Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

"Confessions of a Failed Iconoclast""
Entry 1

"At the age of 23 I was bestowed a large iron hammer by Friedrich Nietzsche to smash idols and gods with. But one day, after having smashed a few of them, I came upon one I really liked and admired. So unbeknownst to other iconoclasts, I secretly smuggled it home and hid it in a closet. Alas I was expelled from the iconoclast guild shortly thereafter. But at least my garden looks much nicer now."

"The End"

"I think marriage is a very alienating institution, for men as well as for women. I think it's a very dangerous institution—dangerous for men, who find themselves trapped, saddled with a wife and children to support; dangerous for women, who aren't financially independent and end up by depending on men who can throw them out when they are 40; and very dangerous for children, because their parents vent all their frustrations and mutual hatred on them. The very words 'conjugal rights' are dreadful. Any institution which solders one person to another, obliging people to sleep together who no longer want to is a bad one."----Simone De Beauvoir

“the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Not everything that washes up on the seashore of our dreams is important. Old ropes, and tar balls, and dead fish. But sometimes a pearled abalone or a turquoise glass floater or an iridescent sea creature will strand itself there. Precious signs that our psyche is still wonderfully alive and full of magical surprises.

We would do well to learn from ourselves as kids. We fell down. We got our feelings hurt. We cried. And then we ran back outside to play again. Nothing was ever serious enough to distract us long from this bristling excitement for being alive and discovering the vast shining world.

“I see now that the path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.”― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.” ― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

We all spend roughly 26 years of our lives sleeping. That's a lot of wasted time if you could achieve the same resting benefit of sleeping in some other way. Perhaps in the future they will devise a way for one half of our brains to sleep while the other stays awake. This is why dolphins never sleep. Think of it! Staying up 24 hours doing twice as many things as you used to. 26 years added to your life! The obvious issue of course is if we can get by operating on only one half of our brains. I feel like many of us in fact do this already, particularly while driving their car right in front of mine.

“Man — let me offer you a definition — is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall — or when he’s about to drown — he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”----Graham Swift

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On the phenomenology of seeing spirits and the Cartesian split..

I watch for spirit forms every night when I'm lying in bed in my semi-dark apt. The apt lights outside cast their usual square and rectangular shapes on my ceiling. Typically I will just scan the room for any movements. And invariably I will see drifting aerial commotion at some point. Focusing right in front of me I see these squiggly blobs undulating before me. Sparkles and splinters of light often accompany them. Are they really there, or am I just hallucinating it?

Well, the movement of these transparent blobs certain suggest living independence from the movement of my eyes. And yet I have some "control" over where they go, often "willing" them to move this way and that. My theory is that these are hybrid entities---half objectively real and half subjectively projected. While I have some agency over their movement and shapes, there is also an otherness and independence from me that suggests their realness. Are we not in fact used to such in-between modes of being in broad daylight? The existence of colors for example as both outside us and yet projected at the same time? The suspicion that spirits are "all in my head" is not really so disconcerting after all knowing that basically the whole universe is in there in some form as well!

In the end our Cartesian binary splitting apart of reality into the objectively physical and subjectively experienced is just an abstract "ideal" dichotomy. It is entirely likely imo that the physical and the phenomenal smear together in a spectrum of a thousand nuanced increments---a sliding scale from absolute exterior "thereness" all the way to relative interior "hereness." The static states are abstract and conceptual. It is only the flowing and intermingling between them that is real.

Removing my hat, my participle dangled precipitously.