Suicide is selfish in the sense that it destroys the brain and body of the individual who suffers from its endless craving to possess pleasure and escape pain. The problem is that new bodies and brains are constantly being created at exponential rates. When I was born in 1936 there were just over 1 billion […]
Every child when born should be given a pill strong enough to take his own life, as Mynheer Peeperkorn did in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” If the child is well brought up, when he becomes an adult he will be happy to end it if he becomes a burden to others; for he can […]
As an undergraduate I often felt such a strong identity with authors I read—Plato in particular—that I would say to myself, “That’s precisely what I think; that’s me.” From the standpoint of consciousness that is correct; my thought was his thought; we are the same consciousness. But from the physical standpoint, of course, it is […]
I have spent a lot of time worrying over Hume’s statement, “Tis perfectly rational to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one’s finger.” In fact it is not rational at all. As soon as the scratch is over one realizes that it is laughable to think the scratch on the finger […]
It is a truism: “Let history be the judge.” But suppose those who come after us have lost all belief and faith in truth and reason. What kind of judges will they be? That’s the case in the United States right now. It seems the best judges of history will be those who have died—Herodotus […]
“Buridain’s Ass” is regarded as a philosophical problem. It is, but not in the way current philosophers think it is. It is a philosophical problem because science is now philosophy, as Bertrand Russell realized. The ass is faced with a problem of desire, not reason or logic. It wants both the straw or water with […]
Dreamcatchers were originally intended by the Iroquois to keep a sleeping person’s good dreams and let his bad dreams pass through. In fact what happens in dreams is that we lose our identity; we become another person, another “soul.” That’s what has to be “caught” or prevented. When I doze off in my recliner I […]
It is interesting how China is handling the Confucian tradition, trying to reconcile it with the official atheism of Stalinist Russia and the Chinese Communist Party itself. It has five tiers, at the top of which are the founders of modern China: Mao of course, and Deng Xiao Ping to whom temples are built in […]
Sitting in the dining room of Milford Place watching house sparrows flying up under the eaves I was surprised to see house finches joining them. No doubt they will be competing with each other when it comes time to build nests, and there is no doubt the house finches will get the best spots because […]
In an interview with the Guardian shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in November, 2016, Sir David Attenborough said with a chuckle, “We could shoot him. It’s not a bad idea.” It would be a good thing if Trump were to die, especially from a stroke where he is dead before his head […]