A commonplace book: an old-fashioned literary diary for recording interesting items from reading you've done. I use mine to record snippets from reading, conversation and life in general. (The early 2003 entries are from a period some years ago -- before the blog age -- when I tried an online commonplace book as a straight web page.)
Monday, June 02, 2025
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
On Consciousness as MetaThinking about Thinking
It seems much more accurate to say that consciousness is along for the ride — watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it. In theory, we can go as far as to say that few (if any) of our behaviors need consciousness in order to be carried out…. the obstacle we face here once again seems to be a case of confusing consciousness with the concept of a self....[we are] machines that think about thinking.
Annaka Harris, Conscious : exploring the mystery of consciousness
Sunday, November 05, 2017
Benjamin Nathans on Yuri Slezkine'd The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
See also Freud and Plato - The Politics of the Soul (Pt 1)
Tuesday, September 05, 2017
Sunday, March 05, 2017
The Authoritarian Personality
• Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealised moral authorities of the in-group.
• Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded.
• Tendency to…condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
• The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate….
• Preoccupation with the dominance- submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures….
• Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
• The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
• Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings-on.”
From a March 23, 2017 New York Review piece on the Frankfurt School: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/23/frankfurt-school-headquarters-neo-marxism/