So... What is acceptable and what is respectable, is a highly arbitrary phenomenon in our society."
Também aqui
Nature VS Nurture
"Estou à espera de morrer e penso que será uma experiência interessante."
RIP George Steiner
Porquê a Índia?
"É a próxima grande explosão cultural. Tive imensos alunos vindos da China e da Índia. Os chineses dizem sempre que sim e aprendem tudo de memória — o que para mim é algo extremamente benéfico. Mas os indianos são criativos. Dizem que não e vão à procura da sua própria opinião. Estou muito otimista em relação ao futuro da ciência, da arte, da língua e da filosofia indianas."
Mais, aqui
Brexit is a collective English mental breakdown
Um excelente artigo.
"English people living on dreams of empire never learned to see others as equals."
"On June 23rd, 2016, the English rejected that offer and opted to continue living the fiction of splendid isolation that sustained the UK and the British empire before it, and to continue denying the Scots and the Irish a will of their own. Any recovery from this collective mental breakdown will involve treating it in the light of its deep historical causes. Not until there is a separate English parliament, giving England at last the distinctive political identity it has shunned for 300 years, will the delusions that led the country to Brexit finally be dissipated by contact with reality. Perhaps then, with their psychosis healed, the English will apply to rejoin the EU."
Mais, aqui
Neoliberalism – An economic ideology
This Is Neoliberalism ▶︎ Introducing the Invisible Ideology (Part 1)
Neoliberalism – An economic ideology that exists within the framework of capitalism
“Marriage is not a house or even a tent…”
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,”
Rainer Maria Rilke
HABITATION
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire
Margaret Atwood
The critical role of energy in foundational infrastructure
"[...] the great economic revolutions in history are infrastructure revolutions, and what makes the great infrastructure revolutions transformational is the convergence of new communications media with new energy regimes. Every energy revolution in history has been accompanied by its own unique communications revolution. Energy revolutions change the temporal and spatial reach of society and make possible more complex living arrangements, all of which require new communication media to manage and coordinate the new opportunities. Try to imagine organizing the production and distribution complexities of a steam-powered urban industrial revolution without cheap and quick steam-powered printing and the telegraph, or organizing the managerial complexities of an oil, auto, and suburban mass-consumer culture without centralized electricity and especially telephone communication, radio and television."
Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin [pg 236]
Information technology is going to erode the need for work
Paul Mason: "Information technology is going to erode the need for work"
"If you ever get to a situation, where humanity is stood to the side of the production process, letting machines do the job, you will need for knowledge to become social"
[Marx, by Paul Mason]
"If such [automated] machines ever existed, the difference between master and slave would disapear"
[Aristotle]
"The two sources of truth in modern life (universities and the media) are on the systemic attack by the new thought architects of fascism"
Paul Mason: here
Never take me for granted
I once held her in my arms
She said she would always stay
But I was cruel
I treated her like a fool
I threw it all away
She said she would always stay
But I was cruel
I treated her like a fool
I threw it all away
Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand
And rivers that ran through every day
I must have been mad
I never knew what I had
Until I threw it all away
And rivers that ran through every day
I must have been mad
I never knew what I had
Until I threw it all away
Love is all there is, it makes the world go 'round
Love and only love, it can't be denied
No matter what you think about it
You just won't be able to do without it
Take a tip from one who's tried
Love and only love, it can't be denied
No matter what you think about it
You just won't be able to do without it
Take a tip from one who's tried
So if you find someone that gives you all of her love
Take it to your heart, don't let it stray
For one thing that's certain
You will surely be a-hurtin'
If you throw it all away
If you throw it all away
Take it to your heart, don't let it stray
For one thing that's certain
You will surely be a-hurtin'
If you throw it all away
If you throw it all away
To Greta and all those like her
"... Para se fazer uma revolução, não bastam os números. As revoluções são geralmente levadas a cabo por pequenas redes de activistas e não pelas massas. Se quer fazer uma grande mudança não se pergunte quantas pessoas defendem as suas ideias, mas quantos dos seus apoiantes são capazes de cooperar eficazmente."
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo-Deus
People have the power - Patti Smith
Al Cabo...
Al Cabo
Al cabo, son muy pocas las palabras
que de verdad nos duelen, y muy pocas
las que consiguen alegrar el alma.
