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17 Jun 2010 @ 06:07, by johnjoseph. Philosophy
Stereotypes lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and non-scientific thought More >
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29 May 2010 @ 18:00, by johnjoseph. Philosophy
False logic and Syllogism More >
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 31 Mar 2010 @ 15:08, by jhs. Philosophy
we're immersing a lot in pure aesthetics these days.. to the point of boredom..
fortunately, a bold lightning flashed up the skies over Angra dos Reis (Brazil) and I made my first foto of a lightning bolt (actually, I cheated, I had a video camera running and extracted a frame).
Perception is a Detection of Differentials, I wrote 10+ years ago (see [link] ) and peakstates of aesthetic perception are no different: no matter how beautiful, in the end there is the danger of becoming boring.
And, yet another point of attention these days: what is the line between the 'most beautiful feeling' and the sensation of 'exaltedness'?
Few philosophers dare to give an opinion about that, let's try Anastasius Nordenholz:
At the end of the chapter ' Total Afformality, A-Conscientiality, A-Worldliness) 'Scientologie', 1934 edition, Apologetik,III, part E, pg 107 re-print available at [link] ), after summarizing his Platonic/Bohmian world view, he wrote:
"Again we are faced with the contrasting of twofold Being, the World-Being and the As-such-Being. The communication between the two, this is task that the image of the Godness within the Consciousness acomplishes.'
Here, and in the following, and final, chapter in general, Nordenholz goes beyond the (compatible) concepts of Plato's word of shadows and David Bohm's 'implicite order' ( [link] ).
He does that by specifying the 'mechanism' of the connection of world-beyond and world-right-here-now using the triad of the 'Axioms of Scientologie' in the highest possible realm, that what was postulated in the Vedas as
atman - bodha - sattva
Going back to our initial question: we could define the marking line between exaltedness (Nordenholz/German: Erhabenheit) and 'pure aesthetics' a la Adorno as the 'awareness of the supreme triad in action while contemplating a worldly shadow'.
Amen. More >
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26 Mar 2010 @ 14:47, by johnjoseph. Philosophy
God's Mind, Information and Light More >
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 6 Mar 2010 @ 07:49, by scotty. Philosophy
WOW !
Just discovered this book - how could I have missed it !!
It's now at the head of my wish list !
The Word for World Is Forest is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1976 and based on her 1972 novella. It is part of the 'Hainish Cycle'.
Setting
Several centuries in the future, humans from Earth have established a logging colony and military base named "New Tahiti" on Athshe, a tree-covered planet whose small, green-furred, big-eyed inhabitants have formed a culture centered on lucid dreaming. Terran greed spirals around native innocence and wisdom, turning the ancient society upside down.
Humans have learned interstellar travel from the people of Hain (the origin-planet of all humanoid races, including the Athsheans, despite their appearance). The various planets have been expanding independently, but during the novel it is learned that the 'League of All Worlds' has been formed. News arrives via an ansible, a new discovery. Previously they had been cut off, 27 light-years from Earth, meaning a 54-year delay in question and response.
Athshe's plants and animals are similar to those of Earth, placed there by the Hainish people in their first wave of colonisation that also settled Earth. The Cetian visitor also states categorically that the native humans "came from the same, original, Hainist stock". It is not explained why they are green-furred and only one meter tall. Other distinctive humans such as the Gethenians are said to have been produced by genetic manipulation by the ancient Hainish colonisers.
The events of the novel occur after The Dispossessed, where both the ansible and the League of Worlds are unrealised dreams. Also well before Planet of Exile, where human settlers have learned to coexist. A date in the 24th century has been suggested More >
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17 Feb 2010 @ 15:55, by johnjoseph. Philosophy
Civilization and Post-modernism More >
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 10 Feb 2010 @ 18:50, by jhs. Philosophy
For some time now I wanted to map out the contect of modern day Ifa.
At the same time I want to revive the concept of 'Ifa for the 21st Century', a project from the early 2000's and very useful for 2,3 years but shredded when I was traveling/working so intensely that I hardly answered my e-mails.
Recently I found MindOMO [link] , a mind-mapping software that is easy to use and share/collaborate.
As a first map, I posted above mentioned map. Whoever finds some errors, has suggestions, or wants to on or off this map, please mail me or leave a comment to this post.
