BIBLIOGRAPHY of THOUGHT
- June 8 -
“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler.”
172 notes link- May 14 -
“true stories can’t be told forward, only backward. we invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded. why one person who has been badly treated by a parent turns into a psychopath and another with similar treatment suffers from severe depression and yet another develops an inexplicable paralysis isn’t clear. what is clear is that memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both explicit and implicit-conscious and unconscious”
Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, a history of my nerves
again, here i am picking up on narrative. this time in relation to memory, which influenced my undergraduate work on murakami, and most of my postgraduate work on collective and individual histories.
(via kirstylouloumitchell)
(via silentsun)
“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?”
1,202 notes link
: “Psychotherapy isn’t what you think. It isn’t a healing of an illness.... →
“Psychotherapy isn’t what you think. It isn’t a healing of an illness. It isn’t guidance from a wise counselor. It isn’t the mutual sharing of good friends. It isn’t learning esoteric knowledge. It isn’t being shown the error of one’s ways. It isn’t finding a new religion. Psychotherapy isn’t what…
- April 26 -
“
Intelligence, Hawking believes contrary to our human-centric existece, may not have any long-term survival value. In comparison the microbial world, will live on, even if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions. Hawking’s main insight is that intelligence was an unlikely development for life on Earth, from the chronology of evolution: “It took a very long time, two and a half billion years, to go from single cells to multi-cell beings, which are a necessary precursor to intelligence. This is a good fraction of the total time available, before the Sun blows up. So it would be consistent with the hypothesis, that the probability for life to develop intelligence, is low. In this case, we might expect to find many other life forms in the galaxy, but we are unlikely to find intelligent life.”
Another possibility is that there is a reasonable probability for life to form, and to evolve to intelligent beings, but at some point in their technological development “the system becomes unstable, and the intelligent life destroys itself. This would be a very pessimistic conclusion. I very much hope it isn’t true.”
” 2 notes link