natural theology

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vol VII: Notes

2018

Notes

Sunday 11 November 2018 - Saturday 17 November 2018

[Notebook: DB 82: Life and Death]

[page 327]

Sunday 11 November 2018

[page 328]

Suspiria: Physical theology: what is it like to life in God? The study of pathological delusions . . . gives us some insight into the functioning of the mind, but the real problem for humanity lies in the delusions of health and sanity, like the Christian history of salvation, witchcraft, voodoo and all their ilk. Human salvation requires that all our dealings with the physical world be informed by science and we can let our imaginations run free as long as we maintain control over the physical consequences of imagination like violence based on gossip and so on. This is to be the theme of the rebuilt physical theology site. Suspiria (2018 film) - Wikipedia

Can I really say something new, interesting and defensible? What do I have in my armoury of little ideas? The development must come from a new way of putting things together, ie a from my epistemological application of Cantor's work. The new framework is obviously the divine world and it is to be showcased in the essay "On leading theology into Cantor's Paradise", which becomes my next priority, begun 24 Jun 218 last touched 24 September.

The only thing that can save us is the truth, and this has to begin with theology, the [traditional theory of everything].

Utterly bored. The trip to university has been a failure in that it did not excite any interesting conversations. Perhaps things will improve when I get a detailed supervisor next year and get out of the undergraduate nursery [if I get that far].

[page 328]

What is human nature? All the big religions say we are sinners and this doctrine becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, the powers that be putting such pressure on the underdogs that the only way they an survive is by 'sin' by stealing the food denied to them.

Kagan page 105: 'The Return of History: 'Nations are reverting to old habits and traditions. This should not be a surprise. These habits and traditions are shaped by powerful forces: an unchanging geography, shared history and experience, often driven by spiritual and ideological beliefs that defy modern reason. Peoples and nations tend to revert to type [a good little collection of oldwifery].

'. . . the greatness that Putin [and Trump] and many Russians [and Americans] seek cannot be achieved in a world that is secure and stable, in which the liberal order remains coherent and cohesive, especially in Europe, and in which the US remains willing and able to continue providing the basic guarantees that make the liberal order possible. Robert Kagan: The Jungle Grows Back

page 112: 'Putin's hostility to the liberal world is also personal. Ever since he consolidated power, he has worried that the external forces of liberalism would work to undermine his authoritarian rule at home.'

page 114: 'Among the liberal order's greatest contributions to international peace has been the discrediting and denial of great power spheres of interest.' Turning back would be a mistake.

[page 329]

A thought before bedtime. What does emergent mean? How much of the information in the child is carried in the genes and [how much] in the structure of the maternal egg that implements the genes. This is a question for Dawkins to answer. Am I totally defined structurally by the gigabyte of information in my genes? What am I arguing for here? That evolution is intelligent design because the selection process is intelligent, as it is in the development of science, where we have a story so far and then random creative variations. So I am taking Christianity as my story so far and then adding a one bit paradigm change from God is not to God is the universe, and then following out the consequences of this which are basically that the Universe evolved from the initial singularity rather than was created by an outside God. So we go first from Moses to Lonergan, and then logic, mathematics, formalism action, evolution etc. The hard part for me is the entangled creation of the initial stock of particles. Work this all out in On Leading Theology into Cantor's Paradise - potential / kinetic // form / process.

Space - potential, time-process. Both arise from the bifurcation of action. The course we follow through space-time is a geodesic, beginning in a simple line in general relativity and expanding like Cantor's line into the transfinite numbers which explain, for instance, the course of the tree of life through space-time.

Monday 12 November

My window on evolution is my own feeling which is strongly biassed toward 'doing good' with the consequence that I find myself feeling rather helpless and desperate when confronted by the evil deeds I see in the world. My task is to understand their causes and so devise

[page 330]

social structures that provide environments that encourage 'good' rather than 'bad' behaviour given the potentials built into human nature by our evolutionary past. The evolution of multicellular creatures is an example of the type of situation I wish to bring about and the fundamental argument is that the loss of autonomy required for cooperation is outweighed by the benefits of cooperation as long as the cooperative structure meets certain design criteria which I see exemplified in the three orthogonal elements of stable government, the separation of the powers of legislation, judgement and execution. An important question: has this got anything to do with 3D space which enables communication without crossed wires? At the bottom of this is fairness, ie the level playing field, ie local flat space.

Universal human rights establishes that we are all sovereigns unto ourselves, but like all sovereigns under God, we are subject to the ancient rule of noblesse oblige. Noblesse oblige - Wikipedia

Intelligent design: from what you have got seek random improvements and select by testing, as we see universally in science, and technology. My bit of intelligent design is to identify god and the universe and explore the result.

The idea that evolution by natural selection [is equivalent to intelligent design] is another little step on the way, like the idea that the universe is conscious because it communicates with itself, two takeaways from my university course on consciousness and evolution.

