Excerpts from the Books that I read - II

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I suspect that the ultimate quality of feelings, a part of why feelings feel the way they feel, is conferred by the neural medium. But a substantial part of the answer to why they feel the way they do pertains to the fact that the life governance processes are either fluid or strained. That is simply their way of operating given the strange state we call life and the strange nature of organisms -- Spinoza's 'Conatus' -- that drives them to endeavor to preserve themselves, come what may, until life is suspended by aging, disease, or externally inflicted injury. The fact that we, sentient and sophisticated creatures, call certain feelings positive and other feelings negative is directly related to the fluidity or strain of the life process. Fluid life states are naturally preferred by our 'conatus'. We gravitate toward them. Strained life states are naturally avoided by our 'conatus'. We stay away. We can sense these relationships, and we also can verify that in the trajectory of our lives fluid life states that feel positive come to be associated with events that we call good, while strained life states that feel negative come to be associated with evil. ~ Page 131 / 132

Feuerback's [ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Feuerbach ] next step was to declare that the motive force of history was not spiritual, but the sum of the material conditions which at any given time determine the men who live in them to think and act as they do. Their material distress caused them, however, to seek solace in an immaterial ideal world of their own, albeit unconscious, invention, where as a reward for the unhappiness of their lives on earth, they would enjoy eternal bliss hereafter. All that they lack on earth -- justice, harmony, order, goodness, unity, permanence -- they transform into transcendent attributes of a transcendent world, which alone they call real, and which they turn into an object of worship. If this illusion was to be exposed, it must be analysed in terms of the material mal-adjustments which psychologically gives rise to it. Like Holbachand the author of "L' Homme Machine" Feuerbach's hatred of transcendentalism often led him to seek for the crudest and simplest explanation in purely physical terms. "Des Mensch ist was er isst" -- "Man is what he eats" is his own Hegelian caricature of his doctrine: human history is the history of the decisive influence of physical environment of men in society; therefore knowledge of physical laws alone can make man master of these forces by enabling him to adapt his life consciously to them. ~ Page 58

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.125785/mode/1up

Many of those who oppose the idea of predominantly contingent universe have misread contingency for 'accidental' or 'random.' Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, for example, have stated explicitly that, "The survivors, who produced us, did so by contingency, by sheerest accident;" "Gould [argues] that contingency -- randomness -- plays a major role in the result of evolution....." and Gould "sees the evolution of humanity as being accidental, purely contingent." Yet Gould states quite clearly in 'Wonderful Life': "I am not speaking of randomness, but of the central principle of all history -- contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before -- the un-erasable and determining signature of history." As Gould notes, contingency is an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, not randomness, chanciness, or accident. ~ Page 218

'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.' ~ Heraclitus

In 2005, researchers found what they believe to be the skull and skeleton of Copernicus beneath the floor of the cathedral in Frombork. The image of Copernicus as he looked at the age of seventy reconstruction by forensic experts

The below excerpt is from PENDULUM ~ Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science - Author Amir D. Aczel