Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Natural Teleology


Natural teleology would mean that the universe is rationally governed in more than one way—not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes—notably, the existence of living, and ultimately conscious, organisms.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.... A satisfying explanation would show that the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Most people don’t like righteousness in others. They can be quite righteous about it.

Louis Menand, The New Yorker (January 8, 2018)

Monday, January 08, 2018

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. 


Philip Larkin, The Old Fools