Michele Pasin / Quotes

Becoming one with the midges

By now it must have been more than two hours into the trip, and I was slumped against the beech looking upward into the tree canopy, idly watching the midges darting to and fro in the shafts of sunlight. How much energy they put into something so futile! There’s no real difference between my life and theirs, I thought morosely, watching them with sudden sympathy . . . and, without a moment’s warning, everything turned inside out. For an instant I became one with the midges. I knew the thrill of hurtling through the rays of light, the knack of being able to turn in midair on a dime. Wow, I thought, and sat up, enthralled.

Saved 29 December 2022 / www.amazon.com ↗

#psychedelics #nature #animals #sympathy

Hofmann on the West's spiritual crisis

Hofmann strongly believed that there was a spiritual crisis in Western civilization, and argued that society must shift from “the materialistic, dualistic…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #spirituality #materialism #dualism #nature #psychedelics

Christian hypochondria

Hypochondria.—There are people who, from sympathy and anxiety for others become hypochondriacal. The resulting form of compassion is nothing else than…

Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits #people #compassion #sympathy

Logic alone doesn't motivate good conduct

In his first book, An Inquiry Into the Good, for example, arguing that logical reasons are often not sufficient to motivate good conduct, he alludes to a…

Nishida Kitarō (stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy) #motivation #sympathy #conduct

A frog's eye is not a camera

Importantly, the frog will persist with this behaviour. It will never adapt its behaviour in light of the unsuccessful attempts to capture the fly. The moral…

Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) #perception #representation #animals #action

Animal memory as learned response

In contrast, most, if not all, animal memory is simply a form of learned response. Your dog remembers you in that it recognises you as its pack leader, but it…

The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) #memory #animals #learning

Augustine divides the sign into natural signs and given signs

Augustine divides the sign into the two main classes of natural signs (signa naturalia) and given signs (signa data). “Natural signs are those which, apart…

Medieval Semiotics (meier-oeser, Stephan) #animals #fire #extent #class