Quotes from books
-
A thread for sharing quotes from books you're currently reading, or even from books you have already read if you feel like it. Any quotes are welcome, whether they be thought-provoking, funny, sad or anything else. Include the book's title and author(s).
Add commentary if you want.
[ ] for adding anything within a quote.
. . . when omitting text. -
"He wrote that 'it could well be argued that the cognitive skills of a normal disconnected right hemisphere without language are vastly inferior to the cognitive skills of a chimpanzee' . . . Yet when the right hemisphere can be shown to outperform the left at some fairly basic task of prediction, he interprets this as a sing of the intelligence of the left hemisphere, on the grounds that animals are also capable of outperforming the human left-hemisphere strategy."
The Master and His Emissary (2019), p. 130
Ian McGilchrist
Comedy
"He" in the quote refers to Michael Gazzaniga, "one of the most distinguished living neuroscientists and hemisphere researchers"
-
"There are certain modes of attention which are naturally called forth by certain kinds of object. We pay a different sort of attention to a dying man from the sort of attention we'd pay to a sunset, or a carburettor. However, this process is reciprocal. It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find . . . [attention] creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way . . . One way of putting this is to say that we neither discover an objective reality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world 'calling forth' something in me that in turn 'calls forth' something in the world."
The Master and His Emissary (2019), p. 133
Ian McGilchrist -
"The point is that philosophy in the West is essentially a left-hemisphere process. It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualized, disembodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear approach to truth, building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick by brick. While such a characterization is not true of most pre-Socratic philosophers, particularly Heraclitus, it is at least true of the majority of philosophers since Plato in the West . . . Heraclitus (like the Oriental philosophers who influenced Greek thought until Plato) was unperturbed by paradox, taking it as a sign that our ordinary ways of thinking are not adequate to the nature of reality. But around the same time that the Platonic mode of discourse, with it's insistence on the Law of the Excluded Middle, came into play — as, in other words, thinking became philosophy in the accepted sense — paradox started to emerge as a focus of intellectual disquiet... Take the sorites paradox. This results from believing that the whole is the sum of it's parts, and can be reached by a sequential process of incrementation. It tries to relate two things: a grain of sand and a heap, as though their relationship was transparent. It presupposes that there must either be a heap or not be a heap at any one time: 'either/or' are your only alternatives. That is the left-hemisphere view, and sure enough it leads to paradox. According to the right-hemisphere view, it is a matter of a shift in context, and the coming into being of a Gestalt, an entity which has imprecisely defined bounds, and is recognised whole: the heap comes into being gradually, and is a process, an evolving, changing 'thing' (this problem is related to the Growing Argument). Failure to take into account context, inability to understand Gestalt forms, an inappropriate demand for precision where none can be found, an ignorance of process, which becomes a never-ending series of static moments: these are signs of left-hemisphere predominance . . . any enclosed, self-referring system the left hemisphere comes up with, if taken strictly on its own terms, self-explodes: there is a member of the system that cannot be accommodated by the system. There is always an escape route from the hall of mirrors, if one looks hard enough."
The Master and His Emissary (2019), pp. 137-140
Ian McGilchrist
Sorites paradox:
- If one grain is not a heap, and adding another grain at any stage doesn't make it a heap, then how can a heap ever come into being?
Philosophy, as in the love of wisdom ("philo" translates to "love", "sophia" translates to "wisdom"), is great. But I doubt most "philosophers" actually love wisdom.
-
"Consider every path carefully, testing it in whichever way you feel necessary — then ask yourself, but only yourself, one question: 'Does this path have a heart?'"
Return of the Warriors (third edition, September 2000), p. 94
Théun Mares
"There is a mysterious force known as intent which exists throughout the entire universe. It is this force which brings about perception, for it is intent which, firstly, aligns the energy fields, and secondly, causes awareness of that alignment."
Return of the Warriors (third edition, September 2000), pp. 179-180
Théun Mares -
@NoeticJuice
1.Amor Fati - nietzsche- “Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent. There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other. Why grow sad from one’s sadness and delight in one’s joy? What does it matter whether our tears come from pleasure or pain? Love your unhappiness and hate your happiness, mix everything up, scramble it all! Be a snowflake dancing in the air, a flower floating downstream! Have courage when you don’t need to, and be a coward when you must be brave! Who knows? You may still be a winner! And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is a loss, and all loss is a gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
- “Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent. There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other. Why grow sad from one’s sadness and delight in one’s joy? What does it matter whether our tears come from pleasure or pain? Love your unhappiness and hate your happiness, mix everything up, scramble it all! Be a snowflake dancing in the air, a flower floating downstream! Have courage when you don’t need to, and be a coward when you must be brave! Who knows? You may still be a winner! And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is a loss, and all loss is a gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.”
