Who are you?

Julian Baggini on the chimerical self. We're all literally no-thing. That's the Buddhist and Humean view, and neuroscience backs them up. Brains give rise to the sense of self, but there's much more (and less) to a person than a brain. This doesn't mean you're not real or that nothing is real. Nothing is, but impermanence is not unreality.




Maybe Lawrence Krauss can help disentangle the verbal morass we tend to fall into when we try to make sense of ourselves as relational beings. Or maybe it just takes a mystic.

Reasons for Reason - NYTimes.com

Finding common currency is not so easy these days, but as David Hume said: there, not in a narrow and sterile concept of "reason," is ultimately where our values abide. So we'd best keep looking, and had best not constrict our "reason" either.

Hume’s point, in alluding to what he also sometimes called “the principle of humanity” was that the ideal of civility requires us to find common currency with those with whom we must discuss practical matters...

Reasons for Reason - NYTimes.com:

"A gathering of stone-related links"...

'via Blog this'

conscience

What another of my favorite novelists, Wallace Stegner, believed in...

Conscience, not as something implanted by divine act, but as something learned from infancy from the tradition and society which has bred us...Man is a great enough creature and a great enough enigma to deserve both our pride and our compassion, and engage our fullest sense of mystery. I shall certainly never do as much with my life as I want to, and I shall sometimes fail miserably to live up to my conscience, whose word I do not distrust even when I can’t obey it. But I am terribly glad to be alive...

He was a Humean: social tradition rules, and mostly rules well. Except when it doesn't. Everyone should read Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety, Spectator Bird... 

Ben Franklin

I've been enjoying Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin. (Einstein is on deck). I didn't know that David Hume had acknowledged Franklin as America's first world-class philosopher, but old Ben -- or Poor Richard -- was a first-rate aphorist for sure. Some of my favorites:

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Wish not so much to live long as to live well.

Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

And of course:
Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.