Monday, April 5, 2010

Reasonable Doubt


"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
Bertrand Russell

8 comments:

  1. Doesn't his "searching for evidence" already support this theory?

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  2. Die Stärke der katholischen Kirche besteht doch gerade in ihrer souveränen Unmodernität! Im Morgengrauen des Sputniks schnell noch die leibliche Himmelfahrt der jungfräulichen Mutter eines Gottes zu verkünden! Das ist eine Ohrfeige der Ereigniskunst, gegen die jedes vom Dadaismus ergriffene Gestammel zu kaltem Muckefuck wird.

    Oh, sorry, I got into the wrong blog.

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  3. Let's try to see the question as a question of proportion. And let's start considering a situation without men and animals.

    The cosmos consists for 75% of hydrogen and vor 23% of helium. All the rest makes 2%.

    And of this 2% almost 100% are completely dead. In the cosmos death and normality are nearly the same. And any certainty about further life beyond what we are experiencing on earth is only statistical conjecturing.

    Life is a very thin film which like a whiff of something beleaguers a spherical body suspended within death. Like the tender coating lanugo on peaches.

    Hence, death is normal in the cosmos, and life exceptional.

    Within life normality is represented by unaware life, and the exceptional is represented by aware life.
    Within aware life, awareness of the environment is normal, but life's self referent awareness of life itself - where the output of a living brian feeds as input the same brain like a rabbit - is again exceptional.

    Within self-aware life normality is represented by disturbed awareness, and health corrisponds to exceptional self-aware life. Hence it is normal to be sick and exceptional to be sane.
    Within sane self-aware life, rational self-awareness is exceptional, and irrational self-awareness is normal.


    Within rational, sane, self-aware life wholly holy life is the exception. And fragmented, unholy life is normal, even if sane, rational and charmingly self-aware.

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  4. "Pooh," said Rabbit kindly, "you haven't any brain."

    "I know," said Pooh humbly.”

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  5. @cs

    What does epitimaios mean with self-reference?

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  6. @ Cee Ess (who is Cee Ess? One of Michaels Korean newly activated fans?)

    Dear Cee Ess, Epitimaois passage works without self-reference ( but life's awareness of life itself) but I can´t accept his quotation of the rabbit. At first because I don´t understand it. Secondly, because Rodney wouldn´t like to be quoted in this dispensable discussion. He underlines instead what Blaise Pascal said: “I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.” Rodney has this continuing abilility. I think he is that rational animal Russel was looking for.

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  7. Eddy J. Yes-key, Zell am SeeApril 6, 2010 at 7:26 AM

    Ebony and Ivory,
    empathy and irony,
    top-hat, rabbit, wizardry
    rational and passional,
    on carots keen, traditional,
    together live in harmony!

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  8. When your emotions and your humor are o.k., and your irrational outfit is harmonious, only then you can be rational!

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