learned to give up arguing

The sixth century B.C. was arguably the most significant in human evolution since the first caveman inadvertently set fire to his home. Beside witnessing the birth of Confucius, this century also saw the founding of Taoism, the birth of Buddha, and the inception of Greek philosophy. Why these vital intellectual events should have taken place just then, for the most part in civilisations that were in disparate states of development and had no contact with each other, remains a mystery. (Some of the solutions put forward – visits from alien spaceships, exceptional activity on the surface of the sun, brain disease, etc. – would suggest that our mental development has not progressed much since this era.) --Confucius: Philosophy in an Hour by Paul Strathern

дальше там тоже интересно:

What we do know is that Confucius’s father was a minor military official and was seventy at the time of Confucius’s birth. When Confucius was three his father died and he was brought up by his mother. (Curiously, of the dozen or so figures who founded the world’s great philosophies and religions, a large majority were brought up in single-parent families.)

и еще:

‘When I was fifteen I was only interested in studying.’ This was the bedrock of his life, which he would later see as having been divided into distinct stages: ‘… When I was thirty I began my life; at forty I was self-assured; at fifty I understood my place in the vast scheme of things; at sixty I learned to give up arguing; and now at seventy I can do whatever I like without disrupting my life.’

я прямо как сам Конфуций, в том же возрасте научился. а его рассуждения про имена приводят на память Витгенштейна. вот тут про это пишут: Moments of Reticence in the Analects and Wittgenstein

negative revelation

Terrifying vistas of reality - эссе о философии Лавкрафта, на мой вкус неплохое. я до сих пор соглашался с тем, что о нем сказал Edmund Wilson: "The only horror is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” но там даже на это возражают в комментариях, а вообще в эссе много всякого интересного, в частности о теории познания.

а я как раз слушаю сейчас Гейзенберга Физика и философия - старик Лавкрафт порадовался бы, послушав, как Гейзенберг барахтается, пытаясь на пальцах объяснить корпускулярно-волновой дуализм. не говоря уже про теорию струн и multiverse, на которую они опоздали.

negative revelation там 4 раза встречается.

см. также Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex: or The Sex Life of a Gentleman - how very interesting. а вот еще The Posthumous Pornification of H. P. Lovecraft

и вот еще беседа слегка раздраженная о различиях между panpsychism и physicalism - типа как блеск и нищета куртизанок.

research project

I sometimes wonder if Simone de Beauvoir viewed her relationship with Sartre as a research project. She lived/slept with a man like that so she could develop the level of disgust necessary to compose The Second Sex. @FischerKing64

Existential malaise

Existential malaise — the feeling that everything is bullshit — might be the price of peace. - это из substack с хорошим названием Everything Is Bullshit одного David Pinsof (@DavidPinsof).

забавная статья, много интересных ссылок. вот, к примеру, The Execution Hypothesis for the Evolution of a Morality of Fairness - это тот же Wrangham, что написал The Goodness Paradox. там упоминается ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’, и вот Reverse Dominance Hierarchies - review by Rob Henderson.

еще Morality and other weapons - необъятное количество примеров и ссылок (часто на самого автора, Rob Kurzban). начинается с хорошей шутки (в которой есть небольшая доля шутки):

Cynics will tell you that the Golden Rule is that whoever has the gold makes the rules.

кстати о доле шутки - это приводит на память stereotype accuracy

он написал книжку Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. еще в своей статье он приводит ссылку на Extract from the Speech by Adolf Hitler, January 30, 1939

senile god

Tyler and John sat down to discuss his latest book, including who he thinks will carry on his work, what young people should learn if liberalism is dead, whether modern physics allows for true atheism, what in Eastern Orthodoxy attracts him, the benefits of pessimism, what philanthropic cause he’d invest a billion dollars in, under what circumstances he’d sacrifice his life, what he makes of UFOs, the current renaissance in film and books, whether Monty Python is still funny, how Herman Melville influenced him, who first spotted his talent, his most unusual work habit, what he’ll do next, and more. --John Gray on Pessimism, Liberalism, and Theism

это с ним беседует Tyler Cowen, тот, что ведет Marginal Revoluton. среди прочего Gray говорит:

Yes, I’m not a theist, I’m an atheist, so for me, it would be quite easy to accept that the world, the cosmos, the human situation, human life, human events do not correspond to any ideas of justice we might have developed...

и дальше он объясняет, чем его атеизм отличается от общепринятого, который проистекает из теизма, который reproduce the central categories and concepts of the religion they deny, even as they deny the beliefs. очень интересно дальше про providence: For me, there’s no providence of any kind in history.

абзац со слов That seems to be a secularization of Christian and other ideas of divine providence in history. мог бы вполне Беккет написать. вот это да - в следующем абзаце он Беккета упоминает!!!