Why torture people to death for their beliefs? Fear. Ferrera apostatised? Tens of thousands of Christian decapitated? 1640. Missionaries - subversion. Silence (2016 film) - Wikipedia

Tuesday 13 November 2018

A large proportion of human evildoing is caused by the conditions under which people are forced to live by the 'unrepresentative swill' in power. Paul Keating

Becoming a 'jihadi' is an act of supererogation a bit like my joining a religious order, an extreme action done in the hope of some sort of redemption. Jihadism - Wikipedia

Our genes are really just the icing on the cake, defining the very [small] differences between a lump of rock and a living body. From a quantum mechanical point of view a lump of rock is already a living body as I try to illustrate by the calculation that there is more computing power in a grain of sand than all the computers on earth. Computing power in a grain of sand

Richardson page 43: Macauley: ' "defenders of our universities commonly take it for granted that we are indebted to them for all talent which they have been unable to destroy." ' Robert Richardson: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

The fixed point theory sees the universe as one dynamic entity with fixed points in some way determined by this holistic dynamics which we might understand as entanglement, but we also want

[page 332]

each of the fixed points, like each electron (eg) to be a degree of freedom, free to move independently. This maybe turns the picture around (as we would like) so that the particles determine the overall dynamics. What we are searching for is potency / act dualism where we translate potency as potential energy and act as kinetic energy, and we wish to see them both grounded in the universe we see while remaining pure act so that potential + kinetic energy = 0. Motion determines form, form determines motion, something like genotype and phenotype. Holding that there is the same data in each so that to specify the phenotype we must add the data embedded in the environment to the data embedded in the genes to explain (eg) the embryological development of the brain. So how do we answer the question 'where do all the particles come from?' and are they all just dust in no way a priori related to one another, or are they entangled by their common origin in the wave function of the universe, whose fixed points are all its orthogonal basis vectors?

Wednesday 14 November 2018

Thinking of my microcosmic physical role in the universe as I seek a role for 'soul' in the bleak Dawkinsian picture of blind genes and blind watchmakers. Obviously my compassionate, conscious and intelligent reality has its roots in the initial singularity in the sense that, as with the traditional god, my human properties are elements of 'being as such'. One clue seems to be quantum mechanical entanglement and the idea is to explain this in terms of consistency. Entanglement establishes correlation between states which reduces

[page 333]

overall entropy of the system, so that instead of the entropy of the universe increasing explosively, it increases in a controlled manner, somewhat as we see in the application of the anthropological cosmological principle described in Barrow and Tipler. The idea might be to see entanglement not so much as a specific quantum mechanical property as a universal network property which explains the intelligence of networks and the fact that a gigabyte of genetic information can explain a petabyte of neural structure in the adult brain. Another way of looking at this might be to see Polanyi's tacit dimension supplying the missing information. Barrow & Tipler: The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension

The Dawkins error is that all the history if a species is written in its genes.

Willie James, Richardson [page] 111: 'It is not what fate does to us that matters; what matters is what we do with what fate does to us.

page 113: Chandogya Upanishad 'tat tvam asi'. Mystical Chapter of the Varieties: ' "This overcoming of the usual barriers between the individual and that absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition . . . 'That thou art", say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: 'Not a part, not a mode of That, but actually That, the Absolute Spirit of the World.' " ' Chandogya Upanishad - Wikipedia, Tat Tvam Asi - Wikipedia, William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature : Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902, Vedanta - Wikipedia

page 121: ' "Not in maxims, not an anschauungen, but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation." '

page 122: 'the self governing resistance of the ego to the world.'

[page 334]

Richardson page 136: 'Peirce . . . never accepted the idea that natural selection is significant to account for the evolution of the mind. For the latter [he] would require "the gentle purposive action of love" or what he called agapasm.'

Peirce: ' "a prerequisite for successful experimentation is an external world resistant to actions arising from misconceptions of it." '

page 139: Henry Adams: ' "several score of the best educated, most agreeable and personally most sociable people in America united in Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polar bear." '

page 166: Whitehead: ' "Where attainable knowledge could have changed the result, ignorance has the force of vice." '

page 178: James to Renouvier: ' "After your Essays, it seems to me that the only important question left is the deepest one of all, the one between understanding and mysticism, between the principle of contradiction and the 'Sein und Nichts' " (being and nothingness).'

page 182: Palmer ' "William James's judgement was corrupted by kindness." '

page 183: mind = consciousness ' "not merely intelligent . . . it is intelligent intelligence. It seems both to supply the means and a standard by which [the means] are measured. It not only serves a final purpose, but it brings a final purpose, — posits it, declares it." '

[page 335]

Richardson page 183: 'The Sentiment of Rationality': page 184: 'James simply sidesteps the long history of reason, right reason, pure reason, and practical reason, walking right past the conventional notion that rationality means abiding by set rules of reasoning.'

page 185: ' "No concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver." '

page 195: 'The freshness of James's views [in the Lowell lectures] comes partly from his tenacious returning again and again to the question of what it is about consciousness that makes it a trait favoured by evolution.'

' "If consciousness can load the dice, can exert continuous pressure in the right direction, can feel what nerve processes are leading to the goal, can reinforce and strengthen these and at the same time inhibit those that threaten to lead us astray, why, consciousness will be of invaluable service." '

page 196: Consciousness evolves ' "to remedy defects of the brain." ' Negative feedback, control.

page 201: James ' "No philosophy that "baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers can succeed." '

'He was looking for . . . "A conception of mind which will give back to the mind the free motion which has been checked, blocked and inhibited in the purely contemplative path . . . will make the world rational again.

page 203: ' "Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis." ' Rationality, Activity and Faith

[page 336]

Richardson page 246-7: Free will and chance. We are wondering why the choice of eigenvalues in a quantum observation is random, weighed by the distances between the eigenfunctions of he measurement operator and the various eigenstates of the system observed, and how is this related to spooky action at a distance. Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia

Thursday 15 November 2018

Intelligence is the ability to find a way out of impossible situations - back off till you find a bifurcation that has an unlocked branch.

Richardson page 246: Renouvier: ' "Our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all propriety be to affirm that we are free." '

Isaac Bashevis Singer: ' "Do you believe in free will? Of course I believe in free will, . . . do I have a choice?" '

page 249: William James, fundamentals of all religions: a) something is wrong; and b) it can be set right.

page 250: WJ snr: ' "The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life, is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and every obscene bird of the night chatters." '

Sed contra: wilderness is the most stable, peaceful maximum entropy state.

page 252: WJ 'feeling' = 'state of consciousness,' eg I feel.

