Dinesh's articles

“Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.”

Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens : Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain ~ Friedrich Schiller

. . . The natural processes which makes human life possible cannot be described as ‘evil’, even if their effects are left in human suffering. This is an idea with an ancient pedigree: when Seneca writes on the propriety of natural processes, he is at pains to conclude that if you don’t like the suffering that accompanies life in this world, that’s your problem. Such Experiences, he says bluntly, are the price we pay for the privilege of being alive. ` Page 126

Dawkins believes that “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (Dawkins 1976) and Csikszentmihalyi urges us to “achieve control” over our minds, desires and actions. “If you let them be controlled by genes and memes, you are missing the opportunity to be yourself” But evolutionary process are not controllable by the creatures they gave rise to; and in any case, who is this self who is going to rebel? ~ Page 233

“la verite surgit de la meprise” ~ Only from this error does the truth come forth” {the truth emerges from the contempt}

Libet en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet distinguishes between the action as a physical act and the urge to act as a mental phenomenon. We can control our actions but not our urges, he concludes. ~ Excerpt “The User Illusion”

Human intellect is discursive and abstract -- as a Consequence (and this is my own personal comment on Roland-Gosselin), aesthetic pleasure too is perfected in the act of judgment that takes into account the individual elements recovered in the ‘reflexio ad phantasmata’ (reflection to the phastasmata){ phantasma ; 1. A supernatural being, such as a ghost: apparition ; 2. An illusory mental image: daydream ; 3. An erroneous perception of reality: delusion ...} Excerpt: From the Tree to the Labyr…

Its conceivable that Darwin’s values, ironically, drew a certain strength from his pondering of natural selection. Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical and all logically incompatible with one another: “My hereditary material is the most important material of earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death” And you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of…

William James, who, more than a century ago, in his book ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/621/pg621.txt tried to find a framework that would encompass all the forms of experience, Eastern and Western, that we call religious. James said that, in the broadest sense, religion can be thought as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmonious adjusting ourselves thereto. ~ Page 261 ~ “Why Buddhism Is True” ~ Robert Wright

‘Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary’ defines a moment of truth as “a moment of crisis on whose outcome much or everything depends.”

“Between what a man calls me and when he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.” ~ William James (AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST)

“A psychological analysis of the faculty of language shows, that even the smallest proficiency in its might require more brain power than the greatest proficiency in any other direction” ~ Chauncey Wright plato.stanford.edu/entries/wright

Beware of the Pigeon League’. The warning came from Galileo’s closest friend in the city, the artist Lodovico Cardi (known as Cigoli) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigoli w;ho was currently working on a remarkable fresco on the dome of Santa Maria Maggiore. It depicted the Madonna standing on the moon -- the moon as revealed by Galileo’s drawing, www.italyonthisday.com/2016/09/cigoli-painter-and-architect.html all pickmarked and irregular. The Pigeon League was his code for malicious group ready…

’Harmony’ was, for Kepler, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler the key to the understanding of ‘life, the universe and everything.’ In 1611, before the invention of the microscope he wrote a paper about snowflakes. Transferring his attention from the vastness of space to the minutiae of frozen water droplets, he described the beautiful and invariable geometrical precision of their 60-degree structures and sub-structures. He went on to speculate: what further structures might lie beyond w…

Still later, Kant tried to fix the argument by introducing language first used by Fichte plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte The subject constitutes itself as a subject. Kant now argues that we can be aware of being moved only insofar as we move ourselves, and, more importantly, that we are aware of other things only insofar as we are aware of our ourselves. In a most remarkable passage, Kant claims that “Iam an object of myself and of my representations that There is also something externa…

. . .(1) The “beautiful is what pleases in the mere estimate formed of it (consequently not by the intervention of any feeling of sense in accordance with a concept of the understanding.) From this it follows immediately that it must please from all interest.” (2) The “sublime is what pleases immediately because of its opposition to sense.” It is “an object (of nature) whose representation determines the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to the presentatio…