#philsophy

[funeral]

Everything which once aspired to transcendence, to discovery, to the infinite, has subtly altered its aim so that it can go into orbit: learning, technology, knowledge, having lost any transcendent aspect to their projects, have begun planning orbital trajectories for themselves. 'Information' is orbital, for example—a form of knowledge which will never again go beyond itself, never again achieve transcendence or self-reflection in its aspiration towards the infinite; yet which, for all that, never sets its feet on the ground, for it has no true purchase on, nor referent in, reality. Information circulates, moves around, makes its circuits (which are sometimes perfectly useless—but that is the whole point: the question of usefulness cannot be raised)—and with each spiral, each revolution, it accumulates.

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil

[thelostfilesofstudents]

[theoptia]

Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil

Text ID: I have colours, many colours, perhaps, many variegated softenings,

[onthelearningtongue]

art will never give up on you

zadie smith | james baldwin | oscar wilde | allen ginsberg | adam zagajewski

[thequietabsolute]

If other people do not understand our behaviour — so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being ‘asocial’ or ‘irrational’ in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to ‘explain,’ which usually implies that the explanation be ‘understood,’ i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself – to his reason and his conscience – and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.

— Erich Fromm, The Art of Being [1989]

[kirkjerk]

Milestone birthday! Fifty seems like an absurd age to be. Over the past few months, I wrote down a lot of ideas I'd most like to share with people, and then I made each into a panel for a comic book. Eventually the things coalesced into 4 categories: personal history, big philosophical idea, advice I'd offer, and then quotes or lyrics I find really meaningful or useful.

[les-fleur]

‏"بعض المعارك يجب أن نخسرها لكي نكتشف أننا كنا نقاتل من أجل وهم."

(سيمون فايل – الجاذبية والنعمة)

[seraphimofhumanity]

Another philosophical conundrum cause I really enjoyed your answer to my question about the ship of Theseus:

Is math invented, or discovered?

Hello, friend! I apologize about my late answer, Sam has been very sick recently and he refuses to let me heal him, so me and Dean have been taking care of him. I promise I have not forgotten about you; I love your questions, they make me think, which I will always appreciate.

I think that having God as my father severely impacts my answer, with the idea that He created everything, including math and it is simply up to His creations -humans- to discover His inventions and there is a world of math that He has invented yet to be discovered by mortal men.

If you are looking for an answer that does not include the supernatural, I am perhaps the wrong person to ask, but I will answer as best I can.

Disregarding God, under the theory of simple evolution, there are... patterns that the universe tends to fall into. The Fibonacci sequence, the Pythagorean theorem etc. etc. Whether that is intentional or not, they surely had no name until humans came along, found the patterns and named them as such, after their great men, their inventors, Latin roots and so on.

So I think overall, I would say humans discover more than invent, however, how they interpret, theorize and reason their discoveries is an invention of the concept of it to other humans. If that makes sense at all.

Those mathematical patterns already existed and humans still have much to discover about the spiralling, confusing mess of 'math' swirling about the cosmos.

ooc - so sorry again about the late response! i've been busier than expected, but thank you so much for the question! like stated above, i adore answering them, they are so fun <33