David Hume, in one of his dialogues on religion, he says, maybe the universe has been created by a senile god who then forgot what he’d created...

...
I am attracted more to Eastern Orthodoxy than I am to Catholicism, partly because its rituals and art are so beautiful, and for me, many of my judgments are aesthetic.

касательно пессимизма его рассуждения тривиальны. ну и всякое там про биосферу, религию и прочее - как-то неубедительно. зато под конец он даже Стругацких упоминает, Пикник - очень кстати.

по части кино я его вкусы не разделяю. а по части книг... за Моби Дика я уже вряд ли возьмусь когда-нибудь. да и за Пруста - тоже.

crooked timber and moral law

In the Sixth Proposition of the essay Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784) Kant famously states that “From such crooked timber as humankind is made of nothing entirely straight can be made.”

но в 1788-м старик передумал и сказал “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

впрочем, может быть он себя не относил к humankind

ну или это лишнее подверждение старого тезиса о том, что бумага все стерпит

Beware The Tenured

Understanding Consciousness Goes Beyond Exploring Brain Chemistry - еще одна позорная статья в SciAm. это один Dr Philip Goff пишет:

There may be a way forward. I argue that we can account for the evolution of consciousness only if we reject reductionism about consciousness. Most consciousness researchers employ a reductionist view of the universe, where physics is running the show. Thus insofar as there are some future possibilities left open by the arrangements of particles in our brains, they are settled by nothing more than the random chanciness implicit in quantum mechanics.

Some challenges have lately emerged to this reductionist paradigm. The neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell has argued that the free will of conscious organisms plays a role in determining what will happen in the brain, over and above what is settled by the laws of physics.

что это такое random chanciness? хотел сказать красиво? и что же это там over and above the laws of physics хочем знать этот Dr Goff в статье пропагандирует свою новую книжку Why? The Purpose of the Universe: In this pioneering work, Philip Goff argues that it is time to move on from both God and atheism. а вот заголовки отзывов (one star) на его предыдущую книжку Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness:

- Beware The Tenured Bearing Junk Science

- Well written but so deeply flawed it’s “not even wrong”

- Bold assertion with no evidence

а вот наш герой борется с ретроградами:

Civil war has broken out in the field of consciousness research. More than 100 consciousness researchers have signed a letter accusing one of the most popular scientific theories of consciousness – the integrated information theory – of being pseudoscience.

полно ссылок, можно всю жизнь читать. а вот Jerry Coyne подробно разъясняет почему панпсихизм - лженаука: Philip Goff returns with panpsychism: now claims that a non-goddy “conscious Universe” explains the “fine-tuning” of physical constants permitting life, там много забавных комментариев. вспоминается Лысенко и вейсманисты-морганисты...

The Prophets of Doom

I do not see any great social advance or 'progress' in the democratisation of power. This is because, as is the thesis of my last book, in practice democracy is not only a delusion but also impossible.

Power necessitates an organised minority ruling over a disorganised mass and, if 'elected', represent neither the will nor the interests of 'the people'.

Liberal democracy provides a smoke-screen for the ruling class and obscures the real mechanisms of power with the lie that 'the people' are sovereign: they are not and never will be.

--The Prophets of Doom, Neema Parvini

стоит обратить внимание на scare quotes

see also Iron law of oligarchy by Robert Michels

There are two key features of Ibn Khaldun's work that would later prove infuential. First, recognition of what we would call today 'in-group preterence' or 'group feeling' that helps keep a people, community, or nation together-we will see something of this when we come to consider Gobineau in Chapter 4 and it has been particularly influential on Turchin, who is covered in Chapter 12. 'A group with high [collective solidarity] will generally win when pitched against a group of lesser [collective solidarity]'. --Ibid.

нет ли тут... сами знаете чего. см. также morality of groups ну и Kevin MacDonald ясное дело.

свету ли провалиться

...according to Hume, any action, however odd it seems, can never be irrational if it’s driven by a passion that wins out over other passions. He even says it is “not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
...
But Hume’s central question of how reason and passions relate to each other is still relevant and passionately debated, and for good reasons.

--Reason is the Slave to the Passions: Hume on Reason vs. Desire

Свету ли провалиться, или вот мне чаю не пить? Я скажу, что свету провалиться, а чтоб мне чай всегда пить.

--Записки из подполья

интересно, Достоевский Юма читал? похоже, он тут соглашается с Юмом. а позиция Юма тут заставляет вспомнить нынешние страхи по поводу искусственного интеллекта (paperclip)

кстати о Достоевском, краткая биография на youtube.

simulated selves

He tends, in short, toward the view that consciousness is most coherently viewed as a fundamental rather than emergent aspect of the physical world, and hence something on the order of a brute fact, like electromagnetism or gravity. --Reality Minus by David Bentley Hart

это он про Чалмерса. ну-ну...

So, obviously, if conscious, thinking subjects with free will (assuming there is such a thing) could exist together within a simulated world, with the power to affect one another and their shared phenomenal environment for either good or ill, then by that very token they and their world would be no less real than one composed of such physical ingredients as basic particles, molecules, and organic tissues.

ну правильно, и что? дальше он пишет: ...in a simulated world, only simulated selves could exist; no one — absolutely no one — ever will or could be at home there. и чем ему не нравятся simulated selves? Он спорит (ругается!) с Чалмерсом на довольно примитивном уровне, я бы сказал: Even as “conceivability” arguments go, this one is pretty feeble. It presumes everything it is meant to prove.

дальше там вообще чушь, начиная с Would it not make more sense to assume that the brain’s capacity for mentality... Syntax cannot exist prior to or apart from semantics, and neither exists except in the intentional activity of a mind. - как раз наоборот, синтаксис первичен.

conscious self-deception

Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception. --Arthur Schopenhauer

Я иногда говорю с людьми так, как ребенок со своей куклой: дитя, правда, знает, что кукла не поймет его речей, но все-таки создает себе путем приятного сознательного самообмана радость общения. --Артур Шопенгауэр

We Live in a Simulation

Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation

Yet there have been skeptics. Physicist Frank Wilczek has argued that there’s too much wasted complexity in our universe for it to be simulated. Building complexity requires energy and time. Why would a conscious, intelligent designer of realities waste so many resources into making our world more complex than it needs to be?

it's not complexity. it's called macaroni code, stupid.

отличная статья, в частности про скорость света как hardware artifact и про raison d’être of subjective experience:

The simplest explanation for the existence of an experience or qualia is that it exists for the purpose of being an experience.

...

So here we are generating this product called consciousness that we apparently don’t have a use for, that is an experience and hence must serve as an experience. The only logical next step is to surmise that this product serves someone else.

см. также Вселенная нереальна. Доказано! [youtube]

intensity of despair

“With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair” --Søren Kierkegaard

--

If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one’s own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. --Erwin Schrödinger / Эрвин Шрёдингер

--

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point. --Arthur Schopenhauer

см. также горе от ума

why

- Why there is something rather than nothing?
- Is there?

© yhs

field of vision

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” --Arthur Schopenhauer

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free." --Ibid.

typical experience

If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs. --Friedrich Nietzsche

Если имеешь характер, то имеешь и свои типичные пережитки, которые постоянно повторяются. -- Фридрих Ницше, По ту сторону добра и зла в переводе Н. Полилова

У человѣка, имѣющаго характеръ, жизнь складывается въ типической повторяющейся послѣдовательности событій. -- Фридрихъ Ницше, По ту сторону добра и зла, перевод неизвестно чей, CHALIDZE PUBLICATIONS 1984 - думаю, что этот перевод более справедливый. сам этот афоризм входит в Раздел IV, Изречения и афоризмы.

есть еще перевод Антоновского, но не найти полный pdf. надо будет английские варианты сравнить. гениальный был гражданин Ницше

ugly sister

A little while after I had fallen in love with science, and had promised to marry her, for better, for worse, I also met her ugly sister, philosophy.

-- Rebel With a Cause by Hans Eysenck

quoted at @KirkegaardEmil among other interesting things, like Eysenck relationship with Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, Khazars etc

philosophy damage

by @MrDanielBuck What philosopher has done the most damage to society? also By popular demand, a poll:

кого там только нет, и Ленин, и Платон, и Фуко... Руссо тоже популярен , а вот целый список

кстати о фактах...

About 30 years ago there was much talk that Geologists ought only to observe & not theorise;6 & I well remember some one saying, that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit & count the pebbles & describe their colours. How odd it is that every one should not see that all observation must be for or against some view, if it is to be of any service. -- Charles Darwin to Henry Fawcett

quoted in Sceptic by Michael Shermer, и дальше он [Shermer] пишет:

If scientific observations are to be of any use, they must be tested against a theory, hypothesis or model. The facts never just speak for themselves. They must be interpreted through the colored lenses of ideas: percepts need concepts.

Ницше бы одобрил.

category errors

There may be only one way out of this dilemma: To disarm mentalism and turn the study of (human) nature into a science. We thus first have to effectively dissolve the ancient body-mind hierarchy problem and thus avoid continued commission to catastrophic Rylean category errors by neglectfully mixing mental and material phenomena as if they were equals in the description or explanation.

...

Despite its enormous subjective appeal and an almost desperate search for it, neither have philosophy nor modern (brain) sciences ever evidenced the slightest trace of consciousness in the human brain or, for that sake, anywhere else in the world.

-- Helmut Nyborg, Molecular Man in a Molecular World, pg. 461

жж