As governments across the world introduce vaccine passports, I find myself at a loss: why are more people in public places not standing up for liberal democracy and for what our senses can tell us about the actual reality around us?
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Looking at the evidence for a moment...
Super Healthy
Just before covid hit I had a (seemingly prophetic) vision of society where everyone was walking about super obsessed with their health. Even the way people were walking appeared engineered to serve some health benefit, every movement meticulously honed and monitored by some smart-app to enhance well-being. What was striking about the vision was how disturbing it was. It felt... well, unhealthy.
Thursday, August 5, 2021
Does our mind generate reality?
It seems obvious that thought cannot conjure up appearances out of thin air. Yet many people assume that the mind generates the appearances of the world we are conscious of. Examples of optical illusions and dreams are given to back this assumption up. I dream I am flying, but in reality, I am lying in my bed. I think I am seeing movement, but in reality it is a succession of still images rapidly flashing before my eye on the TV screen. So from such examples it is concluded that the human mind generates reality for itself without the corresponding sense inputs necessarily conveying any reality at all.
In response to such ideas about perception and the mind, one has to be very clear to avoid getting tangled in a web of abstraction. For example, whether an appearance, that is, whether a particular "percept" is the content of a dream or whether it is something revealed in waking consciousness cannot be established based only on whether it originates from sense-inputs, for these are not sufficient for producing any percepts (if they were there would be no hard problem of consciousness). In reality, only a thinking contemplation will reveal what a particular percept is and what its origin is. Only thinking can render the true reality of a percept. But my own act of thinking cannot generate a percept, far less can it declare that all percepts are the product of my subjective mind. Whether a percept corresponds to the objective world, or whether it is the product of mere fancy can only be established by a thoughtful contemplation of that particular percept.
Thought is thus inescapable at all levels of reality, and it transcends the subject/object duality. It follows that thinking can no longer be imagined as just being in our own heads - for when we look at the very fabric of the world, in any field of study, there we find thinking too.
This is a brief outline of one of the central observations Rudolf Steiner makes on the subject of thinking in his book The Philosophy of Freedom
Tuesday, August 3, 2021
The Invention of the Individual
I was once in the company of someone (educated, self employed activist/filmmaker type) when they declared that individuality was invented by capitalism. I was too dumbfounded to muster a response. There really is a difference between passive and active thinking - the latter does not rest with contradictory, self-undermining statements and will chew away at thoughts until they become sense-making. Active thinking also holds no value in ideas unless they are true. If they are shown to be untrue, the ego doesn't feel any loss, and will delight in the new-found clarity. Whereas the passive-thinker has invested their entire identity in habitual and fashionable ideas like a child to a security blanket.
The Archetype of all Ideas
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Our capacity to think about nature objectively is at the same time natures capacity to express itself as IDEA. Our capacity to then think...