Thinking about Thinking
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Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing
Q: In our last conversation, you said that there is no such thing as an uninterpreted fact. Are you saying that there is no objective ‘something’ that we have to measure the accuracy of our perceptions and knowledge against? A: No. But we have to frame the way we understand the relationship between the knower
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Toward a Participative Ontology and Epistemology
Q: What’s the question this post is attempting to answer? A: Why has our late modern experience for more and more people become so flat, one-dimensional, and with each passing decade so much more meaningless? Q: Do you have a short answer? A: Yes. It’s because the way we use language—and other symbolic representations—has come
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Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins
In our hyperindividualized age, a lot of us are searching for a storyteller: someone or something to tell us what our lives mean. Compared with the sense of purpose and identity that past generations found in sturdy communities, now “it’s very difficult to tell the story of who you are and what you’re doing,” Dr.
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Stonehenge Explained
Built on the site of an ancient cemetery, Stonehenge was a “monument of remembrance,” he said, and an “expression of unity” that pulled people together in the pursuit of a common endeavor. Yet, he said, “People don’t want it to be that simple as an explanation.” (NY Times 2/17/22) The U.S. Capitol explained 2500 years
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Christopher Nolan, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Unconscious
[I haven't had a chance to see Interstellar yet, but Nolan's work has always interested me, and I'm reposting a piece I wrote in 2010 about Tarkovski's Solaris, his response to Kubrick's 2001, which I saw for the first time around the time I first saw Nolan's Inception. I think the post makes sense even
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The Dream Prison of Conventional Wisdom, Part I
In the last several years I have been impressed with the power and persistence of conventional thinking in the face of powerful evidence that would contradict it. So what do I want to say here that hasn't be said a thousand times before referencing Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts, etc. Everybody reading here already understands
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Quote of the Day: Ian McGilchrist
Moral values are not somethig that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any other principle, for that matter, but are irreducible aspects fo the phenomenal world, like colour. I agree with Max Scheler, and for that matter with Wittgenstein, that moral value is a form of experience irreducible to any other
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Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments (repost)
All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking