Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
"It’s a Google Ngram that plots the prevalence of two terms — consumer and customer — in books between 1770 and 2004."
Philosophy professor Jonathan Lear sets out to answer this question in his new book, “A Case for Irony,” attempting to redefine and flesh out this term from the pat and the vague. In Lear’s view, irony is not just about humor: It’s meant to serve as a sobering mirror to our lives and actions, revealing and reaffirming to us our passions and beliefs. It shows how exactly we measure up to our professed ideals, all in an effort to strive for excellence – to become better at whatever it is we devote our lives to. Irony asks us, in a fundamental way, “Am I really who I say I am?”
"Not everything is included. It's politically imperative not to let Occupy Wall Street become an omnibus container for any and all political sentiments. Not every position should be welcomed, encouraged, or tolerated. How this plays out in the General Assemblies is an effect of the local cultures, the activists involved, the patterns of interaction. In NY, the power dynamics are already reflected upon in discussions and working groups. I expect this is also the case already in the other sites. In the same way that racism, sexism, and homophobia have no place in the movement, it should also be the case that libertarian, capitalist, and financialist attempts to interpret and guide the movement are rejected"
Three foci of current research: meaning in explanation, methods for support, ontology of causation.
"As a result, arguments about whether a given result is just above or just below an arbitrary and conventional threshold seems foolish. Doing the calculations wrong is still a major mistake, but whether they're done correctly or not, we should stop pretending that "statistically significant" is some kind of magic guarantee of quality."
-
4chan challenges the benefits of creating an online persona or brand, and they’re right to; the internet was built from cinderblocks of porn and piracy—basic human fun, not the pages of Emily Post. A useful tool that handles your bills and tracks your Domino’s pizza order still bombards you with talking pop-up ads, trolls appearing to be casually racist or aggressively hateful, even during a bleak and business-like discussion of where to find a good mechanic.
-
There’s a thrill to it, taking the opportunity to go undercover when it feels as though you’re breaking the unwritten code of web transparency, but there could be a bigger thrill: creating a cadre of anonymous personas, not with the intent of using them as heckle-puppets or comment trolls, definitely not using them to seduce strangers into dark sedans or wreak general havoc, but to devise a much more creative and fractured experience for yourself online. It is strange that the web, which in every way attempts to cater to the fantasies of its audience (we’re drooling at your photos of dinner at Momofuku, watching six-hour marathons of television shows that we would never admit to our TiVos that we enjoy, airbrushing our profile pictures), would ask us to be so honest about which coffee shops we frequent enough to earn a mayor badge or how we look on any given Wednesday. It’s nice because it fosters trust, but it’s a shame because there are so many other options that we’re being steered away from, partially because we like to guide our networks (people who actually know us, people who feel like they know us because we’ve shared so much of ourselves with them) towards things like our band’s concerts, our essays, our books, our plays and our birthday parties (and additionally because not everyone’s playing by the open-book, be-yourself rules). This is an obvious negative of a false persona: It arrives friendless and nascent, it doesn’t want a Facebook, and it is unrecognizable at the grocery store or at parties. It’s unable to promote itself. Starting over can be daunting, when your rebirth is as a fake adult who doesn’t know anybody. But starting over can feel so good. It’s like exfoliating.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
"This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal stage where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are being forced to fail, working classes are being re-proletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed beyond the grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural disaster” that just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island that gave us the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist project would also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations are being rendered through economic alchemy into not-quite alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure whose life and work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around the clock with no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits around to die. "
"When I stumble on old Star Trek re-runs while channel-surfing, I experience the show as a flickery palimpsest, in media archaeology terms. Meaning: I see the characters -- Spock especially -- through layers of memory and personal meaning. I watch it partly through the eyes of the kid I was when I first tuned in to the show back in the '60s. I think of the episodes where the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock wrestles with his irrational, emotional human side (his Inner Feminine, in '60s terms), episodes that taught me lessons about another, more fluid masculinity, cerebral yet strong, sensitive yet drily funny, at a time when every dad I knew was a blustering, because-I-said-so Authority Figure.
