A
"Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed."
-- Cavett Robert
A
A
A
A
A
a
a
In 2018, for instance, a team at the University of Buenos Aires found evidence that zebra finches, whose brains weigh half a gram, have dreams. Monitors attached to the birds’ throats found that when they were asleep, their muscles sometimes moved in exactly the same pattern as when they were singing out loud; in other words, they seemed to be dreaming about singing.
a
In his 2022 book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg, a specialist in dolphin communication, takes this mistrust of human reason to an extreme. The book’s title encapsulates Gregg’s argument: if Friedrich Nietzsche had been born a narwhal instead of a German philosopher, he would have been much better off, and given his intellectual influence on fascism, so would the world. By extension, the same is true of our whole species. “The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect,” Gregg writes. “We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction.”
A
The Khandana Khanda Khadya is a work by the 12th century Hindu philosopher Sri Harsha which in some sense sets out to disprove epistemology - it seeks to show that all putative means of knowledge, whether sensory observation, inference, or scriptural revelation, are ultimately invalid. That's because Sri Harsha subscribed to a Hindu Vedanta philosophy called Advaita, according to which the physical world is an illusion, and thus the means of knowledge which seem valid in the world of appearance do not capture the true nature of reality.
a
He first argues that "[t]he non-real can have causal efficiency", i.e. that just because something is a cause doesn't mean it's real. And then he goes one step further and argues that "[c]ausal efficiency cannot belong to that which has real being",
a
a
Maharani
#Ahlyabaiholkar of Indore was born on this day on 31st May 1725 and on this day on 31st May 1855 The Kali Temple of Ma
#Bhabatarini was established in Dakshineshwar by another great Queen Mother
#Ranirasmani of Kolkata. On this very day also, May 31, 1891,
#SwamiVivekananda left for Chicago to attend the World Religion Conference in America and returned home as a winner after proving the superiority of Sanatan Hinduism.
On this day, I salute the three great human beings of Indian civilisation.
a
After all, humans and chimpanzees share a common ape ancestor that lived in Africa as recently as 6m years ago. Our most recent common ancestor with the octopus, by contrast, is a worm-like creature thought to have lived 500-600m years ago.
a
Causal efficiency cannot belong to that which has real being.
I. ‘If a cause be that into the nature of which real existence enters as an essential element, then, for this very reason, the cause has no real being.'
II. 'If, on the other hand, real being does not essentially enter into the nature of the cause, then, for this very reason, the cause has not real being.'
A
An octopus has 500m neurons, about as many as a dog, but most of these neurons are located not in the brain but in its eight arms, each of which can move, smell and perhaps even remember on its own. In Godfrey-Smith’s words, an octopus is “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien”. When such a being encounters a human at the bottom of the ocean, what could it possibly make of us?
a
A
Lots of anti-materialists say that they do understand their conscious
experiences. Folks like Chalmers, Montague, Strawson and Goff say,
‘Yes, we know what it’s like to feel pain. There’s this qualitative experience
which can’t be explained by physical science, so we’ve got to rethink our
understanding of the universe.’
a
Meanwhile, animals without “rational souls” are capable of demonstrating admirable qualities such as patience and self-restraint. Among humans, the ability to sacrifice immediate pleasure for future gain is called resisting temptation, and is taken as a sign of maturity. But De Waal shows that even birds are capable of it. In one experiment, an African grey parrot named Griffin was taught that if he resisted the urge to eat a serving of cereal, he would be rewarded after an unpredictable interval with food he liked better, such as cashew nuts. The bird was able to hold out 90% of the time, devising ways to distract himself by talking, preening his feathers, or simply throwing the cup of cereal across the room. Such behaviours, De Waal notes, are quite similar to what human children do in the face of temptation.
a
IDEALISM X VEDANTA
. If the nature of the cause be such that it implies as an essential element real existence, then to say that the generic character ‘real existence' belongs to the cause would involve the absurdity of something (real existence) residing partially in itself (i. e. that real existence which goes to constitute the nature of the cause).
a
The body is the carrier of inner Self, which is the heart, the Master. When we give the mastery to the body, we lose sight of the Master seated inside. Then it can take an eternity before you understand that He is the Master and not I. That is why there is so much disharmony and misery and trouble.
Taken from the book "HeartSpeak 2010 (1st edn., 2011)", Chapter "Ripples of Love – Finding a Master", pg. 42, by Revered Chariji
A
Take the sense of smell. As humans, we learn about our surroundings primarily by seeing and hearing, while our ability to detect odours is fairly undeveloped. For many animals, the reverse is true. In his 2022 book An Immense World, the science journalist Ed Yong writes about an experiment by researcher Lucy Bates involving African elephants. Bates found that if she took urine from an elephant in the rear of a herd and spread it on the ground in front of the herd, the elephants reacted with bewilderment and curiosity, knowing that the individual’s distinctive odour was coming from the wrong place. For them, a smell out of place was as fundamental a violation of reality as a ghostly apparition would be for us.
A
With all of its exciting rhetoric and philosophical insight, there’s a lot to
explore in this interview, but I’d like to focus on the fi nal section –
whether or not Dennett’s view is ‘the silliest claim ever made’. Strawson’s
argument is that Dennett’s view is self-contradictory. He essentially says,
‘Dennett thinks that consciousness is an illusion, but his very thought that
consciousness is an illusion, is itself an instance of consciousness!’ It’s as
if Dennett’s saying he doesn’t believe in tomatoes, whilst he’s biting into
a tomato!
In his reply, Dennett explains that he’s not denying the existence of
consciousness, it’s just ‘not what you think it is’. A helpful way of
understanding this was given by Keith Frankish in the previous chapter.
Suppose you came across a street magician who makes a beetle disappear
before your eyes. In your ignorance, you think that it’s magic. But
when you ask her, ‘How did you do that?’, she tells you it was a trick.
There wasn’t a beetle there in the fi rst place! It still seems as if the beetle
was there (in one sense it’s real – like consciousness), but now you know
more about how it got there. Whether or not Strawson and Dennett are
talking about the same concept is another matter.
A
Animals that perceive the world through scent, such as dogs, even have a different sense of time. We often talk about the importance of “living in the moment”, but in fact we have no other choice; since visual information reaches us at the speed of light, what we see around us are things as they existed an infinitesimal fraction of a second ago. When a dog smells, however, “he is not merely assessing the present but also reading the past and divining the future”, Yong writes. Odour molecules from a person or another dog can linger in a room long after the source is gone, or waft ahead before it appears. When a dog perks up long before its owner walks through the front door, smell can seem like a psychic power.
A
a
"The moment will arrive when you are comfortable with who you are, and what you are - bald or old or fat or poor, successful or struggling - when you don't feel the need to apologize for anything or to deny anything. To be comfortable in your own skin is the beginning of strength."
-- Charles Handy
A
aMark 6:3 lists Jesus’ brothers as James, Joses, Judas and Simon.
a
No comments:
Post a Comment