weary..........................

 

     I am weary of contemplating Nations from the lowest and most beastly degradations of human Life, to the highest Refinement of Civilization:  I am weary of Philosophers, Theologians, Politicians, and Historians.  They are immense Masses of Absurdities, Vices and Lies.  Montesquieu had sense enough to say in Jest, that all our Knowledge might be comprehended in twelve Pages in Duodecimo: and, I believe him, in earnest.  I could express my faith in shorter terms.  He who loves the Workman and his Work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of him.

-John Adams, from his June 28, 1812 letter to Thomas Jefferson

Never bet against Big Al..........................

 

    via

gaps.........................

       I've seen many people shy away from writing because it doesn't come naturally to them.  What they overlook is that writing is more than a vehicle for communicating—it is a tool for learning.  Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic.  It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments.  Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking.  Or as Steve [Martin] himself quipped, "Some people have a way with words, and other people, uh . . . oh, not have a way."

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

seeks.........................

 Philosophy, as Spinoza understands it, does not peddle in temporary cheer, modest improvements in well-being, or chicken soup for the soul; it seeks and claims to find a basis for happiness that is absolutely certain, permanent, and divine.  The principal—indeed, the sole—purpose of his mature philosophy, as expressed in his masterwork, the Ethics, is to achieve this kind of blessedness or salvation. . . . Like Socrates, Spinoza avers that blessedness comes only from a certain kind of knowledge—specifically, the "knowledge of the union the that mind has with the whole of Nature."

-Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

remove the barricade of knowledge.....

       There's a great power in not knowing.  When faced with a challenging task, we may tell ourselves it's too difficult, it's not worth the effort, it's not the way things are done, it's not likely to work, or it's not likely to work for us.

       If we approach a task with ignorance, it can remove the barricade of knowledge blocking progress.  Curiously, not being aware of a challenge may be just what we need to rise to it.

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

The mystery.................................

 Knowledge destroys wonder, destroys the capacity to feel awe. It makes you capable of explaining away everything. It takes away all poetry from life. It takes away all meaning from life. The knowledgeable person is never surprised by anything because he can explain everything. But no explanation is true for they don’t explain anything at all. The mystery remains. The mystery is infinite.

The knowledgeable person becomes so burdened by his knowledge that he loses the mirror-like quality of reflecting the beauty, the benediction, the dance, the ecstasy of existence. Knowledge is not going to help as far as life is concerned. The knowledgeable person is almost a dead person; he lives in his grave.

-Osho

Belief...................................

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.” 

-Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts On Common Things

True.......................................?

"Since Plato, Western thought and the theory of knowledge have focused on the notions of True-False;  as commendable as it was, it is high time to shift the concern to Robust-Fragile, and social epistemology to the more serious problem of Sucker-Nonsucker."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Knowing the wondrousness of the Intertunnel, this was inevitable:

Mystical..........................

"The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.  It is the sower of all true science.  [The person] to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.  To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."

-Albert Einstein

image via

On prizing the Moral Sense................

     During the Six Days, God created man and the other animals.
     He made a man and a woman and placed them in a pleasant garden, along with the other creatures.  They all lived together there in harmony and contentment and blooming youth for some time;  then trouble came.  God had warned the man and the woman that they must not eat of the fruit of a certain tree.  And he added a most strange remark;  he said that if they ate of it they should surely die.  Strange, for the reason that inasmuch as they had never seen a sample of death they could not possibly know what he meant.  Neither would he nor any other god have been able to make those ignorant children understand what was meant, without furnishing a sample.  The mere word could have no meaning for them, any more that it would have for an infant of days.
     Presently a serpent sought them out privately, and came to them walking upright, which was the way of serpents in those days.  The serpent said the forbidden fruit would store their vacant minds with knowledge.  So they ate it, which was quite natural, for man is so made that he eagerly wants to know; whereas the priest, like God, whose imitator and representative he is,  has made it his business from the beginning to keep him from knowing any useful thing.
     Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and at once a great light streamed into their dim heads.  They had acquired knowledge.  What knowledge - useful knowledge?  No - merely knowledge that there was such a thing as good, and such a thing as evil, and how to do evil.  They couldn't do it before.  Therefore all their acts up to this point had been without stain, without  blame, without offense.
     But now they could do evil - and suffer for it;  now they had acquired what the the Church calls an invaluable possession, the Moral Sense;  that sense which differentiates man from beast and sets him above the beast.  Instead of below the beast - where one would suppose his proper place would be, since he is always foul-minded and guilty and the beast is always clean-minded and innocent.  It is like valuing a watch that must go wrong, above a watch that can't.
     The Church still prizes the Moral Sense as man's noblest asset today, although the Church knows God had a distinctly poor opinion of it and did what he could in his clumsy way to keep his happy Children of the Garden from acquiring it.

