Philosophy Wire: Violent world. Inner harmony.

A tiny shark tooth, part of a mantis shrimp and other microscopic marine organisms reveal that as the Andes mountains rose, the Eastern Amazon sank twice, each time for less than a million years. [1]

Mars may have had a far-out birthplace. Simulating the assembly of the solar system around 4.56 billion years ago, researchers propose that the Red Planet didn’t form in the inner solar system alongside the other terrestrial planets as previously thought. Mars instead may have formed around where the asteroid belt is now and migrated inward to its present-day orbit, the scientists report in the June 15 Earth and Planetary Science Letters. [2]

We have a violent past.
We live in a violent world.
Harmony is just into our minds.
A fantasy. An illusion.

And yet this harmony is what drives the world around…

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Philosophy Wire: Dissonant chords. Consonant chords.

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2016-12-28]: Musical tastes are cultural, not hardwired in the brain, new research suggests. In a study of a remote Amazonian tribe called the Tsimane, whose members have little or no exposure to Western music, dissonant chords were rated just as likeable as consonant chords. [1] But wait a minute… If a dissonant chord is liked by someone, then this means that for that someone this chord is not… “dissonant”. Who decides what is good music? Is the universe playing Bach or singing Madonna? The cosmos is silent. Just dance. Without judging. You are mad just for listening to music in the first place…

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Philosophy Wire: Moa, Maori, harmony...

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2014-04-25]: It seems that Maori people ate the last moan birds. [1] Many people use this as an argument against primitive people which seems that they did not live in such harmony with nature as once believed. But why is killing a species not in harmony with nature if that species was not fit for survival you fake ecologists? How perverted must one be to think that not only life but also death are part of harmony in the cosmos?

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Philosophy Wire: Sickness for Health?

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2013-02-28]: Can DNA replication stress be the key? Can providing cancer cells with the fuel to grow be therapeutic? [source: BBC News] Old ideas come to the surface again... Accepting the attack could make it easier to defend…

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Philosophy Wire: Self healing cement, cracks, bacteria, humans…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-10-30]: Scientists discovered the self-healing cement: small bacteria residing in hypnosis inside the material, are activated with water (pouring through micro cracks in the cement body) and generate limestone [source: BBC News]. Nature has many mechanisms to self-heal and it is good that humans have started learning they exist. We just now have to make sure we are the cement and not the cracks… Bacteria in their humility have many ways to help maintain harmony in the cosmos. What can we do to achieve the same?

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Philosophy Wire: Life, harmony search, mystes…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-03-01]: You search for harmony in your life, but harmony is nowhere to be found. You search for harmony in the world, but harmony is nowhere to be found. Maybe you search in the wrong place after all… Did you try to look inside your self? Old mystes knew that gods talked when human remained silent…

 

Related article: The Value of Silence

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Harmonia & Antithesis - The path to One

Αρμονία (En. harmonia) is what wise men seek. But why do we seek it? Why do people want harmony in their lives, why do they want harmony in their thinking?

Harmony is a weird thing.
You cannot have it unless you have met excess.

We seek harmony because we think we see it is the world.
But the world is most of the times an ugly place full of antinomies and misery.

We like harmony because we feel good when we have it.
So is harmony product of our selfishness?

Harmony is the way to unite opposites into One.
But if opposites are part of this world, could they also be part of Harmony in the cosmos?

If we think antithesis is an illusion,
why don't think the other way around - could Harmony be an illusion too?

Intuition tells us that the world is not as complicated or full of antinomies as mathematics think.
If something and its opposite are true, then maybe there is no antinomie at all.

"True" and "False" are human inventions.
I wouldn't trust them much...

Main Thesis: Harmonia Philosophica [English] (Credo quia absurdum!!)

Why live forever? or The importance of Death

Philosophy Message by Spiros Kakos [2011-10-28]: Research for immortality intensifies. Scientific teams which study the DNA of people who live long are constantly increasing. Χ Prize Foundation will give ten million dollars to the first team that will analyze the full DNA sequence of 100 centenarians [source: http://genomics.xprize.org/].

