Internet articles (17 entries)
The Catastrophe of Birth
In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer makes a similar comment, but about Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. He writes that when it came to describing Hell, Dante must have had plenty of material to work with, since our world is full of suffering and torture, but when it came to describing Heaven and its wonderful pleasures, he must have lacked inspiration, for the same reason. Read the full page
Perhaps, at least in part, the quest to create an artificial consciousness is part of a longing that comes from the human unconscious. We long for entering into communion with other minds different from our own. We do not want to suffer alone in a high degree of knowledge and for this we are willing to create an artificial consciousness. The same impulse may serve as the basis for those who seek to find other intelligent consciousnesses in the stars, through the discovery of intelligent alien life.
Darkness
And what do those philosophers who oppose our resenting life propose? The forging of new myths such as the übermensch or the deification of human history. However, changing gods won’t make a difference, just as returning to medieval or ancient times won’t make a difference. Eventually, these new myths will die, too, because some of us are intelligent enough to see through them. Read the full page
Excess lucidity
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. Read the full page
The invention of agriculture
It’s not all doom and gloom though because eventually we invented machines to do most of the farming, and quality of life eventually recovered past the hunter gatherers. Although it probably took all the way up until 1983 when they invented the Nintendo Entertainment System. Read the full page
Aella on fetishes and the myth of trauma
My guess is also that fetishes are less malleable and controllable than most people seem to assume they are. Read the full page
The Origin of the Intrinsic Human Ridiculousness – Astutillo Smeriglia
The biggest tragedy of humans, let’s even say the tragedy that constitutes the essence of their existence itself, is that the more they try to be serious, the more they look ridiculous. Read the full page
Why “We Are the Flesh” has a deeper twist ending than “The Sixth Sense”
Do you remember when The Sixth Sense came out? Hell, you don’t have to—that movie’s twist ending is still a punch line. It’s ingrained in our pop cultural DNA at this point.
But why? Why do people become so fixated on them? Read the full page
Creating death
Of course everyone knows, on an intellectual level, that they won’t live forever. But that doesn’t mean that they really acknowledge it. Read the full page
The first time I watched Buffalo ’66 – Matteo Gagliardi
Vincent Gallo is everything. Actor, director, painter, model, musician, producer, screenwriter, and hustler. He… Read the full page
The Gift of Life – Astutillo Smeriglia
Life is not a gift.
A gift is something given to someone who already exists apart from the gift, something that, once received, can also be set aside and forgotten. Read the full page
Suffering is not just an intellectual game
Now, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem – well, to put it kindly, ridiculous. Read the full page
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Clearly, many conceptual problems are associated with this question. How do we define nothing? What are its properties? If it has properties, doesn’t that make it something? The theist claims that God is the answer. But, then, why is there God rather than nothing? Assuming we can define nothing, why should nothing be a more natural state of affairs than something? Read the full page
Gavazzeni: “Music worsens the man”
What is music for you?
Neurosis. It arouses the worst feelings. Read the full page
There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life – I repeat, everything – is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.
Umberto Galimberti – The success of philosophy
But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. Read the full page
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But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing… the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small… [Tennis player] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way… Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.