Day 2236, human nature.

Day's pictures, Philosophy

David Hume

Treatise of human nature

Book I: The understanding

Section 1: The origin of our ideas All the perceptions of the human mind fall into two distinct kinds, which I shall call ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’. These differ in the degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind and make their way into our thought or consciousness. The perceptions that enter with most force and violence we may name ‘impressions’; and under this name I bring all our sensations, passions, and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul [= ‘mind’; no religious implications]. By ‘ideas’ I mean the faint images of the others in thinking and reasoning: for example, all the perceptions aroused by your reading this book – apart from perceptions arising from sight and touch, and apart from the immediate pleasure or uneasiness your reading may cause in you. I don’t think I need to say much to explain this distinction: everyone will readily perceive for himself the difference between feeling (·impressions·) and thinking (·ideas·).

Read about this book here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Treatise_of_Human_Nature

Read this book here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4705

 

 

 

Day 2234, marbles.

Day's pictures, Poetry

Afraid of the dark

we embark in imaginary

boundaries

Observations: there are countless political, religious and cultural views. Most people have their own distinctive views on these matters. Most people have more believe than doubt in their own views resulting in these countless different opinions or certainties.

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Day 2233, epistemology.

Day's pictures

 

Today at work, I listened to a book about the history of Italy, and thoughts kept popping into my head that made me pause. For thousands of years, we all built this wealth of knowledge but listening to descriptions of life over the past 2000 years and comparing that to how we live now, not much is changed besides the cloth we wear and the houses we live in.

This wealth of knowledge has brought us a lot, of course. We live longer, and our societies are a lot safer compared to the ones that came before us. All this thinking about life and how to live it by all these thinkers has slowly trickled down, it seems. Did you know that there were places in Italy 150 years ago where 100% of the inhabitants were illiterate? Twenty-five percent of newborns would die in the first year of their life, and because of this, life expectancy was around 30 in that same period. We have come a long way, but if you read what people thought about life, politics, and society back then, and even earlier, you will realize that progress is mostly reserved for our material well-being.

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