Category: ideas

“For the famous, immortality may actually be achieved during a lifetime, but the rest of us have to wait until death, when the ice releases our youths, and we become all of our selves again.”

“What is progress? In culture, and especially in high culture, progress is the attempt to make something better, which implies hierarchical thinking: if there is something better, this means that there is also something worse.”

“That neural circuitry is all subcortical; it’s not conscious. … The minute something is received as dangerous, or threatening, it invokes this defensive physical reaction. That’s the connection between snapping and threat detection, and that explains why we’re bewildered after we react in this way.”

“Now, in Germany and elsewhere, doors are closing. But what are the potential consequences of this resistance to outsiders, to those in need? Is it justified? Do we owe the suffering and dispossessed something more, if we are to call ourselves ethical beings?”

Last month, Gerald Dworkin posted a list of ten lies he considered justified and asked readers to respond. They “brought forth almost every position that has ever been put forward by philosophers on the subject.”

Nigel Warburton: “In my view philosophy is primarily the attempt to understand, and as such is an activity of enquiry. There’s no guarantee that discovering how things are will benefit us psychologically: it might in fact make things much worse.”
Jules Evans: “I’m not arguing that all philosophy is therapy, but rather that ancient Greeks and Romans viewed philosophy that way, as did many Indian philosophers. … Ancient philosophy really can help people overcome suffering.”

These two professors pin it on “the locating of philosophy within a modern institution (the research university) in the late 19th century. This institutionalization of philosophy made it into a discipline that could be seriously pursued only in an academic setting. This fact represents one of the enduring failures of contemporary philosophy.”

“However quietly it begins to arrive, The Age of Autonomy marks a giant step beyond the world of connected devices and the Internet of Things. With 50 billion devices and a trillion sensors coming on line, simple practicality would suggest autonomy will become a necessity.”

The public domain is robust because people on the Internet—in this case, Project Gutenberg’s volunteer corps, led by the late Hart—willed this freedom into being.

“It has generated a rare level of interest among data-driven tech people and entrepreneurs who see personal development as just another optimization problem, if a uniquely central one. Yet, while [the] methods are unusual, its aspirational promise – that a better version of ourselves is within reach – is distinctly familiar.”