“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.
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
Daniel J Boorstin (1961)
(Source: tabathist)
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.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson (via topsecretatheist)
Nicholson Baker, Changes of Mind (via philphys)
Agent Smith, The Matrix (via yellowbuzzer)
Friedrich Nietzsche (via kafka-cockroach)
action philosophers was both funny and educational, to this day i miss it
(Source: satiricles)
Nietzsche (via ccellard00r)
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.
Plato (via philphys)