Posts in Chronological Order

the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence

“The times through which we are passing — and even more terrifying, those through which our children and grandchildren will pass — are difficult ones. Difficulty, however, has always been life’s stimulant, awakening and goading all our impulses, both good and bad, in order to make us overleap the obstacle which has suddenly risen before…

“But the subtler contents never appear on the surface; they always come to light outside the consulting hour. I therefore asked her cautiously, `Tell me, how do I seem to you when you are not with me? Am I just the same?’ She said, `When I am with you, you are quite pleasant, but when…

“And of course the inner processes are very patient. The puzzle of humanness is apparently not meant to be a simple affair to be easily mastered. Whatever deals with human lives is naturally patient.” Wilson van Dusen, The Natural Depth in Man

In this election year, a reminder. “Democracy is not so much a new form of political life as a dissolution and disorganization of the old forms. It is simply a resolution of government into the hands of the people, a taking down of that which has before it existed, and a recommitment of it to…

“It was possible for Paine, in the 18th century, to believe that culture was served merely by the absence of a church, a state, a social order such as those under which Europe labored. That was the error of his school, for the absence of these harmful or obsolete institutions left a vacancy in society,…

How many angry ideologues still have not learned this simple lesson! “Historic observation shows that there are many modes of change, other than dialectical opposition: Maturation, mimesis, mutual aid are all as effective as the struggle between opposing classes. In failing to take in the diverse modes of change, Marx compelled himself to overlook a…

J. K Rowling on the connection between inner and outer worlds