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Post by Tamrin on Nov 19, 2010 6:43:15 GMT 10
Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio- historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature
If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context
Wilhelm Dilthey (Born this day 1833)
And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Appointed Britain's poet laureate this day 1850)
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Post by Tamrin on Nov 22, 2010 6:17:40 GMT 10
One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that nature recoil upon itself
Jack London (Died this day 1916)
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Post by Tamrin on Nov 23, 2010 15:17:42 GMT 10
The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness
Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved
André Malraux (Died this day 1976)
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 9, 2011 9:37:31 GMT 10
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years
J.B. Watson (Born this day 1879)
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Post by Tamrin on May 9, 2011 7:05:26 GMT 10
Law is born from despair of human nature
José Ortega y Gasset (Born this day 1883)
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 16, 2012 8:39:45 GMT 10
In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense
Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic
If we take memetics seriously then the 'me' that could do the choosing is itself a memetic construct: a fluid and ever-changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator
Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes
When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion
If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universeDr. Susan Blackmore, PhD, MSc, BABritish psychologist, lecturer, broadcaster and author ( The Meme Machine) (Born 29 July 1951) You start by copying other peoples paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we're talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity
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