I have a PhD in STEM. I started believing in my late 20s in graduate school. Readings that were influential included: accounts of high profile scientists who were also believers (e.g., Freeman Dyson), Tolstoy's "Confession", poets like William Blake and thinkers like Simone Weil, philosophers like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and apologetics from C.S. Lewis and GK Chesterton.
My motivation to read any of this was downstream of some other internal feeling that I couldn't shake and slowly began to gnaw at me in my 20s -- that what I could sense around me (or sense at all) couldn't be all that "is". I suppose one way to phrase this is that I became increasingly disturbed by my inability to answer fundamental "where?" or "why?" questions (e.g., "why did the Big Bang happen?", "where is the singularity?", etc.). The standard retorts that some things are simply mysteries didn't satisfy me. Instead I started to suspect that much of what I thought was "territory" was actually just various "maps" that people have created in their minds to help navigate the territory. Around this time I stumbled onto Immanuel Kant's antinomies and realized that many people had thought along these lines in the past. Once I was on this trail, I've never strayed.
> Fun example from a friend: his family were extremely direct but his girlfriend’s family was very indirect. As a young naive guy he was having dinner with his girlfriend’s family and her father asked: “is there any salt” and my friend looked up at the glass salt shaker and said “yes” and continued with his meal.
Are we supposed to side with your friend here? The fact that he couldn't infer that the father might want some salt is, at best, very shortsighted and pedantic. It's roughly equivalent to a teacher responding to "Can I go to the washroom?" with "I don't know, can you?" -- except in this case it's not said in jest.
Yeah it’s just meant to be funny, in a haha-been-there kind of way. It’s an example of Asperger’s -like thinking, overly literal. My friend was embarrassed in front of his gf, and he learned what indirect speaking was.
Indirect speakers don’t know they are speaking indirectly. They get upset with literal people, because “how could you not know what I mean? You must be a jerk!”
IDK, I just do the normal-person thing of asking my question a different way when I don't get the result I was expecting instead of fuming about being misinterpreted.
They could be considering the new high end display a different product rather than a refresh (for marketing purposes at least).
I recall the XDR being announced alongside the last Mac Pro redesign. No new Mac Pro yet, so maybe they’ll announce the new large display whenever that is announced?
Yeah the quote assumes you're riding without speed limits. In a typical commute, it does get easier once your cardiovascular ability exceeds the upper speed limit given the route.
No, the quote assumes you want to go faster. I don't really. I enjoy my ride and if I wanted to get to work 5 minutes faster, I would leave 5 minutes earlier.
It's certainly a responsibility. A responsibility that, through its unique circumstances, you were not given the opportunity to accept our reject on your own volition.
I generally view that life has no meaning out of the box. We tend to think of terms like "meaningless" as a negative thing, but I see that more as a reaction to the indoctrination of a society that insists on lives having meaning. You wouldn't say a scattering of sand on the floor had "meaning," but you also wouldn't call the scattering "meaningless" in its negative connotation.
And just as we could use our finger to arrange the sand into a message and assign it meaning, we can choose to assign a meaning to our own lives. But that's still doesn't mean it started having meaning. If it did, that would be predestination, which is absurd.
I don't feel life's a responsibility. Rather a consequence of someone elses irresponsibility that you are now stuck with, doing damage control and trying to suffer as little as possible.
I suppose that would depend on how easy it is to change ones perspective, which is something I've made no claim about. If you are depressed, for example, perspective change is notoriously difficult--and in my (admittedly limited, anecdotal) experience, everyone I have known to view life as a curse has been suffering some level of depression.
What perspective change? Your brains splattered on the wall? While I am also grateful to be alive, I don't think it's that hard to imagine other people being in situations where they feel deeply unhappy about being born, and that that feeling really can't be dispelled with a simple "perspective change", unless you mean suicide.
I think you're misreading the comment you're responding to. Its parent comment said that life can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you choose to look. They responded by asking whether the word "curse" is appropriate if it can be changed based only on perspective.
I read the comment with a bit more grace. I just assumed they were skipping to the end of a journey without any of the subject's empathetic nuance. Meaning, most philosophical, spiritual, psychological, and mindset approaches all "end" with the idea that we have a choice in how we feel about things. That choice is choosing to feel things differently.
Those ends would say that suffering is a product of our own making. It is a choice. Bad things can happen to you, but your perspective on the situation creates the suffering (resistance, guilt, personalization, inability to see it as a change agent, etc.).
“ Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”
- Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
You can remove intelligence from that hypothesis entirely, and it won't change the meaning. You can substitute almost anything else, too: "Owning a rubber duck without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis." Well, yeah, but why is the duck in that sentence?
It's in there because of the claim directly preceding it: "But all too often a search for a rubber duck drives out the search for love". It builds upon that first statement.
Because we all sold out to the man. Culturally, we have chosen the lavish life promised under the man's umbrella, to doing the work of trying to go our own way. We now reap what we've sown.
My motivation to read any of this was downstream of some other internal feeling that I couldn't shake and slowly began to gnaw at me in my 20s -- that what I could sense around me (or sense at all) couldn't be all that "is". I suppose one way to phrase this is that I became increasingly disturbed by my inability to answer fundamental "where?" or "why?" questions (e.g., "why did the Big Bang happen?", "where is the singularity?", etc.). The standard retorts that some things are simply mysteries didn't satisfy me. Instead I started to suspect that much of what I thought was "territory" was actually just various "maps" that people have created in their minds to help navigate the territory. Around this time I stumbled onto Immanuel Kant's antinomies and realized that many people had thought along these lines in the past. Once I was on this trail, I've never strayed.