The Human Question

http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2010/09/big-questions-online-is-human.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/88apr/wright.htm http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060972572/theatlanticmonthA/

Legendum est: https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/why-does-higgs-particle-matter

It seems that he was onto something after all... http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/transformations-lamarckism

It seems that those who know tell me that jellyfishes, octopedes, insects and vertebrates all form eyes because of something in the environment -- light -- rather than because there was a specific genetic predisposition. If that is true, then what about our ability to do math?  What is there are four other species of rational animal in the universe?  Don't we already know that -- IF they do math, then they will know that 2+3=5 with as great a certainty as we do? And wouldn't that be because of a different kind of light shining on their minds? n.b., nephew Bryan sent me article from The Tangled Bank: an Introduction to Evolution  by Carl Zimmer, which illustrates the evolution of eyes on pages 172.

...the Government of the United States deliberately encourages and even makes necessary by its laws the breeding--with a breakneck rapidity -- of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble-minded and criminal classes. Billions of dollars are expended by our state and federal governments and by private charities and philanthropies for the care, the maintenance, and the perpetuation  of these classes Year by year their numbers are mounting.  Year by year more money is expended.  The American public is taxed--heavily taxed--to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundations of our civilization.  More than one-quarter  of the total incomes of our States is spent upon the maintenance of asylums, prisons and other institutions for the care of the defective, the diseased and the delinquent.  Do not conclude, however, that all of our feeble-minded and mentally defective are segregated in institutions.  No, indeed.  This is a free country, a democratic country, a country o

found this at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scheler/ :  "...Scheler's claim that the human being is a God seeker allows for atheists and agnostics, but it does lead him to a much stronger claim. “Every finite spirit believes either in a God or in an idol” (GW V, 261). An idol is a finite object that is treated as if it were infinite, as if it were God (GW V, 263). The atheist is not really, according to Scheler, a non-believer. Rather the atheist believes in a no-God, believes that there is no absolute value or meaning. This is still a religious act and a religious belief. Scheler's point is that there is always an intending of the absolute, a seeking of a God. What is in question is necessarily what fulfills this intention. The human being is always already taking some object as a God. In the act of idolatry, this God is a finite object or good such as wealth, fame or power..."

While listening to what Wittgenstein has to say about necessity as it pertains to mathematics, I noted that he is not denying that we encounter constraint or necessity when doing mathematics: he is denying that this constraint comes from something outside the game.  Rather, it is from the game itself.  But what if mathematics is a game we can play with rational beings very different from ourselves?  Can we intuit that all would be constrained as we are?  Even if they are incredibly smarter?  And what about God?  Is math a game we play with God rather than being a kind of activity the we aim at God (or at God's Mind) as a kind of ideal object?

... is "this way." In other words, it presupposes (albeit not explicitly) that you and the other are cooperating in some common endeavor directed toward a common goal.  Without that presupposition, there is no communication.

Science as such cannot discuss miracles, but it can show them.

Psyche is the unity in the manifold of acts.

Complexity has to do with the way in which something can be described mathematically.  Something describable in a simple equation is, well, simple.  Something describable in a complex one is, more complicated than the other one (obviously I've forgotten the details, but that'll probably do for now). Thesis: isn't our description is always in part a function of how we interpret what we are looking at? Suppose someone thinks that the brain is a radiator: wouldn't he or she think that its mathematical description is simpler than would someone who recognizes the brain for what it is?  Yes, By several orders of magnitude! Suppose you were shown a tin bucket full of sand and asked to compare its complexity to that of  a human brain:   What if you found out later that each pebble in the tin bucket is actually (as long as you don't move it) shaped and situated precisely (to the nearest nanometer) in order to convey (in an ET language that you don't know) the histo

Better to say emergent agency than emergent property, for properties as such belong, and that to which they belong is an agent either in the full sense (e.g., you and I) or in a diminished sense (a falling rock). Try to define the property of an agent and you will see that it is a category mistake (taking a moment as a piece) to substantialize it, for it is always given as the property of a whole just as the shape and color of this desktop are both "of" this whole.  The "of-ness" of properties. Try to define the property of a non agent, and you will see the same, especially if you recall that causality is attributed to sub-agents only by analogy with agents.

If God does not exist, then His existence is impossible. But His existence IS possible. Therefore, God exists. The key here is to argue the second premise on the basis of analogy.  If goodness in things is objective, then there may be goodness ipse. One can argue the first premise on the basis of becoming: such a being could not come to be if not already existing.  But this may be cheating...

Human communication displays a common desire for the infinite, and in virtue of that display, constitutes as a goal the shared satisfaction of that desire.

The prayer of the scientist if he prayed, which is not likely: Lord, grant that my discovery may increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in  Brain  be published before the destruction takes place. (Walker Percy,  Love in the Ruins )

Aristotle's concept of energeia is a kind of temporal holism (and hence a basic evidence in support of anti-reductivism).  For the act of seeing continuously a ONE whole act, not an accumulation of an infinite number of infinitely small events (the latter being a reductive interpretation). It is only in virtue of energeia's being seen as such a temporal whole  that kinesis can be seen as a whole as well. Judgment, qua synthesis, is another kind of