It can never be too strongly impressed upon a mind anxious for the acquisition of knowledge, that the commonest things by which we are surrounded are deserving of minute and careful attention. The most profound investigations of Philosophy are necessarily connected with the ordinary circumstances of our being, and of the world in which our every-day life is spent. With regard to our own existence, the pulsation of the heart, the act of respiration, the voluntary movement of our limbs, the condition of sleep, are among the most ordinary operations of our nature; and yet how long were the wisest of men struggling with dark and bewildering speculations before they could offer anything like a satisfactory solution of these phenomena, and how far are we still from an accurate and complete knowledge of them! The science of Meteorology, which attempts to explain to us the philosophy of matters constantly before our eyes, as dew, mist, and rain, is dependent for its illustrations upon a knowledge of the most complicated facts, such as the influence of heat and electricity upon the air; and this knowledge is at present so imperfect, that even these common occurrences of the weather, which men have been observing and reasoning upon for ages, are by no means satisfactorily explained, or reduced to the precision that every science should aspire to. Yet, however difficult it may be entirely to comprehend the phenomena we daily witness, everything in nature is full of instruction. Thus the humblest flower of the field, although, to one whose curiosity has not been excited, and whose understanding has, therefore, remained uninformed, it may appear worthless and contemptible, is valuable to the botanist, not only with regard to its place in the arrangement of this portion of the Creator’s works, but as it leads his mind forward to the consideration of those beautiful provisions for the support of vegetable life, which it is the part of the physiologist to study and to admire.
The first paragraph of the introductory chapter of Insect Architecture.
Some points to note:
i think zizek already gave us the best reply to richard dawkins’ bullshit about philosophy
Doesn’t this also match up with how Deleuze defines philosophy somewhere? “the science of determining the conditions of a problem”?
I guess I’m not really a philosopher, because I preferred the reply that just copied Dawkins’s reply but made it about continental breakfast.
(via jethroq)
[video]
The Talking Ghost: End of cycle plots have always bothered me. Y’know the kind. “Evil... -
End of cycle plots have always bothered me. Y’know the kind. “Evil thing comes every so many years, and we can only ever manage to bind it but now you kill it once and for all!” is the one that actually really bothers me. I understand why it normally goes this way, since most people don’t want…
Those plots are kind of just really hackneyed ways to make the epic conflict more special, I feel.
That’s why I don’t like most of them myself. I can’t really think of an example of an end to a cycle like that that I’ve liked in a story…I really like how the Sinistrals keep coming back though. Must fucking suck to live in the Lufia world. Just these gods always coming back to fuck up your shit everyone couple whatever years.
I am interested in the ending of cycles personally because that whole Buddhism thing. But that isn’t referring to like…THE EVIL THING CYCLE sort of cycle in specific. Though admittedly I’d like to see how one would tackle ending a the cyclic rebirth of an evil overlord with Buddhist metaphysics in tact. Granted you’d have to fuck around with the rebirth rules a bit to explain why this thing is always so evil when it does manage to get out Hell, but…
It’d be interesting I guess since Enlightenment is the one way to end rebirth cycles really…We’d have to redeem the fuck out of that villain with out Amitabha Pure Lands and shit.
GUANYIN AND HER COMPANIONS CAN BE THE PROTAGONISTS.
Now, that would be much more interesting than “Hit it harder with this special thing”.
See what I’m thinking is the Dark Lord gets tired of the whole thing and one day he asks the heroine if there’s another way they can do this. And then touched by his sincerity, the heroine and the Dark Lord join forces to escape the fate that the centuries have built, and defeat the system that wishes to use the system to their own ends.
So basically Maoyu (which I still have to watch).
That sounds pretty neat actually. And different from whatever arcane madness will be managed by Guanyin and her crew in RPG land. What with a bizarre last boss fight like the Mother games.
One of my little plot bunnies is Our Intrepid Heroes starting a cycle of reincarnating themselves to lock The Bad Evil away, and only ending it thousands of years later. It’s like my own shitty idea of Buddhist morals
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: 20 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 30
This is a really lovely piece from a genuine class act. A guy who really is worth paying attention to. I just turned 32, and I’m still trying to figure out how to live a balanced, grown-up life. Kareem gets it.
#18 man. Never thought of that before and it’s cool as hell.
8. Watch more TV. Yeah, you heard right, Little Kareem. It’s great that you always have your nose in history books. That’s made you more knowledgeable about your past and it has put the present in context. But pop culture is history in the making and watching some of the popular shows of each era reveals a lot about the average person, while history books often dwell on the powerful people.
Past classics, the stuff that’s survived to now that we can read, was often if not usually pop culture in its time. People should remember that.
Ergo Socialismus: thecreach: baronessvonbullshit: i don’t think darwinism presents that... -
Like yeah, I read some of Kropotkin’s essays, and his theory of mutual aide seems far more likely model fo human behaviour than “survival of the fittest”
Reblogging this again because I got linked to an essay by Gould on the topic. It’s inauspiciously titled “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot” but it’s worth reading.
(Source: baronessvonbullshit)
Ergo Socialismus: thecreach: baronessvonbullshit: i don’t think darwinism presents that... -
i don’t think darwinism presents that much of an obstacle to socialism in any way though - it’s worth noting that marx’s reaction on the publication of origin of species was largely positive. evolutionary theory has merely been manipulated to suit…
Kropotkin’s essays are cool enough that Dawkins did a short documentary based on the idea. (I thought the documentary was explicitly based on Kropotkin, but I guess not.)
I wouldn’t say mutual aid is a “better” idea of sociobiology than ALL GORE ALL THE TIME RARR, though. It’s rather obviously wrong that life is all violence, but also wrong that it’s all helping one another. It’s not all one or the other. (Of course, people with a theme park idea of evolution tend to overemphasize the violence, so some more emphasis on mutual aid would be great)
Social Behavior: Genes, Ecology, and Evolution is a neat textbook on societal behavior in animals (especially birds, you would not believe how many kinds of sexual arrangements they’ve come up with) but I don’t know why I’m mentioning that on a dumb tumblr post.
Recently a video from Syria was posted in which a rebel eats part of a dead government soldier’s lung. TIME interviewed the guy:
Al Hamad, who is Sunni and harbors a sectarian hatred for Alawite Muslims, said he has another gruesome video of his killing a government soldier from the Alawite faith. (Syrian President Bashar al Assad is Alawite; the conflict in Syria is increasingly sectarian.) “Hopefully we will slaughter all of them [Alawites]. I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip I am sawing another Shabiha [pro-government militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him in small pieces and large ones.” Al Hamad also explained that even though both sides of the conflict in Syria are using video clips of their own brutal actions to intimidate the other he believes that his clip would have particular impact on the regime’s troops. “They film as well but after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is,” he said, using his nom de guerre and referring to the part of Syria he currently controls.
And he did the lung thing in part because the dead soldier had a video on his cellphone of him (the soldier) raping three women with a stick.
so, Syria’s going well.
THE WHOLE TIME, BUBBLE BUDDY WAS ALIVE.
BUBBLE BUDDY WATCHED HIM DIE. HE WATCHED HIM DIE AND DIDN’T EVEN SPARE A WORD.I’m going to interject here and state, for the record, that a fish underwater is drowning in more water.
THE OCEAN DOESN’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR SCIENCE
Did somebody say water under more water?
OCEANS EXIST OUTSIDE OF LOGIC, SEE?
Brine pools aren’t exactly hard to understand or illogical. Brine is denser than water, so it sinks, but it’s still liquid.
They’re cool ecosystems. Stuff lives in them, including possibly an animal that never needs oxygen.
(via misterjuantastic)
What Is the Why - By Micah Zenko -
I’m liking this Zenko dude. His twitter is mostly links to his stuff, if you want more.
