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Stoicism : 10 tools of ancient philosophy that improved my life
Stoicism : 10 tools of ancient philosophy that improved my life
This is quite an annoying article, or make that 'advertisement for a book', from The Guardian 20-9-22. It is hard to imagine how you could fill up a whole book with this drivel. The fad of Stoicism will pass just like the fad of Zen and dare I say it, Catholicism, and like all of those it can pretty much be summed up with : Try to not want what you want — what a revelation! But the Stoics might add : try to not not want that which you have to have.
Stoicism : 10 tools of ancient philosophy that improved my life
Perception and the Real
Perception and the Real
If our evolutionary heritage in its development of consciousness limited its capacities to survival and propagation of the species, then much of the so-called ‘super-natural’ world of the noumenal is neither super nor beyond us. We are immersed in a cosmos that our brain and body for the most part filter out, exclude from access what we did not need as a species to survive in jungles, deserts, mountains, etc.
Perception and the Real
New Look, Same Great Look | Kim Beil
New Look, Same Great Look | Kim Beil
The history of humans being confounded by colour.
It’s now estimated that perception may be up to 90 percent based on memory; barely 10 percent of what we think we’re seeing is the result of stimuli outside the body in the present moment. In order to process huge amounts of visual information, the brain relies on memories of prior experience. Color is not only a wonder of the natural world but something inside us, as Wittgenstein hinted. Following Goethe, whose 1810 Theory of Colours inspired Wittgenstein’s investigation, “If the eye were not sunny, how could we perceive light?” Our memories of experiences, like photographs, may seem to represent the past, but they also shape how we see the present and the future.
New Look, Same Great Look | Kim Beil
The Punk-Prophet Philosophy of Michel Houellebecq — Justin E.H.Smith
The Punk-Prophet Philosophy of Michel Houellebecq — Justin E.H.Smith
The success of France’s most famous novelist has less to do with art and knowledge than anxiety and rock ’n’ roll.
One of Houellebecq’s more endearing juvenile enthusiasms is his passion for quantum mechanics, his admiration for the physicist Niels Bohr, and his belief that culture has not yet caught up with the mind-blowing implications of 20th-century theoretical physics. In a typical 1995 interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais and Christophe Duchâtelet, the author warns: “We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes.” The problem, Houellebecq thinks, is that “we’re stuck in a mechanistic and individualistic view of the world,” as a result of which, he predicts, “we will die.” Of course, many physicists and philosophers of science have themselves grappled with the problem of how to preserve what is sometimes called “the manifest image” of the world, while also accepting the reality of such puzzling phenomena as quantum superposition. Many believe our minds are simply so evolved as to keep us constantly convinced of the reality of midsized physical objects, of individual humans and animals, of all that is “manifest,” even if our best theory tells us it’s all in fact a lot more complicated than that. If failure to think in consistently quantum-theoretical terms leads to death, one would want to ask Houellebecq what it’s like to pass one’s time in a state of such profound enlightenment that even Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger only dipped into it as their work required. But of course Houellebecq is in no such state. He is not living each moment in full light of the implications of quantum theory, and his insistence that we must do so reminds us more of the common than of the exceptional quality of his mind.
The Punk-Prophet Philosophy of Michel Houellebecq — Justin E.H.Smith
Dear Antonioni
Dear Antonioni
Roland Barthes
the three virtues — which to my mind constitute the artist. I shall name them at once: vigilance, wisdom, and, most paradoxical of all, fragility.
…fragility oh dear god. yes. i am broken, does that count?
Dear Antonioni