Excerpts from Book that I read

Schopenhauer explicitly acknowledges his debt to Empedocles, especially for the general concept of existence as a struggle between forces of will -- specifically, Love and Strife: “Everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict, and the fickleness of victory . . . This strife may be seen to pervade the whole of nature, indeed nature . . . exists only through it.” He cites Aristotle’s commentary: “as Empedocles says, if there were no strife in things, everything would be one and the same.” Thus nature reflects a kind of law of the jungle, with each form of existence competing with all others to maintain and fulfill itself. Schopenhauer saw struggle and strife all around him, and that led to his notoriously pessimistic assessment of life in general. He was exceptional in that instance, most all panpsychist philosophers seem to have adopted sympathetic, compassionate, and optimistic worldviews. . . . Page 145

Fechner’s plato.stanford.edu/entries/fechner personal, intuitive feel for the plant-soul is abundantly evident throughout his writing. One finds passionate and poetic words, such as the following: I stood one on a hot summer’s day before a pool and contemplated a water-lily which had spread its leaves evenly over the water and with an open blossom was basking in the sunlight. . . . It seemed to me that nature surely would not have built a creature so beautiful, and so carefully designed for such conditions, merely to be an object of idle observation. . . . I was inclined rather to think that nature had built it thus in order that all the pleasure which can be derived from bathing at once a sunlight and in water might be enjoyed by one creature in the fullest measure. ~ Page 147 -o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o . . . When a Buddhist becomes enlightened, he or she remains in this world. The image of a beautiful lotus blossom floating atop of grimy, mucky pond conveys symbolically the Buddhist perception of life in this world. ~ Page 91 Excerpt: “When Religion Becomes Evil” ~ Author” Charles Kimball

Source of the image www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHTuI40HjVE&t=837s

www.history.com/topics/immigration/us-immigration-since-1965

Free as a leaf in the wind

The Greek Language of the classical period continued in use during the Middle Ages, and survived as a court language at the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, and as a language of cult in the descendent of these. Although it has dialects, some of them spoken in parts in Anatolia until the exchange of population between Greek and Turkey in 1922, it has never subdivided into a separate family of languages in the way that Latin did. It began to do so in the aftermath of the empire of Alexander the Great, but in most areas Greek was ultimately replaced by other local tongues. A version of Greek is, however, still spoken in parts of southern Italy -- a last remnant there of the colonies of the classical period. ~ Page 63 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Renfrew

Beyond the pointing gesture, the second form of “natural” communication that humans employ is spontaneously generated, nonconventional iconic gestures or pantomime. These gestures are used to direct the imagination of others to nonpresent entities, actions, or situations. Iconic gestures go beyond simply directing attention to situations deictically, as a pointing, by actually symbolizing an entity, action or situation in an external icon. Iconic gestures are “natural” because they employ normally effective intentional actions, just in a special way. The recipient can, on the basis of observing them, imagine the real actions or objects the communicator is pantomiming, and then, in the context of their common ground, make the appropriate inference to his communicative intention. Examples of informative uses of iconic gestures would be things like warning of a nearby snake by moving one’s hand in a slithering motion, telling of a deer at the waterhole by miming antlers on one’s own head (or the sound of his vocalization), or identifying the whereabouts of a friend by pantomiming his swimming. What the appropriate common ground, such gestures communicate very effectively about all kinds of nonpresent situations. ~ Page 60

As one dramatic example in the contemporary world, we may point to what are arguably the most abstract and complex forms of human thinking, that is, those involved in Western science and mathematics. The point here is that those forms of thinking are simply not possible without special forms of socially constructed conventions, namely, those in written forms, that developed over historical time in Western culture. This point is stressed especially by Peirce (1931-1958) and in summarized in the classic text of modern logic by Lewis and Langford: “Had it not been for the adoption of the new and more versatile idographic symbols, many branches of mathematics could never hae been developed because no human mind could grasp the essence of their oprations in terms of the phonograms of ordinary language.” Many scholars of literacy would also argue that written language makes certain forms of reasoning, if not possible, at least more accessible (Olson, 1994). Writing also greatly facilitates metalinguistic thinking and the possibility to analyze, criticize, and evaluate our own linguistic communication, as well as that of others. Pictures and other graphic symbols used as communicative devices are collective representations that contribute to the process in important ways as well. These modern cultures that have created active communities of scientists, mathematicians, linguistics, and other scholars are pretty much unthinkable without written language, written mathematical numerals and operations, and other forms of visually based and semipermanent symbols. Cultures that have not created and do not currently possess any of these kinds of graphic symbols cannot currently participate in these activities. This demonstrates quite clearly that many of the most complex and sophisticated human cognitive processes are indeed culturally and historically constructed. It also opens the possibility that some other human cngnitive achievements are a kind of co-evolutionary mixture. Our own view would be that many of the complexities of human language are of this nature; built on universal cognitive processes but with culturally constructed concrete manifestations. ~ Page 142

The European discovery of the America nevertheless challenged the scriptural explanation of how the Earth had been peopled. As evidence accumulated that the lands Columbus described and explored after 1492 were not, as he claimed, parts of Asia but new worlds entirely, it became difficult to explain how these places had acquired human inhabitants. Which of Noah’s lineages had ventured that far, and why had God not explained them to the Christian faithful, as He had done for all parts of the “old” world? The idea of a separate creation of human beings, ‘polygenism,’ was technically heretical. Another part of Scripture made that clear: God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” Native Americans had to come from the same stock as Europeans -- but how? In some ways, that the primordial breeding pair had dispersed progeny so far away compounded the wonder of human procreation, but the Americas also confounded Christian faith in the idea of a unified human lineage and destiny. ~ Page 19

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

. . . . Traditionally, people suffering from depression were thought to harbor an unrealistically negative view of world -- a delusional negativity was seen to be the cause of their despondency. Alloy and Abramson were surprised to find depressed people showed a “surprising degree of accuracy” in judging how the blinking light affected by their manipulation of the button (in the Lab. Experiment) Meanwhile, the non-depressed subjects consistently ‘overrated’ their ability to control the blinking light. In other words, the gap between the groups was not caused by the healthy group seeing reality clearly and the depressed people seen the world with delusional pessimism. No, the “healthy” group had a ‘delusion of control’ while their ‘unhealthy’ counterparts were ‘seeing reality clearly. The subtitle of the psychologists paper was “Sadder but Wiser.” . . . Page 88 Excerpt from:

. . . . . “No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.” With this, Popper dismissed the idea that the truth of any nontrivial hypothesis can be established through any amount of supporting evidence. The criticism was a re-articulation of David Hume’s Problem of Induction, posed over two hundred years before. But Popper proposed a solution. He argued that the only logically valid path to certain knowledge is ‘refutation’ -- a single instance of a black swan would be enough to disprove the hypothesis that all swans are white. Hence, scientists should not strive to confirm hypothesis, but to refute them. ` Page 18