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
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Labels:
awareness,
being,
complexity,
consciousness,
cosmology,
ethics,
evolution,
existence,
life,
nature,
philosophy,
physics,
possibility,
reality,
reason,
universe
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
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)
Louis Menand, The New Yorker (January 8, 2018)
Labels:
contemporary life,
modernity,
politics,
standards,
tolerance
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
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see.
Philip Larkin, The Old Fools
Labels:
age,
awareness,
contemplation,
death,
existence,
humanity,
identity,
insult,
life,
melancholy,
old age,
Philip Larkin,
poetry,
prophecy,
seasons,
thermodynamics
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