-Mark Twain, as excerpted from Letters from the Earth

Uncertainty...................................

Wright thought that metaphysical speculation - ideas about the origin, end, and meaning of life - came naturally to human beings.  He didn't condemn such ideas out of hand, he just thought the should never be confused with science.  For what science teaches is the the phenomenal world -the world we cans see and touch - is characterized, through and through, by change, and that our knowledge of it is characterized, through and through, by uncertainty.
     His favorite illustration was the weather.  Everyone believes that the weather is purely a product of physical cause and effect, but no one can predict it with certainty.  "Unlike planetary perturbations, the weather makes the most reckless excursions from its averages, and obscures them by a most inconsequent and incalculable fickleness," he maintained in one of the first articles he ever published, "The Winds and the Weather," in 1858.  We accept this state of affairs about the weather - that it is a perfectly lawful, rather mundane phenomenon whose complexity nevertheless vastly exceeds our ability to understand it - and yet we freely pontificate about the causes of human unhappiness and the future progress of society, things determined by factors presumably many times more complex than the weather...
      It is not, Wright believed, that every event is not completely determined by physical causes.  It is just that precise knowledge of those causes and how they operate is inaccessible to science in its present state - and considering the multitude of factors, each with its own probability of occurrence, involved in producing the outcome of even the simplest events, such as flipping a coin, that knowledge will probably remain inaccessible.

-Louis Menand,   The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America

On mining big data...........................

"Plumbing the depths of chaos, it divines meaning."

"In the 1980's,it was still possible for an amateur to learn everything humans knew about the planets.  Today, that's no longer true.  The Alps of raw data would take more than one lifetime to summit, passing countless Ph D dissertations at campsites along the trail."

"How extraordinary that we've created peripheral brains to discover truths about nature that we seek.  We're teaching them how to work together calmly as a society, share data at lightning speed, and to cooperate so much better than we do, rubbing brains together in the invisible drawing room we sometimes call the 'cloud.'  Undaunted, despite our physical and mental limitations, we design robots to continue the quest we began long ago:  making sense of nature."

-Diane Ackerman,  The Human Age:  The World Shaped By Us

But...............................

"We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we can't be wise with other men's wisdom."

-Michel de Montaigne

The beginning of wisdom.............................

Like math and physics, religion is a human activity, a heart-felt response to the mystery of the cosmos.  However inspired or lofty, religious expressions of truth are limited by their own finitude.  Like math and physics, they resemble reality without being equivalent to it.  Our notions of the absolute, the eternal, the all, the nothing, or God do not exhaust that which we attempt to describe.  They are our notions of God, however inspired or verified by centuries of experience and the testimony of the faithful.  The are perceptions, perhaps incredibly helpful ones, but perceptions none the less.  Every kind of human knowing is shaped by the knower, individually and culturally.  And among the body of transcendent knowledge that comes through the spiritual insights of the millennia, and there is much, the most important virtue among them is most surely humility, which is the beginning of wisdom.

-Timothy Carson,  The Square Root Of God

image via

On knowledge and wisdom......................

 "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit............... Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."

quote from this list of paraprosdokians

Know....................................................

“Eventually all things fall into place. Until then, laugh at the confusion, live for the moments, and know EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON.” 
-Albert Schweitzer

YouTube video, from whence above photo came, here.

the more....................................................

“The more I live, the more I regret how little I know”
-Claude Monet

Just another word...............................

Wondering if this is still true.....................

Pour ce qui est des connaissances non-écrites qui se trouvent dispersées parmi les hommes de différents professions, je suis persuadé qu’ils passent de beaucoup tant à l'égard de la multitude que de l'importance, tout ce qui se trouve marqué dans les livres, et que la meilleure partie de notre trésor n'est pas encore enregistrée.

• I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

-Gottfried Wihlhem von Leibniz (1646-1716)

On knowledge and wisdom.....................

"Never mistake knowledge for wisdom.  One helps you make a living, the other helps you make a life."
-Eleanor Roosevelt