[page 337]

Richardson page 256: ' "That beloved incarnation was among nature's possibilities." '

page 262: Paine: Age of Reason: Nature is true revelation, "science is the true theology." Paine

page 289: 'What we will not in the long run believe is any "philosophy whose principles are incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy. . . . What, on the other hand, we will believe . . . is any philosophy that reaches that teaches that the inmost nature of reality is congruent to the powers which you possess." '

Psychology of belief → The perception of reality.

page 309: Potential: ' "The essence of good is simply to satisfy demand." ' (Aquinas) Aquinas, Summa, I II, 3, 8: Does man's happiness consist in the vision of the divine essence?

page 331: '"All the natural sciences aim at practical prediction and control and in none of them is this more that case than in psychology today. . . . We live surrounded by an enormous body of people who are most definitely interested in the control of states of mind." '

Friday 16 November 2018

Diary: a record of consciousness, that is of work for self control trying to aim myself squarely at my target, which is false beliefs that are hampering the development of a peaceful society, many of which are the products of the perennial tension between the public and the private roles of people with financial / political power., ie using other people for personal benefit vs benefitting other people, by pointing out the inbuilt advantages of cooperation which appear to be the drivers of complexification in evolution.

[page 338]

The target for me is to develop the coupling between consistency and peace using mathematical modelling that builds on the determinism of finite arithmetic and the indeterminacy of transfinite arithmetic. This is in effect a tautology insofar as infinite ≡ indeterminate, ie uncontrolled. The Christian God has (falsely) total control. Gödel and Turing showed us that this is not the case, so opening the way for variation and evolution error and death.

Richardson page 355: ' "Pessimism is essentially a religious disease . . . The nightmare version of life has plenty or organic sources but its great reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that beyond nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is." ' A contradiction removed by the recognition that the spirit is nature, as the mind is the body.

page 363: ' "This feeling forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis." ' The will to Believe / The Right to Believe The Will to Believe - Wikipedia

page 377: Pragmatism: ' "There can be no difference that does not make a difference . . . no difference in abstract truth which does not express itself in a difference of concrete fact, and of conduct consequent upon the fact, imposed on somebody, somehow somewhere and somewhen." '

Philosophical conceptions and practical results.

[page 339]

Richardson page 390-1: The Varieties of Religious Experience; The Tasks of Religious Philosophy.

page 397: Once born vs twice born. Francis W Newman ' "God has two families of children on this earth, the once born and the twice born . . . " '

I am one and a half times born. I do not think I was ever really a believer, although I joined the Dominicans. I only did it for practical reasons, to save my soul on the terms that I had been taught. My quick study of Aquinas and Lonergan immediately exposed the errors of the Church to me and I was happy to leave the nightmare that I had voluntarily entered and get on with the job of being a once-born scientific theologian, developing a new doctrine of God. Boorstein. Michelle Boorstein: Meeting of U.S. Bishops in Baltimore closes with no action after sexual abuse crisis

Comment on Boorstein: This sick old monster needs to be put down and replaced by a new church, build on human rights, justice, democracy and a scientifically reasonable picture of the place of humanity in the universe. What we have now is an archaic cult which holds itself above the law on the basis of a divine right of kings handed to Moses by a fictitious divinity on Mount Sinai. An organisation whose whole justification is that humanity is inherently broken through original sin, offering a scheme of redemption that involves human sacrifice, built around a remembrance of this sacrifice that maintains that communicants are truly practicing cannibalism, a ridiculous doctrine based on the notion that a wafer that looks like bread is in substance the real body of Jesus of Nazarareth. And this is only the beginning. Its hapless adherents and their children are preyed upon by a sexually deviant priesthood totally under the protection of a corrupt hierarchy. They are promised, if they behave themselves, eternal life in a heaven of total bliss. If they fail to toe the line, an eternity of agony. All of this run by a two thousand year old mob of antiquated codgers who are mortally afraid of women while dressing themselves up like queens dripping with gold crosses and fancy hats.

Page 424: ' "I am for the first time in my teaching life trying to construct a universe before the eyes of my students in systematic lectures with no text [1902]." '

page 428: 'What James had seen in Bergson's work in December 1902 was "a conclusive demolition of the dualism of subject and object in perception." ' Matter and Memory - Wikipedia

page 435: James: ' "to report in one book, at least, such impressions as my own intellect has received from the universe." '

page 448: Does consciousness exist? James - No. Does communication exist? Me - Yes, and consciousness is self communication.

page 449: ' "A World of Pure Experience", in which he tried to specify (the title giving a provisional answer) what the one stuff of which things and

[page 340]

thought are made of might be. William James 1904: A World of Pure Experience

Richardson page 450: 'James's radical empiricism was an integral part of the early-twentieth century revolution that swept through politics, thought and sensitivity. . . . James transfers our attention from substance to process, from a concept of self to the process of selving, from the concept of truth to the process of truing (a carpenter with a plane "trues" or "trues up" a board), from a trust in concepts to an interest in percepts or perceptions.' In fact he does away with all the Christian / Platonic rot and gets back to Aristotle's divine first self loving mover that Aquinas studied and could not make stick.

page 457: James radical empiricism = network theory: all is communication / experience.

page 482: 'There was one major casualty of James's rush toward pragmatism: somewhere along the way he benched radical empiricism.

page 484: 'Philosophy for James is always ad hominem

Contra Dawkins: in science the literature (ie the genome) is not everything. There are also the scientists.

page 487: Pragmatism: A New Name or Some Old Ways of Thinking. Pragmatism - Wikipedia

page 488: ' "On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true." This is not the Protestant God, not the Christian God, not monotheism.

