Transcendence

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bhavacakra.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In Western religion we seek to attain immortality; in Eastern religion we seek to escape it.

“The secret of religious enlightenment, revealed to the Buddha as he sat beneath the Bo tree, is the suppression of desire, a systematic elimination of all our attachments to the world,” writes Gordon Graham in his Eight Theories of Ethics. “In such turning away comes moksha or release and eventually, for it may take more than one life to achieve it, entry to Nirvana — a term which captures both the idea of nothingness and of heaven. The Buddhist ideal, then, finds supreme value in personal extinction. (Whether this amounts to total extinction is a further matter.) In so doing it wholly discounts subjective values because it is these, after all, that keep us chained to the unending cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

“It is of great interest to note that, while Western minds are accustomed to think of religious faith as entailing the belief and hope that we will be saved from eternal death and live for ever, the belief of Eastern religions is that, other things being equal, we do live for ever and it is from this dreadful fate that we must look to spirituality to save us.”

| Death · Religion

Required Reading

In 1990, Spanish philosopher Jon Perez Laraudogoitia submitted an article to Mind entitled “This Article Should Not Be Rejected by Mind.” In it, he argued:

  1. If statement 1 in this argument is trivially true, then this article should be accepted.
  2. If statement 1 were false, then its antecedent (“statement 1 in this argument is trivially true”) would be true, which means that statement 1 itself would be true, a contradiction. So statement 1 must be true.
  3. But that seems wrong, since Mind is a serious journal and shouldn’t publish trivial truths.
  4. That means statement 1 must be either false or a non-trivial truth. We know it can’t be false (#2), so it must be a non-trivial truth, and its antecedent (“statement 1 in this argument is trivially true”) is false.
  5. What then is the truth value of its consequent, “this article should be accepted”? If this were false then Mind shouldn’t publish the article; that can’t be right, since the article consists of a non-trivial truth and its justification.
  6. So the consequent must be true, and Mind should publish the article.

They published it. “This is, I believe, the first article in the whole history of philosophy the content of which is concerned exclusively with its own self, or, in other words, which is totally self-referential,” Laraudogoitia wrote. “The reason why it is published is because in it there is a proof that it should not be rejected and that is all.”

| Science & Math

Rise or Fall

https://www.google.com/patents/US325437

Here’s an old-timey way to prevent oversleeping, patented by A.J. Nordmann in 1885. Set your alarm clock as normal but attach it to a lever on Nordmann’s “alarm and waking bed.” Now if you don’t turn off the alarm in time, the head of the bedframe will drop to the floor.

“Thus a person sleeping is awakened as the alarm sounds, and should he fail to rise he is immediately dropped down with the head portion of the mattress F, which then has its bearing upon the springs H.”

I suppose that really chronic oversleepers could remove the springs, to make the jolt even more jarring.

| Technology

“A Memory”

When I was as high as that
I saw a poet in his hat.
I think the poet must have smiled
At such a solemn gazing child.

Now wasn’t it a funny thing
To get a sight of J.M. Synge,
And notice nothing but his hat?
Yet life is often queer like that.

— L.A.G. Strong

| Poems

Tit for Tat

On March 19, 1884, the French cargo ship Frigorifique was cruising through heavy fog in the Bay of Biscay when the British steamer Rumney loomed out of nowhere and struck it amidships. The French crew scrambled aboard the Rumney, and their own ship disappeared into the fog.

Some time later, while the injured Rumney was still lowering its boats, another ship hove out of the fog and struck it amidships. This proved to be the empty Frigorifique — her jammed rudder had led her in a great circle through the fog to return for a second collision.

Both ships sank this time, but the crews escaped safely in the Rumney‘s lifeboats.

| Oddities

20 to 3

icosagon puzzle

Prove that, if we choose nine vertices of a regular icosagon, some three of these will form an isosceles triangle.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Light Work

If a pane of green glass gives the things behind it a green colour, it turns white to green, red to black, yellow to greenish yellow, blue to greenish blue. The white pane should, therefore, make everything whitish, i.e. it should make everything pale; and, then why shouldn’t it turn black to grey? — Even a yellow glass makes things darker, should a white glass make things darker too?

— Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, 1977

‘Our Second Experiment,’ the Professor announced, as Bruno returned to his place, still thoughtfully rubbing his elbows, ‘is the production of that seldom-seen-but-greatly-to-be-admired phenomenon, Black Light! You have seen White Light, Red Light, Green Light, and so on: but never, till this wonderful day, have any eyes but mine seen Black Light! This box,’ carefully lifting it upon the table, and covering it with a heap of blankets, ‘is quite full of it. The way I made it was this — I took a lighted candle into a dark cupboard and shut the door. Of course the cupboard was then full of Yellow Light. Then I took a bottle of Black ink, and poured it over the candle: and, to my delight, every atom of the Yellow Light turned Black! That was indeed the proudest moment of my life! Then I filled a box with it. And now would any one like to get under the blankets and see it?’

— Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893

| Oddities

Leave-Taking

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1430845

In 1964 Canadian writer Graeme Gibson bought a parrot in Mexico. The bird, which Gibson named Harold Wilson, was bright and affectionate at first, but he seemed to grow lonely in the dark Canadian winter, so in the spring Gibson made arrangements to donate him to the Toronto Zoo. At the aviary Gibson carried Harold into the cage that had been prepared for him, placed him on a perch, said his goodbyes, and turned to go.

“Then Harold did something that astonished me. For the very first time, and in exactly the voice my kids might have used, he called out ‘Daddy!’ When I turned to look at him he was leaning towards me expectantly. ‘Daddy’, he repeated.

“I don’t remember what I said to him. Something about him being happier there, that he’d soon make friends. The kind of things you say to kids when you abandon them at camp. But outside the aviary I could still hear him calling ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ as we walked away. I was shattered to discover that Harold knew my name, and that he did so because he’d identified himself with my children.

“I now believe he’d known it all along, but was using it — for the first time — out of desperation. Both Konrad Lorenz and Bernd Heinrich mention instances of birds calling out the private names of intimates when threatened by serious danger. I am no longer surprised by such information. We think of our captive birds as our pets, but perhaps we are theirs as well.”

(From Gibson’s Perpetual Motion, 1982.)

| Language · Science & Math

Unquote

“If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes, — some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong, — and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly, that we can say they were almost made for each other.” — Sydney Smith

| Quotations

Perspective

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1158427

Suppose the Grand Canyon were man-made. It could have been formed (though it wasn’t) by agricultural or industrial erosion; the results of poor farming methods can look very similar — artificial badlands — if on a smaller scale. Would this hideous scar on the fair face of the earth still be a national park? Would anyone visit it other than groups of awed schoolchildren studying Environmental Destruction, absorbing the dreadful lesson of what can happen to a desert raped by human exploiters? Strip mining can produce spectacular and dramatic landscapes. W.H. Auden loved the lead-mining landscapes of Cornwall above all others; the evocative and aromatic hillsides of the Mediterranean, with their olives, sages, thyme, and dwarf conifers, are a result of centuries of deforestation, goat herding, and the building of roads and cities.

— Frederick Turner, “Cultivating the American Garden: Toward a Secular View of Nature,” Harper’s, August 1985

| Art