Detail from Hua Yan (1682-1756), Scholar and a Bat.
16.02.2026 15:04
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Detail from Hua Yan (1682-1756), Scholar and a Bat.
There is an important respect in which Armstrong's analogy between materialism and the equation of the gene and the DNA molecule fails. Pre-molecular genetics was an exact scientific theory: the concept of the gene was introduced in the service of scientific explanation, and subsequent work in molecular biology which makes the equation plausible has had the same aim. But the psychology of common sense, embodied in the ordinary concepts of belief, desire, sensation, perception, emotion, and so forth is not a scientific theory. The mental states for which Armstrong offers causal analyses are picked out by a system which has evolved naturally, and whose form may depend significantly on its extra-scientific functions. Our dealings with and declarations to one another require a specialized vocabulary, and although it serves us moderately well in ordinary life, its narrowness and inadequacy as a psychological theory become evident when we attempt to apply it in the formulation of general descriptions of human behavior or in the explanation of abnormal mental conditions. The crude and incomplete causal theory embodied in common-sense pyschology should not be expected to survive the next hundred years of central nervous system studies intact. It would be surprising if concepts like belief and desire found correspondents in a neurophysiological theory, considering how limited their explanatory and predictive power is, even for gross behavior. The physical behavior which, on Armstrong's analysis, a given intention is apt to cause, may be the product of causes whose complexity cannot be brought into even rough correspondence with the simple elements of a present-day psychological explanation.
Guess who wrote this, more than 10 years prior to Churchland's “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes”.
1 Happiness 1 2 Death 61 3 The Remainder of Life 106
A perfect table of contents.
Mirror: A film by Andrei Tarkovsky
Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
The historiography of class struggle, one might add, has been systematically distorted in a state-centered direction. Everyday resistance does not throw up the manifestos, demonstrations, or pitched battles that normally compel attention. It makes no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political and economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any movement that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the ship-wreck (for example, a fiscal crisis) itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is seldom that the perpetrators seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in anonymity. It is also extremely rare that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be openly to confess that their policy is unpopular and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside. Thus, the nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists conspire to create a complicitous silence that is reflected in the historical record. In this context, the events that claim most attention are typically those to which the state and ruling classes accord most space in their archives. Thus, for example, a small and futile rebellion claims an attention that is often all out of proportion to its impact on class relations while unheralded acts of flight, sabotage, and theft that may be of greater long-run significance are rarely noticed.
James Scott.
A stunningly beautiful initial depicting a dying man in bed with his soul being taken up by an angel. From a copy of Aristotle’s De Anima, likely copied at Oxford c. 1260. @theulspeccoll.bsky.social since 1715, MS Ee.2.31.
A crowd of penguins captioned BREAKING: MASSIVE ANTI-AMERICAN PROTESTS IN HEARD AND MCDONALD ISLANDS.
We stand in solidarity with the penguins.
Did you go back and study “Severance” before filming season 2? I don’t have technology. I only have a satellite dish on my house. So I’ve seen “Severance” on DVDs that they’re good enough to send me. I don’t have a cellphone. I’ve never emailed or, what do you call it, Twittered. Does it make you feel a bit alien in a world where everyone is attached to their phones? Not really. I’ve never had a watch either. But if I need the time, I just ask somebody. Likewise, once in a while when I need to use a phone, I just ask if I can borrow one.
Christopher Walken.
Excellent guesses—Darwin it was.
No. 7. JULY, 1877. MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. I.-A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AN INFANT.
150 years ago you could get random observations of your baby published in Mind. Indisputably the most famous person to ever publish there—guess who!
From Eric Huntington, “Buddhist Cosmology” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022. doi.org/10.1093/acre...
Surrounding the great, circular ocean is a ring of mountains known as Cakravāla (also Cakravāḍa), which forms the external boundary of the world. The disk-shaped earth that supports all these oceans, continents, and mountains floats atop decreasingly substantial layers of fundamental elements (earth, water, sometimes fire, and wind) that ultimately float in the void of space. Most traditions acknowledge a multiplicity of such single world-systems (loka-dhātu), often abutting one another horizontally and sometimes also layered vertically. Groups of thousands, millions, and billions of such worlds play important roles in metaphors for vastness and innumerability. When described in such collections, each world typically has the same basic geographical features, including its own Sumeru, four major continents, great ocean, and so on, making this a generic model for all worlds in Buddhist cosmology. In other cases, however, alternative worlds are described with quite different landscapes to emphasize specific contrasts with this world (see the section “Mahāyāna and East Asia”). Within each single world-system that follows the generic pattern, there are also numerous heavens and hells above and below the relatively flat surface of the world. While the heavens generally rise directly above Sumeru, the hells may descend—depending on the tradition—centrally below Sumeru, peripherally below southern Jambudvīpa, broadly filling all of the elemental layers below the entire cosmos, or even externally in the deltoid interstices between adjacent discoid worlds. Based on these layers above and below the surface of the earth, many cosmological systems also propose vertical divisions of space, most commonly distinguishing the more-or-less geographical realm of the earth, hells, and lower heavens (kāma-dhātu, realm of desire) from more ethereal realms of form (rūpa-dhātu) and formlessness (ārūpya-dhātu) above.
Unless your multiverse has endless hells lurking in the triangular gaps between worlds, I don't buy it.
I'm friends with one of the provosts who oversees IT and I could barely resist emailing him to ask how his night is going.
An NYU student really levelled up on this tonight, managing to find an unsecured email list that goes to all faculty and everyone in IT. In the five minutes it took me to auto-filter the list to trash, five professors had already unwittingly replied to 10,000+ people... no doubt it's ongoing.
Counterpoint—this is the ideal nap, now you are ready to go dance all night.
Many more examples (with high-resolution images) in Gillian Riley, “Eat Your Words! Seventeenth-Century Edible Letterforms” in Gastronomica, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 45-59. doi.org/10.1525/gfc....
A menu box allowing you to “Undo send” at timescales of 0, 5, 10 or 20 seconds.
Regret calibration.
This post has a link to an associated WeChat announcement on their official channel.
Some of the most beautiful books I have purchased since moving to China are published by Jiazazhi. One favourite is Chen Zhe (陈哲), Bees & The Bearable (蜜蜂 & 可承受的).
Very sad to learn today that Yanyou—the founder of Jiazazhi, the Chinese photo book publisher and bookstore—was arrested in June and is still being held. There is a small note about it in this AP story. #china
Paul Frambot | Morpho @PaulFrambot Last week, 6 out of 30 candidates interviewed by our recruiter were likely North Korean hackers using deepfakes to disguise their accents and facial expressions. Now implementing stricter hiring protocols eg. thorough background checks, in-person meetings, ... Any suggestions?
To solve problems like this:
You think your life should get better, I think you should suffer and die, we agree that something must change.
Abstract Could the Chinese philosopher Confucius have supported Donald Trump?
Scandalous that “Confucius for Trump?“ was addressed before “Funeral strippers?”
The magic spell hypothesis: just as magic spells are written distinctively to make them appear special, so legal language is made complex in order to signal a special kind of authority. See: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
why would you use chatgpt to simulate an endless tedious argument with various professional philosophers when we already have the daily nous comment section?
Ah, missed that! Shouldn't have expected I could beat you to googly eye news.