[page 341]

Richardson page 490: Second wind elicited by excitement, effects and ideas.

page 502: James: ' "The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding spiritual not as the rule, but as the exception in the midst of nature." '

page page 511: A pluralistic Universe; The Meaning of Truth. William James 1909: A Pluralistic Universe, William James 1909a: The Meaning of Truth

page 512: Some Problems of Philosophy

page 513: ' A Pluralistic Universe came out in April. The caterpillar of Zerrissenheit had been transformed into the butterfly of panpsychic pluralism, but not everybody saw it that way.

page 515: 'The Moral Equivalent of War' A suggestion concerning mysticism.

A Pluralistic Mystic.

Boy Erased Boy Erased - Wikipedia

Saturday 17 November 2018

The usual morning discussion with myself. My recent courses in the philosophy of ind and the naturalisation of morality have convinced me that the philosophy industry is a long way behind insofar as it appears to be unaware of the cosmological foundation upon which humanity is built, so that I do feel that I have something to contribute. The problem now is to hold a position in the

[page 342]

university that I can work from. The advantage here is that it is a pubic institution and I am a paying customer so they cannot simply dismiss me as the Dominicans did. My disadvantage is that my attempts to introduce some of my ideas into my essays led to low marks because I was not in compliance with the philosophical methodology is taking an argumentative position against previous authors because it seemed to me that so much new material needed to be introduced first. Over the christmas break I will write a critique of the criticisms I received which will clarify my position which will be good for me to think it through again and bring me to the critical leading edge of the discipline. I am beginning to feel as excited about my ideas as in did about 1965 in the monastery. Then I thought I had a story that my teachers would listen to but I was far too politically naive to realise how easily I would be squashed. Now I wonder if I would have done better to go straight into academia rather than living 'in the world' getting married, having children and all that stuff, but my life is as it is and I take heart from William James attitude to psychology that I am a body in the world following a course that is not particularly clear to me. My fifty years of free and independent study have set me up for a final denouement and I look forward to the next ten years or so, five years to write a thesis, five years to propagate it and then the contented feeling that I have managed to do something after all. I am an agent.

[page 343]

Churchill: The further back you go the further forward you can see. Avi Shlaim: Brexit and Suez: A tale of two Tory fiascos