Y son también muy pocas las personas
que mueven nuestro corazon, y menos
aún las que lo mueven mucho tiempo.
Al cabo, son poquíssimas las cosas
que de verdad importan en la vida:
poder querer a alguien, que nos quieran
y no morri después que nuestros hijos.
Amalia Bautista
do amor e do medo
One shall never allow oneself to be loved by those who one feels intimidated by.
Nunca nos permitiremos ser amados por aqueles por quem nos sentimos intimidados.
Giving narratives a framework for a better world
"At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. "'Free' as in 'free speech,'" Richard Stallman says, not "'free' as in 'free beer.'" But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low cost or no cost. When the marginal cost of production is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn't charge – well, the world looks a little different. This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice."
Jeremy Rifkin, in Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 220]
The Second Enclosure Movement - James Boyle - Conference on the Public Domain
"When you give a monopoly to someone it is an incentive for governmental corruption. You are setting up a continuing system os incentives designed to ensure the corruption of your government."
[26:17]
James Boyle: The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain:
Abstract:
"We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. It sounds grandiloquent to call it "the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind," but in a very real sense that is just what it is. True, the new state-created property rights may be "intellectual" rather than "real," but once again things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights. In this article, I try to develop the vocabulary and the analytic tools necessary to turn the tide of enclosure. I offer an historical sketch of various types of skepticism about intellectual property, from the antimonopolist criticisms of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, through the emergence of affirmative arguments for the public domain, to the use of the language of the commons to defend the possibility of distributed methods of non-proprietary production. In many ways, it turns out, concepts of the public domain show the same variation in assumptions, and the same analytic differences, as the concept of property itself. I conclude by arguing that, for a number of reasons, the appropriate model for the change in thinking which I argue for comes from the history of the environmental movement. The invention of the concept of "the environment" pulls together a string of otherwise disconnected issues, offers analytical insight into the blindness implicit in prior ways of thinking, and leads to perception of common interest where none was seen before. Like the environment, the public domain must be "invented" before it is saved. Like the environment, like "nature," the public domain turns out to be a concept that is considerably more slippery than many of us realize. And, like the environment, the public domain nevertheless turns out to be useful, perhaps even necessary."
here
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine
The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back
[Seventeenth century protest against English enclosures]
---
Thomas More (one of the only political theorists who are also a saint!):
"your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heard say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities."
Here
As narrativas do Eu / Fake it till you make it (?) / Difference is everywhere / NLP / o Eterno Retorno da diferença
About Deleuze - Lecture 1 and 2_1
Topics from the lecture on the book "Difference & Repition" (Paul Patton):
Deleuze analysis how 'difference' comes down to us philosophically, as a secondary category. His engaging with the history of philosophy is an engagement seeking to show that the primary way of thinking of difference is as secondary to identities.
Structuralists defend that the 'surface identity' refers to the underlying identity that gives rise to it (ex: problem with authority comes from Oedipus complex).
Post-Structuralists (Foucault, Deleuze) agree that we have surface identities, but they deny that these identities come from some deeper essential core.
For the Post-Structuralists, our identities are not a product of some deep essence. But if our identities are not a product of some deep essence, where did they come from? How is it that these identities came to us, if they didn't come from something deep underneath?
– For Foucault – Our identities are a product of a history in which we are immersed. Who we are, is produced, created, through the 'histories' in which we find ourselves. So, if we have a problem, we should just look inside ourselves (to see what the essential core is and how it has gone wrong), but we should look just as much outside. So if we have a problem, it's not because of who we are, but of the context (narrative) we find ourselves in. So we have to adopt/develop alternative practices :D, alternative ways of seeing the world.
The alternative practice will, ultimately, challenge the identities (the identities that are currently 'on offer'). So, the 'history narrative', people are not 'essentially' normal or not. They 'get produced' as normal, through various practices, as psychotherapy...
So, Foucault tends to reject the idea of ontology as a way of accounting for our identities. So it looks like it's deep, essential and onthological, but it turns out to be (the 'ontology of the present': mentioned by Foucault).
Foucault is not interested in the brain and how it develops. He's interested in the 'history' itself of things that gives us the habits, and not in the biological matter. For Foucault, the brain might as well be a black box because he's not interested in the brain. Brain is whatever it is that can be subject to these habits.
For Foucault, if we are a product of our history, we are exposed to the outside. The outside filters into us, makes us.
