"Delightful pessimism"

He found delight in earthquakes too.

"Perry recalled William bringing home a volume of Schopenhauer and reading “amusing specimens of his delightful pessimism.” It is perfectly characteristic of the volatile William James that he later came to loathe Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he took as equivalent to determinism, and that he came rather delightedly to abuse the author of The World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, James wrote twenty-five years later, is “that of a dog who would rather see the world ten times worse than it is, than lose his chance of barking at it.”

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson : https://a.co/6NdhLig

Parthenon at Sunset

https://www.threads.net/@rawelementproductions/post/DG29LxuJUyy?xmt=AQGz3-IF5IVRSPXm4i1mZnyWGacZ-zPzrG6FuL7SRpHXjA

Hope

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function," but the summations of the state of the world often assume that it must be all one way or the other, and since it is not all good it must all suck royally. Fitzgerald's forgotten next sentence is, "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." You wonder what made Vaclav Havel hopeful in 1985 or 1986, when Czechoslovakia was still a Soviet satellite and he was still a jailbird playwright.

Havel said then, The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

--Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark (11)

Open Letter to Elon Musk - Democracy Docket

"You recently criticized me and another prominent lawyer fighting for the rule of law and democracy in the United States. I am used to being attacked for my work, particularly on the platform you own and dominate.

I used to be a regular on Twitter, where I amassed over 900,000 followers — all organic except for the right-wing bots who seemed to grow in number. Like many others, I stopped regularly posting on the site because, under your stewardship, it became a hellscape of hate and misinformation.

I also used to buy your cars — first a Model X and then a Model S — back when you spoke optimistically about solving the climate crisis. My family no longer owns any of your cars and never will..."

Marc Elias

https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/my-open-letter-to-elon-musk/

Getting personal with AI

Is AI truly conscious, or just an advanced illusion of thought? Richard Dawkins shares his conversation between ChatGPT displaying the depths of machine intelligence and its success passing the Turing Test for consciousness.

https://richarddawkins.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web

PBD

On this day in 1993, Carl Sagan wrote the first draft of what would become his timeless Pale Blue Dot monologue. Here it is, animated: https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/12/10/pale-blue-dot-motion-graphics/

My letter about fine-tuning, consciousness, god...

From The New York Times:

Choosing My Religion (or Not)

Readers question Ross Douthat's arguments about belief.

To the Editor:

Ross Douthat's arguments for a god based on "fine tuning" and human consciousness, while impressive coming from the "precocious undergraduate" he cites, do not finally compel assent. Undergraduate conversations about the possible existence of a god are fun, sometimes. But insisting, at this moment of political blitzkrieg in Washington, that they should make us all religious believers flirts insensibly with theocratic intolerance. We don't all need to be religious, any more than we all need to be Republican.

James Phil Oliver
Nashville
The writer is an associate professor of philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University.

Feb 15, 2025 online [Sunday Feb 16 print edition]

(They lopped off my first two paragraphs but it felt good to push back against Ross's over-reach.)

Dostoevsky reprieved

https://www.instagram.com/p/DFg8gfmoeKI/?igsh=ejB4YnBhMGViamNy

Humanism animation

✨ 'Human nature, human potential' 🌍💡🔬❤️

View on Threads  

Mediation

John Lachs was prophetic about the hazards of losing experiential immediacy in our lives, back in 1980 when he published Intermediate Man. Christine Rosen addresses the problem:

"There has always been and likely always will be a percentage of people who prefer armchair travel to the real thing, reproductions of paintings to the inconvenience of going to a museum, the safety and predictability of pornography to sex with a real person, and the cooking show to the cooked meal.

But in an age when nearly everything is reproducible as data, it's worth remembering that information about pleasure is not the same thing as the experience of it. As Huxley reminds us, understanding of this kind requires "a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence."" — The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen