Actually, the nonist is a very cool blog
check out the nonist
(begging forgiveness for the Mildred post)
How Happy Is Iceland?
Tyler Cowen ruminating on happiness in Iceland:
It is perhaps a Buddhist idea to suggest that the happiest country in the world is a totally empty one.
Video Highlights of the Marc Hauser, Errol Morris interview
Seed posted video of the Marc Hauser, Errol Morris interview I posted yesterday.
Acting…
You know … acting is not very difficult, once you know how to do it…. And that’s … so beautiful, because you can say that about anything: It’s not difficult, once you know how.
“Revitalizing Dead Culture”
Chris, at The Artful Gamer, muses about the history of gaming:
First, let’s correct a false assumption that often undermines this kind of historical exploration: it does not involve living in the past, it involves living through the past. In history we look at ourselves in the present through the past, and come to understand ourselves as standing in a long genealogy of meaning that pre-exists us. Now that’s a lot to swallow for the modernist who sees him/herself as largely being self-made and sees the past as a sequence of barbaric events that are thankfully left far behind her/him. That kind of modernist philosophy still persists today: we see it in people who cannot understand why Yar’s Revenge, Chrono Trigger or The Faery Tale Adventure are still compelling games. They simply stare blankly at the screen and think to themselves, ‘these graphics sure suck!’.
I love this idea.
It is only in history that we glean meaning, context which vivifies truth. It is this sussing out of history, contiguous connected events, rather than parsing abstractions or isolated particulars (both breeding the solipsism/onanism of modernism), that we are able to bring truth to struggle, to know who we are.
i have a bum jedi outfit
If you don’t laugh at Dave Hil: Jedi Master, then I regret to inform you that you are either a defective person or bitter that you can’t attend a local Jedi school.
Did Unitarianism become too dogmatic for someone?
Dudeism.com: The Church of the Latter-Day Dude
(via Winston of Nobody Asked . . .)
a re-acquaintance with the terminology
Richard Dawkins (paraphrased):
THEIST: Someone who believes there is a supernatural intelligence behind the universe that intervenes on behalf of humanity at certain junctures. A theist believes that prayers are answered, interventions occur, miracles happen. A theist believes that the supernatural intelligence has a plan for each human on earth and is deeply invested in the fate and proceedings of its creatures.
DEIST: Someone who believes that there is a supernatural intelligence behind the universe but does not believe there is any continuing intervention. A deist believes that the supernatural intelligence was intimately involved with the creation of our universe, but aside from that preliminary work, is not active with respect to the daily affairs of humankind.
PANTHEIST: Someone who does not believe in a supernatural intelligence at all, but appreciates the beauty and wonder and structure of the natural world around him. A pantheist may occasionally dip into religious language, but the God mentioned when doing so is a poetic, metaphorical god that represents the feelings of awe and smallness of man when contrasted to the natural world and its systems. God to the pantheist is a non-supernatural term for nature, the universe and the laws that govern its workings.
…
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism; deism is watered-down theism.
what’s more subjective?
“I need a drink.”
“You need a haircut.”
Compensation; or, Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear and Ralph Waldo Emerson?
This morning on the freeway, for just a few seconds, I had the unpleasant feeling of being the Honda meat in a Ford SUV sandwich. Then, after I exited, I got a green light on the service road.
Self-deprecation?
“(Clooney’s) strategy for being a movie star is pretty simple, if counterintuitive: he makes fun of himself. It’s the by-product of every successful person’s strategy, which is to figure out what the other person is thinking. ‘Before they could kill me on Batman & Robin, I said, “It’s a bad film, and I’m the worst thing in it.” ‘ ”
(”Guess Who Came to Dinner?” by Joel Stein, Time, March 3, 2008)
Ponderable?
“As we learn, we must develop the ability to relate to things and people in their uniqueness, recognizing the value and significance of each and every one. Sympathy and antipathy, pleasure and displeasure, must take on totally new roles. This is clearly not a matter of completely eradicating sympathy and antipathy and becoming totally numb to them. On the contrary, the more we cultivate our ability to refrain from responding immediately to sympathy or antipathy with a judgment or an action, the finer the sensitivity we develop. Once we can control the character they already assume within us, we will experience that sympathies and antipathies assume a higher character. Even the seemingly most unappealing thing has hidden qualities that are revealed when we do not simply yield to our own selfish feelings. People who have schooled themselves in this regard are exceptionally sensitive to everything around them because they do not allow their own inclinations to make them unreceptive. Any inclination we follow blindly deadens our ability to see things around us in the right light; it makes us force our way through our environment rather than exposing ourselves to it and experiencing its inherent value.” Read more
Something I can get behind
Frequently, you’ll hear people claim that atheists are vitriolic and essentially the flip side of Christian fundamentalism. In response, atheists generally cite the fact that, putting tone aside, the nature of their beliefs is different: they require evidence while Christians require only faith.Fine as far as that goes. However, I think that there is a connection between some fundamentalist religious people and some atheists. It doesn’t have to do with the theory of religion or belief in god, but rather the way humans actually choose their beliefs.
valentine’s day thievery
Lap dances, computer programming, scrubbing the toilet; they’re all the same. Whatever you are doing right now is the gateway to liberation.