Now, this leaves open a question: "Is there any other way to stop thinking of identities being the product of essence?"
Why would anybody turn to ontology if you are trying to resist the idea that our identities are not the product of some deep essence [minuto 1:10:10]? It seems the wrong place to turn. And yet, that's where Deleuze goes.
So, when we see it, when we have a good grip on the development of this Deleuzian ontology, it will present itself as a potentially compelling way to think about who we are, and who we might be. Moving past ideas of identity.
– For Deleuze – Who is a Materialist, rather than working through history (narrative), he works through ontology. What there is, is the material stuff. Deleuze's 'Difference in Repetition'.
Can we think of 'difference' not as difference between things but 'difference' on it's own, simply as difference?
Deleuze says that when we talk about 'difference', we tend to think about difference as secondary and 'identities' as primary. [1:17:00]. Can we think as 'difference', not as the difference between two identities but 'difference' on its own simply as difference? The move Deleuze is going to make is to make 'Difference' primary and 'Identity' secondary. One way to read the book, "Difference & Repetition" is as an ontology of how 'difference' gives rise to 'identities'. Identities are secondary and they are rooted in something that is not an identity, which means it could be a lot of things that it is, currently, not. Not an essence in any way we thought of.
Example: It goes back to infant brain development. The synaptic connections in infant brains, are not yet really formed, and the way it works (roughly), has a lot to do with habit. So the way it happens is that we become a product of the synaptic connections that get formed in our brain, through development. [1:22:55]
So, how shall we think about the brain? The brain is not some essential identity that gets formed through brain development. It can't be that because if it were, there could only be one way that we could develop. And there's so many different ways we can develop. So whatever the brain is, it doesn't hold any potential. The brain cannot either be as if there were a bunch of different possible "me's" in there, and that in the way my synaptic connections formed they would give me one 'me' as opposed to the other 'me'. So we can't think of the infant brain as an identity that just happens and unfolds, on the one hand, and we can't think of it as a set of possible identities, one of which gets chosen, and we cannot either think of the child's brain as a complete blank slate that could become anything, because whatever my brain develops me into, it's not going to develop me into a seagull, or a racoon... So the infants brain has to have some kind of structure but, on the other hand, the structure is not a structure of any possibilities...
So to put it on ontological terms, what is the 'Being' of this thing (this infant brain)? Deleuze's answer is that it's a 'field of difference'.
The "Field of Difference" – [1:36:11] is structured, on the one hand, because if it weren't it could become anything. But it's not structured with any identities, on the other hand, because there are no identities there waiting to come out. So, not a blank slate, not an identity, not a set of potentialities, but something that could be many different things through its exposure to experience (the Foucault side of it...). And, to be noticed about this 'Field of Difference', is that we don't know all of what it can be. Because it's the ways in which it habituates itself, the different things to which it's exposed, the way it takes up those things that it's exposed to, will make it what it is.
Because it's a human brain and because it's a 'field of difference', the identity that gets formed is not the only identity that it might form, not the only identity it might have formed, but it's also not the only identity it might have formed once it gets formed, because people re-habituate themselves. They change their synaptic connections and they become somebody else. They change!
So the 'field of difference' just doesn't go away! It's there within the identity.
And, interesting enough, this thought resonates with cognitive science.
So how do we think about this field of difference and how does it give rise to identities? [1:42:11]
----
Repitition [1:42:11]: Things do repeat. Everything repeats... But what repeats is not identity. What repeats, for Deleuze, what keeps coming back, is 'difference'. There is always something ahead of us that repeats, that we find in our future, but it's not the same thing over and over again (like Nietzsche's eternal return). Deleuze's repetition is the 'eternal return of difference'. The 'same thing' that returns is difference. So, as we move through the future, as we move through our world, towards the future, what we are faced with, what keeps coming back to face us, are not simply identities but, in fact, that field of difference. Which means that whatever anything is, it could also be something else and we can't be sure of it can possibly be.
 |
| [1:51:16] Start by reading from page 50 and read to the end of the chapter (Nietzsche). Skip the note on Heiddeger's philosophy of difference (page 64). Structure of the reading: Aristotle - Hegel - Nietzsche - Plato |
How has difference come down to us philosophically?
– 'Difference' is secondary to 'identity', for Aristotle. For Aristotle, 'identity' is primary.
