Monday, April 8, 2024
In the way
Monday, March 4, 2024
Early soul-body distinctions in Greek practice
If we may judge by the furniture of their tombs, the inhabitants of the Aegean region had felt since Neolithic times that man's need for food, drink, and clothing, and his desire for service and entertainment, did not cease with death. I say advisedly "felt," rather than "believed"; for such acts as feeding the dead look like a direct response to emotional drives, not necessarily mediated by any theory. Man, I take it, feeds his dead for the same sort of reason as a little girl feeds her doll; and like the little girl, he abstains from killing his phantasy by applying reality-standards. When the archaic Greek poured liquids down a feeding-tube into the livid jaws of a mouldering corpse, all we can say is that he abstained, for good reasons, from knowing what he was doing; or, to put it more abstractly, that he ignored the distinction between corpse and ghost--he treated them as "consubstantial."
To have formulated that distinction with precision and clarity, to have disentangled the ghost from the corpse, is, of course, the achievement of the Homeric poets. There are passages in both poems which suggest that they were proud of the achievement, and fully conscious of its novelty and importance. They had indeed a right to be proud; for there is no domain where clear thinking encounters stronger unconscious resistance than when we try to think about death. (pp. 136-137)
As quoted in "The Greeks and the Irrational" by E. R. Dodds
Sunday, February 4, 2024
George Berkeley
The account of George Berkeley in Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy," starting on page 647 reads that the presence of GOD the observer of all is what makes possible the universe. Without observation there is no there there. Russell notes that Berkeley's argument rests upon sensation and its seat within one's mind and not upon a tangible reality, per se. The point we can make upon this foundation is relaxing the conditions of an observer to that of an 'interactant' an encounter, a chance collision. Nothing more. Nothing less.
To speak
The human vocal chords are butterfly wings for navigating through sound. Key to the evolution of sound production is the affordable universe of sound production that gives purchase to such an adaptation. In the probabilistic framework of the universe the voice precedes the sound that produces it.
Friday, January 26, 2024
Sunday, December 3, 2023
imagine
Imagine yourself as being presented to a social 'throng' as a collectible action figure 'still in its packaging.'
living outside the quantum tether
Perhaps, big perhaps, consciousness, that is, the thing humans do in their self-awareness routine, can only exist if it breaks a tether with other existing consciousnesses in the universe, meaning that consciousness is a compute intensive activity for the universe in such a way that two of them cannot exist simultaneously within the same speed-of-light updatable way. In other words, if the speed of light is the distance requirement for quantum multiplicity to exist and update itself within the universe, then consciousness is a singularity, which collapses the multiplicity, and to do so it must sever the quantum tether with it's multiplicity--other consciousnesses.
I'm a first-rate bullshit artist.