Quotes

Day 2965, standing in the light.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Quotes

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.

 

Day 2964, Individual.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Quotes

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

Day 2962, control.

Daily picture, Quotes

J. Krishnamurti

The Krishnamurti reader
15 Life without a Shadow of Control

…So the question arises, can thought be aware of itself? You are thinking now, aren’t you? When I ask you a question, the whole movement of thinking arises. Right? Obviously. Now I am asking  whether that thinking itself sees itself thinking? No, it is not possible. You see, I am asking whether one can live a life without having a single conflict, a single effort, without any form of control. We live with effort, we struggle; there is always achieving, moving, and so our life is lived in constant struggle, constant battle, constant contradiction-“I must do this, I must not do that, I must control myself, why should I control myself, that is oldfashioned, I will do what I want to do.” All that is a movement of violence. We are asking if it is possible to live without any shadow of control. Which does not mean doing everything you want to do. That is too childish, because you cannot. Where there is control there is conflict, there is a battle going on, which expresses  itself in many, many different ways-violence, suppression, neuroticism, and permissiveness. So I am asking myself and you whether we can live a daily life without a shadow of control. To live that way, I have to find out who the controller is. Is the controller different from the controlled? If they are both the same, there is no need for control. If I am jealous because you have everything and I have nothing, from that jealousy arises anger, hatred, envy, a sense of violence. I want to have all that you have, and if I can’t get it I get bitter, angry, and all the rest follows. So can I live without jealousy, which means without comparison? Test it out. Can you live your daily life without comparing at all? Of course there is comparing when I choose something to wear. I am not talking about that. I am talking about not having any sense of measurement psychologically, which is comparison. If you have no measurement at all, will you decay, will you become a vegetable, do nothing, stagnate? Because you are comparing, because you are struggling, you think you are living, but if you don’t struggle, it may be a totally different form of living.

Day 2959, who are well.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche 

The Will to Power
Book One: European Nihilism

75 An able craftsman or scholar cuts a fine figure when he takes pride in his art and looks on life content and satisfied. But nothing looks more wretched than when a shoemaker or schoolmaster gives us to understand with a suffering mind that he was really born for something better. There is nothing better than what is good, and good is having some ability and using that to create Tuchtigkeit or virtu in the Italian Renaissance sense. Today, in our time when the state has an absurdly fat stomach, there are in all fields and departments, in addition to the real workers, also “representatives”; e.g., besides the scholars also scribblers, besides the suffering classes also garrulous, boastful ne’er-do-wells who “represent” this suffering, not to speak of the professional politicians who are well off while “representing” distress with powerful lungs before a parliament. Our modern life is extremely expensive owing to the large number of intermediaries; in an ancient city, on the other hand, and, echoing that, also in many cities in Spain and Italy, one appeared oneself and would have given a hoot to such modern representatives and intermediaries-or a kick!

Day 2955, wondering.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Untimely Meditations
On the uses and disadvantages of history for life

1. Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness – what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say: ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ -but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering.

Day 2952, because.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

On the Genealogy of Morals
Prologue

3 Because of a doubt peculiar to my own nature, which I am reluctant to confess—for it concerns itself with morality, with everything which up to the present has been celebrated on earth as morality—a doubt which came into my life so early, so uninvited, so irresistibly, in such contradiction to my surroundings, my age, the examples around me, and my origin, that I would almost have the right to call it my “a priori” [before experience]—because of this, my curiosity as  well as my suspicions had to pause early on at the question about where our good and evil really originated. In fact, as a thirteen-yearold lad, my mind was already occupying itself with the problem of the origin of evil. At an age when one has “half childish play, half God in one’s heart,” I devoted my first childish literary trifle, my first written philosophical exercise, to this problem—and so far as my “solution” to it at that time is

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Day 2948, I.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil
On the prejudices of philosophers

16 There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer’s superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification took place from either the side of the subject or the side of the object. But I will say this a hundred times: “immediate certainty,” like “absolute knowledge” and the “thing in itself ” contains a contradictio in adjecto. For once and for all, we should free ourselves from the seduction of words! Let the people believe that knowing means knowing to the very end; the philosopher has to say: “When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition ‘I think,’ I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is an ‘I,’ and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by thinking, – that I know what thinking is. Because if I had not already made up my mind what thinking is, how could I tell whether what had just happened was not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? Enough: this ‘I think’ presupposes that I compare my present state with other states that I have seen in myself, in order to determine what it is: and because of this retrospective comparison with other types of ‘knowing,’ this present state has absolutely no ‘immediate certainty’ for me.” – In place of that “immediate certainty” which may, in this case, win the faith of the people, the philosopher gets handed a whole assortment of metaphysical questions, genuinely probing intellectual questions of conscience, such as: “Where do I get the concept of thinking from? Why do I believe in causes and effects? What gives me the right to speak about an I, and, for that matter, about an I as cause, and, finally, about an I as the cause of thoughts?” Whoever dares to answer these metaphysical questions right away with an appeal to a sort of intuitive knowledge, like the person who says: “I think and know that at least this is true, real, certain” – he will find the philosopher of today ready with a smile and two question-marks. “My dear sir,” the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, “it is improbable that you are not mistaken: but why insist on the truth?” 

Day 2945,

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
Sometimes
you have to start at the beginning
somewhere
halfway

Friedrich Nietzsche

On the Genealogy of Morals
Preface

1 We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves, how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. We are constantly making for them, being by nature winged creatures and honeygatherers of the spirit; there is one thing alone we really care about from the heart “bringing something home.” Whatever else there is in life, so-called experiences”-which of us has sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient time? Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us “absent-minded”: we cannot give our hearts to it-not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into hose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up  and asks himself: “what really was that which just struck?” so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, “what really was that which we have just experienced?” and moreover: “who are we really?” and, afterward as aforesaid, count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being-and alas! miscount them. So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law “Each is furthest from himself · applies to aur eternity-we are not “men of knowledge” with respect to ourselves.

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Day 2940, pseudosciences.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book 1

11 Popular morality and popular medicine. – The morality which prevails in a community is constantly being worked at by everybody: most people produce example after example of the alleged relationship between cause and effect, between guilt and punishment, confirm it as well founded and strengthen their faith: some observe actions and their consequences afresh and draw conclusions and laws from their observations: a very few take exception here and there and thus diminish faith on these points. – All, however, are at one in the wholly crude, unscientific character of their activity; whether it is a matter of producing examples, making observations or taking exception, whether it is a matter of proving, confirming, expressing or refuting a law – both material and form are worthless, as are the material and form of all popular medicine. Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudosciences.

Day 2938, losing.

Daily picture, Quotes

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic, in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life. Sam Harris

Day 2937, choice.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
I wonder the doors
where they are in me
if I could open
if I am already been
in the other room

Do I even have a key
or a choice

If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Day 2936, understand.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
I open the door
because it is a door

the world is simple
and hard
to understand

Every singular thing, or anything which is finite and has a determinate existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence; and again, this cause can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and so on, to infinity. Spinoza

Day 2935, I feel that.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
I am determined
to throw this rock
through those windows

The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion. E.O. Wilson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson

 

Day 2934, machine.

Daily picture, Quotes

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call ‘soul’ or ‘spirit,’ is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the ‘soul’ or the ‘spirit’ ceases likewise.

I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life. Nikola Tesla

Day 2933, we can only.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
I see a charged battery
at least
til I test it

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must*. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being. Albert Einstein

*Der Mensch kann wohl tun was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. (Man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants.)

Day 2932, a priori.

Daily picture, Quotes
 
We like to believe that all history is a halting and imperfect preparation for the magnificent era of which we are the salt and summit; but this notion of progress is mere conceit and folly. “In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done the opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found it.” In the light of all this we get a new and grimmer sense of the inescapable reality of determinism. “Spinoza says (Epistle 62) that if a stone which has been projected through the air had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add to this only that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me; and what in the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognize in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognize as will.” But in neither the stone nor the philosopher is the will “free.” Will as a whole is free, for there is no other will beside it that could limit it; but each part of the universal Will—each species, each organism, each organ—is irrevocably determined by the whole.
 
Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life, which just means that he can become another person. But a posterior, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity; that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns, and as it were, play the part which he had; undertaken, to the very end. Arthur Schopenhauer, from Wille Durants The Story of Philosophy