– For Hegel, 'difference' is secondary to 'identity'.
– Nietzsche is the thinker for whom 'difference' becomes primary.
– As for Plato: oddly enough, after we read Nietzsche, we can see Plato as opening the door to overturning his own philosophy, but we can only see that after having seen Nietzsche.
• Aristotle:
Aristotle's thought is a thought of categories. [2:07:07] For him we have 3 'identity' categories: Genera, Species, and Individuals
Genera identity examples: colours, animals...
Species identity examples: black, white, horse, whale (black is the 'species' of the 'genera' colour; whale is the 'species' of the 'genera' animal)
Individuals identity examples: a white horse, a black whale.
– So, 'this white horse', is a member of a 'species' which is a member of a 'genera'.
[2:08:57] - For Aristotle, difference lies between different 'genera', between different 'species', and between 'different individuals'. In order to have 'difference' you must have 'identities' first. What is primary for Aristotle are the categories themselves. Difference emerges as distinctions within various categories. There's no such thing as difference itself, and difference doesn't generate identity. First we have identities, and difference happens between them.
• Hegel:
Thesis - Antithesis - Synthesis -> dialectic
[2:11:44] Of all of the 'philosophical enemies' Deleuze had, he considered Hegel the one who was his greatest enemy. Hegel's notion of 'dialectic' was what Deleuze criticised the most. Hegel sees himself as working by means of difference. He sees things as unfolding by means of diference. But he still has difference subordinated to identity. That is why 'difference' is opposition.
For Hegel, history does not procede in a linear fashion (step by step by step). It procedes dialectically. The notion of the dialectic in Hegel's hands takes on a certain form which it had not had before:
––– You start with a specific situation, and that situation generates its own opposition. So situations are internally unstable and generate their own opposition. So then there is a conflict that has to be resolved, and it's resolved into a new situation. That new situation will have its own instabilities.
So, in Hegel there is the 'thesis' (the situation). To understand the dialectic we can use the [simple] analogy of stereoscopic vision: two different eyes (two identities) capture two different images that merge into one other final image (the new 'thesis' is the 'synthesis' and the synthesis becomes the new thesis). In Hegel's thought, the negative is primary: – what gets the movement going between identities is opposition.
Examples of dialectics:
1) Relationships develop dialectically.
2) Marx, who was a dialectical thinker. For Marx the economic situation is one that is always in tension: owners vs workers. History, for Marx, is driven by conflict between classes, and if you get rid of the notion of classes, if you end up having a single class, then there isn't going to be this eternal tension. So we will have reached an 'eternal synthesis'. And this is what Marx means by 'the end of History'. So, through the 'dialectic' we do have a movement of differences, but they work by opposition or by negativity. Each movement is a negation of the earlier one (according to Hegel).
Deleuze wants to point out that identities don't have to come from other single identities.
– Can there be a thought of the 'negative' which makes the negative secondary rather than primary?
– Why would one want a thought that makes the
• Nietzsche:
[2:29:42] For Nietzsche there are two forms of negation: one is the Hegelian one, and the other is a form where negation is not primary, but secondary. For Nietzsche there are two types of forces: Active forces and reactive forces. Active forces are not in conflict with the reactive forces. Only reactive forces are in conflict with active forces.
– An active force is a force of creation. It does what it does. It follows its own path.
– A reactive force works by stopping an active force. It reacts to an active force.
The primary way as to think of difference is as secondary to identity.
----
Deleuze ontology: Ontology is a matter of relations without positive terms. 'Being' is relations without positive terms.
----
Personal change [1:39:37]
People often think that personal change comes from epiphanies. Like, you have this moment, and everything becomes clear. Suddenly the scales fall from your eyes, you see the 'truth', and now you're somebody else. And what studies of folks have shown is that personal change almost never happens like that. Why not? Well, think of how brains develop. They develop through habituation os synaptic connections. So, to become something other than you were is, often, not a matter of realising something in a moment but, rather, habituating yourself. Getting the habit. People change by trying things out, experimenting, etc, etc.
... to be continued...
The Psychiatrist
Notas:
Ontology: the study of what there is (physical... mental... God...). And, what 'Being' is.
Idealists: There is only mental stuff.
One of the qualities of matter, is that it is convertible into energy. But energy is just mass in another state, so it's just more material... Matter has a lot more qualities than we may think.
