Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 22 December 2020

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

But this notion of value [“utilitarian values”] reflects an astonishingly impoverished understanding of human beings: it’s based on the assumption that we’re nothing more than decision-making machines choosing among options based on how much they satisfy our hedonistic desires.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The law of movement itself, Nature or History, singles out the foes of mankind and no free action of mere men is permitted to interfere with it.

If you've followed what I've written from time to time, you should know that I'm a big fan of history as a form of knowledge (or a way of knowing), but I'm not at all a fan of "History" as a replacement for human thought and decision-making, a "plan" that we must recognize, reveal, and realize. So, I contend, say Arendt and Collingwood, among others.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

"It’s the integration of cognition with affect that appears to be key to self-awareness.” [Dr. Donald Stuss.]

“You seem to be suggesting,” I [Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon] “that affect, or emotion, is very important for the brain’s high-level integrative and executive functions. Yet conventionally people think of emotion as a primitive aspect of human psychology. They believe the highest level of human intellectual function is rationality—cold, detached, and instrumental. And this conventional perspective suggests that, ideally, we should strip emotion out of our decision-making and cast it aside.”

“Exactly. I’ve [Stuss] spent decades studying the role of frontal lobes in logical cognition, but I’m now bringing in affect. We’ve shown that the polar region of the right frontal lobe—a region long regarded as useless—is a place important for humor and intentionality. The frontal lobes are also the source of our ‘gut feeling,’ which is something largely dissociable from knowledge and logic. The essence of human life is the integration of these things.”

Thoughts of the Day: 9 December 2020

 

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

The activity of consciousness, we have seen, converts impression into idea, that is, crude sensation into imagination. Regarded as names for a certain kind or level of experience, the words consciousness and imagination are synonymous: they stand for the same thing, namely, the level of experience at which this conversion occurs. But within a single experience of this kind there is a distinction between that which effects the conversion and that which has undergone it. Consciousness is the first of these, imagination is the second. Imagination is thus the new form which feeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness. This makes good the suggestion t. . . that imagination is a distinct level of experience intermediate between sensation and intellect, the point at which the life of thought makes contact with the life of purely psychical experience. As we should now restate that suggestion: it is not sensa as such that provide the data for intellect, it is sensa transformed into ideas of imagination by the work of consciousness.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

TMT [Terror Management Theory] proposes that fear of death is a primordial feature of the human mind. As early humans evolved their extraordinary intelligence, they started to use symbols in their minds to represent abstract ideas, like the ideas of the self and the future. Then . . . they combined these two symbols in particular to imagine the self in the future. This recursive self-awareness— consciousness of one’s consciousness through time— was a source of both awe and dread: awe, because it helped give these early humans a sense of agency and, with it, feelings of power and possibility; and dread, because it made them aware that their selves were subject to the inexorable degradation of time. “The most fateful consequence of mental time travel,” the psychologist Michael Corballis writes, “may be the understanding that we will all die.”

The Age of the Crisis of Man

Mark Greif

An empty discourse is one that behaves as if it wishes to be filled with a single inductive or deductive answer-a definitive argument meant to persuade all hearers and end inquiry through complete satisfaction-but in fact generates the continuation of attempts, or tacitly admits to unanswerability.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

First, Socrates is a gadfly: he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will “sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives” unless somebody comes along to arouse them. And what does he arouse them to? To thinking and examination, an activity without which life, in his view, was not only not worth much but was not fully alive.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

But what, exactly did he mean? What are “institutions”? Experts have suggested dozens of definitions, but I have always found the one offered by Douglass North, a Nobel prize–winning economic historian, most useful. Institutions, he says, are “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Counter-education interiorizes and individualizes, as Ficino said, the uniformities of education. Individualizing education, i.e., lodging learning within someone’s soul, requires eros, not because individualizing favors one student over another, the so-called “teacher’s pet,” but because eros kindles each person’s particular style of desire.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 25 November 2020

 

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Will and Ariel Durant echo Machiavelli: “History repeats itself in the large because…man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex.”

My review here. 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Some animals adopt a form of ‘musilanguage’, using intonation, not just body language, to communicate with humans: look at the domestic dog. Amongst one another they communicate preferentially by scent, and body language. But they have achieved awareness of the fact that intonation is an important part of human communication.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

John J. Mearsheimer

If defense has a clear advantage over offense, and conquest is therefore difficult, great powers will have little incentive to use force to gain power and will concentrate instead on  protecting  what they have. When defense has the advantage, protecting what you have should be a relatively easy task. Alternatively, if offense is easier, states will be sorely tempted to try conquering each other, and there will be a lot of war in the system.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

One of these [ideas about consciousness that are off the beaten scientific track] is the evolution of consciousness, something we touched on in the last chapter. What I mean by the evolution of consciousness has nothing to do with Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’. I do not mean how consciousness evolved by chance out of ‘un’ or ‘non-consciousness’, or how our chance consciousness evolved, under a variety of environmental pressures, from some dim, vague awareness to our own acute sense of self and the world. As we’ve seen, in these and other mainstream ideas about consciousness, it is ultimately a chance outcome, an epiphenomenon, of some physical or material reality. The evolution of consciousness I am thinking of takes consciousness as fundamental and irreducible and not solely localised inside our heads. Consciousness from this perspective did not emerge out of matter at some time in the past. Consciousness was there to begin with, and it would be more correct from this perspective to say that matter emerged out of it, a point we will return to.

My review here.

Quotes from Ophuls, Pt. 5

The quotes today from Requiem for Modern Politics all concern television. When reading these quotes, ask yourself: would Donald Trump be a candidate for president if television as a medium didn't exist?

Television is not an informative medium at all, but a dramatic one: it transmits images, not ideas; it evokes emotions, not thoughts; and it arouses passion, not deliberation. Indeed, at its worst, it is frankly inflammatory. 81
 

Reading is active: the reader translates printed words on a page into mental images, which takes imagination and thought. Viewing television is passive: the viewer absorbs ready-made images, which takes neither thought nor imagination. Because reading exercises the mind, whereas television entrances and even stupefies it, citizens no longer deliberate but instead respond to events with raw emotion. Television is theIf refore antithetical to the traditional understanding of politics and citizenship in the liberal tradition. 82
 

Finally, if the goal of civilization is greater consciousness, a position held in one form or another by virtually everyone from Plato to Freud, then television is indeed the enemy of civilization: to use Fruedian language, it fosters more id and less ego, more unconscious emotional reaction and less of the reality principle. In effect, television is psychoanalysis in reverse. 86 [Italics mine]

"If the goal of civilization is greater consciousness": Is this the goal of civilization? If not, what is? What creates "greater consciousness"?