-
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” ― Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
-
"The norms Canguilhem talks about are biological. They are the adaptations that the individual makes to itself or to its milieu in order to survive. They are, therefore, temporary norms. They can be propulsive if the organism can define new norms and adapt to new circumstances, or repulsive if the organism has to do everything in its power to maintain the current situation. Because of this combination of propulsivity and repulsivity, we consider things to be normal or pathological. An organism is in a dynamic interaction with its environment, and within this interaction, new situations occur that we consider ‘ill’ or ‘healthy’. We consider disease to be a negative biological experience: we perceive ourselves as healthy if our organism is resilient to change in the environment (propulsive). We perceive ourselves as ill if our organism is less resilient to changes (repulsive). Pathology and health are hence systemic properties. It is an individual assessment of the current situation in which one suffers. This does not mean that the pathology is actually ‘in’ the individual. Pathology arises when there is a mismatch between the individual and their environment, and if the individual cannot repair this mismatch by itself. For example, someone with low blood pressure at sea level is healthy when they are in the mountains because they will experience no suffering. Science may explain a specific experience of illness by pointing out where the mismatch lies. But medicine, as it deals with disease and health, operates at the level of experience, not merely at the level of causation."
-
Cheating with a quote from a /pamphlet/.
The conflict in nature between different kinds of organism has been popularly expressed in phrases like “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest.” Yet few people realize that mutual cooperation between different kinds of organisms—symbiosis—is just as important, and that the “fittest” may be the one that most helps another to survive.
Whether intentional or not, Trager’s description of the “fittest” is not merely a scientific judgment made by an eminent biologist; it is also an ethical judgment similar to the one Kropotkin derived from his own work as a naturalist and his ideals as an anarchist. Trager emphasized that the “nearly perfect” integration of “symbiotic microorganisms into the economy of the host … has lead to the hypothesis that certain intracellular organelles might have been originally independent microorganisms.” Accordingly, the chloroplasts that are responsible for photosynthetic activity in plants with eukaryotic, or nucleated, cells are discrete structures that replicate by division, have their own distinctive DNA very similar to that of circular bacteria, synthesize their own proteins, and are bounded by two-unit membranes.
Much the same is true of the eukaryotic cell’s “powerhouse,” its mitochondria. The eukaryotic cells are the morphological units of all complex forms of animal and plant life. The Protista and fungi also share these well-nucleated cell structures. Eucaryotes are aerobic and include clearly formed subunits, or organelles. By contrast, the prokaryotes lack nuclei; they are anaerobic, less specialized than the eucaryotics, and they constitute the evolutionary predecessors of the eucaryotics. In fact, they are the only life forms that could have survived and flourished in the early earth’s atmosphere, with its mere traces of free oxygen.
It is now widely accepted that the eukaryotic cells consist of highly functional symbiotic arrangements of procaryotes that have become totally interdependent with other constituents. Eucaryotic flagella derive from anaerobic spirochetes; mitochondria, from prokaryotic bacteria that were capable of respiration as well as fermentation; and plant chloroplasts from “blue-green algae,” which have recently been reclassified as cyanobacteria. The theory, now almost a biological convention, holds that phagocytic ancestors of what were to become eucaryotes absorbed (without digesting) certain spirochetes, protomitochondria, and, in the case of photosynthetic cells, coccoid cyanobacteria and chloroxybacteria. Existing phyla of multicellular aerobic life forms thus had their origins in a symbiotic process that integrated a variety of microorganisms into what we can reasonably be called a colonial organism, the eukaryotic cell. Mutualism, not predation, seems to have been the guiding principle for the evolution of the highly complex aerobic life forms that are common today.
Obvious extensions to cooperation between life forms in the society, producing complexification, differentiation, the opportunity for recreation, et c.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-sociobiology-or-social-ecology
-
"If one had to encapsulate the principal differences in the experience mediated by the two hemispheres, their two modes of being, one could put it like this. The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known — and to this world it exists in a relationship of care. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantages of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference. It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really 'break out' to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own representations only. Where the thing itself is 'present' to the right hemisphere, it is only 're-presented' by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing. Where the right hemisphere is conscious of the Other, whatever that may be, the left hemisphere's consciousness is of itself."
The Master and His Emissary (2019), pp. 174-175
Ian McGilchrist -
"Drawing does indeed involve thought, and it is an effective and efficient method for perceptual training. And perceptual knowledge can impact learning in all disciplines."
"Learning to draw may uncover potentialities that are unknown to you right now. The German artist Albrecht Dürer said, 'From this, the treasure secretly gathered in your heart will become evident through your creative work.'"
"Research on brain-hemisphere aspects of visual perception indicates that drawing a complex realistic image of a perceived form is mainly a function of the right hemisphere of the brain . . . it appears that the right hemisphere perceives — processes visual information — in a mode suitable for drawing, and the left-brain mode of functioning (L-mode) may be inappropriate for the task.
"As our hemispheres gather in the same sensory information, the task may be shared, each handling the part suited to its style. Or one hemisphere, often the left, can 'take over' and inhibit the other half. Remember, language dominates!"
" . . . it seems probable that you have all the brain power needed for drawing, but old habits of seeing interfere with that ability and block it. The exercises in this book are designed to remove that interference and unblock it."
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (the definitive 4th edition), pp. XIX, 7, 31, 36, 5
Betty Edwards
@NoeticJuice said in Did you replace Dr. Ray Peat after he died or are you living gurulessly? (pls include serviceable rayplacements):
@dapose said in Did you replace Dr. Ray Peat after he died or are you living gurulessly? (pls include serviceable rayplacements):
We need to be painting and playing music and making art.
I'd like to see more art here: Sketch thread
