Thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

Roberto Bolaño

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

My guess: depending on what you read.

Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.

Uh, technically?

If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.

Let’s hope we steer clear of that here. 8)

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Next up: rap battles?

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Some more than others, let’s say.

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.

You know, generally.

[iambiguous]

God

“But what of faith? What of fidelity and loyalty? Complete trust? Faith is not granted by tangible proof. It comes from the heart and the soul. If a person needs proof of god’s existence, then the very notion of spirituality is diminished into sensuality and we have reduced what is holy into what is logical.” R.A. Salvatore

Complete horseshit.
If I do say so myself.

“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.” André Gide

Complete horseshit.
If I do say so myself.

"Only the hopeless love God.” Jennifer Donnelly

Does He know that?

I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?” Rousseau Jean-Jacques

How about you?

“Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn’t a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.” Sam Kean

And we’re still at it today, aren’t we?

“This was not the time to say “I don’t know.” The brothers had begging, hungry looks, like dogs waiting to be fed. They wanted an answer. It would be nice if it was the right answer, but if it couldn’t be, then any answer would do, because then we would stop being worried…and then his mind caught alight.
That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be.” Terry Pratchett

Uh, keep them doped with religion?

[iambiguous]

Science

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood." Marie Curie

With the possible exception of radiation perhaps.

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” Carl Sagan

If only on this side of the grave?

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tell that to the folks in the Vatican.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Carl Sagan

The Cosmos in other words.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” Richard Dawkins

Fuck that, right? To paraphrase Lesley Gore, “it’s my life and I’ll whine if I want to.”

“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” Albert Einstein

Uh, some examples please?

[iambiguous]

Death

“I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.” Don DeLillo

After all, very few have.

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.” R.D. Laing

So far, anyway.

“It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains…If only one could leave this life slowly!” Roman Payne

Or, say, not at all?

“There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death.” Fran Lebowitz

Okay, but then what?

“You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.” Kurt Vonnegut

In fact, start practicing now.

“I was thinking about how people seem to read the bible a lot more as they get older, and then it dawned on me—they’re cramming for their final exam.” George Carlin

That is one way to look at it, of course.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy

“Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.” Benjamin Franklin

Get this man a kite!

“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.” Thomas Jefferson

Get this man a plantation!

“A prison becomes a home when you have the key.” George Sterling

That is one way to look at it.

“Plato was a bore.” Friedrich Nietzsche

We’ll need a context, of course.

“If there were a party of those who aren’t sure they’re right, I’d belong to it.”― Albert Camus

Let’s start one here.

“Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” Edgar Allan Poe

Probably got this from Benjamin Button.

[iambiguous]

Free Will

“Free will is the cutting edge of Creation, don’t you see? The word spontaneity derives from the Latin sponte, meaning ‘of one’s free will.’ Spontaneity is the impulse, the purest expression of freedom, and the impulse wants to do whatever it wants to do. But you are afraid of what others think, others who are just as afraid of what you think, and so you pussyfoot along the perimeter of the free-will zone, wilting like a wallflower.” Tony Vigorito

On the other hand, what if you are compelled to wilt?

“The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To be an individual expression of this will is to lead a life of continual desire, deficiency, and suffering.” Christopher Janaway

See, I told you.

"There is no free will. Human actions, as part of the natural order, are determined…As individual parts of the empirical world we are ineluctably pushed through life by a force inside us which is not of our choosing, which gives rise to needs and desires we can never fully satisfy, and is without ultimate purpose. Schopenhauer concludes that it would have been better not to exist—and that the world itself is something whose existence we should deplore rather than celebrate.” Christopher Janaway

I think we can all agree on that now, right?

“Free Will : “I made you think so.”
Predestination: "I knew you had to.”

And so on and so forth.

“…if you truly want to know why I’m helping you, you won’t get any easy answers. It’s not because I believe in the goodness of humankind. It’s not because I believe God and the rest of the monsters are evil. I only wish to have the capacity to change. To know that we have the ability to take a different direction than the one presented to us. That is more important than good and evil. Than life or death.” Autumn Christian

Whatever that means, of course.

“No, free will is not an ‘extra’; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.” Raymond Smullyan

The “click” part.

