Day 3572, Leviathan.

Daily picture, Quotes

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan
Chapter 13. The natural condition of mankind as concerning their happiness and misery


Nature has made men so equal in their physical and mental capacities that, although sometimes we may find one man who is obviously stronger in body or quicker of mind than another, yet taking all in all the difference between one and another is not so great that one man can claim to have any advantage ·of strength or skill or the like· that can’t just as well be claimed by some others. As for Ÿstrength of body: the weakest man is strong enough to kill the strongest, either by a secret plot or by an alliance with others who are in the same danger that he is in.

As for the faculties of the mind: I find that men are even more equal in these than they are in bodily strength. (In this discussion I set aside skills based on words, and especially the skill – known as ‘science’ – of being guided by general and infallible rules. Very few people have this, and even they don’t have it with respect to many things. I am
setting it aside because it isn’t a natural faculty that we are born with, nor is it something that we acquire – as we acquire prudence – while looking for something else.) Prudence is simply experience; and men will get an equal amount of that in an equal period of time spent on things that they equally apply themselves to. What may make such equality in credible is really just one’s vain sense of one’s own wisdom, which most men think they have more of than the common herd – that is, more than anyone else except for a few others whom they value because of their fame or because their agreement with them. It’s just a fact about human nature that however much a man may acknowledge many others to be more Ÿwitty, or more Ÿeloquent, or more Ÿlearned than he is, he won’t easily believe that many men are as Ÿwise as he is; for he sees his own wisdom close up, and other men’s at a distance. This, however, shows the equality of men rather than their inequality. For ordinarily there is no greater sign that something is equally distributed than that every man is contented with his share!


Distrust·: This equality of ability produces equality of hope for the attaining of our goals. So if any two men want a single thing which they can’t both enjoy, they become enemies; and each of them on the way to his goal (which is principally his own survival, though sometimes merely his delight) tries to destroy or subdue the other. And so it comes about that when someone has through farming and building come to possess a pleasant estate, if an invader would have nothing to fear but that one man’s individual power, there will probably be an invader – someone who comes with united forces to deprive him not only of the fruit of his labour but also of his life or liberty. And the ·successful· invader will then be in similar danger from someone else.

Read the rest here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2HCH0013

 

Day 3571, The origin of ideas.

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David Hume

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Section 2: The origin of ideas

Everyone will freely admit that the perceptions of the mind when a man Ÿfeels the pain of excessive heat or the pleasure of moderate warmth are considerably unlike what he feels when he later Ÿremembers this sensation or earlier Ÿlooks forward to it in his imagination. Memory and imagination may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses, but they can’t create a perception that has as much force and vivacity as the one they are copying. Even when they operate with greatest vigour, the most we will say is that they represent their object so vividly that we could almost say we feel or see it. Except when the mind is out of order because of disease or madness, memory and imagination can never be so lively as to create perceptions that are indistinguishable from the ones we have in seeing or feeling. The most lively thought is still dimmer than the dullest sensation.   

A similar distinction runs through all the other perceptions of the mind. A real fit of anger is very different from merely thinking of that emotion. If you tell me that someone is in love, I understand your meaning and form a correct conception of the state he is in; but I would never mistake that conception for the turmoil of actually being in love! When we think back on our past sensations and feelings, our thought is a faithful mirror that copies
its objects truly; but it does so in colours that are fainter and more washed-out than those in which our original perceptions were clothed. To tell one from the other you don’t need careful thought or philosophical ability.

So we can divide the mind’s perceptions into two classes, on the basis of their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forcible and lively are commonly called ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’. The others have no name in our language or in most others, presumably because we don’t need a general label for them except when we are doing
philosophy. Let us, then, take the liberty of calling them ‘impressions’, using that word in a slightly unusual sense. By the term ‘impression’, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions when we hear or see or feel or love or hate or desire or will. These are to be distinguished from ideas, which are the fainter perceptions of which we are conscious
when we reflect on our impressions.

Day 3570, neurobiology.

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Robert M. Sapolsky

Behave
The Approach in this Book

I make my living as a combination neurobiologist — someone who studies the brain — and primatologist — someone who studies monkeys and apes. Therefore, this is a book that is rooted in science, specifically biology. And out of that come three key points. First, you can’t begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology; I say this for the benefit of a certain breed of social scientist who finds biology to be irrelevant and a bit ideologically suspect when thinking about human social behavior. But just as important, second, you’re just as much up the creek if you rely only on biology; this is said for the benefit of a style of molecular fundamentalist who believes that the social sciences are destined to be consumed by “real” science. And as a third point, by the time you finish this book, you’ll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are “biological” and those that would be described as, say, “psychological” or “cultural.” Utterly intertwined.
Understanding the biology of these human behaviors is obviously important. But unfortunately it is hellishly complicated. 2 Now, if you were interested in the biology of, say, how migrating birds navigate, or in the mating reflex that occurs in female hamsters when they’re ovulating, this would be an easier task. But that’s not what we’re interested in. Instead, it’s human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.
How are we supposed to make sense of all these factors in thinking about behavior? We tend to use a certain cognitive strategy when dealing with complex, multifaceted phenomena, in that we break down those separate facets into categories, into buckets of explanation. Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexually solicitive gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him (I haven’t a clue if this is how it works, but let’s just suppose). And thus we have a key behavioral biological question — why did the chicken cross the road? And if you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling,” and if you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis (or some such thing), allowing her to move forward rapidly,” and if you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behavior in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation.
The goal of this book is to avoid such categorical thinking. Putting facts into nice cleanly demarcated buckets of explanation has its advantages — for example, it can help you remember facts better. But it can wreak havoc on your ability to think about those facts. This is because the boundaries between different categories are often arbitrary, but once some arbitrary boundary exists, we forget that it is arbitrary and get way too impressed with its importance.

 

 

Day 3569, Education.

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Krishnamurti

Chapter I
Education and the significance of life

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia. This is especially true in colleges and universities. We are turning out, as if through a mold, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible.

Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success. The urge to be successful, which is the pursuit of reward whether in the material or in the so-called spiritual sphere,
the search for inward or outward security, the desire for comfort—this whole process smothers discontent, puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear; and fear blocks the intelligent understanding of life. With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.

In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict,and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion. This fear of life, this fear of struggle and of new experience, kills in us the spirit of adventure; our whole upbringing and education have made us afraid to be different from our neighbor, afraid to
think contrary to the established pattern of society, falsely respectful of authority and tradition.

Fortunately, there are a few who are in earnest, who are willing to examine our human problems without the prejudice of the right or of the left; but in the vast majority of us, there is no real spirit of discontent, of revolt. When we yield uncomprehendingly to environment, any spirit of revolt that we may have had dies down, and our responsibilities soon put an end to it.

Revolt is of two kinds: there is violent revolt,  which is mere reaction, without understanding, against the existing order; and there is the deep psychological revolt of intelligence. There are many who revolt against the established orthodoxies only to fall into new orthodoxies, further illusions and concealed selfindulgences. What generally happens is that we break away from one group or set of ideals and join another group, take up other ideals, thus creating a new pattern of thought against which we will again have to revolt. Reaction only breeds opposition, and reform needs further reform.

Read the rest here: https://kfoundation.org/krishnamurti-education-and-the-significance-of-life-chapter-1/

 

Day 3568, not the fault.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

317 The judgment ofthe evening. – He who reflects on the work he has done during the day and during his life, but does so when he has finished it and is tired, usually arrives at a melancholy conclusion: this however is not the fault of his day or his life, but ofhis tiredness.- In the midst of our work we usually have no leisure to pass judgment on life and existence, nor in the midst ofour pleasures: but ifwe should happen to do so, we should no longer agree with him who waited for the seventh day and its repose before he decided that everything was very beautiful – he had let the better moment go by.

Day 3562, unfamiliar.

Do you know that they say?, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

312 The forgetful – In outbursts of passion, and in the fantasising of dreams and insanity, a man rediscovers his own and mankind’s prehistory: animality with its savage grimaces; on these occasions his memory goes sufficiently far back, while his civilised condition evolves out of a forgetting of these primal experiences, that is to say out of a relaxation of his memory. He who, as a forgetter on a grand scale, is wholly unfamiliar with all this does not understand man- but it is to the general advantage that there should appear here and there such individuals as ‘do not understand us’ and who are as it were begotten by the seed of the gods and born of reason.