Monthly Archive for December, 2008
Page 2 of 2
I’ve noticed something peculiar happening as the years go by. Years feel more like months, months like weeks, weeks like days, and so on. Then I recall sitting in math class in junior high school looking at the clock; time seemed to stand still. It doesn’t seems to move all that fast sitting the dentist chair either, I might add. Continue reading ‘How to Know You’re Happy’
My word! I imagine it is hard for philosophies of what ever stripe to see things as simply as they may be. To really get to the bottom of any of this, I imagine we must examine what we mean, exactly, by the words: free, will, difference, sameness, and all the rest of the words we use for thinking and speaking. That process may be too plodding for the mind (otherwise correlations would be selling like hotcakes!). The mind wants to get ‘it’ done quickly and move on to greener pastures of thought. Continue reading ‘It Is Spooky’
I was soaking in the hot bath this morning and Dave’s recent reply to Butterflies have wings; we have minds popped into my mind. A hot bath never fails to loosen up thinking, I find. Anyway, he said, “Our models in our minds are staler than we know.” He also quoted George Box, one of the most influential statisticians of the 20th century, who said ‘all models are wrong, some are useful’.
I agree, but only if we’re talking about judging models ‘by their covers’. Taken at face value all models are wrong. However, when considering a model as mirroring the mind of the model maker, every model is 100% on target. This parallels something Jesus said: ‘Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit’. We are the tree, the models we make, or are attracted to, are the fruit. The tree and its fruit share the same root. Continue reading ‘Of What Is The Taoist Model Symptomatic?’
Forty years ago I had various and sundry options that would win my heart over, distracting me from what I knew I ought to do (or as Buddha put it in his Fourth Noble Truth, “There is salvation for him whose self disappears before truth, whose will is bent on what he ought to do, whose sole desire is the performance of his duty”). Continue reading ‘Is ‘Free Will’ the Only Option?’
Recent Comments by Post