Come inside! And when you do, the first thing you see is a big smile. Big smiles often hide something, and most of the time, it’s something damaged turned into a peaceful look down, with a smile, on all those smalltime problems surrounding the smiler. So you see a smile when you come inside and closer. Also, here, it’s hiding something you can only see when you come really close or if you stay exposed for a longer time.
The smile is a good tool; it protects the surroundings from all the darkness and lowness you feel for them and the words you want use to tell them this; the smile can prevent you from talking, just smile, don’t talk is a motto you will find inside of me and a lot of smilers
There are many different smiles, the one I talk about is almost always there as if it’s grown into your face, as if time and sorrow worked together and carved it out, molded your face into a permanent state of happiness.
Time and sorrow need a tool to carve and ease the pain. Anger is the tool that cuts and eats away your life and flesh and is a great carver for permanently marking a body and, thus, a mind. Grace in mind and body is the anodyne that comes along to ease the pain and brings balance to the life behind the smile.
This gloomy, shiny smiley stench coming from this carved-in face, penetrating my brain, has a soothing effect on my daily life. It calms me down and sands away all the rough edges of this overactive brain that, even I believe, sometimes belongs to a sleepy doofus.
Smiling through life when you have eyes on you. When you are alone, the world is blind, and you just…are…Your face is…just a face without expression because what is an expression without eyes to reflect on?
The best thing you can do in life is to study history and repair what's left of it. This way, in a thousand years, curious minds can only study what we have repaired and not what we have distroyed.
Let's fix the past and don't think about the future. Let's just stop for a while.
The boat you see here is caled Dyrafjeld. I help with the restauration and hopefully this will extend the life expectancy well over what you can expect. You can read more here:http://www.dyrafjeld.no/index-eng.php
I don’t write much about politics and what’s happening in the world. I try to understand it by studying history and philosophy, but that’s more about the mechanisms of wars and other pains we humans like to inflict on each other. Maybe liked is not the right word, but I still think that in 5000 years, history books will precisely write that about us humans in the pre-civilized age; they loved to make each other miserable, why else would you poison the environment, don’t feed the whole population and start wars for vanity, pride and money.
The thing is that most people just want to live their lives, and for most of us, that’s already enough of a task. But a smaller group inherited the trades that make them frontrunners and not followers like the rest. Putin and a handful of people have the power to steer a whole country and large parts of the world into ruin. Bush and his clique did the same, and the list goes on and on. Democracy is supposed to be the cure, and in some sense, it does a good job, but that’s only because all the other forms of government fail even harder; it still can’t stop dictators from rising to the top.
In Holland, we just had our yearly Memorial Day, and we stand still by what happened during the Second World War. At the same time, a quarter of the people voted for a racist party that had, til not so long ago, a point in their party program that promised new voters that all Muslims would be banned from Holland and their religion criminalized. Most people can only listen to the drummer and goosestep the direction ordered, and the drummers know that.
I don’t see a solution. We are all different, and most people are still not seriously interested in the reason why they do the things they do. Most people can be talked into reason, but that’s part of the problem; they can be talked into all kinds of ideas. My motto for the future would be: don’t believe your own thoughts and those of others, at least not at firsthand.
“Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” Hermann Goring
Göring was the second highest-ranking official tried at Nuremberg, behind Reich President (former Admiral) Karl Dönitz. The prosecution levelled an indictment of four charges, including a charge of conspiracy; waging a war of aggression; war crimes, including the plundering and removal to Germany of works of art and other property; and crimes against humanity, including the disappearance of political and other opponents under the Nacht und Nebel decree; the torture and ill treatment of prisoners of war; and the murder and enslavement of civilians, including what was at the time estimated to be 5,700,000 Jews. (Wikipedia)
When I started my journey into the world of what there is to know about us humans, I liked to go to one of the many second-hand bookstores in the town close to where I was living. For little money, you could buy a few books, and often I read the introduction and then decided if it was worth my time. One of these books was written By Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist with some provoking thoughts. The titles of some of his books speak for themselves: The Fear of Freedom, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics and The art of loving . From this last book, you can find some quotes and links to the pages of the book at archive.org
“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.” The Art of Loving
“But actually, people want to conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies. Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.”The Art of Loving
“Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and the connection that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.”The Art of Loving
I enjoy thinking about all these abstract ideas about our minds, free will, and the limits of what we can know. I think about these things when I write in the evening and sometimes during the day, but I also have a normal job and have to interact with people who have no interest and probably have no clue about these thoughts I have. It is like having some obscure hobby; people like you to tell about it but not too much, and you probably have to use a lot of words to explain a detail while discussing with someone with the same hobby, a name and a nod will often be enough.