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Applebaum, Anne, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956, Doubleday 2012 'At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.'  
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Barrow, John D., and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford University Press 1996 'This wide-ranging and detailed book explores the many ramifications of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, covering the whole spectrum of human inquiry from Aristotle to Z bosons. Bringing a unique combination of skills and knowledge to the subject, John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler-two of the world's leading cosmologists-cover the definition and nature of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the interpretation of the quantum theory in relation to the existence of observers.' 
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Cantor, Georg, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Philip E B Jourdain), Dover 1895, 1897, 1955 Jacket: 'One of the greatest mathematical classics of all time, this work established a new field of mathematics which was to be of incalculable importance in topology, number theory, analysis, theory of functions, etc, as well as the entire field of modern logic.' 
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Einstein, Albert, and Robert W Lawson (translator) Roger Penrose (Introduction), Robert Geroch (Commentary), David C Cassidy (Historical Essay) , Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Pi Press 2005 Preface: 'The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. ... The author has spared himself no pains in his endeavour to present the main ideas in the simplest and most intelligible form, and on the whole, in the sequence and connection in which they actually originated.' page 3  
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Feynman, Richard P, and Robert B Leighton, Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (volume 3) : Quantum Mechanics, Addison Wesley 1970 Foreword: 'This set of lectures tries to elucidate from the beginning those features of quantum mechanics which are the most basic and the most general. . . . In each instance the ideas are introduced together with a detailed discussion of some specific examples - to try to make the physical ideas as real as possible.' Matthew Sands 
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Feynman, Richard P, and Robert B Leighton et al, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (volume 1) : Mainly Mechanics, Radiation and Heat, Addison Wesley 1963 Foreword: 'This book is based on a course of lectures in introductory physics given by Prof. R P Feynman at the California Institute of Technology during the academic year 1961-62. ... The lectures constitute a major part of a fundamental revision of the introductory course, carried out over a four year period. ... The need for a basic revision arose both from the rapid development of physics in recent decades and from the fact that entering freshmen have shown a stewady incrase in mathematical ability as a result of improvements in high school mathematical course content.' 
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Horney, Karen , Self Analysis, 1994 Introduction: 'Professional analytical help ... can scarcely reach everyone whom it is capable of benefiting. It is for this reason that the question of self-analysis has importance. Is has always been regarded as not only valuable but also feasible to "know oneself", but it is possible that the endeavour can be greatly assisted by the discoveries of psychoanalysis. ... It is the object of this book to raise this question seriously, with all due consideration for the difficulties involved.' (9) 
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Hui, Zhou Wei, Shanghai Baby, Washington Square Press 2001 Editorial review From Library Journal 'Wei Hui's debut novel, which was banned in China, delves deep into the dark and glittering heart of Shanghai, as experienced by a hopeful and hedonistic young novelist, Nikki (better known to her friends as Coco, after the also irrepressibly glamorous Coco Chanel). Although deeply in love with her impotent artist boyfriend Tian Tian, the frustrated Coco takes a successful German businessman as a lover. What follows is the painful and explicit sexual and vocational journey of a young woman in search of her true self, attempting to gain control of her own trajectory as nefarious forces work on her from both within and without. Indeed, it seems almost as if the city's over-the-top materialism drives its inhabitants toward adultery and dark passions, forcing them at once into the dual role of victim/accomplice. It is just such paradoxes that make Wei Hui's novel so complex and thought-provoking: she deftly explores the intimate relationships that belie the seeming oppositions of East and West, love and desire, the natural and the artificial, hedonism and spiritualism. Haunting and resonant, Shanghai Baby proves the existence of the sacred in the profane. For all Chinese literature and contemporary fiction collections.' Tania Barnes, Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc 
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James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature : Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902, Modern Library 1994 ' When William James went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on "natural religion," he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Considering religion, then, not as it is defined by—or takes place in—the churches, but as it is felt in everyday life, he undertook a project that, upon completion, stands not only as one of the most important texts on psychology ever written, not only as a vitally serious contemplation of spirituality, but for many critics one of the best works of nonfiction written in the 20th century.' 
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Kagan, Robert, The Jungle Grows Back, Alfred A. Knopp 2018 ' Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe from declining democracy to growing geopolitical competition. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward going it alone or withdrawing in the face of such disarray. In this powerful urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons that American withdrawal or selfish unilateralism would be the worst possible response, based on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world.' 
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Kolmogorov, A N, and Nathan Morrison (Translator) (With an added bibliography by A T Bharucha-Reid), Foundations of the Theory of Probability, Chelsea 1956 Preface: 'The purpose of this monograph is to give an axiomatic foundation for the theory of probability. . . . This task would have been a rather hopeless one before the introduction of Lebesgue's theories of measure and integration. However, after Lebesgue's publication of his investigations, the analogies between measure of a set and mathematical expectation of a random variable became apparent. These analogies allowed of further extensions; thus, for example, various properties of independent random variables were seen to be in complete analogy with the corresponding properties of orthogonal functions . . .' 
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' 
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Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome, Paul: A Critical Life, Oxford University Press, USA 1998 Amazon editorial review: From Library Journal Murphy-O'Connor, a professor of New Testament studies who teaches in Jerusalem, has written an important scholarly biography of Paul based on an extensive analysis of his letters rather than on Luke's Acts of the Apostles, as is traditionally done. The first chapter of the book, "The Chronological Framework," compares evidence from the Pauline corpus with that of Luke's Acts and extant extrabiblical archaeological evidence, enabling Murphy-O'Connor to postulate a more precisely delimited chronology for Paul's entire life than does Gunther Bornkamm's Paul (1971). The remaining 13 chapters, based on information extracted from the authentic Pauline letters, discuss in more detail specific events in Paul's life. One problem with this methodology is that of pure speculation due to the nature of the sources and the occasional lack of confirming extra-biblical evidence. In addition to Paul's biography, Murphy-O'Connor also treats the development in Paul's theological thought. Recommended for academic libraries.Pius Murray, Holy Apostles Coll. & Seminary, Cromwell, Ct. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc 
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Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome, Paul: A Critical Life, Oxford University Press, USA • ISBN-13: 978-0192853424 1998 Amazon editorial review: From Library Journal Murphy-O'Connor, a professor of New Testament studies who teaches in Jerusalem, has written an important scholarly biography of Paul based on an extensive analysis of his letters rather than on Luke's Acts of the Apostles, as is traditionally done. The first chapter of the book, "The Chronological Framework," compares evidence from the Pauline corpus with that of Luke's Acts and extant extrabiblical archaeological evidence, enabling Murphy-O'Connor to postulate a more precisely delimited chronology for Paul's entire life than does Gunther Bornkamm's Paul (1971). The remaining 13 chapters, based on information extracted from the authentic Pauline letters, discuss in more detail specific events in Paul's life. One problem with this methodology is that of pure speculation due to the nature of the sources and the occasional lack of confirming extra-biblical evidence. In addition to Paul's biography, Murphy-O'Connor also treats the development in Paul's theological thought. Recommended for academic libraries.Pius Murray, Holy Apostles Coll. & Seminary, Cromwell, Ct. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc 
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Paine, Thomas, The Age of Reason, Dover 2004 ' "Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst," declared Thomas Paine, adding, "every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity." Paine's years of study and reflection on the role of religion in society culminated with his final work, The Age of Reason. This coolly reasoned polemic influenced religious thinking throughout the world at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and its resonance remains undiminished by time. The selfsame humanist and egalitarian views that made Paine a popular figure of the American Revolution brought him into frequent conflict with political authorities. Parts of The Age of Reason were written in a French jail, where Paine was confined for his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI.' 
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Polanyi, Michael, and Amaryta Sen (foreword), The Tacit Dimension, University Of Chicago Press 1966, 2009 Amazon product description: '“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell,” writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The Tacit Dimension argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.' 
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Richardson, Robert D., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2007 Jacket: 'Pivotal member of the Metaphysical Club, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, older brother of the extraordinary siblings Henry and Alice, the remarkable William James put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching and religion — on Modernism itself. In this thought provoking and moving biography, James emerges as an immensely complex and fascinating man.' 
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Tanenbaum, Andrew S, Computer Networks, Prentice Hall International 1996 Preface: 'The key to designing a computer network was first enunciated by Julius Caesar: Divide and Conquer. The idea is to design a network as a sequence of layers, or abstract machines, each one based upon the previous one. . . . This book uses a model in which networks are divided into seven layers. The structure of the book follows the structure of the model to a considerable extent.'  
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Links

Al Jazeera: The Listning Post, History suppresses: Censorship in Israel's archives, ' The silencing of Palestinian History in Israel's Archives: Sealed in Israel's archives and libraries are troves of Palestinian books, documents, photographs and films that were looted from Palestinian institutions and personal archives by Jewish militias and later, the Israeli military. "This confiscation is a kind of daily struggle that Palestinians face," says Sherene Seikaly, a scholar of Middle Eastern history. "One of the reasons, that these archives are a target, that they're threatening, is because they're really a record of Palestinian social life, and Palestine more broadly." ' back

