#self-contradiction

#self-contradiction

Attar's 'Conference of the Birds' follows a flock of souls seeking the Simorgh, symbolizing the Divine, through seven valleys, ultimately revealing the Divine as a reflection of the self in relation with others.

Plato's choice of this word is deliberate. He is not describing neutral carriers. He is describing people whose job is manufacturing a convincing reality for an audience that cannot see behind the curtain. Here is what matters clinically: the conjurers are not necessarily villains. They may be devoted parents, conscientious teachers, or well-meaning community leaders.

At the beginning of the series, we learn of his dream to be the next Fred Astaire. With all of Fred's talent, Bob appears bereft of a quality repeatedly noted but never fleshed out, that thing that makes someone a star. Whether it's agreeableness, charisma, some combination, or something else altogether, Bob can't grab hold of what lies beyond himself. So, he's forever left settling-for Oscars, Tonys, and Golden Globes. In conjunction, they reflect back to him the person he'll never be.

A drawn circle is at least something physical. You can see it, touch it, erase it. The skeptic can still say, "Circles are grounded in physical reality. Justice is different; it's just an idea in your head." So let's talk about the number two. Point to it. Not two apples, not two fingers, not a numeral on a page-that's just a symbol.

For most of my life, I thought of myself as a fixed entity: This is me. These are my traits. This is who I am. I assumed I was essentially that same person who loved sugary cereal at age 8, fried chicken at 12, and tequila at 21, and who still loves those things now, even if my stomach disagrees. But this is an illusion. Neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism all agree: There is nothing fixed about us-not even close.

Led Zeppelin warned us about the perils of misunderstood communications in relationships. Failing to translate what we are trying to say or do so that someone else gets it is the root of so many problems. But translation is a fantastic find when it goes right. Here are some things I've learned about translating meaning from a lifetime of speaking numerous languages, practicing a wide array of martial arts, and communicating science.

In my previous post, I summarized my response to Christian de Weerd, who denied that a Darwinian approach to consciousness is even possible. I argued that consciousness science has unnecessarily insulated itself from the evolutionary tools that revolutionized our understanding of every other biological phenomenon, and that treating human consciousness as the paradigm case distorts our picture of consciousness as a natural phenomenon spanning millions of species across millions of years.

They escaped persecution in the form of violent antisemitism and came to Canada with next to nothing. They built their lives from the ground up and understood, through lived experience, what the normalization of cruelty did to the human spirit, how quickly people can be swayed by the opinions of the day, and how easily one could forfeit the human capacity to stop and truly think about what one is doing.

In January 1986, NASA engineers knew the Space Shuttle Challenger's O-rings had never been tested in freezing temperatures. They recommended delaying the launch. Managers asked: Could the engineers prove it was unsafe? They couldn't-they could only say the system hadn't been designed for these conditions. Under pressure, the engineers withdrew their recommendation. The next morning, Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven astronauts.

Or maybe you've found yourself picking apart why someone's success "isn't that impressive" when deep down, you know you're just feeling bitter about it? I've been there. More times than I'd like to admit. And after years of digging into the psychology behind human behavior and interviewing over 200 people about their professional journeys, I've discovered something fascinating: that resentment we feel toward others' success? It's rarely about them. It's almost always about the uncomfortable truths we're avoiding about ourselves.

Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983-they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don't know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it's not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field's youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.

Take the sur­prise some have expressed in recent years upon find­ing out that the expres­sion to "pic­ture" some­thing in one's head isn't just a fig­ure of speech. You mean that peo­ple "pic­tur­ing an apple," say, haven't been just think­ing about an apple, but actu­al­ly see­ing one in their heads? The inabil­i­ty to do that has a name: aphan­ta­sia, from the Greek word phan­ta­sia, "image," and prefix - a, "with­out."