“Videri quam esse” (“To seem to be, rather than to be”)
I'm strange but i like to be a good strange, My name is Clarence, born in 1988, Pisces and I'm a student of Sociology and the child of the internet. I usually feel like my life has no meaning and i want to die but sometimes it seems like life is worth living for and i love everything in it. If it seems odd to read think what it might be like living it. I like reading philosophy, fiction and tech news.
This Blog is where i collect all the the weird and interesting links from around the net, its not meant to be that serious and just fun. If you stop by here you can enjoy comics, tech, current events, sociology, a little pornography (or erotica if you prefer to call it that) and more weird stuff. Please feel free to tell he what you like and dislike about the site and more of what you want to see.
Please feel free to talk to me by letter in my ask or by following me on other social networks but please just throw me a message WHO YOU ARE.
By the By it goes without saying you should make sure children don't read most of this.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
What we do on social media platforms is often analyzed as a performance or construction of the self. On this view, what we are doing is giving shape to our identity. What we “Like” is the projected identity, or better yet, the perception and affirmation of that identity by others. This, of course, does not exhaust what is done with social media, but it is an important and pervasive element.
When we think about social media as a field for the construction and enactment of identities, we tend to think of it as the projection, authentic or inauthentic, of a fixed reality. But perhaps we would do well to consider the possibility that identity on social networks is not so much being performed as it is being sought, that behind the identity-work on social media platforms there is an inchoate and fluid reality seeking to take shape by expending itself.
If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (via hss6749)
“We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach.”
-Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays
Almost any evening on television I can watch in my own home a celebrity performing in a skit which is the television version of a movie (made from a novel), to the accompaniment of dubbed-in laughter and applause - the whole performance sponsered by a steel manufacturer or an oil company, by a manufacturer of cosmetics to cure imaginary ailments, or by a brewer or cigarette manufacturer of products indistinguishable from those of his competitor - all put in order to create a more favorable corporate image.
Daniel J Boorstin (1961)
(Source: tabathist)
The Quantum Physics of Free Will
Do we have autonomy, or are our choices preordained? Is that a false choice? And what, if anything, does physics have to say about that?
Do quantum effects make our choices our own?
A debate that has gone on for millennia has flared up again in recent years
Is the fact you are reading this story a decision you arrived at it by your own free choice, or was your interest programmed into the universe from the moment of the big bang? What makes free will such a fun topic is not only that it dives deep into physics, neuroscience, and philosophy, but also that we all feel we have a direct stake in the answers.
Part of my own interest is that I’ve never been able to see why people get worked up about a supposed conflict between free will and determinism. To my mind, there is no conflict. Human consciousness and therefore the concept of free will are emergent properties, so whether microscopic physics is deterministic or not is irrelevant.
My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson (via topsecretatheist)
Our opinions, gently nudged by circumstance, revise themselves under cover of inattention. We tell them, in a steady voice, No, I’m not interested in a change at present. But there is no stopping opinions. They don’t care about whether we want to hold them or not; they do what they have to do.
And graver still, we are sometimes only minimally aware of just which new beliefs we have adopted.
Nicholson Baker, Changes of Mind (via philphys)
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program… Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
Agent Smith, The Matrix (via yellowbuzzer)
Christianity is Platonism for the people.
Friedrich Nietzsche (via kafka-cockroach)
action philosophers was both funny and educational, to this day i miss it
(Source: satiricles)
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.
Nietzsche (via ccellard00r)
In the system’s perception, the distinction between the world as it is and the world as it is observed becomes blurred.
NIklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media (via gravity7)
Humans Are Neat …
… because of Immanuel Kant.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the big brains of the European Enlightenment. He’s not so much known for his original philosophy as he is known for his herculean effort to reconcile empiricism and rationalism. The philosophy born out of this attempted reconciliation also strives “to be universally valid in covering all self-conscious rational beings.” (Shand, 160)
These efforts have had a pretty huge influence on the study of philosophy. The 100 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time describes Kant’s impact as follows:
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher whose comprehensive and systematic work in the theory of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics greatly influenced all subsequent philosophy, especially the various schools of Kantianism and Idealism. (188)
In the end, though:
Kant’s dictum was that what can and should be learned is not so much philosophy, as to philosophize. What we need to do is not to absorb schools of thought as subjectively historical, as facts reported to one, but instead to “practice reason’s talent in the adherence to all its universal principles … reserving always the right of reason to examine these principles themselves with regard to their sources and either to confirm or reject them.” (Arrington, 171)
And that’s a philosophy of philosophy I can get behind.
So enjoy the silly song (I have to agree with youtube commentator rcalicea when he or she says “[a]ny song that successfully uses ‘spatiotemporal’ deserves props!”), and think about how neat it is that we are able to reason at all.
References:
Arrington, Robert L. (editor). The World’s Great Philosophers. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.Duignan, Brian (editor). The 100 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time. New York: Britannica Educational Publishing, 2010.
Shand, John. Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy. London: UCL Press, 1993.
Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils — no, nor the human race, as I believe — and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.
Plato (via philphys)