More interesting stuff, thanks Jim.
You say T. A. Shippey wrote about J. R. R. Tolkien's work: "Its great
statement was that defeat is no refutation" and you call this "darkly
inspiring"?
It more readily conjures the recipe for a famous comedy sketch... the one in
which a knight gets his arms and legs cut off by another knight, and screams,
"Come back here and fight. Coward!"
"Having done with philosophy, one properly defeats one's opponents *after*
refuting them."
--M. T. Ness
"Why is that?"
--G. B. Peterson
"Because, authority belongs to the one who best answers those who question
authority."
--M. T. Ness
"Can we get back to the subject?"
--G. B. Peterson's brother, Enis
Some people "elect to retire from life" as Stapleton has written, long before
old age. I've heard that a disproportionate number of highly intelligent
people commit suicide.
Researchers looking into the correlation of suicide to intelligence could find
this very depressing work. They'd go home and get stupid with alcohol and/or
drugs to relax. Perhaps the same thing happens to civilizations. They get to
the point where people can see the fatal flaw in intelligence, and they go for
opiates of the cognitive as well as the medicinal kind.
Constellations of concepts and oceans of memes travel through the human brain.
The best ones never seem to die.
τΏτ
Stay hungry,
--J. R.
Useless hypotheses:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia
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