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brain conscious mind

Brains in Vats Paradox

Penfield’s classic brain experiments of the 1930s inspired a certain famous riddle, long since dubbed “brains in vats” by philosophy students. It goes like this: You think you’re sitting there reading this post. Actually, you could be a disembodied brain in a laboratory somewhere, soaking in a vat of nutrients. Electrodes are attached to the brain. And a mad scientist...
Novalis

Embrace Paradox to find Truth

Ulva Naumann stated in Maier files: “Knowing Ultimate Truth is only possible when you’re able to embrace paradox.” Your logical mind may find this impossible, but life itself has no problem in being paradoxical regardless. Good fortune always seems to bring happiness, but deceives you with her smiles, whereas bad fortune is always truthful because by changing she shows her...
Sophists

Is truth an illusion?

TIDBITS The sophists were skeptics who doubted the possibility of attaining true knowledge of anything. They emphasized the practical application of rhetoric in civic and political life. Some claimed that they could teach both a thing and its opposite, simultaneously arguing both thesis and antithesis. One of the founders of sophism was Gorgias a Sicilian philosopher, orator, and rhetorician who...
Stars

Is this reality?

Otto Maier and his theory about waves, reality and time curves are rooted in the works of the men he looked up to, Leibniz and Descartes. In his “First Meditation” (1641), French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes decided he could not be absolutely sure he wasn’t dreaming. Most people would probably disagree with Descartes. You’re not dreaming right now, and...
Otto Maier

Everything is motion

Before the eighteenth century, people crudely measured time. Galileo used his own pulse as a measure. Today, our atomic clocks can measure a time interval as small as one-millionth of a second. (Though we have a word for one-trillionth of a second— pico second —we still have no way of accurately measuring it.) But no matter how finely calibrated our...

Paradox of Tristram Shandy

Here is a subconscious double standard: Infinities of time seem a little different from infinities of space. It is natural to think that space extends out in all directions forever (or is this a culturally instilled belief?). Time is supposed to be infinite only in the future direction. We ask when time began but rarely where space began. The infinity...

Thomas More and Utopia

Known to some as Sir Thomas More and to others as Saint Thomas More, the author of 1516’s Utopia—and inventor of the word utopia itself—lived from 1478 to 1535. He was a man of great conviction, deep Catholic faith, and remarkable rhetorical skill. It’s not often possible to trace the origins of an entire literary genre (Utopian and Dystopian Works...
Niels bohr

Is understanding seeing the paradoxes?

Understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox. Are paradoxes “all in our heads” or are they built into the universal structure of logic? At first sight the idea of knowing what the universe is like, is absurd. American-Canadian neurosurgeon Penfield expanded brain surgery’s methods and techniques, including mapping the functions of various regions of the brain. Penfield’s...
Ishtar

Crescent Moon and Star

It was Rodin who stated that “Man never invented anything new, only discovered things.” Although it’s correct to say that certain symbols have been man-made for a particular purpose, it’s just as correct to argue that everything is somehow inspired by the natural world around us, by the forms of nature, plants, animals, the elements. Even a reaction against the...
zoetrope - movie

The deep occult origine of movies & paradoxical reality

In common usage, the word “paradox” often refers to statements that may be both true and false i.e. ironic or unexpected. Some paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One well-known example is Zeno’s arrow paradox, where it appears to show that motion is impossible. Zeno...
Contradictions and paradox

Can truth be a liar?

When it is exclaimed that contradictions may very well be true, numerous analytic philosophers will screw up their face into an appearance of discomfort, and say ‘But I just don’t see what it could be for a contradiction to be true’. They could mean numerous things by this. ‘See’ might just mean ‘understand’, by which case they might be complaining...
checkerboard

This statement is a lie

Paradoxes appear in all shapes and forms. Certain are uncomplicated paradoxes of reasoning with minimal potential for investigation, while others sit atop icebergs of full scale scientific disciplines. Many may be solved by mindful consideration of their hidden assumptions, one or more of them could be faulty. These, strictly stating, really should not be referred to as paradoxes at all,...
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