Quotes

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.

Day 3556, extricate.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

281 The ego wants everything.- It seems that the sole purpose of human action is possession: this idea is, at least, contained in the various languages, which regard all past action as having put us in possession of something (‘I have spoken, struggled, conquered’: that is to say, I am now in possession of my speech, struggle, victory). How greedy
man appears here! He does not want to extricate himself even from the past, but wants to continue to have it!

Day 3555, You know.

Ai, Quotes

Today I had a long “discussion” with AI. I have tried different versions now and also downloaded some AI models to try them offline. Story short. Some of them know a lot and can present it quite impressively. Here is an AI-generated summary and podcast of our exchange. 

Understanding the Great Divide: Nietzsche vs. Krishnamurti

Introduction: Two Rebels, Two Different Paths

Both Friedrich Nietzsche and Jiddu Krishnamurti were radical thinkers who challenged the foundations of human belief and social structures. They saw humanity as trapped in a prison of its own making—a prison built from tradition, morality, and second-hand truths. This document is designed to guide you through their philosophies, starting with the common ground where they tore down the old world and then exploring the vastly different paths they forged. As one analysis puts it, their relationship can be summed up perfectly: “They meet in negation but diverge sharply in direction.”

Continue reading →

Day 3541, anticipate

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

254 Anticipators. -The distinguishing, but also perilous quality in poetic natures is their exhaustive imagination: they anticipate, enjoy and suffer in advance that which is to come or could come, so that when it finally does come they are already tired of it. Lord Byron, who was only too familiar with all this, wrote in his diary: ‘If I have a son he shall become something quite prosaic- a lawyer or a pirate.’

Day 3534, three times.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

249 Who is ever alone? – The timid man does not know what it is to be alone: an enemy is always standing behind his chair.- Oh, if there were someone who could tell us the history of that subtle feeling called solitude!

250 Night and music. – The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.

251 Stoical. -There is a cheerfulness peculiar to the Stoic: he experiences it whenever he feels hemmed in by the formalities he himself has prescribed for his conduct; he then enjoys the sensation of himself as dominator.

Day 3513, cannot grasp.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

219 Deception in self-humiliation. -Through your irrational behaviour you have done your neighbour great harm and destroyed an irrecoverable happiness – and then you subdue your vanity sufficiently to go to him, expose your irrationality to his contempt and believe that after this painful and to you very difficult scene everything has again been put to rights- that your voluntary loss ofhonour compensates for his involuntary loss of happiness: suffused with this feeling you go away uplifted and restored in your virtue. But your neighbour is still as unhappy as he was before, he derives no consolation from the fact that you are irrational and have admitted it, he even remembers the
painful sight ofyou pouring contempt upon yourselfbefore him as a fresh injury for which he has to thank you- but he has no thought of revenge and cannot grasp how you could in any way compensate him. At bottom that scene you performed was performed before yourself and for the sake of yourself: you invited in a witness of it, again for
your own sake and not for his – do not deceive yourself.

Day 3506,

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Friedrich Nietzsche

To Paul Deussen
Leipzig, second half of October, 1868

My dear Friend: — Your letters arrive of late at some special festive occasion. Thus, when, not too long ago, I moved to my new residence in Leipzig, your letter which our friend Roscher had correctly dispatched here, was lying on the table. Soon thereafter I addressed the first part of my Laertianum to you so I may not be accused again of being ungrateful to my friends and through continuous silence create the impression as if I were dead. Nay, I live and, what’s more, live well and wish that you would sometime personally convince yourself of it, especially to realize that ϕιλοσοϕε (to philosophize) and being sick are not really identical concepts, but that, on the contrary, there is a certain “health,” the eternal foe of profound philosophy which, as you know, nowadays has become the nickname of certain kinds of border heroes and historians.

Day 3504,

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of Idols
How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth, The Four Great Errors

4 The error of imaginary causes . – To start from the dream: on to a certain sensation, the result for example of a distant cannon – shot, a cause is subsequently foisted (often a whole little novel in which precisely the dreamer is the chief character). The sensation, meanwhile, continues to persist, as a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the cause – creating drive permits it to step into the foreground – now no longer as a chance occurrence but as ‘meaning’. The cannon – shot enters in a causal way, in an apparent inversion of time. That which comes later, the motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details which pass like lightning, the shot follows .… What has happened? The ideas engendered by a certain condition have been misunderstood as the cause of that condition. – We do just the same thing, in fact, when we are awake. Most of our general feelings – every sort of restraint, pressure, tension, explosion in the play and counter – play of our organs, likewise and especially the condition of the nervus sympathicus – excite our cause – creating drive: we want to have a reason for feeling as we do – for feeling well or for feeling ill. It never suffices us simply to establish the mere fact that we feel as we do: we acknowledge this fact – become conscious of it – only when we have furnished it with a motivation of some kind. – The memory, which in such a case becomes active without our being aware of it, calls up earlier states of a similar kind and the causal interpretations which have grown out of them – not their causality. To be sure, the belief that these ideas, the accompanying occurrences in the consciousness, were causes is also brought up by the memory. Thus there arises an habituation to a certain causal interpretation which in truth obstructs and even prohibits an investigation of the cause.

Day 3500, especially.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
Tokens Of Higher And Lower Culture

230 Esprit fort. – Compared with him who has tradition on his side and requires no reasons for his actions, the free spirit is always weak, especially in actions; for he is aware of too many motives and points of view and therefore possesses an uncertain and unpractised hand. What means are there of nonetheless rendering him relatively strong, so that he shall at least make his way and not ineffectually perish? How does the strong spirit (esprit fort) come into being? This is in the individual case the question how genius is produced. Whence comes the energy, the inflexible strength, the endurance with which the individual thinks, in opposition to tradition, to attain to a wholly individual perception of the world?