I can only write in the evenings, and often, a long day of work has taken most of my energy. I have tried to organize my work, and I have many lists with ideas and attempts. One philosopher I like is Benedict de Spinoza. I bought his book Ethics many years ago, not to read it but just to have it and maybe look up some quotes. He probably had the same problem that I have with organizing his thoughts. The difference is that he started systematically and didn’t quit. You can read on Wikipedia in more detail about his process, but, in short, he writes down propositions comes up with proofs, and connects all of these with each other. I wish I had the time to study it; maybe one day, I will.
The way I study philosophy, the way I got into it, was by reading general books about philosophy and, over time, books about philosophers. I later mixed this with books written by philosophers, but the main thing I learned from this approach is who is who and who is read by whom. Spinoza is one of those philosophers who is read by most philosophers after him, maybe not as much as the three famous Greek philosophers, but his thoughts were, and still are, important. Together with his contemporary philosophers like Rene Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, he paved the way from ancient Greek thought to our modern, more rationalistic society. I cannot tell you in detail why he is important, but because he is highly regarded by his peers, I will also regard him highly. It is like admiring Einstein while only understanding 5% of why he should be admired.
Another challenge with studying philosophy this way is that I might have strong disagreements with, for example, Spinoza, but if many accomplished philosophers agree with him then I have to figure out why my criticism seems to be wrong. For me, this is a good lesson in humility but it is important to get a good overview of who is who in philosophy or whatever new field of knowledge you enter. That’s why I never recommend reading books written by philosophers at the beginning of your journey; you might not know that the first book you read is from a charlatan, or you might disagree with an expert in its field because you don’t recognize them as such.
You can read part of Spinoza’s book underneath and the rest at Gutenberg.org. I highlighted one part that I quoted in an earlier post. This is why I bought his book years ago: so I can place quotes I read in their contexts. These days, you can do all of this on the internet.
From Ethics (1677)
PROP. XXXV. Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.
Proof. — There is nothing positive in ideas, which causes them to be called false (II. xxxiii.); but falsity cannot consist in simple privation (for minds, not bodies, are said to err and to be mistaken), neither can it consist in absolute ignorance, for ignorance and error are not identical; wherefore it consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve. Q.E.D.
Note. — In the note to II. xvii. I explained how error consists in the privation of knowledge, but in order to throw more light on the subject I will give an example. For instance, men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions. As for their saying that human actions depend on the will, this is a mere phrase without any idea to correspond thereto. What the will is, and how it moves the body, they none of them know; those who boast of such knowledge, and feign dwellings and habitations for the soul, are wont to provoke either laughter or disgust. So, again, when we look at the sun, we imagine that it is distant from us about two hundred feet; this error does not lie solely in this fancy, but in the fact that, while we thus imagine, we do not know the sun’s true distance or the cause of the fancy. For although we afterwards learn, that the sun is distant from us more than six hundred of the earth’s diameters, we none the less shall fancy it to be near; for we do not imagine the sun as near us, because we are ignorant of its true distance, but because the modification of our body involves the essence of the sun, in so far as our said body is affected thereby.