Barringer’s Postcards
Arthur Conan Doyle on Fate/Destiny
“I believe that providence one way or another gets a man’s full powers out of him, but that it is essential that the man himself should cooperate to the extent of putting himself in the way of achievement. Give yourself the chance always. If it is so fated, you will win through. If your path lies elsewhere, then you have got your sign through your failure. But do not put yourself in the position later in life of looking back and saying, ‘Perhaps I might have had a career there had I tried.’”–Memories and Adventures (1924; quoted from page 172, Wordsworth Editions 2007)
Is the spirit willing?
Most of us, I imagine, grew up with the Bible verse, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” somewhere in our heads. I don’t even want to dip into the many exegetical possibilities for this verse, some of which are diametrically opposed to one another, and even what I take to be a most obvious explanation–the dualistic one of two intelligences, spiritual and physical–actually seems a too casual mislabeling of two intelligences, one good, one evil. But I’d like to suggest that what may really be happening here is an examination of consciousness versus unconsciousness or, if you will, the human versus the animal mind. Living in the “spirit”, in this sense, would be a thinkier thing to do, requiring a more concentrated effort; it’s easier to live instinctually, reacting rather than pondering before acting. Manicheism, then, is not a belief in a good God and an evil God–a Father and a Devil–but rather a way of elaborating the difficulties of humanity moving out of the animal psyche and into a truly human psyche which demands a full-on embrace of thought.
Try first, decide later
I’ve observed that there’s much resistance in contemporary society to simply trying out ideas to see if they work. It seems more important to many people to know who they are and what they believe. New ideas are either accepted or rejected and then those choices are vigorously defended. If it’s going to help you figure something out, why not look at a problem from every possible angle? Working on kottke.org is a big part of my process of idea scaffolding. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with everything I link to1 but reading articles and then describing them to others is a good way to continually wonder, “Gosh, isn’t it interesting to think about the world this way?”
From the Comments
I just read some interesting comments on this over at John’s blogmeridian–several of which expressed concerns about the implications of this idea (an old idea, as we know) with respect to it being new fodder for Intelligent Design proponents. Some wondered why Whitworth would apparently fail to see and address this matter. But I don’t find this odd at all. I am actively not a friend of Intelligent Design arguments–but just how open may one’s curiosity be if explorations are avoided because uncomfortable results might appear? My sense is that Whitworth is not making a “claim,” as some suggest, but is playing the game that everybody else is playing by probing at the boundaries of operational paradigms. How important is it, for intance, that we find an answer for why the experimentally demonstrable presence of quantum entanglement violates the established speed of light limit to cause at a distance? We are “living with” this lack of an answer–not just in this realm of inquiry but in many others. But scientific method favors those who are willing to look for improved models of understanding–not just those that fit our needs. The central problem with ID and anthropic arguments is that they are driven by a desire to assert, rather than a desire to explore. They can’t speak to the fact of our desire to always know more than we do. They can’t begin to get comfortable with the counter intuitive. And if one could wave a wand and grant them their wish of full acceptance–they would simply find that they didn’t know any more than they ever did, and all of their assertions about the nature of the “Designer” would be as arbtrary as they ever were. Whitworth says–Look at this, and you decide if it represents a problem solving approach that is superior to what we have now. It probably won’t gain the approval of many–but string theory and brane theory aren’t doing such a good job at the moment either.
Arbitrary Marks
I’ll be guest blogging over at Arbitrary Marks until the 24th on epistemology, language, and the postmodern condition until the 24th for those interested.
This is funny because I have been neglecting my own blog for months.
In a riddle whose answer is “categorical imperative,” what are the only prohibited words?
Over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo counters that nasty hit-job on Kant with this stirring defense of Kantian ethics:
Kant Attack-ad
Nietzsche approves the ad, but I bet some operative in South Carolina is responsible for it . . .
I spotted the (Myspace) video here; the Youtube is from here.
The Meditations
The significance of death was very important in the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. He didn’t believe in the afterlife. He wrote: ‘We live for an instant, only to be swallowed in “complete forgetfulness and the void of infinite time on this side of us.” “Think how many ere now, after passing their life in implacable enmity, suspicion, hatred… are now dead and burnt to ashes.” According to Marcus Aurelius everything will be turned in absolute oblivion, even legends. “Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away, its perception dim, the fabric of the entire body prone to decay, and the soul a vortex, and fortune incalculable, and fame uncertain. In a word all things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim’s sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness.” ‘Everything existing “is already disintegrating and changing… everything is by nature made but to die.” ‘The length of one’s life is irrelevant, “for look at the yawning gulf of time behind thee and before thee at another infinity to come. In this eternity the life of a baby of three days and the life of a nestor of three centuries are as one.” ‘To desire is to be permanently disappointed and disturbed, since everything we desire in this world is “empty and corrupt and paltry.” For Marcus Aurelius, death was desirable, because it would make an end to all desires.
Hey, Spinozaheads
I remember that a couple of people around here (Andrew, Deron, Daryl?) were reading or planned to read Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza, which happens to be copublished by the nonprofit for which I work. So I thought y’all might like to know that for the month of November, Ms. Goldstein will be discussing her book online with all comers. It’s hosted by B&N, but it’s free as in beer and, possibly, also speech.
ancestor simulations
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims. But now it seems quite possible.