Ifa for the 21st Century Mindmap: [link]
Standard Disclaimer: I don't necessarily endorse every of the links, especially those that are NOT explicitly using Ifa but provide a branch of a holistic approach (which for necessarily includes the energy and archetypes of Ifa). I do not receive any compensation or favor in listing or not listing a certain provider, organization or author. More >
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19 Dec 2008 @ 09:42, by johnjoseph. Philosophy
Cosmic Egg, Cosmic Onion
It is time to stop being outsiders looking in, aliens in a place which is our own, alienated people who don’t belong, fragmented beings seeing things with a fragmented consciousness and awareness. One way we can deal with these problems is to start looking around from the inside, being comfortable with ourselves and the world, constructing a worldview where we are insiders rather than outsiders.
In his book “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” David Bohm looks at the situation instigated by the creation of a grid which we put in front of our eyes and consciousness and see things “over there”, separate and alien. This is the case, he suggests, with Descartes’ co-ordinate system and also, going further back, with the Euclidean geometry project itself. In passing, he suggests that herein lies the mystery and solution of Zeno’s paradoxes. In slightly different language and terms I will try to convey my understanding of what he is getting at. A line between A and B is finite but the minute we try to measure it with a number system we encounter problems that lead to contradictions. The minute we try to measure a finite length with numbers we create a fractal, something where finite and infinite co-exist because between any two points on a line an infinite number of quantities exist, which is what Zeno’s paradoxes are all about. This is my interpretation of what Bohm says when he hints that he has solved Zeno’s paradoxes.
And indeed, as we know from the Differential and Integral Calculus, this Cartesian system does not like infinities. You cannot integrate or differentiate across discontinuities. The hidden bugbear of this alienated Cartesian system, despite its successes of the past three centuries, is infinitude.
The Cartesian project, like the creation of 3-D perspective which happened earlier, in the Italian Renaissance, are signs that a certain split in consciousness, in awareness, was descending on the Western mind. Other evidence of this is the Mind/Body split and dualism also associated with the name of Descartes.
Now is the time to heal this split. How to do it? By taking the grid away; by taking the graduated quantities also. One way we can do this is suggested by Chaos theory which isn’t very interested in grids and gradations, but is rather more interested in maps and scales of self-similarity. In Chaos theory infinities are no longer seen as a problem but as something inherent in the fractal vision which can easily be dealt with.
Personally, I believe that the ancient view of a cosmic egg, or the more modern idea of a cosmic onion, both fractal, are very near to the truth. I also believe that the so-called space-time continuum is an alienated view that misses a lot and does not exist. It seems to me that the reality we are in is the inside of a cosmic entity, such as those just mentioned, and that at the centre of each whirling fractal at smaller and smaller scales lie infinities. In other words the inside of this cosmic entity is discontinuous, riddled with an infinity of holes rather like a Sierpinski gasket. Infinity is no longer something that can be ignored.
Moving inside and looking around and exploring is the first step to becoming Insiders, and at home in the Cosmos. More >
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4 Dec 2008 @ 03:58, by anandavala. Philosophy
What is this experiential process that is happening right now?
What is experience?
What is this individual stream of experience? What am I?
Why do I experience things right now and only remember past
experiences? What is the present moment, the arrow of time, time
itself, the process of change and memory?
What do the contents-of-experience (phenomena) represent? What is
the phenomenal world?
What is that persistent complex phenomenon that closely
accompanies my stream of experience? What is my body? More >
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30 Nov 2008 @ 10:59, by anandavala. Philosophy
Some comments inspired by two fascinating essays written by David
Chalmers, The Puzzle
of Conscious Experience and Facing
Up to the Problem of Consciousness.
The “hard problem of consciousness” is the issue of why is it
that we experience anything at all, or why is it that there is
something that it is like to be something? The reason why this
problem is intractable to empirical science is because in its
philosophical foundations empiricism
takes the contents of experience (phenomena)
to be the foundation of its ontology,
upon which all its later knowledge depends.
However it is impossible to use the contents of experience to
construct a theory of experience because, in a causal sense,
experience precedes the contents of experience. Empirical science
studies phenomena, their perceivable attributes, behaviours and
functional relationships hence it can explain much of the functional
aspects of consciousness such as how do we integrate information from
many sources into a coherent knowledge base or how can we verbalise
our internal states (the easy problems of consciousness) but it
cannot explain experience itself (the hard problem).
However, empirical science is not the whole of science. There are
rationalist
methods which, as quantum physics shows, can be very accurate
(quantum physics is by far the most accurate science ever developed
and it has rationalist rather than empiricist foundations).
Rationalist approaches must eventually connect with, and be verified
by their correspondence with the objects of experience, however these
are not their starting point. They take a rational theoretical model
as their ontological foundation and only when this foundation later
connects with experience are they considered to be verified. It is
conceivable that a rationalist theory could overcome the limitations
of empiricism and provide a scientific explanation of conscious
experience. More >
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