Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺
@BigBrainPhiloso • 14,691 subscribers
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You Are Not In the Universe. You Are the Universe. There is a running joke in modern physics. For decades, scientists have gestured at empty space and declared: there's a field out there that connects everything. Their hands wave at the horizon. Their instruments point at the cosmos. Gregg Braden isn't laughing. Instead, he's redirecting the finger. "Field's not out there. We're the field. 50 trillion cells in the human body. Every one of those cells has about 100 trillion atoms emerging from the field and collapsing into the field." Right now, the atoms that compose your hands, your lungs, your thoughts are winking in and out of existence. You are not a passenger moving through the universe. You are the universe, expressing itself in temporary, biological form. And that changes everything about what you think is possible. Because if your atoms are constantly re-emerging from the field, and you hold the blueprint that tells those atoms how to emerge, then you have far more authority over your physical reality than anyone taught you. "This is why we can heal our bodies almost instantaneously when we know how to access this part of ourselves, because we hold the blueprint that tells those atoms how to express when they come into the body." The mechanism lies in the mirror neurons of the human brain only discovered in 2004. These neurons cannot distinguish between an experience you are having and one you are witnessing. The body doesn't audit the source. It simply responds to the image. Which means imagination is not escapism. It is biology. When you hold a sustained image of yourself fully healed, fully capable, you are issuing instructions. You are laying down a new blueprint. "If you got something you don't like in your body, what you do is you are using the gift of imagination to create a new blueprint for that atom to come into." The question is not whether this power exists. The question is whether you'll stop looking for it out there and recognise it has been here all along.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺48,227 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Steve Jobs on why death is "life's single best invention":
Big Brain Philosophy20,652 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Alan Watts on life’s real secret: "Don’t separate work from play, treat it all as a dance".
Big Brain Philosophy36,993 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Žižek on radical autonomy: You don't just obey moral rules. You authorize them.
Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺16,453 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Iris Murdoch on what philosophy actually is: Philosophy is notoriously difficult to define even for those who practise it. Speaking with Bryan Magee in 1977, Murdoch doesn't sidestep the question. She leans into it. "It's notoriously difficult to find philosophy… it's very difficult to say what it is." Her first move is to locate philosophy in the territory of structure and depth. It is "to do with conceptual structures," she says with "very deep structures of belief and knowledge," with meaning, with significance, with the question of how language relates to the world. But definition by content isn't enough. So she defines it by exclusion. Philosophy is not science. That much feels familiar. Yet Murdoch adds a subtler distinction: even when philosophy adopts a scientific style, "the actual what you're doing is certainly not science." The manner may borrow from the lab, but the activity is something else entirely. And philosophy is not art either. Her sharpest line is reserved for this boundary: "It's very important it's not sounds… as soon as you start doing sounds you're falling right out of philosophy." Sound aesthetic sensation, the seductive surface of language pulls the mind away from what philosophy actually is. The moment writing becomes music, it stops being thought. So if it is not science and not art, what is philosophy? Murdoch's answer is quiet but precise: "a kind of reflection on concepts." Not experiment. Not expression. Reflection. A sustained, disciplined turning of attention onto the structures we use to think — and asking whether they hold.
Big Brain Philosophy18,908 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
John Searle: consciousness cannot be an illusion and here's the argument that makes it undeniable Science has a long track record of overturning our intuitions. The table looks solid, it isn't. The sun appears to set, it doesn't. We've learned to accept that appearances deceive us, and that reality lies beneath. But philosopher John Searle argues there is exactly one domain where this move simply cannot be made: consciousness itself. "Where consciousness is concerned, you can't make the standard appearance/reality distinction that we make for the rest of the world." His logic is simple. When a scientist tells you the table isn't really solid and that it's a cloud of micro-particles, you can accept that. The appearance (solidity) and the reality (particles) are two different things, and you can hold them apart. Same with the sunset. It looks like the sun moves. It doesn't. The rotation of the Earth creates an illusion. Appearance and reality come apart and you understand the gap. Now try applying that same logic to your conscious experience. Someone claims your pain isn't really there, that your awareness is just an illusion. But here, Searle says, the distinction collapses entirely: "Where the existence of consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality. There's no way that some guy can come to me and convince me I'm not conscious if I think I'm conscious, I am conscious." This is a structural point about what consciousness fundamentally is. For every other phenomenon, the appearance can be explained away by pointing to what's "really" happening underneath. But consciousness is the very medium in which all appearances occur. There is no "underneath" to retreat to. To say consciousness is an illusion, you would first need to be conscious of the illusion. The argument defeats itself on contact.
Big Brain Philosophy17,476 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Nietzsche wrote halfway between metaphor and fact. And if you don't understand that, you'll misread everything he ever said. Most philosophers write in one of two modes: they deal in pure concepts, or they traffic in images and stories. Nietzsche did neither. He operated in the charged territory between them. And according to J. P. Stern, that is the key to understanding him. Stern uses one of Nietzsche's most famous themes as his example: the 19th century's loss of religious faith. What Nietzsche called, with characteristic drama, the death of God. Here is how Nietzsche described what would follow: "Rather than cope with the unbearable loneliness of their condition, men will continue to seek their shattered God and for his sake they will love the very serpents that dwell among his ruins." Stern's point is that this passage is doing two things at once. Words like loneliness and condition are abstract, the vocabulary of philosophy and argument. But serpents in the ruins of a shattered God is pure image, vivid and almost mythological. Neither mode cancels out the other. They coexist in the same sentence, doing different work. It is a deliberate style. One that Stern argues is unique to Nietzsche and easy to misread if you come to him expecting conventional philosophy. If you take the metaphors literally, you get mysticism. If you strip them away and read only the concepts, you lose the emotional truth the images are carrying. The method only works if you hold both registers in mind simultaneously.
Big Brain Philosophy15,210 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Alan Watts on why the work/play divide is a scam:
Big Brain Philosophy13,185 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Noam Chomsky on Why Our Limits Are the Foundation of Our Freedom Noam Chomsky flips a common intuition on its head: In a 1977 interview with Bryan Magee for the BBC series Men of Ideas, Chomsky is confronted with what his interviewer calls an "alarming" consequence of his theories. The idea that humans are, as Magee puts it, "very very rigidly pre-programmed." There are certain things we can understand, certain things we can communicate, "and anything that falls outside that we simply can't." Chomsky agrees with the premise. But not the alarm. "That's certainly correct," he says of the rigid pre-programming. What he pushes back on is the reaction to it: "While it's true that our genetic program rigidly constrains us, I think the more important point is that the existence of that rigid constraint is what provides the basis for our freedom and creativity." The interviewer, caught off guard, asks him to clarify. Does he really mean it's only because we're pre-programmed that we can do all the things we can do? "Exactly," Chomsky replies. Then he delivers the core of the argument: "If we really were plastic organisms without an extensive pre-programming, then the state that our mind achieves would in fact be a reflection of the environment." In other words: a mind without built-in structure wouldn't be a free mind but a mirror. It would simply take the shape of whatever surrounded it. Freedom and creativity require something internal doing the shaping, pushing back, generating. The constraints aren't the opposite of freedom. They're the precondition for it.
Big Brain Philosophy11,225 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
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