Utilitarianism: that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness...[or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.It has been applied to social welfare economics, the crisis of global poverty, the ethics of raising animals for food and the importance of avoiding existential risks to humanity. [Jeremy Bentham]
Insight Therapy: a type of psychotherapy in which the therapist helps their patient understand how their feelings, beliefs, actions, and events from the past are influencing their current mindset.
More stuff:
The Harder problem of Consciousness: here
A causalidade em Deleuze: diferença interna e produção de si: aqui
Holographic ontology: holographic ontology highlights a strong quantum characteristic of complexity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy about global life. Instead of a teleological process of homogenization, holographic transition is more multifaceted and dynamic. [...] As global challenges loom, transnational interconnectedness deepens, and a myriad of issues interact in unpredictable ways, it is now time to take the worlds’ holographic existence more seriously.
here
Saussure: “in language there are only differences without positive terms”. Language is a huge contradiction and without these contradictions or differences language would cease to exist. Here
Definition and the Epistemology of Natural Kinds in Aristotle: here
Hegelian Dialectics For Dummies: here
The Philosopher's Zone
The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.
Here
Agustina
“Em geral não há livros escritos por mulheres. Por homens, tão-pouco. São fêmeas as que se confessam em páginas e páginas de queixume ou de triunfo sexual. E os homens escrevem de maneira submissa à sua masculinidade. Só alguns, muito poucos, têm a anomalia de ultrapassar as raias desse dever – o de serem machos exemplares. Quando isso acontece, são mais profundos do que o mar e mais vastos do que o mundo”.
“Francamente – porque pensam que eu escrevo? Para incomodar o maior número possível de pessoas, com o máximo de inteligência. Por narcisismo, que é um facto civilizador (...) Escrevo para desiludir com mérito, que é a maneira de se fazer lembrar com virtude”.
Agustina Bessa-Luís
Um Manguito com arte e imensa classe - aqui
On focussing / Change [in life] is automatic. Progress is not. / Fake it till you make it [rituals] / Conditioning the elephant
WHEN did you decide to accept a specific limitation about yourself?
TONY ROBBINS | 30 Minutes for the NEXT 30 Years of Your LIFE
On Netflix: here
Resolutions ≠ Wishlist
Resolution = to resolve
"If you want to take the island, you burn the boats" (like that, there's no turning back).
on Goals and Standards – "everybody, in life, gets their 'musts'. They don't get their 'shoulds'. Most people have a list of 'shoulds'. When we make 'shoulds' into 'musts', we attach ourselves to the.
"We all act consistently with who we believe we are. We stay consistent with how we define ourselves"
"We live who we believe we are"
"Once you lock into that identity, your brain finds a way to keep you there"
RAS - the part of the brain that tells you what you notice in the world.
So around and around it goes!
RAS:
The reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of neurons located in the brain stem that project anteriorly to the hypothalamus to mediate behavior, as well as both posteriorly to the thalamus and directly to the cortex for activation of awake, desynchronized cortical EEG patterns. It's a bundle of nerves at our brainstem that filters out unnecessary information so the important stuff gets through. ... Your RAS takes what you focus on and creates a filter for it.
Reticular Activating System
RAISE YOUR STANDARD
The brief sum of life...
The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long.
Horace
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Ernest Dowson
Girlfriend / Boyfriend
Partners in committed non-marital relationships are also sometimes described as a significant other or partner, [3] especially if the individuals are cohabiting.
Boyfriend and partner mean different things to different people; the distinctions between the terms are subjective. How the term is used will ultimately be determined by personal preference.[4]
A 2005 study of 115 people ages 21 to 35 who were either living with or had lived with a romantic partner notes that the lack of proper terms often leads to awkward situations, such as someone upset over not being introduced in social situations to avoid the question.[5]
There is a significant difference between girlfriend and boyfriend, and girl friend and boy friend. In a strictly grammatical sense, a girlfriend[6] or boyfriend[7] is an 'individual of significance' with whom one shares a relationship.
Here
Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media
"We grew up to be consumers of Media. Now Media is consuming us. The things we read watch us read them. The things we listen to, listen to us listen to them."
re:publica 2012 - Eben Moglen - Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media
Anarchism Triumphant: "This paper shows why free software, far from being a marginal participant in the commercial software market, is the vital first step in the withering away of the intellectual property system." - here
