wheelock

He (Borges) has a superb conceptual grasp of what Wilbur M. Urban called "the natural metaphysic of the human mind" -- the abstracting, god making, fluid, kaleidoscopic world view possessed by primitive men for want of a body of sure and useful knowledge, and the view to which sophisticated men inevitably return when they despair of truth. The philosophy perennis formulates a circular, predestined universe, capricious and chaotic, capable of an infinite number of equally valid configurations; a world in which everything conceivable is true and where "false" can only mean "unthought." Borges looks upon modern men, with their fixed hiearchy of knowledge and an idea of being that differs radically from the loose cosmologies of their ancient forebears, as if they were a choral group that sings only one dogmatized song. — Carter Wheelock

Buddha's Clear Liquid Self-Dissolving Solution (now comes in new bucket size).

Do you suspect someone has been screwing your wife while you're at work? Did you lose your job due to a corporate merger and you are worried your family will now be homeless? Buddha's Clear Liquid Self-Dissolving Solution is the right solution for you.

Simply submerge the heads of the problematic selves in provided bucket containing Buddha's Clear Liquid Self-Dissolving Solution and whoila! your problems are solved.

From the makers of Ayn Rand's Industrial Strength Self-Galvanizing solution.

God accidentally spills a bucket of clear liquid.

14 billion years later he cleans it up.

Where do you get that one market shutting down results in an unrelated other market shutting down? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I'm just wondering what this local manufacturing economy would look like. Maybe other markets would still exist but their prices might adjust to exclude those who have nothing worth trading. Isn't that kind of why developing nations don't really change quickly, as they have nothing to bring to the table by which they could evolve their economies.

The surplus that is to be gained by specializing in a very desirable product and scaling up reshapes the geography around it. Going in the opposite direction (losing surplus value by which you can trade) may reshape your local geography and its available resources in a way you don't expect or are very not pleased with respect to how you live currently.



You think we could never have enough chocolate but these workers aren't compensated so well for their goods. Would they be better off if the demand for chocolate went down?

Ecologies are all connected from the bottom to the top. It's all enormously complicated.

The average diet (excluding the consumed residues of glyphosate) is probably far worse via the "gut flora" influence than a healthier diet with average glyphosate residues, though this is just a guess.

Coca-cola sells a product which causes immense harm directly (diabetes) and indirectly (raising cost healthcare insurance), though this is probably disputed. Gut flora might actually have a big role to play in our inability to act against what harms us, even though we may intellectually understand what harms us.

What is good for the gut is good for the body. What is bad for the gut is bad for the body. But what is good for the gut?

What is good for the mind is good for the body. What is bad for the mind is bad for the body.
But what is good for the mind?

Somewhere and everywhere we end up making trade-offs. What is good for the mind is bad for the body. Oh well... But if it is bad for the body, is it not also bad for the mind?

What are you trying to do on this site?

Learning to be self-reliant / self-sufficient and only entering formal markets when it is one's only choice (you can't fly your own aircraft, so you hire an airline to fly you somewhere; you can't mine your own minerals, so you buy them from a mine operator, etc.) is what would be revolutionary. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I sense a contradiction in this paragraph. How would someone determine when entering a formal market is their only choice? Wouldn't such a decrease in the demand to travel outside of one's own geographic locality make air travel too expensive for the average joe. Air travel wouldn't be there as choice. Whatever the old market was it wouldn't be there anymore and the new kind of market would be the formal market(?)

Through the dawning age
We go walking together
Toward the yawning grave
Braving dangers, we make our way
We'll leave our bones in the dust
An untold legend is lighting up

What if I was the last sight you ever saw?
Would you die with a smile on your face?

Well, don't even try to say you will
'Cause you'd hardly recognize the sight
Young are getting old and the summer is cold
And all the birds've been singing at night

When we're dead and gone
Will the mountains remember?
Or just carry on
Moving slow as the forest grows?
And turn our bones into dust
An untold legend is lighting up

When will I reach that light that I'm running to?
When I die will it turn out forever?
There's a fire burning inside of me
When I die will light burn out forever?

Well, don't even lie, I know it will, babe
'Cause the darkness doesn't need the light
All the young are getting old and the summer is cold
All the birds've been singing at night

Well, don't even try to save me, friend
'Cause I know it ain't worth the fight
All the young are getting old and the summer is cold
All the birds've been singing at night

If you just copy the joke you can change it yourself.



He doesn't own the version of his joke unless his joke is his bread and butter. As an aside, he can live without butter. It is better to live without butter. You can't believe it's not better.

Edit: It is better to leave our history unrevised. But you can't believe it's not better because there was only margarine in George Orwell's 1984. Big Brother's marketing campaign: "Margarine is Butter"

Long ago I danced for a King named Clark,
Who frowned and began to bark.
He sold me away,
To a tyrant they say,
Who cut out my tongue as a lark.

"It's not the consumers' job to know what they want", said Steve Jobs.

This reminds me of that script that cashiers ask but hope you don't have a problematic answer to:

"Did you find everything you need?"

This always becomes a philosophic question in my mind, that buckles at its restricted consumer context, but I'm bound to a conventional "yes" or "no."

A a version of the Steve Jobs meme : "It's not the consumers' job to know what they need."

I know what I want not what I need. Nothing really needs anything unless it is inseparable from want. I don't need to be alive but I want to be alive.

"The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to write terrible jokes. "

"Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of his own terrible jokes."

"Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad humor.


Almost Baruch Spinoza (tweaked parts in italics), famous Jewish joke critic and stone polisher.

One of the definitions of humor:


"comply with the wishes of (someone) in order to keep them content, however unreasonable such wishes might be."

Philosophical Humor (collected by David Chalmers)

Just ignore me.

The demon Cantor and a polytheistic shaman, Quag, are having dinner. Cantor asks "Can every number count towards infinity?" The shaman says "No, but if they all set themselves up in a row, they could collaboratively count in any direction."

Slavery is wrong. Is this statement true of false?

Who do you need to convince otherwise and once they are convinced, will they demonstrate it by their actions?

That there are no problems in the world, that nothing is broken, that you don't need to go anywhere or do anything, not even eat food, is a kind of horribly freeing or depressing untruthy truth.

Must the truth bear any relation whatsoever to what is good, and if so, why? Is what is good for you good for me in a poker game?