Listening to the jagged, atonal music of my parents' arguments late at night, when they thought I'd fallen asleep -- the inevitable drawn-out prelude to the inevitable divorce -- I clung to Spock's fundamentalist faith in reason, fervently trying to believe that an arched eyebrow and a Puckish aloofness could be my heat shield against the firefight on the other side of my bedroom wall.
Like Obama, I believe in the final frontier. But like Prince Keon, I believe it's inside us."
-
The great comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, "People don't want the meaning of life, they want the experience of life." He could not have hit the nail more firmly on the head.
One thing I have never understood in the vitriol that people manage to dredge up in these science vs. religion battles is their lack clarity about goals. Is human spiritual endeavor really about "knowing" the existence of a superbeing? Does this academic "knowing", as in "I can prove this to be true," really what lies behind the spiritual genius of people like the ninth century Sufi poet Rumi, the 13th century Zen teacher Dogen, or more modem examples like Martin Luther King or Ghandi?
-
As the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said "Even if God did exist, that would change nothing." One way to interpret his meaning was that a formulaic "knowledge" of a superbeing's existence is beside the point when the real issue before us every day, all day is the verb "to be."
It’s the act of being that gives rise to our suffering and our moments of enlightenment. Right there, right in the very experience of life, is the warm, embodied truth we long for so completely.
-
Because whether there is a God or not, the universe per se cannot have a purpose in any anthropomorphic sense for which that term is usually employed. The universe is simply the collection of galaxies, stars, planets, comets, meteorites, and other solar system detritus, plus whatever dark matter and dark energy turn out to be. The universe is governed by laws of nature that themselves have no purpose other than what they inevitably dictate matter and energy to do.
-
Humans have an evolved sense of purpose — a psychological desire to accomplish a goal — that developed out of behaviors that were selected for because they were good for the individual or for the group. Although cultures may differ on what behaviors are defined as purposeful, the desire to behave in purposeful ways is an evolved trait. Purpose is in our nature.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
-
The debate about solitary individuals is sometimes referred to as the debate about "private language." Wittgenstein uses this expression in another context, however, to name a language that refers to private sensations. Such a private language by definition cannot be understood by anyone other than its user (who alone knows the sensations to which it refers). Wittgenstein invites us to imagine a man who decides to write 'S' in his diary whenever he has a certain sensation. This sensation has no natural expression, and 'S' cannot be defined in words. The only judge of whether 'S' is used correctly is the inventor of 'S'. The only criterion of correctness is whether a sensation feels the same to him or her. There are no criteria for its being the same other than its seeming the same. So he writes 'S' when he feels like it. He might as well be doodling. The so-called 'private language' is no language at all. The point of this is not to show that a private language is impossible but to show that certain things one might want to say about language are ultimately incoherent. If we really try to picture a world of private objects (sensations) and inner acts of meaning and so on, we see that what we picture is either regular public language or incomprehensible behavior (the man might as well quack as say or write 'S').
-
This suggests not that pains and so on are irrelevant but that we should not construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation'. If we want to understand a concept like pain we should not think of a pain as a private object referred to somehow by the public word "pain." A pain is not "a something," just as love, democracy and strength are not things, but it is no more "a nothing" than they are either (see Philosophical Investigations Sect. 304). Saying this is hardly satisfactory, but there is no simple answer to the question "What is pain?" Wittgenstein offers not an answer but a kind of philosophical 'therapy' intended to clear away what can seem so obscure.
In short, you do not need shared formal definitions to be productive as a group. A good research paper does not need to introduce formal definitions.
he SHiFT network supports people in mid-life who seek greater meaning in life and work.
in list: Twin Cities Stuff
Humans are not very good at generating random sequences; when asked to come up with a “random” sequence of coin flips from their heads, they inevitably include too few long strings of the same outcome. In other words, they think that randomness looks a lot more uniform and structureless than it really does.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in meaning
-
meaning of life
Items: 19 | Visits: 38
Created by: tom o'brien
-
Philosophy of Life
What's the true meaning of l...
Items: 7 | Visits: 34
Created by: Brant Chen
-
Definitions, Meaning and Phrases
Items: 3 | Visits: 31
Created by: Sean Brady
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo