It's kind of like mental onanism you know. You don't care what the object actually is, you just want to consume your own dopamine and use the object as a trigger.
I actually published it on my blog to avoid publishing it here and annoying shallow minds. But I see now that any comment oriented toward analysis is painful.
W00t! Free-wheeling society! La la la. I'm not listening. Love love and seek pleasure. Don't rock the boat. Majority rules. Blah blah. I feel hurt, your mean. My internal feelings of shame, pride, envy, lust and sloth are all that is important. I want to consume the neatness in the world visually, I will sit back in my chair repeating this dopamine circuit, oh the pleasure, ah its like orgasm. Give me more neat!
I started writing a comment and went off the rails... I published it on my blog: http://reactionpotential.blogspot.com/2011/06/god-cat-consciousness.html
I wonder if it is also an analogue for the "straight and narrow" it is a common theme in literature that describes the anagogical procession from ignorance to enlightenment. In John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Christian walks a straight-and-narrow path to the Celestial City and “Whenever the characters get off" the path "they get into trouble.” In the Wizard of Oz the path leads to the Emerald City. Generally such stories will follow one character who begins in the state of ignorance and gradually learns by the help of characters with definite traits and defecits that reflect her own psychological nature. As in the Tin-Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion who all have their strengths and weaknesses reflecting human psychology. In Pilgrim's Progress these characters actually have names reflecting those triats, such as "Pliable" and "Obstinate". The general theme is very old, probably prehistoric.
Personally, I think this is the nature of much great literature, whether it is Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Dante's Divine Comedy or Shakespeare's Othello. While it has a deeper enlightened meaning to it, it also passes as great entertainment to those not interested in grasping the hidden meaning. Anyway, just a thought I wanted to share and interesting history.
This reminds me of the time N?gasena was called to the attenion of King Milinda and King Milinda asked Nagasena's name Nagasena renounced his name as a mere empty word. (http://www.jonathantan.org/handouts/buddhism/Buddhism-H04-Milinda.pdf)
They don't mean anything but as symbols how attached to them can you really be? If I didn't like my name "Ryan" and preferred something like "Man-with-head-in-books" or Swami-Rayananda-El-Bhodiccita, I could just change it.
Does writing an apology 100 times actually make the person feel genuinely remorseful or merely humiliated and is acting from aversion or fear of consequence the same as conscience?
Cute. My father wanted to have "Other than that I'm okay!" written on his.
@senor espaniolo
"Let (h)er rip" is an idiom meaning "to allow"
"I just filled the tank up with gasoline, let 'er rip!" means "you are allowed to proceed with ignition."
But it is an informal permission not a formal allowance as a boss to a employee.
Leslie is saying "Let 'er rip" where "(h)er" is a fart. However rip also doubles for "Rest In Peace" or R.I.P. which is a common marking on gravestones to symbolize the wishes of the living.
Yes, however the culture is generally divided into discrete categories of ethnicity, religion, theory and doctrine. I'm an ethnic mutt who only appears caucasian but has considerable native contributions to my genetics.
I'm also a highly philosophically minded scientific type, but I'm also a highly religious philosophic type and a highly scientific religious type. These categories mean absolutely nothing to me because their boundaries are mere illusions projected outward from the egotistical strivings of their so-called adherents, who more often than not contradict the implicit bounds of their own grouping.
With that said, the most of available venues for the expression of some opinion are hosted or frequented by some naive grouping of individuals for a singular ideological purpose. I enjoy watching contemplative teachings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton as much as I enjoyed watching the 2-Day long Beyond Belief and Beyond Belief 2 conferences put on at Caltech by Michael Shermer and Skeptic Magazine. The one totally renounces matterial physics, i.e. science, and the other totally renounces noetic realization, i.e. contemplative prayer ala Thomas Merton.
What am I to do when you are all divided and put up your walls to keep the other sentiments and view-points out, and when you don't want to pull your head out and listen to something new? There is nowhere to express opinions contrary to the opinions held by the majority.
It's still just a theory. It still has to have Popper's falsifiability criteria which makes it only tentatively true witht he prospect of being disproven. This is more true the more abstract and purely mathematical the theory is. You could develop a system of symbols that provides for an internally consistent theory which does not accord with any experience and that would 'just be a theory'. Gravity has plenty of verifiable evidence. The theory of gravity, is just a theory accounting for what we observe as "gravity". I can disbelieve in the theory but still accept the reality of the empirical fact.
Likewise, I can disbelieve evolution if I have another theory which explains the same facts or just because I feel like it. Personally, I think evolution is fairly accurate within the realm of relative conceptualization and perception, but with respect to the unbroken ground of all being, it is a mere artefact and cannot explain everything. Scientists focus on broken down objects and events and attempt to theorize from the point-of-view of a fractured and fragmented event. Whereas, religions tend to deal with the world as it is in unity, unbroken, as a stream flowing and not as individual water droplets bouncing off each other. Both perspectives have their merits, but either without the other is pure delusion.
I was absolutely certain the major benefit of C. elegans to research is that it has a single large nerve cord that runs the entire length of it's body. This large cord makes studying it's nervous system a lot easier.
These people are smart, don't get involved in war and there is no reason for them to hurt you. Like the swiss or the swiss guard at the Vatican. completely unarmed and yet, neither Switzerland or Vatican City are the target of Al-Qaida, I mean, war.
After the first hundred years you are bound to get bored of the same old scripts. I'm only 30 and I can already predict half of what people (including myself) are going to say. There is only a small range of socially acceptable scripts pertaining to a given situation and I think I've heard them all.
I do know that the USA, Canada and places like this are more affluent than they are happy. I have a few acquaintances from around other parts, like Palestine, Tanzania, Lebanon, Syria, etc... and they are all immediately more pleasant, compassionate and realistic than any of my Canadian brethren or Americans I've met.
Kind of ironic, but that's how it goes. What you own, owns you. Your happiness merely becomes contingent upon it and places you in bondage. Making you cranky unless you get your drug (TV, Sports, Movies, Games, Funny Pictures, etc...). Wisdom like this is also deeply imbedded in the ethos of some of these societies. The contrast is so stark that in one country women have nothing covered but their eyes and in another everything covered but their eyes and each things the other is oppressed by a male-dominant cultural ethos. The niqabi is oppressed because she is not allowed to express herself, the American skank is oppressed because she is not allowed to value herself apart from her appearance.
This kind of thinking or sentiment would probably attune to what Christians generally call our "Sinful nature" as opposed to Truth. In similar vain; I recently read a plethora of comments on Hijab by Muslim women, all of which were roughly "insh'Allah I will have the courage to be a niqabi" and this means "God willing, I will have the courage to be one who wears a niqab (Muslim veil). That is the sentiment of one who acknowledges their own desires to be seen as beautiful, to earn the yearning of men and the jealousy of women, but who recognizing her sinful side entertains the idea of one day overcoming it. To western ears this just sounds like a woman who has been brainwashed by religious nonsense. But truth is, western ears have been brainwashed with egotism. And such egotists will accuse her of her hypocrisy in order to dismantle her sentiment and nullify it. In this way they don't have to face their own corruption.
W00t! Free-wheeling society! La la la. I'm not listening. Love love and seek pleasure. Don't rock the boat. Majority rules. Blah blah. I feel hurt, your mean. My internal feelings of shame, pride, envy, lust and sloth are all that is important. I want to consume the neatness in the world visually, I will sit back in my chair repeating this dopamine circuit, oh the pleasure, ah its like orgasm. Give me more neat!
Personally, I think this is the nature of much great literature, whether it is Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Dante's Divine Comedy or Shakespeare's Othello. While it has a deeper enlightened meaning to it, it also passes as great entertainment to those not interested in grasping the hidden meaning. Anyway, just a thought I wanted to share and interesting history.
They don't mean anything but as symbols how attached to them can you really be? If I didn't like my name "Ryan" and preferred something like "Man-with-head-in-books" or Swami-Rayananda-El-Bhodiccita, I could just change it.
@senor espaniolo
"Let (h)er rip" is an idiom meaning "to allow"
"I just filled the tank up with gasoline, let 'er rip!" means "you are allowed to proceed with ignition."
But it is an informal permission not a formal allowance as a boss to a employee.
Leslie is saying "Let 'er rip" where "(h)er" is a fart. However rip also doubles for "Rest In Peace" or R.I.P. which is a common marking on gravestones to symbolize the wishes of the living.
Stop me before I start making sense. Black/Large
Yes, however the culture is generally divided into discrete categories of ethnicity, religion, theory and doctrine. I'm an ethnic mutt who only appears caucasian but has considerable native contributions to my genetics.
I'm also a highly philosophically minded scientific type, but I'm also a highly religious philosophic type and a highly scientific religious type. These categories mean absolutely nothing to me because their boundaries are mere illusions projected outward from the egotistical strivings of their so-called adherents, who more often than not contradict the implicit bounds of their own grouping.
With that said, the most of available venues for the expression of some opinion are hosted or frequented by some naive grouping of individuals for a singular ideological purpose. I enjoy watching contemplative teachings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton as much as I enjoyed watching the 2-Day long Beyond Belief and Beyond Belief 2 conferences put on at Caltech by Michael Shermer and Skeptic Magazine. The one totally renounces matterial physics, i.e. science, and the other totally renounces noetic realization, i.e. contemplative prayer ala Thomas Merton.
What am I to do when you are all divided and put up your walls to keep the other sentiments and view-points out, and when you don't want to pull your head out and listen to something new? There is nowhere to express opinions contrary to the opinions held by the majority.
It's still just a theory. It still has to have Popper's falsifiability criteria which makes it only tentatively true witht he prospect of being disproven. This is more true the more abstract and purely mathematical the theory is. You could develop a system of symbols that provides for an internally consistent theory which does not accord with any experience and that would 'just be a theory'. Gravity has plenty of verifiable evidence. The theory of gravity, is just a theory accounting for what we observe as "gravity". I can disbelieve in the theory but still accept the reality of the empirical fact.
Likewise, I can disbelieve evolution if I have another theory which explains the same facts or just because I feel like it. Personally, I think evolution is fairly accurate within the realm of relative conceptualization and perception, but with respect to the unbroken ground of all being, it is a mere artefact and cannot explain everything. Scientists focus on broken down objects and events and attempt to theorize from the point-of-view of a fractured and fragmented event. Whereas, religions tend to deal with the world as it is in unity, unbroken, as a stream flowing and not as individual water droplets bouncing off each other. Both perspectives have their merits, but either without the other is pure delusion.
After the first hundred years you are bound to get bored of the same old scripts. I'm only 30 and I can already predict half of what people (including myself) are going to say. There is only a small range of socially acceptable scripts pertaining to a given situation and I think I've heard them all.
Kind of ironic, but that's how it goes. What you own, owns you. Your happiness merely becomes contingent upon it and places you in bondage. Making you cranky unless you get your drug (TV, Sports, Movies, Games, Funny Pictures, etc...). Wisdom like this is also deeply imbedded in the ethos of some of these societies. The contrast is so stark that in one country women have nothing covered but their eyes and in another everything covered but their eyes and each things the other is oppressed by a male-dominant cultural ethos. The niqabi is oppressed because she is not allowed to express herself, the American skank is oppressed because she is not allowed to value herself apart from her appearance.