We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism? Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 Activity Recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED No home is complete without a stainless steel syllogism! Reality -- where the action is. "That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles." -- The many and varied advantages of philosophy (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods) "Why is it that the philosophy of technology has never really gotten underway? Why has a culture so firmly based on countless philosophical instruments, techniques, and systems remained so steadfast in its reluctance to examine its own foundations?" -- Langdon Winner. [Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life. from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, s.259, Walter Kaufmann transl. My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on-- from The Will to Power, s.636, Walter Kaufmann transl. If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." David Hume "Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect." - Destructio Destructionum, Averroës "We must expect each student to strive for excellence in terms of the kind of excellence that is within their reach. We must recognise that there may be excellence or shoddiness in every line of human endeavour. We must learn to honour excellence no matter how humble the activity and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity: An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water!" John W. Gardner Well, she was proud of being a professional slut, and should be; she was quite good at it. Just as I am an excellent geek, and Max is a top-notch philosopher. Perhaps we can help restore some positive connotations to that epithet one day. Lee Daniel Crocker 'Because the cosmos is ancient by our measure, people assume they are latecomers, gazing out into a universe worn down and faltering. But if the firmament will expand for an enormous span of time, or even for an eternity, then our universe glistens with morning dew. Homo sapiens may represent a youth movement, arriving at a time when almost everything is still to come. Dreary projections about ultimate fates may be supplanted by the belief that, like the cosmos itself, the human prospect is, as the physicist Freeman Dyson once wrote, 'infinite in all directions.'' Gregg Easterbrook sufficiently radical optimism - optimism that more and more seems to be technically feasible - raises the most fundamental questions about consciousness, identity, and desire. Vernor Vinge "There's nothing implicit about the material of anything - if you can capture its logical organisation in some other medium you can have that same 'machine', because it's the organisation that constitutes the machine, not the stuff it's made of..." - Chris Langton without consciousness, what use is the universe? Keith Elis I don't know if Gordon already discussed it, but there's a chapter in Smolin's book called "The Flower and the Dodecahedron", comparing the beauty of natural forms arising through evolution, and that of mathematical forms arising out of logical necessity. He wants to know: which is a better picture of the laws of nature? Theoretical physicists have traditionally sided with the dodecahedron; Smolin is arguing for the flower. I like flowers *and* dodecahedra! Somehow our universe has room for both. John Baez "We prefer our metaphysics with a money-back guarantee."-- Penn & Teller The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. "I already know the important things!" we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away. The Zensufi Master CH:D 12 "Though we often live unconsciously, " on automatic pilot ", every one of us can learn to be awake. It just takes practise." "We live in this world in order always to learn industriously and to enlighten each other by means of discussion, and to strive vigorously to promote the progress of science and the fine arts." AMADEUS MOZART Seek those who find your road agreeable, your personality and mind stimulating, your philosophy acceptable, and your experience helpful. Let whose who do not, seek their own kind. Henri Fabre It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Epicuros Sovran Maxims "...the only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it." - Daniel C. Dennett Anyone who studies General Relativity or quantum mechanics may perhaps begin to appreciate something of the true strangeness of the Universe. It is not a human place and is under no obligation to obey human laws. Eliezer S. Yudkowsky "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am, I know I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe." (R Buckminster Fuller" We don't have any hard evidence that we are here for a purpose; but assuming that we are adds interest to life and does no harm. jwas@ix.netcom.com(jw) Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. - Ashleigh Brilliant - >The universe has no obligation to be reassuring. A Sandberg