 

But why live forever if we do not know how to live or why do you live at all? If breathing, eating, making sex and earning money is all there is, it is natural that we want to increase the duration of all those pleasures. But nature’s wisdom is greater than the thinking of petty scientism-lovers. And nature has its own plan for life, which incorporates death. The wise choice would be not to defy that plan, but to accept it, live it and try to understand it. If we think nature was wise to give us the good of life, why do we think that death – which was also given to us by nature – is something bad?

 

As Rilke said, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things”…

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Gnosticism and Alchemy

Alchemy was a spiritual practice cloaked under a science mantle. In his Alchemical Catechism, Paracelsus clearly denotes that his usage of the metals was a symbol: “When the Philosophers speak of gold and silver, from which they extract their matter, are we to suppose that they refer to the vulgar gold and silver? By no means; vulgar silver and gold are dead, while those of the Philosophers are full of life”… Jung, who studied alchemistical symbols extensively, visualized Alchemy as the “Yoga of the West”. The Alchemist passed with the help of transformations through various levels of enlightenment – until the final perfect, healthy, incorruptible, and everlasting state. According to many (Jung included) the evolution from ignorance to enlightenment described by Alchemy was based on the Gnosticism philosophy which managed to survive the purges from the Christian church by using encoded alchemistic texts.

The philosophy called Gnosticism is not an easy one to follow least of all to understand. The dogmas Gnostics believed to were mostly pre-philosophical and even they had a hard time even explaining them.
According to the Gnostics, this world, the material cosmos, is the result of a primordial error on the part of a supra-cosmic, supremely divine being, usually called Sophia (Wisdom) or simply the Logos. This being is described as the final emanation of a divine hierarchy, called the Plêrôma or “Fullness,” at the head of which resides the supreme God, the One beyond Being. The error of Sophia, which is usually identified as a reckless desire to know the transcendent God, leads to the hypostatization of her desire in the form of a semi-divine and essentially ignorant creature known as the Demiurge.

Our desire to “understand” is the main source of the paradoxes with which we are engulfed. And alchemy tried to fight these paradoxes by unifying all antinomies into oneness. Our eagerness to “know” has created our theories. Our theories have created imaginary notions like “time” or “change” (see Harmonia Philosophica). And our imaginary notions have created the antinomies which we cannot comprehend no matter how much we try.

We have to become more open-minded and LESS knowledgeable if we are to find the lapis philosophorum…


Sources
http://www.iep.utm.edu/gnostic/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy
Harmonia Philosophica [English]

Philosophy Reminder: What does it mean to be Dogmatic?

Harmonia Philosophica has fighting against dogmatism as its main objective. But what is the definition of being dogmatic? A doctrine is anything which we believe even if it has not been proven 100% and which we have forgotten that it directs our thoughts and our actions. The second part of the definition is very important. Nothing can be proved beyond reasonable doubt - neither religious nor scientific proposals. We have to rely on some principles / axioms for everything we think or say. But this is not being dogmatic. These axioms are converted into dogmas when we silently forget that we use them and, thus, transform them into "obvious truths" even though they were just assumptions in the beginning. For example, we take for granted that a logical proposition is either true or false – this is an axiom on which we have build our Logic. If we forget this and if we think for a moment that this is a "given truth" we will have unwittingly become dogmatic (yes, Dialethism is the other way – see Harmonia Philosophica main article). Question your beliefs (scientific or religious) and always remember that all axioms can be changed… Then change your axioms and question your beliefs again…

It doe not matter if your are in chains. As long as you know it and think like you were not…

PS. And yes, this applies for both theistic and atheistic axioms. For both materialistic and idealistic axioms. For both religious and scientific axioms. The axiom “I am not dogmatic” is the most common of them all…

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Philosophy Wire: The child, Evil and the (non) importance of ignorance…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-06-11]: A 5-year old girl may be after all be prosecuted with murder charges [source: Yahoo! News]. Can someone who does not know the definition of evil, actually do evil? And if not, then why do such events do not take place among the children of “primitive” Indians? If murder is the disruption of the harmony of the world, isn’t that something everyone should sense? We have distanced ourselves from that harmony years ago. And children are just doing what they sense around them…

Relative article: The Source of Ethics

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