Aquinas, Summa, I II, 3, 8, Does man's happiness consist in the vision of the divine essence?, 'I answer that, Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence. To make this clear, two points must be observed. First, that man is not perfectly happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek: . . . If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than "that He is"; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consists, as stated above (this question articles 1, 7; q 2, a 8). back

Avi Shlaim, Brexit and Suez: A tale of two Tory fiascos, ' Some lessons might, therefore, be learned today from the failure of British statecraft back in 1956. As Churchill once observed, the farther back you go, the farther forward you can see. The broader context for both crises was uncertainty regarding Britain's place in the world. Eden, observed a Sunday Times editorial on January 16, 1977, "was the last prime minister to believe Britain was a great power and the first to confront a crisis that proved beyond doubt that she was not".' back

Betsy Woodruff, China Bars Dissident From Accepting U.W. Human Tights Award, ' Joshua Wong, who led major student protests against Beijing in 2014, was sentenced in January to three months in prison for his role leading the demonstrations. He is appealing the conviction, and out on bail. As a condition of his bail, Wong surrendered his passport to the court. Documents show the court has denied his request to travel to the United States to receive the Lantos prize, an award from an American foundation honoring former House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Tom Lantos.' back

Boy Erased - Wikipedia, Boy Erased - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedis, ' Boy Erased is a 2018 American biographical drama film based on Garrard Conley's 2016 memoir of the same name. It is written for the screen and directed by Joel Edgerton, who also produces with Kerry Kohansky Roberts and Steve Golin. The film stars Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Edgerton, and follows the son of Baptist parents who is forced to take part in a gay conversion therapy program.' back

Chandogya Upanishad - Wikipedia, Chandogya Upanishad - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Chandogya Upanishad . . . is a Sanskrit text embedded in the Chandogya Brahmana of the Sama Veda of Hinduism. It is one of the oldest Upanishads. It lists as number 9 in the Muktika canon of 108 Upanishads. The Upanishad belongs to the Tandya school of the Samaveda. Like Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, the Chandogya Upanishad is an anthology of texts that must have pre-existed as separate texts, and were edited into a larger text by one or more ancient Indian scholars.' back

Claude Shannon, Communication in the Presence of Noise, 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two “function spaces,” and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of “ideal” systems which transmit at this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second for certain information sources is calculated.' back

Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli, Conservative Logic, 'Conservative logic is a comprehensive model of computation which explicitly reflects a number of fundamental principles of physics, such as the reversibility of the dynamical laws and the conservation of certain additive quantities (among which energy plays a distinguished role). Because it more closely mirrors physics than traditional models of computation, conservative logic is in a better position to provide indications concerning the realization of high-performance computing systems, i.e., of systems that make very efficient use of the "computing resources" actually offered by nature. In particular, conservative logic shows that it is ideally possible to build sequential circuits with zero internal power dissipation. After establishing a general framework, we discuss two specific models of computation. The first uses binary variables and is the conservative-logic counterpart of switching theory; this model proves that universal computing capabilities are compatible with the reversibility and conservation constraints. The second model, which is a refinement of the first, constitutes a substantial breakthrough in establishing a correspondence between computation and physics. In fact, this model is based on elastic collisions of identical "balls," and thus is formally identical with the atomic model that underlies the (classical) kinetic theory of perfect gases. Quite literally, the functional behavior of a general-purpose digital computer can be reproduced by a perfect gas placed in a suitably shaped container and given appropriate initial conditions.' back

Elizabeth Bruenig, The Catholic Church is embroiled n a hel; of its own making, ' The events at this week’s meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore haven’t given much cause for confidence. The main subject of the convention was set to be the sex abuse crisis, which has roiled the church anew since this summer’s revelations concerning Pennsylvania and disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. The bishops had planned to vote on “concrete measures to respond to the abuse crisis,” but Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the conference president, was informed the night before the meeting that the Vatican had decreed there would be no such vote.' back

Franz Wild, Vernon Silver and Willim Clowes, Trouble in the Congo: The Misadventures of Glenwore, ' Just six months ago, Glasenberg sounded confident that the crowning moment of his journey remained ahead, reminding shareholders of predictions that the world would need to triple cobalt production by 2030 to meet demand. “We’re the best placed of all the large-cap companies to take advantage of this electric vehicle phenomenon,” he said at Glencore’s annual meeting in May. But in July that promise clouded. Glencore announced that the U.S. Department of Justice had subpoenaed documents and other records related to its Congolese investments and other deals, and was examining its compliance with U.S. laws on foreign corruption and money laundering.' back

Gideon Levi, How Freud Made Clear We're 'Nothing but a Band of Murderers', ' The emotional conflict regarding the death of loved ones is what gave rise to psychology and religion, Freud said. Over the grave of the loved one arose the doctrines of the soul and the belief in immortality, and that’s where the guilt feelings arose that spawned the first moral imperatives. The most important prohibition generated by the awakening conscience was “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” It was conceived from the outset as a response to the hidden hatred behind the mourning for loved ones who have died, and later expanded to be directed at strangers and eventually enemies too.' back

Glory be to the Father - Wikipedia, Glory be to the Father - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Glory Be to the Father, also known as Gloria Patri, is a doxology, a short hymn of praise to God in various Christian liturgies. . . . Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto, Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, As it was in the beginning, is now and always, and to the ages of ages. Amen.' back

