دفترچه

Sleeping Habits

I THINK, THEREFORE I THINK I'LL STAY IN BED :))

Scientists who hate to get up early can point to the sad fate of
Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the father of analytic geometry. Descartes
showed genius even as a schoolboy, when he succeeded in
convincing his Jesuit schoolmasters that he should never be asked to
get out of bed before 11. This custom he followed throughout a long
and busy military career, his superior officers being no more able than
his teachers to interfere with his peaceful morning habits. Descartes
later claimed that all his great scientific and philosophical works were
composed during the mornings he spent in bed. (So, no doubt, was his
treatise on the art of dueling, the only one of all his books that the
Catholic Church did not proscribe after his death.)
This happy life was changed in 1649, when Queen Christina of
Sweden invited him to Stockholm to instruct her in geometry. Unfortunately,
her royal schedule demanded that these teaching sessions
take place at 5 A.M. The shock of getting up so early and walking
through the frigid winter darkness to her palace gave him pneumonia,
and he died on February 11, 1650.

Forever For All

A lengthy read, but it does definitely worth the time.

It's indeed a thoroughly well written and thought-provoking book, with lots of interesting and exciting ideas on different — sometimes peculiar — subjects, albeit scattered unevenly through the chapters.


[MENTION=285]Unknown[/MENTION]

The two major divisions of opinions are the reductionist and the nonreductionist views, as discussed by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons;[2] a short summary will be useful here. For a reductionist, the question of the survival or nonsurvival of P1 in P2 is reducible to certain other facts about P1 and P2 that can be described in an im-personal way. Such facts, for example, may include the different psychological and physical characteristics of both P1 and P2 and the process involved (if applicable) in the formation or development of P2 out of P1.
It should be clear that physical characteristics of a person can be described in an impersonal way, for example, by resorting to physics, if we think of a person as amounting to a collection of particles in ...


Interchangeability.
Two persons, I submit, should be considered one and the same if they can be said to experience the same events at the conscious level. Clearly this will happen if the two could be in the same quantum state, for then everything about them must be repeated as far as we know.

Applied more broadly, the general argument is that we deceive ourselves the
better to deceive others.

And there is an intimate association between our immune system and our
psyches, such that self-deception is often associated with major immune
effects, all of which must be calculated if we are to understand the full
biological effects of our mental lives (see Chapter 6). There is a whole world
of social psychology that shows how our minds bias information, from initial
avoidance, to false encoding, memory, and logic, to incorrect statements to
others—from one end to the other (see Chapter 7). Key mechanisms include
denial, projection, and perpetual efforts to reduce cognitive dissonance.

Perhaps worst of all—from an evolutionary perspective—there is now lower
negative biological feedback on those making bad decisions. You decide,
hundreds die—but do you also die or even suffer?

There are two great axes in human mental life: intelligence and
consciousness. You can be very bright but unconscious, or slow but
conscious, or any of the combinations in between. Of course, consciousness
comes in many forms and degrees. We can deny reality and then deny the
denial.




The Folly of Fools - The Logic of Deceit and Self-deception in Human Life.pdf