A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible

"… It is a great and underappreciated talent — the capacity to be seized. Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they're not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life. Others have a certain receptivity to them..."

David Brooks 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/opinion/persistence-work-difficulty.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Is Agnes Callard Making You Uncomfortable?

"...The reason Socratic ethics—or Socratizing, as Callard verbs it—hasn’t been more widely taken up, she thinks, is that it’s an intellectualist theory, and most of us are aversive to intellectualism. Though accustomed to thinking of myself as a thinker, reading Callard I often felt as the Neanderthals must have on encountering Homo sapiens—Is all this thinking really necessary? My nonphilosopher brain began to seize from epistemological overdrive when Callard spent roughly four pages elaborating every possible implication of the question, 'Where are my keys?'”
...
https://newrepublic.com/article/190778/agnes-callard-philosopher-uncomfortable-questions

Gandalf

He has a point.

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

AI nightmare

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/10/2308654/-Cartoon-Greetings-citizen

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

"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/