Lillehammer by night
Mike Driver
Acquired Stardust
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I'd rather be in outer space šø
Keni
YOU ARE THE REASON
Game of Thrones Daily
art blog(derogatory)

ē„ę„ / Permanent Vacation

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Today's Document
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosimo Galluzzi

⣠Chile in a Photography ā£
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

ellievsbear
Peter Solarz
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@conatusprinciple
Lillehammer by night
Cardboard Boxes, The Human and The Thing-in-Itself
Iām writing with a slight optimism right now, cause I have a feeling that the AI-madness and all the current dystopia is leading to a resurgence and increased interest in the poorly cared for humanities again! Wild I know, but this is what 20+ years of app-mania, increasingly sucky tech and the destruction of communities does to you, right? What is a human again?
Idk, at times I like being human: the stupidity, the irrational emotions, the insights and growth, the horniness and the joy. Stubborn, at times self-defeating on both an individual and a communal level, but still, generationally speaking, amazingly capable, adaptable, creative, if we are into one another.
My girlfriend and I were doing some work for our daughterās marching band a few weeks back along with 60+ other parents. Itās an example of a Norwegian /dugnad/, itās basically volunteer work in Norwegian. Within a weekend we made a flea market for books and clothes, on Sunday we tore it all down. It was a great success. But on Friday I had some immediate thoughts while looking at the hundreds of cardboard boxes filled with books: āThis looks /impossible/, we will never be done in time.ā The excess of materiality was weighing heavy on my shoulders. But then I started working, and everyone else started working, and a few heads who had been doing this type of thing for a few years already knew how to arrange everything and gave directions. I just kept at it, not thinking I was contributing much, but every 30 minutes I raised my head and the big hall looked completely different. Within a few hours I was an ant in the colony. Everyone was moving around, pushing, shoving, directing, carrying, fixing. Bumping into one another, laughing and talking about stupid and interesting books they found along the way. And just like that we were done. If we are into one another. Some are not, they get high on ideas about eternal life, about a man-made intelligence that vastly surpasses ours. The social impacts of such events would clearly be huge, but from both a Kantian and Spinozist perspective I have lost interest in them: Iām stuck in /this/ body, with /this/ mind anyway. I will always wake up as some variant of what I call āmyselfā, eternally stupid. I can grow, change and decline, lose power and gain it, but as Spinoza said, the infinite substance of God is only known to us through two attributes and their modi: thought and extension. There are, according to Spinoza, of course an infinite number of attributes as well, these are just not known to us because our mind-body canāt interface with them. A bat uses sonar to move around. There are a number of audio frequencies that a dog can pick up, but my ear canāt. Same with light. I know, I know, bad examples. These are all questions of extension/physicality and would count as variants of Spinozaās attribute of extension, but the analogy is just this: We are limited, and as Kant said: we perceive phenomena, not the thing in itself. (And forgive me for not being able to give a perfect example of something real, true and āout thereā that my mind by definition is incapable of imagining, visualizing, let alone talking about. This is the whole point, this inability is the proof of our limits. Life is hard. We need to show care for ourselves and others.) We are limited but this is what makes us interesting, as well as every other living species on earth in their particularity. And there are interesting ways to be human, and to feel human, to vibe with your humanity sort of, to feel yourself and to study and learn what it all means. And this is what Iām doing tonight. #philosophy #ai #humanism
Gardening, dirty boots and obligatory #crocus
Back at the cabin. I need a break from the city and the madness of the world and Iām lucky I have this place.
Kerouac and Cassady
In memory of Jürgen Habermas
In memory of Jürgen Habermas. One cannot say his ideals of liberal democracy has been leading the way lately, but I am certain we will see a comeback of his theory of communicative action. Itās form & language is dry as hell, but there is a utopian kernel in there: that in principle all language contains the possibility of understanding & reciprocality, and that implicitly, going into any speech-situation we are open to change our minds. If not, language as communication is dead and amounts to nothing but coercion or propaganda. #habermas #philosophy
The adults talked politics in between some serious SimCity-action with the kids tonight.
Cucumber: The existence of English āGurkinā, Norwegian āAgurkā and Swedish āGurkaā necessarily implies the existence of primordial, chaotic and nebulous āGURKā
Here comes a story that is strange, almost dreamlike.Iām taking a walk in the cabin area, when suddenly I think āwhat if I see an owl today?ā and start looking up into the trees. 50 m and 3 trees later, a fairly large owl is sitting there looking down at me ā I got to come close and have a chat
Cabinlyfe, just carried 45 liters of water
But seriously, conservatives are funny, āThere is no such thing as societyā right up until some war needs to be fought, a royal family, national day, symbol or power hierarchy needs to be celebrated ā then youāre suddenly in a damn tight and suffocating community without having chosen it yourself
Some thoughts on meaning and existentialism: https://conatusprinciple.blog/2026/02/15/some-thoughts-on-meaning-and.html
Some thoughts on meaning and existentialism
Now I might be arguing against a strawman here or a somewhat pop presentation of existentialist thought, but here goes. During a discussion with some friends we talked about existentialism and especially Camus' and Sartreās ideas of lifeās inherent meaninglessness. I know that most existentialists claim that because life is meaningless, our goal is to create meaning. But I feel that existentialism lands on the conclusion of lifeās meaninglessness in a somewhat puzzling way. How meaningful or meaningless life seems is a result of what one expects to find in the first place. If one demands an absolute meaning, a predefined goal, a religious truth, then of course life appears meaninglessāthese truths and goals are difficult to defend philosophically. But to leap from this to the conclusion that all of life is meaningless is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We find and develop meaning all the time, pragmatically, as lifeforms. Meaning lies in the ordinary, the everyday, but at times exceptional as well. Nihilism, then, is the result of demanding absolutes. I think Nietzsche said something about this as well. So the existentialists are partly reacting to an absence of something they themselves donāt believe ināa theological absoluteāand thus indirectly continue this line of thought, keeping it alive as a ghost of sorts. They are positing a lack of an absolute they would never affirm or believe in, a rather puzzling stance, one that feels wholly unnecessary. Itās an attitude of reacting. We should rather build philosophies of affirmation.
Teachers and educators: What are you best/favorite arguments against grades and grading students? And what are your best arguments for?
I canāt really understand why someone would prefer reading pdfās in Emacs compared to epub. As plain text epubs are an absolute joy to read and work with in org mode (nov.el). And lately Iāve tried org-remark that lets me annotate the epub as well and integrates with nov. Just awesome stuff.
Emacs #allheimen #norsktut #emacs