Infallibility - First Vatican Council, The Latin Text of Denzinger: Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, Denzinger 3074: 'Romanum Pontificem, cum ex cathedra loquitur, id est, cum omnium Christianorum pastoris et doctoris munere fungens pro suprema sua Apostolica auctoritate doctrinam de fide vel moribus ab universa Ecclesia tenendam definit, per assistentiam divinam ipsi in beato Petro promissam, ea infallibilitate pollere, qua divinus Redemptor Ecclesiam suam in definienda doctrina de fide vel moribus instructam esse voluit; ideoque eiusmodi Romani Pontificis definitiones ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae, irreformabiles esse.
Si quis autem huic Nostrae definitioni contradicere, quod Deus avertat: anathema sit.' back

Jihadism - Wikipedia, Jihadism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The term "Jihadism" (also "jihadist movement", "jihadi movement" and variants) is a 21st-century neologism found in Western languages to describe Islamist militant movements perceived as military movements "rooted in Islam" and "existentially threatening" to the West.' back

Joel Kotkin, To Make the Internet great Again, Trump Must Smash Facebook and Its Tech Oligarch Friends, 'Unreliable narrator though the President may be, people are indeed waking up to the tech giants’ massive and largely unchecked power, and the consequences of turning over our channels of communication to them. That includes World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who said earlier this year that he “was devastated” by how the internet has been used in recent elections, including our presidential race, and that he’s working to create a new system now that "the web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places.” ' back

Julie Zauzmer and Michelle Boorstein, Vatican tells U. S. bishops not to vote on proposal to tackle sexual abuse, spurns lay and civil investigations, 'BALTIMORE — The Vatican stymied a plan by America’s Catholic leaders to confront sexual abuse, insisting in a surprise directive on Monday morning that America’s bishops postpone their effort to hold bishops more responsible in the abuse cases that have scourged the church. At the same time, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States suggested that bishops should not look to lay people in the church or law enforcement to confront the church’s sexual abuse crisis.' back

Matter and Memory - Wikipedia, Matter and Memory - Wikipedia, the free ecyclopedia, ' Matter and Memory (French: Matière et mémoire, 1896) is a book by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Its subtitle is Essay on the relation of body and spirit (Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit), and the work presents an analysis of the classical philosophical problems concerning this relation. Within that frame the analysis of memory serves the purpose of clarifying the problem. Matter and Memory was written in reaction to the book The Maladies of Memory by Théodule Ribot, which appeared in 1881. Ribot claimed that the findings of brain science proved that memory is lodged within a particular part of the nervous system; localized within the brain and thus being of a material nature. Bergson was opposed to this reduction of spirit to matter.' back

Michelle Boorstein, Meeting of U.S. Bishops in Baltimore closes with no action after sexual abuse crisis, 'And then in the final hours on Wednesday, the bishops representing 196 American archdiocese and dioceses took a vote on a measure to simply “encourage” the Vatican to share documents related to its investigation of McCarrick.

It was shot down, 137 to 83.

And thus closed the gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which opened dramatically with the Vatican’s insistence that the body delay a vote on reform measures until a major Vatican synod in the winter and wound down with an almost complete lack of the kind of contrition and decisive action parishioners have been demanding since summer. back

Mohammad Zaheer, It pains me to say it - but Boris Johnson is right about Asia Bibi, ' Despite being freed by her country’s Supreme Court, Asia Bibi’s life is in danger. Violent mobs held the nation hostage in the aftermath of the verdict, demanding that the Pakistani Christian farm labourer, who had falsely been accused of blasphemy, be hanged. The Pakistani government has appeared helpless in tackling the hardliners calling for her head, choosing instead a policy of appeasement. Disheartened by the government’s capitulation and afraid for his life, her lawyer has already fled to the Netherlands, and there are calls across the western world for her to be given asylum. Several countries have stepped forward to offer her sanctuary, but the UK is not one of them. Now, politicians such as Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid are urging the government to do so.' back

Noblesse oblige - Wikipedia, Noblesse oblige - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Noblesse oblige is a French expression used in English. It translates as "nobility obliges" and denotes the concept that nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person who holds such a status to fulfill social responsibilities. For example, a primary obligation of a nobleman could include generosity towards those around him. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the term "suggests noble ancestry constrains to honourable behaviour; privilege entails responsibility." ' back

Olbers' paradox - Wikipedia, Olbers' paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In astrophysics and physical cosmology, Olbers' paradox, named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers and also called the "dark night sky paradox", is the argument that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. The darkness of the night sky is one of the pieces of evidence for a non-static universe such as the Big Bang model. If the universe is static and populated by an infinite number of stars, any sight line from Earth must end at the (very bright) surface of a star, so the night sky should be completely bright. This contradicts the observed darkness of the night.' back

Paul Keating, Australian Parliament, back

Peter Hadley, Estimate the size of an atom, 'The object of this section is to estimate the the size of an atom. While the Schrödinger equation can be solved for the hydrogen atom, only the uncertainty relation will be used here. This approach is mathematically simpler and provides some insight into what determines the size of an atom.' back

Peter Waldman, The EPA Can't Wait to Reopen the Mine That Poisoned North Idaho, ' Mining has left a mark on the culture of the Silver Valley and an indelible stain on the landscape, which remains heavily contaminated. To extract a pound of metal, mining companies had to process nearly 14 pounds of ore, and they dumped the crushed waste rock into mountain streams and along river banks. Over the course of a century, the tailings and mine drainage flowed down the 40-mile-long watershed, depositing some 75 million tons of highly toxic sludge into Lake Coeur d’Alene.' back

Pragmatism - Wikipedia, Pragmatism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedai, 'Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around 1870.[1] Its origins are often attributed to the philosophers William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce later described it in his pragmatic maxim: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object." ' back

