Category: ideas

“Even “1+1=2” is less obvious than it seems at first. Beginning in the early part of the 20th century, mathematicians and philosophers, led at first by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege and later by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and others, tried to see whether mathematical knowledge–facts like “1+1=2″–could be reduced to the laws of logic.”

“Can you tell a real Jackson Pollock painting from a watered-down replica? If so, don’t feel too superior: So can your eight-month-old baby.”

“The reality is, no system of secular ethics has managed to displace religious approaches to ethics in the contemporary popular imagination. It is worth asking why.”

“Pigs, cows, goats, horses, and dogs that allegedly broke the law were routinely subjected to the same legal proceedings as humans. In a court of law, they were treated as persons. … What the trials strongly suggest is that pre-industrial citizens deemed the animals among them worthy of human justice primarily because they had, like humans, the free will to make basic choices.”

“When someone is punching Spider-Man, he feels the sensation and can avoid it. Our suit is the same concept.” The inventors intend it for safety uses, of course.

Researchers at Tufts University “want to give computers the ability to directly monitor your brain as you work, responding to your needs in real time. In other words, it will act as a filter, letting through information when you want it while keeping the rest at bay.”

Alain de Botton has been arguing that we should have temples without God(s) – and in fact an atheist congregation of some 300 souls has sprung up in north London; members “congregate to sing secular songs, celebrate life and the natural world, have readings from secular texts, like Alice in Wonderland, and have secular sermons, on topics like ‘life is all too brief and nothing comes after it’.”

Claire Creffield: “I didn’t warm to Alain de Botton’s suggestion, in his book Religion for Atheists, that we should start building ‘atheist temples’, because not far from my house there is already a splendid one. … The building is Durham Cathedral.”

“When I turned on the implant about a month and half after surgery, I ran down the hall, screaming. I expected that I would be able to hear instantaneously. That proved not to be the case. You see, if you never heard before, any unfamiliar sensation feels like pain.”

“In August of 1563, Michel de Montaigne, the famous French essayist, was introduced to three [indigenous Brazilians] who were visiting Rouen, France, at the invitation of King Charles the Ninth. The three men had never before left Brazil, had just been subjected to a long interrogation by the king (who was 13 years old at the time), and if they had not already contracted some dangerous European illness, they were surely undergoing a rather severe case of culture shock. Despite this, they still had enough poise to lucidly respond to Montaigne’s questions about what they thought of their new surroundings.”