Individualism. I was raised in the West, and as such, I believed, till I was around 21, that the goal in life was to make a good life for myself. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I wanted to make money and use this to buy my way to a future that mostly revolved around me. I had no idea what kind of negative effect this individualistic and capitalistic mindset had on the world, it didn’t cross my mind, till it did. I am still guilty of this inbred behavior, but at least I feel guilty now, and I try to steer away from what comes easy. But it has steered my choices in profound ways, I have worked for nonprofit organizations for most of my career, a more or less conscious decision.
However, this individualism or egoism is not unique to only our culture; we are all different in the way we look and the experiences we have, and the culture we grew up in is not more than a layer this experience has to go through. We also have a slightly unique way of dealing with the world around us and within us, but all these individual characteristics are, for the most part, exclusively yours, only when you look really close. Our uniqueness fades away the more distance you have from it. You can describe unique characteristics to a group of a thousand people and forget that it’s made up of a thousand individuals and you.
You are also made up of a thousand individual parts and experiences, and you and the outside world see that combination as your characteristics, your individuality. But just as a group of a thousand people can only be judged on a superficial level and thus labeled, so is your individuality a loose… estimation of who you are. Maybe there isn’t even a real you besides this view from a distance of the parts that seem to form you.
Does this all matter? You are so used to yourself and how you behave that it might as well be seen as being a part of who you are. So-called reality will probably agree with you, and in our daily life, it is easier to say about yourself or someone else who and what we or they seem to be. However, the downside of putting each other in boxes is that there are a lot of problems with this. Look at history and the news and see how often labels around people’s necks are part of the problem and even worse when whole groups get labeled and are put in boxes.
It is something typically human, I think. Imagine the first humans learning how to speak and how the most influential person in that first group decided what to name the things around them, the one with the loudest voice you could say. We are all conditioned to accept authority in our lives and the naming they do, even the flawed authority in ourselves.
Who are you? I think the best way of finding yourself is not to look for it but just be and take what you seem to be not too seriously, especially the labels attached to certain behaviors because labels come with expectations, and expectations are not timeless, let alone real.
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” Friedrich Nietzsche
“I won’t tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world’s voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!” Oscar Wilde
“You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If we are just a product of nature and consciousness, an outcome of a random mutation, why are we making such a big fuss about everything? What do I mean by that? Where do I get that from you might ask. And trust me, I ask those questions myself a lot.
“You can only be afraid of what you think you know.”
“The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.” J. Krishnamurti
I love quotes like this. Consciousness has as a byproduct the realization that there is an I and a time that passes and that takes away part of our freedom. We live in a small group and call it our group, and the other groups divide the world into two, three, and more because it’s our nature. Our consciousness invents the reasons why we believe this is our land and our god is the only one. We have been used to believing our own thoughts, and we hardly realize the nature and origin of our thoughts. Only when we are drunk, sad, or mad do we realize that our thoughts have their roots somewhere deep inside us, feeding itself on an ancient well. Krishnamurti is important to me because he has a lot of knowledge of Eastern philosophy and religion and is critical about it, like a Western philosopher. He is not telling you how to live your life; he just observes and tries to communicate what he sees like an Eistein could see the universe. He is like a Nietzsche is to me, someone who understand the nature of who we are. His life story is also interesting to investigate.
“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!” Friedrich Nietzsche
This quite is not so different from the ones above; Nietzsche also understands that our beliefs and opinions are just that. He also understands that the reason why there is constant turmoil between people is that passionate belief in our own truths. I love Nietzsche because he embraces the struggle we have in ourselves. Life is not to avoid our nature and complain about its outcome and effect but to live with it and stop attaching values to it. In some sense, he does the same as Krishnamurti, only Nietzsche has no legacy of Eastern philosophy that often has a tendency to teach you how to endure our so-called suffering instead of approaching it more… let’s say: impersonal…
“Man is the cruelest animal.” Friedrich Nietzsche
“I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.” Baruch Spinoza
“People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Albert Einstein
Religious people are abnormal. As a normal person, I don’t understand how you can believe in a certain version of a religion and maintain that you know better which religion is true than the other believers in their particular religion. Why would these religious people think that they have more right to the claim of what is true? Why don’t the others not have that right? Why are religious people so arrogant? Is arrogance not the ultimate abnormality in a world filled with interpretations? Is religion the last convulsion of a humanity moving out of childhood? Is religion that cozy blanket that has kept you safe for so long?
But religion is not the only safety blanket, of course; many behaviors in “adulthood” function as safety blankets. Most of our lives, even the normal ones, are a constant longing for and use of childhood carelessness. Growing up is an art that no one has mastered fully yet. Maybe I am wrong, but I have never met or read about a person who did not have some kind of safety blanket, a belief that is not grounded in reality but just a belief.
I have lived among people who don’t speak my language for a long time. I understand them well enough, but not when they speak their own dialects. But still… I learn who they are by the abundance of other signals. Language is overrated as one of the tools that helps us communicate with each other.
We might speak to ourselves every now and then, but most of the time, these words are afterthoughts thrown at our actions and feelings, a clumsy way to rationalize or order our inner world. In some sense, we also do this when we communicate with others outside ourselves. We don’t need to talk to the people we really know.
The strange thing about us humans is that we sometimes learn to see something we hold as truth in a new light. We learned something new, and looking back, we find it hard to understand how we could ever have been so foolish. But then, we keep on living and believing many of our other and sometimes older beliefs. Are we so hardwired to believe what is in us despite the knowledge that we have been wrong many times? Intelligence might be just a trick we dumb animals are only good at when we play.
You can freely choose the latest fashion from the choices offered. The fact that most people in old pictures are easily recognized as coming from a specific time shows that there were only a few styles to choose from. We freely choose to all look the same, even if we don’t want to. We still look out of order in a recognizable style. Going against the grain has also its style. We choose between what is on offer, though you might question the freedom in such a forced choice.
The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
The problem of free will. We had no say in who we are, what our character is, and where our upbringing has pushed us. We glide on a slide down to our end, and only the wiggle room between the sides of the slide gives us the impression that we have free will.
We will no longer condemn each other for having red hair, being gay, or being a woman. One day, we will no longer condemn each other for our other traits. There will no longer be a right way to live, and the only boundary will be the freedom of others to live their lives fitting the way they are. Society will no longer blame the drunken driver; it will only take away their driver’s license in the same way that someone with a contagious disease gets quarantined. Life will still not be fair, but our political way of living is no longer up for debate; it will have no value and should be contested in the same way we contest our choice of clothing.
People who don’t believe in free will will see a future like this. And where is the choice to make this change in you and society, you might ask? It has to be similar to the process of emancipating women. It will go slowly, but people will accept it over time, and no one person or idea will tip the scale.
Inspecting water pumps together with the head of the village, Cambodia 1993.
The following short aphorism from the book Human All Too Human has no hidden traps or meanings I just like the way it flows. You can read the original at the bottom, but the nice thing about the English language combined with the characters of the translators is that you can enjoy it in several forms and choose the one you like. Let me know which one you like the most. I personally prefer Hollingdale translations.
-488 Composure in action. – Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action usually acts with greater composure than the fierceness of his desires before he acted had led us to expect. (Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 1986)
-488 Calm in action. As a waterfall becomes slower and more floating as it plunges, so the great man of action will act with greater calm than could be expected from his violent desire before the deed. (Translated by Marion Faber, 1984)
-488 Equanimity in action. -As a waterfall moves more slowly and floats more leisurely as it plunges downward, so a great man of action tends to act with more equanimity than his tempestuous desire prior to acting would have led us to expect. (Translated by Gary Handwerk, 1995)
488. Calmness in action.—As a cascade in its descent becomes more deliberate and suspended, so the great man of action usually acts with more calmness than his strong passions previous to action would lead one to expect. (Translated by Helen Zimmern, 1909)
-488 The calm indeed. — Just as a waterfall becomes slower and more floating as it falls, so the great man of deeds tends to act with more calmness, which is what his stormy desire before the deed led to expect. (Google translate, 2024)
-488 The calm indeed. Just as a waterfall becomes slower and more flowing as it falls, so the great man of deeds tends to act with more calmness, which is not what his stormy desire before the deed led to expect. (Translated by Chat GPT 3.5, 2024)
I told ChatGPT that it was the same translation as Googles translation, it apologized and gave me a new translation:
The tranquility, indeed. Just as a waterfall slows and becomes more graceful in its descent, similarly, the person of great deeds tends to act with more calmness, contrary to what his turbulent desire before the deed might have suggested. (Translated by Chat GPT 3.5, 2024)
Die Ruhe in der That. — Wie ein Wasserfall im Sturz langsamer und schwebender wird, so pflegt der grosse Mensch der That mit mehr Ruhe zu handeln, also seine stürmische Begierde vor der That es erwarten liess.
We were probably standing still here, not to give the kids a chance to pose for me, but still, they did. I was almost always in the last car, looking back at what came towards us and my camera was never far away. We were for those kids, probably what the police or firefighters were to us when we were that young. I was stationed in an area of Cambodia bordering Thailand. It was an erea that was abandoned for many years because the Kmehr Rouge was holding out there to the last moment. After the first UN soldiers arrived, the people living in the refugee camps in Thailand came slowly back. Most of them were born in refugee camps in Cambodia’s neighboring country and had no bond with the area aside from some sparse stories of the elders who survived the killings. These kids you see here are most likely not aware of what happened to the place they soon started calling home; by now, they probably know what they live there.
There are a few moments from my time in Cambodia that I still remember. One of them was captured in this picture. A couple of times per week we went on patrol, most of the time we drove the same routes but not this time. On this picture you can see a street and a wagon and a row of trees, the reason why this is so memorable for me is because of the settlement behind the tree’s. The little village close to our camp was small, maybe 10 huts and nothing else. The village we drove past this day had some stone buildings and some sort of centrum. It was the first sign that people lived here before all the problems started in Cambodia. For some reason this moved me and this picture captures civilization for me.
Yesterday I wrote about free will and that we don’t have it. Now, I have very few visitors who read my blog, but there are always a handful of people who do and even like it. Yesterday was the first time in 2881 days that no one liked what I had written. It is understandable, even amongst people who study us people professionally or in their free time, and even philosophers are, on the whole, defenders of some sort of free will. Almost everybody among these thinkers knows that we are determined by where we grow up and that minor damages in the brain we have, but most of them don’t want to go all the way and call in the help of some kind of mysterious force that is not connected to our material body but can act separate from that. It is like what believers in God do when they say that God is responsible when the scientists say that they don’t know what caused, for instance, the Big Bang. It is called the God of the gaps, and that is what most people do when there is uncertainty about what the last cause is of our behavior.
Some quotes from people who have written about our lack of free will.
Those with free will, a wonderful illusion whereby the human being has made himself into a higher being; the highest nobility, noticeable in good as in bad. Yet already bestial. Anyone who raises himself above it, raises himself above the animal and becomes a conscious plant. The act of free will would be the miracle, the break in the chain of nature. Humans would be miracle-doers. The consciousness of a motive brings deception along with it-the intellect {is} the primeval and sole liar. Friedrich Nietzsche in The Will To Power
Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime – by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?Sam Harris in Free Will
In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.Robert M. Sapolsky in Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills. In Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organization does in nowise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or irrational, without his will being for any thing in these various states. Baron d’Holbach
Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only ‘pseudo problems,’ because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision. Percy Williams Bridgman, The Nature of Physical Theory
Which do you think is more valuable to humanity? a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of “free will” can be compatible with determinism? or b. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society? Of course my answer is b). Jerry A. Coyne
People erroneously jump to the conclusions that if I want to press it, I choose to want to. This is of course false. I don’t choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly. Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The conviction that a law of necessity governs human activities introduces into our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence and an excellence, such as would be unattainable without this conviction.Albert Einstein
Nochrisis 