Tags / 38 quotes from 14 sources
#illusion
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
Abbaiare alla luna
Chissà perché ma nella realtà tutti noi vogliamo essere diversi, soprattutto quando facciamo di tutto per omologarci. Mi veniva sempre in mente un’immagine: abbaiare alla luna. Ogni volta temevo di essere anche io uno di quelli che fanno un gran rumore, sembrano convintissimi…
Smettere di lavorare non basta per essere felici
Purché non si riduca all’assunto: «Smettendo di lavorare sarò felice». Credo che quest’assunto infatti non sia per niente vero. In ogni epoca di crisi morale, di spiazzamento sociale, si tende a sovrastimare l’effetto di qualche soluzione taumaturgica. La vita è e resta (anche)…
Non posti nuovi, ma occhi nuovi
«Per un vero viaggio di scoperta non occorrono posti nuovi, ma occhi nuovi», scriveva Marcel Proust. E credo avesse ragione. Chi fugge è invece convinto del contrario, e cioè che sta male dove sta per motivi esterni, ma che basti cambiare orizzonte premendo un tasto sul…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Dennett's Cartesian Theater and multiple drafts
Dennett does not share the view that consciousness is decomposable. In other words, he thinks that our feeling that we have a unitary conscious experience is an illusion. He calls this feeling the “Cartesian Theater”—the place in the brain where all of the information…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
The Muller-Lyer illusion
Consider the Muller-Lyer illusion. Line 1 and Line 2 are of the same length, although Line 2 appears to be longer than Line 1. Even though we have knowledge that tells us the two lines are of equal length, our perception of the two arrows is not privy to this information. Our…
L'imperfetta meraviglia (Andrea De Carlo)
La stupidità degli innamoramenti
Il problema è che lui ormai conosce fin troppo bene la stupidità degli innamoramenti: l’entusiasmo indiscriminato per la novità, l’amplificazione fuori misura di differenze minuscole, l’attribuzione di qualità non del tutto verificate, l’interpretazione esageratamente generosa…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
La separazione come illusione ottica della coscienza
L’essere umano è una parte del tutto chiamato universo, una parte limitata nello spazio e nel tempo. Fa esperienza di se stesso, dei suoi pensieri e sentimenti come di qualcosa di separato dal resto. Un tipo di illusione ottica della coscienza, questa illusione è una specie di…
Le grandi storie che ci raccontiamo
Uno si costruisce grandi storie, questo è il fatto, e può andare avanti anni a crederci, non importa quanto pazze sono, e inverosimili, se le porta addosso, e basta. Si è anche felici, di cose del genere. Felici. E potrebbero non finire mai. Poi, un giorno, succede che si rompe…
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
Il ritratto che dipingiamo noi
Lui guarda via; dice “Spesso quando trovi qualcosa pensi che sia perché l’avevi cercata”. “E non è così?” dice lei. Vorrebbe saperlo; le servirebbe. Lui sorride amaro. “È quasi sempre un collegamento illusorio” dice. “O una verità transitoria.” Lei dice “Nel senso che…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
Constitutive ontologies = second path
In following the second path the observer assumes, quite differently, that the starting point must be the constitutive biological phenomena of being unable to distinguish perception from illusion in daily living. In the absence of being able to make statements about…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Il buddhismo come scienza del mentale
Il buddhismo è una scienza del mentale di antica derivazione, sorta in India intorno al VI secolo a.C. grazie alla predicazione di Gautama Siddhartha, il Buddha storico. Assunse aspetti cultuali già in India, per poi diffondersi in una vasta area dell’Asia; tra l’altro, in Cina…
L'haiku unisce forma e vuoto
Nishitani Keiji, nel suo scritto sulla «pazzia» (kyo) di Basho, lo evidenzia: l’haiku è la combinazione della forma e del vuoto, le categorie del Sutra del cuore (Hannya shin gyo).25 Questo genere poetico alimenta la convinzione che i fenomeni e la loro indicibile matrice siano…
Esistenza e non esistenza in Dogen
Il Dharma del Buddha è ovunque: questa la constatazione di esordio. Poiché la Legge (dharma, ho) riguarda tutte le cose, la natura buddhica attecchisce in tutte le cose. È un assunto del Grande Veicolo. Le cose esistono, e si traccia una distinzione tra i Buddha e gli esseri…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Hume finds no experience of the self
Hume made devastating criticisms of the Cartesian account of the self and personal identity. There is no experience of the self, according to Hume; and the identity that we ascribe to ourselves through the changes in our lives is an entirely fictitious identity. It is a kind of…
For consciousness, appearance is reality
But why couldn’t we show that consciousness was an illusion like sunsets and thus do an eliminative reduction? Eliminative reductions rest on the distinction between appearance and reality. But we cannot show that the very existence of consciousness is an illusion like sunsets…
Causation as one damn thing after another
This felt determination of the mind gives us the conviction that there are necessary connections in nature. But that conviction is nothing but an illusion. The only reality is the reality of priority, contiguity, and constant conjunction. Causation on Hume’s account is…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Illusory sobering up
At which point I decided I would like to go for a walk through the woods. I felt perfectly capable of handling this; in fact I appeared to have come down and be functioning quite normally again. Unbeknownst to me, a new phenomenon had appeared in my sessions: one referred to in…
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
Books of the dead treat death as illusion
The Book of Dead Philosophers is not a ‘Book of the Dead’, whether Egyptian or Tibetan. These exquisite ancient writings carefully describe the rituals necessary to prepare with certainty for the afterlife. The Egyptian Book of the Dead comprises 189 spells to ensure that the…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Honoring the godhead in the stranger
Anyone who brags about knowing this doesn’t understand it, for he is only using the theory as a trick to maintain his illusion of separateness, a gimmick in a game of spiritual one-upmanship. Moreover, such bragging is deeply offensive to those who do not understand, and who…
The skin is a bridge as much as a barrier
The skin is always considered as a wall, barrier, or boundary which definitively separates oneself from the world—despite the fact that it is covered with pores breathing air and with nerve-ends relaying information. The skin informs us just as much as it outforms; it is as…
Removing the illusion of oneself as a separate ego does not mean being “unselfish”
But this must not be confused with our usual ideas of the practice of “unselfishness,” which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego. Such “unselfishness” is apt to be a highly…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
A very persistent illusion
If the unified self is an illusion, it is a very persistent one.
Mere constructs versus real constructions
idea of the self as a construction is one that many want to resist, because it seems to imply that it is not real. But of course constructions can be perfectly real. It is important to distinguish between ‘mere constructs’, which exist solely as ideas, and real constructions…
The chariot exists but not apart from its parts
This is sometimes taken to mean that chariots do not exist, only their parts. But this is clearly nonsense. A cart is not an illusion just because it has no existence other than by the correct arrangement of its parts. The only thing that doesn’t exist is an object which is…
The Ego Trick
you just are the collection of these thoughts, ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’.6 This is the heart of the Ego Trick. The trick is to create something…
Self-experience exists whether or not selves do
I may have to think of myself as having a unity over time, but that does not mean that I really have it. How we must think about things at certain times, for certain purposes, in certain ways, does not necessarily tells us about how they actually are. Kant recognised this: ‘The…
Three central facts about ourselves
These are the three central facts about ourselves that we have to accept, if we believe that the Ego Trick has done its job and created unified individuals out of a bundle of mental, neural and physical activity. First, the unity of the self is psychological. Second, we are no…
Explaining versus explaining away
My inattentive acquaintance had failed to spot the difference between explaining something and explaining it away. The TV programme had done the latter: it had shown that what appears to be spontaneous human combustion is no such thing. There are those among both supporters and…
The Buddha rejected ātman as a fiction
According to Stephen Batchelor, ‘What the Buddha did was to reject that whole model altogether and declare that such an ātman effectively was a fiction, an illusion. So when he says anattā, he is rejecting the idea that there is an ātman, that there is a brahman, and focusing…
Illusory is only the idea of an unchanging self
the most coherent readings of its teachings on not-self are indeed remarkably congruent with more recent bundle theories. The self is not an illusion. What is illusory is an idea of self which sees it as an unchanging, immortal essence.
The self is not what it seems
that is what the Buddha was saying – not that there’s no such thing as a self, because in many contexts he would say there is, but that the self is not what it seems to be.’
Dennett: the self as user illusion
The philosopher Daniel Dennett takes a similar line, calling the perception of a unitary controlling mind a ‘veridical illusion’. ‘It’s an illusion in the same way the desktop on your computer is an illusion,’ he told me. ‘There aren’t any little yellow files on your hard disc…
Ricoeur's great oscillation of the I
we must avoid what Paul Ricoeur called ‘the great oscillation that causes the “I” of the “I think” to appear, by turns, to be elevated inordinately to the heights of first truth and then cast down to the depths of a vast illusion’.
Ego-less experience is not more veridical
Similarly, if we are to see ourselves as we really are, we will always see a self there. Ego-less experience is not somehow more veridical than ego experience.
Hofstadter's marble in the envelopes
example of this given by Douglas Hofstadter, another writer who is keen to talk of illusions, describing the self as ‘a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn’t believe that it was perceiving a mirage’.6 He recounts an anecdote in which he pushed down on a pile of…
The feeling is right, the interpretation wrong
The feeling (resistance to compression) is entirely veridical: only the interpretation of the feeling (there is a marble there) is mistaken. He only goes wrong when he misinterprets what it is
The solidity of self is the illusion
The solidity of self is an illusion; the self itself is not. The Ego Trick is not to persuade us that we exist when we do not, but to make us believe we are more substantial and enduring than we really are. There may be an illusion as to what we really are, but not that we…
Why The Modern World Is Bad For Your Brain (daniel J Levitin)
Our brains are not wired to multitask well
Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think…