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Showing posts from January, 2016

What, if Anything, is "Reality"

We are hard-wired to accept the direct and indirect evidence of our senses as painting a picture of the "real world". Whatever disagreements we may have over interpretation, we all take it for granted that there is a real world "out there". We are just limited in the amount of evidence we can collect, the power of our analytical tools etc. The inevitable conclusion for all of his is that "reality", as we experience it, is about our experience (something that happens in our heads) and is not something separate. Our ideas about the world are not the world itself. This observation has been made repeatedly down through the ages. I encountered it twice at approximately the same time back in the 1970's. First in the Tao Te Ching : The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal name The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth The named is the mother of myriad things and in the writings of Ludwig Wittgenste

Belling the Cat

The Web is buzzing with cannon shots at the "evil corporations", fired by the twin Generals of the Generalization: Bernie Sanders and Chris Hedges. OK, so what's the plan? Abolish corporations? Seriously? Lets face it, we need some way to organize people and capital to get things done, even small things like building a sidewalk. It's not the "corporation" that are the issue - it's the way they are treated as people with rights. Big mistake. Generally speaking, a "person" created by a bunch of real people results in a "person" with intelligence of the lowest common denominator and ethics of a sewer rat. This "person" is a psychopath and should not be granted any rights at all. When we granted the "right" of free speech to corporations, we admitted a 100 ton gorilla to the legislature. That gorilla buys votes with the money taken out of the salaries of its employees, or added to the prices it charges to its customer