Excerpts from Book that I read

The great social psychologist Floyd Henry Allport said “Socialized behavior is….the supreme achievement of the cortex.” He was right. If you think about this for a moment, you will realize that the social world is our main focus, and it takes up an extraordinary amount of our time and energy. When was the last time that you were not thinking of something social? It shouldn’t come as any surprise to you and most of you thinking of social: Why are thy doing that? What was she thinking? Not another meeting! When did they get married? Does he like me? I own them a dinner. And on and on. It can drive you crazy! All these social thoughts are reflected in our conversation. Consider all those cell phone conversations that you overhear. Ever hear anyone talking about particle physics or prehistoric stone axes? Social psychologist Nicholas Emler has studied the content of conversations and found that 80 to 90 percent are about specific names and known individuals, that is, social small talk. We are social animals to the core. ~ Page 159

books.google.com/books/about/Thumbs_Toes_and_Tears.html?i... www.kurzweilai.net/why-language-is-all-thumbs

It was a quiet winter evening. I had settled down by the fireplace with my grandson Eli to read him Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic, ‘The Little Prince.’ We were just starting, reading the first page where the six year old boy, strongly impressed by a book about the jungle, makes a drawing. To him the picture was clear: It is a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. How surprised he was when the grown-ups did not see what he had drawn – all they say was a hat! He had made a second drawing, so they would be able to understand. Only when the boy met the Little Prince did he find someone who looked at his first drawing with the same eyes, seeing it was an elephant in a boa. I had found my metaphor. xi Prologue (Mind Set by John Naisbitt)

Strategy of guessing based on past experience is known as "inductive reasoning." As we've seen, inductive reasoning makes us vastly better than computers in solving problems ...... But it also makes people like Descartes nervous, because it means that our beliefs are not necessarily true. Instead, they are "probabilistically" true. This point was made (and made famous) by David Hume en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume who was arguably the first thinker to fully grasp both the import and limitation of inductive reasoning. To borrow his much-cited example: How can I be sure that all swans are white if I myself have seen only a tiny fraction of all the swans that have existed? If the world were always uniform, consistent, and predictable, I could trust that I am right about this induction (and about all inductions). Unfortunately, as Hume noted, nothing in logic requires the world to be that way, and we know from experience that it isn't always so. I can keep my eyes open for more white swans, but no matter how many I spot, I'll be only adding to my body of evidence, rather than actually proving something about the necessary color scheme of swans. In other words, inductions are necessarily impossible to substantiate. We can know that they are wrong - as Hume's example turned out to be, when a species of black swan was discovered in Australia after his death - but we can't know that they are right. All we know is that they are at least somewhat more likely to be right and the next best guess we could make ~ Page 118

On the international scene, the last decades have an explosion of apologies by political leaders for crimes committed by their governments. The political scientist Graham Dodds politicalscience.concordia.ca/people/Dodds.php has compiled “a fairly comprehensive chronological listing of major political apologies” through the centuries.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHMD05OcJTQ

In the late 1970s, another physicist stepped up to the plate, bearing credentials that made Capra look like an undergrad by comparison. David Bohm had done his graduate work at Berkeley under Oppenheimer and taught at Princeton when Einstein was on campus. He was also influenced by his two-decade-long dialogue with J. Krishnamurthi. Bohm theorized that the domain we think of reality, with its separate objects and events, is actually enfolded within (and unfolds from) a realm of unbroken wholeness in which everything – all of matter and all of consciousness – is simultaneously connected to everything else. “The sphere of ordinary material life and sphere of mystical experience,” said Bohm, “have a certain shared order [that] will allow a fruitful relationship between them” Bohm theory evoked a compelling image: the hologram, in which each piece of the whole is mirrored in every other piece. Another Vedic visual now came into use: Indra’s Net, a vast network of jewels, each of which reflects the image of all the others. Throughout the 1980s, as Reagan reigned in Washington, conversations about the “holographic universe” and the “holographic paradigm” ranged over a variety of disciplines. Many of the participants had been influenced by Eastern philosophy, and now their ideas were heard by the public. ~ Page 287/288 (American Veda – Philip Goldberg)

Radical social theorist and organizer of the working class, whose thought is widely regarded as the chief inspiration for all forms of modern social radicalism. Born 5 May 1818 in the Rhenish city of Trier, Karl Heinrich Marx was a son of successful Jewish lawyer of conservative political views who converted to Christianity in 1824. He studied law at the University of Bonn in 1835 and at the University of Berlin in 1836, changing his course of study in that year to philosophy, under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and the Young Hegelian movement. Marx completed his doctorate in philosophy in 1841.

Hobbes grounds the citizens’ obligation to obey the law by on the promise of obedience. He explicitly says that a person ‘is obliged by his contracts, that is, that he ought to perform for his promise sake’. Third, Hobbes knew that the danger to the stability of the state did not arise from the self interest of all its ordinary citizens, but rather from the self interest of a few powerful persons who would exploit false moral views. He regarded it as one of the most important duties of the sovereign to combat these false views, and to put forward true views about morality, including is relationship to religion

assets.cambridge.org/97805218/71389/frontmatter/9780521871389_frontmatter.pdf

“THE MEANING OF A WORD IS ITS USE IN LANGUAGE” ~ LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Today, it's hard to imagine computer owners in the United States and other developed countries abandoning for thin clients. { www.igel.com/us/ } Many of us, after all, have dozens or even hundreds of gigabytes of date on our personal hard drives, including hefty music and video files. But once utility services mature, the idea of getting rid of your PC will become much more attractive. At that point, each of us will have access to virtually unlimited online storage as well as a rich array of software services. We'll also be tapping into the Net through many different devises, from mobile phones to televisions, and we'll want to have all of them share our data and applications. Having our files and software locked into our PC's hard drive will be an unnecessary nuisance. Companies like Google and Yahoo will likely be eager to supply with all-purpose utility services, possibly including thin-client devices, for free - in return for the privilege of showing us advertisements. We may find, twenty or so years from now, that the personal computer has become a museum piece, a reminder of a curious time when all of were forced to be amateur computer technicians. ~ Page 80 - 81 (BIG SWITCH)

BrunoGiordano (1548-1600), an Italian wandering scholar, once a Dominican, starts from a Neo-Platonist position. The phenomena we see in the world are the effects of a world-soul which animates nature and makes it into a single organism. In Bruno’s thought God sometimes seems distant and unknowable; at other times God seems to be totally identified with the world of nature. In Bruno’s august but not wholly intelligible expression, God is the Nature which causes Nature which manifests itself in the Nature which is caused by Nature. The world of nature, for Bruno, is infinite, with no edge, surface, or limit. In this boundless space there are many scholar systems; our sun is just one star among others, and no one star can be called the centre of the universe, since all position is relative. Our earth enjoys no unique privilege; for all we know intelligent life is present elsewhere in the universe. Solar systems rise, glow, and perish, pulsating moments in the life of the single organism whole soul is the world-soul. The universe is built up of atoms, physical and spiritual; each human being is a conscious, immortal atom, mirroring in itself the entire universe. Bruno’s opinions, unsurprisingly, did not find favour with the Church. He was passed from one Inquisition to an other, and, having refused to recant, was burnt in Rome in 1600. His theories anticipate, in an exciting way, scientific discoveries of later ages and speculations which remain popular with scientists at the present day. But that is what they are, speculations; so far as we know he devoted no time to observation or experiment ~ page 199

An human being is a part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison to us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection of a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. ~ Einstein