Priya Satia, What Happened Beyond the Western Front, ' Shifting our gaze from France to the Middle East, we can see how faith in technological warfare survived. The Mesopotamia and Palestine campaigns—in which the British fought the Ottoman Empire in present-day Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Syria, and Saudi Arabia in alliance with the indigenous “Arab Revolt”—were mobile and creative military affairs, incorporating deception tactics, irregular warfare, and air power, which have become basic to modern warfare. This tactical exceptionalism was the product of British commanders’ unique willingness to use craft in a region that they thought of as magical and mysterious, an ancient biblical land of “cunning and subterfuge,” “where little surprise would be occasioned in … seeing a genie floating … out of a magic bottle.” ' back

Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia, Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Quantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a possible property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart&mdasheven if the individual objects are spatially separated in a spacelike manner. This interconnection leads to non-classical correlations between observable physical properties of remote systems, often referred to as nonlocal correlations.' back

Silence (2016 film) - Wikipedia, Silence (2016 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Silence is a 2016 historical period drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and with a screenplay by Jay Cocks and Scorsese, based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō. . . . The story is set in a time when it was common for the faith's Japanese adherents, then called the kakure kirishitan, to hide from persecution which resulted from the suppression of Christianity in Japan during the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–1638) against the Tokugawa shogunate.' back

Suspiria (2018 film) - Wikipedia, Suspiria (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Suspiria (Latin: "sighs") is a 2018 supernatural horror film directed by Luca Guadagnino with a screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the 1977 film directed by Dario Argento. It stars Dakota Johnson as an American woman who enrolls at a prestigious dance academy in 1977 Berlin that is run by a coven of witches. Tilda Swinton co-stars in three roles, including as the company's lead choreographer as well as a male psychotherapist who becomes embroiled with the academy.' back

Tat Tvam Asi - Wikipedia, Tat Tvam Asi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Tat Tvam Asi. . . is one of the Mahāvākyas (Grand Pronouncements) in Vedantic Sanatana Dharma. It originally occurs in the Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7,[1] in the dialogue between Uddalaka and his son Śvetaketu; it appears at the end of a section, and is repeated at the end of the subsequent sections as a refrain. The meaning of this saying is that the Self - in its original, pure, primordial state - is wholly or partially identifiable or identical with the Ultimate Reality that is the ground and origin of all phenomena.] back

The Phrase Finder, There is more than one way to skin a cat, 'Other versions of the phrase were in use in the 19th century, which specify the 'other ways' of felicide that might be employed. Charles Kingsley recorded the most common variant in the novel Westward Ho!, 1855. As befits a West Country gentleman, Kingsley opted for: There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream. Other forms of end that have been employed (and sometimes of a dog rather than a cat) are hanging, choking with butter and choking with pudding.' back

The Will to Believe - Wikipedia, The Will to Believe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, '"The Will to Believe" is a lecture by William James, first published in 1896, which defends, in certain cases, the adoption of a belief without prior evidence of its truth. In particular, James is concerned in this lecture about defending the rationality of religious faith even lacking sufficient evidence of religious truth. . . . James' central argument in "The Will to Believe" hinges on the idea that access to the evidence for whether or not certain beliefs are true depends crucially upon first adopting those beliefs without evidence. As an example, James argues that it can be rational to have unsupported faith in one's own ability to accomplish tasks that require confidence.' back

Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton - New World Encyclopedia, 'Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was a prominent American Trappist monk, poet, and author. A prolific writer, he was among the most recognized monastic figures of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was a literary sensation and catapulted him to celebrity status. He remained true to the vows of his order, despite personal struggles which made him a symbol for humanity's search for meaning in the modern world. Merton was a leading voice of interfaith engagement. Drawing from early experiences with Asian art and reverence for nature, Merton recognized commonalities in the contemplative traditions of Christianity and Buddhism and encouraged the cross-fertilization of Eastern and Western spirituality. An outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and supporter of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Merton urged the Church to take a more activist stance of social issues. Merton's sometimes strident pronouncements stood in contrast to his writings on faith and inner transformation, for which the Trappist monk is best remembered. "We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves," Merton wrote, "and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God."' back

Vedanta - Wikipedia, Vedanta - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Vedanta . . . or Uttara Mīmāṃsā is one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy. Vedanta literally means "end of the Vedas", reflecting ideas that emerged from the speculations and philosophies contained in the Upanishads. It does not stand for one comprehensive or unifying doctrine. Rather it is an umbrella term for many sub-traditions, ranging from dualism to non-dualism, all of which developed on the basis of a common textual connection called the Prasthanatrayi. The Prasthanatrayi is a collective term for the Principal Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita.' back

William James 1904, A World of Pure Experience, ' I give the name 'radical empiricism to my Weltanschauung. Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts the order of logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal an abstraction. My description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of the second order.' VOL. 1. No. 20. SEPTEMBER 29, 1904 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS back

William James 1909, A Pluralistic Universe, Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy back

William James 1909a, The Meaning of Truth, A sequel to Pragmatism back

Wojciech Hubert Zurek, Quantum origin of quantum jumps: breaking of unitary symmetry induced by information transfer and the transition from quantum to classical, 'Submitted on 17 Mar 2007 (v1), last revised 18 Mar 2008 (this version, v3)) "Measurements transfer information about a system to the apparatus, and then further on -- to observers and (often inadvertently) to the environment. I show that even imperfect copying essential in such situations restricts possible unperturbed outcomes to an orthogonal subset of all possible states of the system, thus breaking the unitary symmetry of its Hilbert space implied by the quantum superposition principle. Preferred outcome states emerge as a result. They provide framework for the ``wavepacket collapse'', designating terminal points of quantum jumps, and defining the measured observable by specifying its eigenstates. In quantum Darwinism, they are the progenitors of multiple copies spread throughout the environment -- the fittest quantum states that not only survive decoherence, but subvert it into carrying information about them -- into becoming a witness.' back

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