[iambiguous]

Stanisław Lem from Solaris

A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn’t create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he’s born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that’s impossible, since a person who isn’t brought up among people cannot become a person.

That may well be me in a nutshell.

Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

Next up: a substitute for religion here.

I wanted to stop her; in the darkness and silence we occasionally managed to throw off our despair for a while by making each other forget.

Anyone up for that here?

There are no answers, only choices.

Too scary for you?

We have named all the stars and all the planets, even though they might already have had names of their own. What a nerve!

Next up: all the moons.

A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultaneous multiplicity of processes, however they may be interconnected, however they may complement one another, is beyond us. We experience this even with relatively simple phenomena. The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all.

It’s back: the unbearable lightness of being.

[iambiguous]

Logic

"I know that if you don’t look for an alternative, Sophos, you certainly won’t find one.” Megan Whalen Turner

An alternative for what though?

“His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.” Robert A. Heinlein

Welcome aboard!

“An argument in apologetics, when actually used in dialogue, is an extension of the arguer. The arguer’s tone, sincerity, care, concern, listening, and respect matter as much as his or her logic – probably more." Peter Kreeft

Including dasein of course.

“When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information” Thomas Gilovich

Let’s promise each other this will never happen here, okay?

“Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.” Ayn Rand

Talk about a world of words!

“Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.” Carl Lotus Becker

Cue the objectivists?

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Epistemology

“Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.” Louise Erdrich

Objectivism!

“We’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.” Chuck Klosterman

Objectivism!

“He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived.” Baruch Spinoza

Objectivism!
Or determinism?

“What the pragmatist has his pragmatism for is to be able to say, Here is a definition and it does not differ at all from your confusedly apprehended conception because there is no practical difference.” Charles Sanders Peirce

We’ll need a context, of course.

“A man is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophical theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.” G.K. Chesterton

Yep, that means coming down out of the clouds, I’m afraid.

“I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.” Carl Friedrich Gauss

If you get his drift.

[iambiguous]

Sarah Perry from The Essex Serpent

To cleave to something is to cling to it with all your heart, he said, but to cleave something apart is to break it up.

English!

Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, the desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.

You first, okay?

I believe for most of us - for me, certainly - what’s below the skin is more worth looking at than what’s outside it. Turn me inside out and I’d be quite a handsome man!

Cue the Mantle brothers.

Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I can live as I must. Oh, I don’t mean without morals or conscience- I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that…

How much did you get for yours?

felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars: when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out.” Sarah Perry

He wondered if that would ever work for him…

“I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful,” said Cora: “And I was never more happy. I can’t remember when I last looked in the mirror… ”
“Yesterday,” said Martha. “You were admiring your nose.”

Among other things no doubt.

[iambiguous]

William Golding from Lord of the Flies

Maybe there is a beast…maybe it’s only us.

Or, sure, it’s always them.

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

Unless, of course, you had to be there.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

More to the point, perhaps, what didn’t go wrong?

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior [to men] and always have been.

My guess: not all of them.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

Next up: the Beast here.

If faces were different when lit from above or below – what was a face? What was anything?

Anyway, it’s probably not important.

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” Richard P. Feynman

Again, sure, if that works for you, take it with you all the way to the grave.

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.” Virginia Woolf

And, come on, get real…what are the odds that it is yours?

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?.. If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.” Ian McEwan

I may actually be unique though.

“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.” Arundhati Roy

Still, we post them anyway.

“I do not forget any good deed done to me and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.” Viktor E. Frankl

Ah, so the Nazis are off the hook?

“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.” Somerset Maugham

But even then, only “here and now”.

[iambiguous]

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

Then [also inexorably] all the way to the grave.

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

If only theoretically up in the clouds, say.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

Language games. Certainly, let’s call them that.

Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.

Just the good guys of course.

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn’t live much longer.

What’s that make us then?!

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.

Or, perhaps, both?

[iambiguous]

Science

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” Carl Sagan

Yeah, I was once foolish enough to believe that myself.

“Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.” Stephen Hawking

Actually, from time to time it can be – must be – both.

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.” Richard P. Feynman

Yo, Satyr! Yo’re up!!

“So this is it," said Arthur, “We are going to die.”
“Yes,” said Ford, “except… no! Wait a minute!” He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s this switch?” he cried.
“What? Where?” cried Arthur, twisting round.
“No, I was only fooling,” said Ford, "we are going to die after all.” Douglas Adams

Another fucking smartass!
Though still no match for the ones we have here.

“In my opinion, we don’t devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.” Bill Watterson

He means pinheads of course.

“If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.” Douglas Adams

Next up: Schrödinger’s cat.

[iambiguous]

Roberto Bolaño

Every hundred feet the world changes.

That will be 30.48 meters for others here.

What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others…And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

Uh, whatever you can get them to believe?

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

What if it is exaclty the same thing?!

…we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

No, really, actually think about that a bit. Then a bit more.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

Let’s take that down out of the philosophical clouds.

Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

Either that or it’s Stooge Stuff.

[iambiguous]

God

“Philosophers can debate the meaning of life, but you need a Lord who can declare the meaning of life.” Max Lucado

Indeed, and how many times have IC and I pointed this out to you?

“Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.” Gore Vidal

Next up: one here.

“It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.” Peter Kreeft

Though not necessarily your God, of course.

“But I don’t understand God. I don’t understand how He could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.” Jim Butcher

Again, in other words.

“If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction.” George MacDonald

Split the difference?

“God wasn’t love, couldn’t be love. Because for me, love was a corpse.” Ellen Hopkins

You tell me.

“Our assholes will be clean but we must never wash our hands. Our immune systems will be strengthened by our being dirty. Not filthy. Just mildly grimy. Filthy fingernails have always been a favorite fashion accessory of mine. Especially when you place your hands in the prayer positions. Matter of fact, I urge all my followers to forgo nail polish permanently and replace it with expertly applied soot. The nonexistent gods above will ignore our prayers better this way.” John Waters

I almost met him once. In the lobby of the Charles Theatre.

[iambiguous]

Death

“You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.” Ernest Cline

Heaven. Is that just how it is too?

“I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth, I know that you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.” Ava Dellaira

How…comforting?

“Death twitches my ear;
‘Live,’ he says, ‘I’m coming’.” Virgil

Or, sure, you might just be banned.

“Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.” Jonathan Harnisch

Virtually, for example.

“You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.” Neale Donald Walsch

If only all the way to the grave so far.

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Vladimir Nabokov

Sounds familiar.

[iambiguous]

Philosophy

“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’
Diogenes said: 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king." Anthony de Mello

But only until the workers of the world unite.

“Maybe that’s it…with what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces." Maybe…what we’re supposed to do is come together. That’s how we stop the breaking.” David Levithan

And it’s not like you won’t have plenty of One True Paths to choose from.

“The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.” St. Thomas Aquinas

And I’m sure if he were around today he’d advise you to start here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gdeV4Rk9EfL-NyraEGXXwSjDNeMaRoX

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it." Albert Camus

Or just make uo a new one.

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” Carl Sagan

Of course, he was just another Commie, right?

“If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.” Marcus Aurelius

Right, the truth never harmed anyone.

[iambiguous]

Free Will

“I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath.” Sam Harris

Actually, what if he can’t really take credit for anything other than what his brain compels him to take credit for?

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” Karl Marx

Take him for example.

"Hard to grasp democracy without free will.” Toba Beta

Unless, of course, we’re doing it right now.

“We prattle about free will, but we’re nothing but response . . . mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves.” Alfred Bester

Compelled then to prattle about that.

“Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. That’s always been a danger of the engineering mindset, as it moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and beings to design a more perfect social world. We are the screws and rivets in their grand design” Franklin Foer

Pray for us!

“Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life.” Sam Harris

See what I mean…the free will determinist?

[iambiguous]

Stanisław Lem from Solaris

Was it possible for thought to exist without consciousness?

God knows?

…even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.

Examples?

I was already thinking there was no way out of the vicious circle of madness—after all, no one can think with anything but his brain, no one can be outside himself to check whether the processes taking place in his body are normal.

Or, for that matter, abnormal.

It’s what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!

Next up: war of the worlds.

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.

Rhymes with dasein.

Giese was an unemotional man, but then in the study of Solaris emotion is a hindrance to the explorer. Imagination and premature theorizing are positive disadvantages in approaching a planet where—as has become clear—anything is possible. The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize.

What, even here?