Been doing a binging of the Blacklist, which I leave in the background.

Frustrating in that there's a good show in the morass of seasons, a questionable lead actress, and other factors.

I can't recommend actually watching it with deep focus, but if you leave it in the background your mind might be able, as mine sort of has, utilize it for an excellent show vaguely in memory. It doesn't work perfectly because of some plot points are just too big and stupid but if you are just bored and want something playing while you work it might suffice...

Quote from: sciborg2 on March 07, 2021, 07:57:54 pm

Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.

Bakker readers should be Frankl readers... it seems axiomatic .

The Bakker Appendix N would be an interesting list...

"We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.

They are representatives of abstract forces, who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.

There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.

The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push."
 -William S Burroughs

"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
  - Viktor Frankl

"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

"MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butcher's slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!

MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes upon your own carnage...."

-Italo Calvino interviews Montezuma

=-=-=

One cannot ignore the marginal, the "little", the liminal, the "zara hatke" [somewhat odd], the woman we see only when we squint a little -- in these cracks may rebellion, and the promise of a better tomorrow, be found.
  -Qalandar

"The values of contemporary capitalism are drawn out into a suffocating eternity: it was always like this, and it always will be; the Flintstones and the Jetsons were, after all, basically the same people. But meanwhile those strange shapes and patterns on the cave walls still glimmer, beckoning us in — if we knew how to understand them — to a world impossibly different to our own."
    -Sam Kriss

"At a time when over the whole world a nameless drama is taking place and when men are fighting each other without any idea why because they’ve never had the courage to go down into the depths of the drama of their consciousness, this is not the time to destroy a spirit who has never had any other idea than to bring to light the drama of his consciousness in order to teach others to recognize all their own interior enemies so as to destroy them.

The enmity that each man harbours in himself, of himself towards himself."
   -Antonin Artaud
 

Could sea creatures unlock the origins of the mind?

When it comes to understanding the mind, philosopher, writer and diver Peter Godfrey-Smith suggests marine life may hold some illuminating answers. Among the vast array of marine life, shrimp, coral, and cuttlefish exhibit amazing levels of consciousness and the octopus with its many tentacles and 8 limbs-- functions as a creature with multiple “selves.”  What can we learn from the way these animals experience the world? Could sea creatures unlock the origins of the mind?

KCRW’s Jonathan Bastian talks with Peter Godrey-Smith about his new book “Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind” about his exploration of levels of consciousness and “self” among some of his favorite undersea creatures.

Is there this problem of projecting our human way of thinking, our human way of understanding self on to these creatures?

Godfrey-Smith: “There is a problem there and this is a good point to talk about the octopus. One of the reasons octopuses are an important case in the story, is the fact that there's a kind of ‘centeredness of self’ that we humans, and probably lots of other mammals and vertebrates have as a consequence of how our nervous systems are set up and our bodily organization There's a ‘centeredness of self’ that might be absent or very different in some animals with different organizations and the octopus is the outstanding case, because most of its nervous system is not concentrated in the head between the eyes but spread through the body, especially in the upper part of the arms. There's a gigantic network of control devices and sensors in the arms, which is larger than the central brain.

So when we look at an octopus and try to imagine what it's experience is like, one of the big questions is how we should tackle these differences in organization that might imply differences in the kind of “selfhood” that's present there. This is another question, which I'd love to give a definitive answer on how to handle this but I think it has some very puzzling features.”

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
  -Emerson

Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
  —Erwin Schrödinger