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sciborg2

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« Reply #150 on: July 05, 2019, 05:17:29 pm »
"Everyone believes in the Devil when the Sun goes down...at least a little bit..."
 -Me

edit:

"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History


Reminds me of this museum curator I'd heard of who would comment on the natural history of man:

"From the Stone Age til now..my God, what a decline!"
« Last Edit: July 05, 2019, 05:19:48 pm by sciborg2 »

sciborg2

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« Reply #151 on: July 06, 2019, 05:02:01 pm »
"We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us.

What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth?

We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road alone."
               --Symmachus,  (c. 340-c. 405), asking for the continuance of pagan ceremonies in the now Christian Roman Empire


Always liked this quote since reading it in highschool, though I guess now with the nutjobs on the 'Net you have to point out some ways of seeking the truth might make a difference if they involve doing evil shit to others...

sciborg2

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« Reply #152 on: July 14, 2019, 01:58:22 am »
"Right now we're computational machines that consume the planet.

We need to be living imaginative beings that co-create the affordances that bloom the planet and in that process we bloom also."
 -Bonnitta Roy

sciborg2

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« Reply #153 on: July 14, 2019, 01:50:21 pm »
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.  We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.  It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.  Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

 -Richard Lewontin, review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World in the New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997)

sciborg2

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« Reply #154 on: July 17, 2019, 02:47:42 pm »
"I will say, though, that if there’s no objective morality, there’s no morality at all."
   -Peter Hankins, Conscious Entities

"Be careful with favors, because it's funny how quickly a favor becomes an obligation."
   -Me

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« Reply #155 on: July 17, 2019, 03:10:19 pm »
"I will say, though, that if there’s no objective morality, there’s no morality at all."
   -Peter Hankins, Conscious Entities

Hmm, yeah, I'm really unsure how I should be considering Moral Realism.  I find it hard to believe, but on the other hand, it seems weird if there isn't.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

sciborg2

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« Reply #156 on: July 20, 2019, 07:41:57 pm »
Hmm, yeah, I'm really unsure how I should be considering Moral Realism.  I find it hard to believe, but on the other hand, it seems weird if there isn't.

Do you believe in Mathematical Realism? But yes, Moral Realism has a "leap of faith" aspect.

=-=-=

 In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.

 -Cormac McCarthy, Blood Merdian

sciborg2

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« Reply #157 on: July 24, 2019, 12:08:57 pm »
"Mathematics as such is always a measure, not the thing measured."
   -Wittgenstein

sciborg2

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« Reply #158 on: July 26, 2019, 07:57:42 pm »
"Mathematics as such is always a measure, not the thing measured."
   -Wittgenstein

All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.

Nagarjuna

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« Reply #159 on: July 29, 2019, 12:35:39 pm »
"Mathematics as such is always a measure, not the thing measured."
   -Wittgenstein

All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.

Nagarjuna

Reminds me of what Deleuze and Guattari say in What is Philosophy?

"Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance. Now philosophy wants to know how to retain infinite speeds while gaining consistency, by giving the virtual a consistency specific to it. The philosophical sieve, as plane of immanence that cuts through the chaos, selects infinite movements of thought and is filled with concepts formed like consistent particles going as fast as thought. Science approaches chaos in a completely different, almost opposite way: it relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual. By retaining the infinite, philosophy gives consistency to the virtual through concepts; by relinquishing the infinite, science gives a reference to the virtual, which actualizes it through functions. Philosophy proceeds with a plane of immanence or consistency; science with a plane of reference."
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

Francis Buck

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« Reply #160 on: July 31, 2019, 04:05:35 am »
Really like those last two, very thought provoking!

Quote
'We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.'
 – William James


(one of these days I'm going to end up taking a quote I've saved and posting here only to realize it was from here that I got the quote in the first place)

TaoHorror

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« Reply #161 on: July 31, 2019, 07:41:16 pm »
(one of these days I'm going to end up taking a quote I've saved and posting here only to realize it was from here that I got the quote in the first place)

Then the thread is working  ;D
It's me, Dave, open up, I've got the stuff

Wilshire

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« Reply #162 on: August 02, 2019, 02:01:08 pm »
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game".

Game developer Soren Johnson
One of the other conditions of possibility.

sciborg2

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« Reply #163 on: August 22, 2019, 03:55:31 am »
"But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but "few" initiates. And in fact when compared with the Spartan version, Plato's initiation process is more subtle and more arduous. There are a greater number of trials to overcome and, having survived the last, the initiate may find is "the only one." Then there may not be enough time for him to pass on his initiation. And there may not be anyone to follow him, with the result that the chain is broken.

So one day Plato began to write the Republic. And he wrote the text in the form it is in so that one who wanted to understand it might be subjected to that initiatory process of "sufferings and pleasures...labors, fears, and convulsions." The many who did not understand, and were not supposed to understand, imagined they were reading a treatise on the perfect State."
 -R.Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
« Last Edit: August 22, 2019, 04:04:14 am by sciborg2 »

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« Reply #164 on: August 22, 2019, 05:22:38 pm »
That makes me think of what I just heard on a podcast the other day:

Quote
"She said, “The elders are pragmatical buggers. We wouldn’t have survived if they weren’t.” And she pushed me to look at this knowledge. These stories that we’re told sound superficial and childlike. That’s because they are, because you don’t get the detailed stories until you’re initiated. And so we’re hearing what the children would hear. So you’re grounding the information in the physical landscape. It’s so much more robust, and then as you get initiated, you get layer upon layer of complexity."

-Lynne Kelly on The MindScape Podcast (I backed it up a bit, so you can get a broader context.)
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira