Why did good married couples look so glum? Old couples, young couples, thirty-five-year-old Atlanta couples in condos, sixty-five-year-old Ohio couples in villas, each as glum as if one had got stuck with the other at a cocktail party for two hours. Two hours? Ten years! Thirty years! ***** In his strange new mood he made…
Catching up on Sam Harris’ podcasts — this one is of particular interest. Sam’s guest, David Krakauer, I recall from taking the debut Santa Fe Institute freebie course a few years back run by the excellent Melanie Mitchell. Do check out the SFI’s free programmes, notably SFI’s Complexity Explorer: it beats many a fee-paying university course. In any event, if you…
We live in a time when being dumb is reward and being smart is counter-culture. If one makes a claim for harbouring a disinterested approach to truth, then one needs to explore ideas beyond one’s ideological reservation, most of which have long since become barren and infertile through infelicitous activity. It used to be that being liberal was punkishly…
Born on this day and still going. I had the privilege of chi sao‘ing with sigung (master’s master) some 15 years ago in London and afterwards bumming a smoke from him outside. It’s also been three years since the loss of one of my sifus. bruce leeEmbodied cognitionG.K. Khoeip chunmartial artsWing Chunyip man
The very excellent Seth Vannatta in Response: The Digital Journal of Popular Culture Scholarship. I’d suggest that readers also think about Wittgenstein’s idea in the Tractatus that ethics and aesthetics are one — on which much has been written. I’d also refer readers to the collection of essays entitled Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection. aestheticsAlfred North WhiteheadethicsFurtwänglerHans-Georg GadamerImmanuel KantJohn DeweyLudwig…
Happy birthday to the wonderful Buddy Guy. bluesBuddy Guyguitarmusic
Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a…
It’s one of those delicious cultural ironies (of course there are a few other examples) that a significant amount of Islamic art preservation (and more besides) is down to one Nasser Khalili, a Jewish Iranian-born academic and former art dealer. Ownership is nothing but a myth, we are only a temporary custodian of what we…
Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which? Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion,…
With my good chum Péter Érdi at The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers mega shindig. Check out Peter’s excellent book (the title is as bold as Dennett’s Consciousness Explained) and now that Peter is head honcho for Cognitive Systems Research consider submitting something to them — it’s a very ecumenical journal with a nice balance between the philosophical and…
manwithoutqualities 