Author: Gary Reiner

thinking, reading, and writing about whatever's going on in the world...

What Is The Essence Of Things?

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Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe — through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence, it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations.

Time Reborn
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
Lee Smolin

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Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin
born 1955

. Lee Smolin website
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Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist. Smolin is best known for his contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory.

His research interests also include cosmology, elementary particle theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and theoretical biology.

Smolin is a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto.

Books by Lee Smolin include:

 

Where Can We Find Wisdom?

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We can find wisdom everywhere: in every person, situation, and experience to which we bring an open inquiring mind. Although it is possible to learn from all people and all things, religious traditions especially recommend five sources.

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Essential Spirituality
Essential Spirituality: The 7 Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind
Roger Walsh

Background on Roger Walsh

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Religious Traditions Advise Us to Seek Wisdom from Five Sources

  1. In Nature
    Whether it is a mountain peak, a forest valley, or an ocean shore, somehow nature sifts the trivia of our minds and reminds us of the timeless and important.
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  2. In Silence and Solitude
    In silence — even more so in solitude — we escape the superficial demands of society. Silence allows the mind to rest. Then the inner chatter of thoughts and fantasies ceases and inner silence mirrors the outer silence.
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    When silence reigns both within and without, we can hear what can never be spoken, the wisdom that waits beyond words.
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  3. From the Wise
    Who better to teach wisdom than the wise? But who are the wise? The great religious founders such as Buddha, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Jesus and Mohammad; also, the great men and women who invigorated these traditions. But we need not remain fixated on the past or assume that wise people became extinct thousands of years ago.
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    If valued and cultivated, wisdom can flower in people of all times and places. The 20th century produced many wise and compassionate people. The vast majority of them are unknown, while some — such as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama — are household names.
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    Not only saints and sages can inspire us. There are many degrees of wisdom, and those only a few steps ahead can help, as can friends traveling the path with us.
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  4. In Ourselves
    As practice deepens, we gradually awaken to a startling realization: We do not really know ourselves. Of course, we know our habits and the personality we put on each day and pretend it is our Self. But we come to realize that we don’t really know our own inner depths, how our mind works, and our deepest Self.
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    So many wise people have urged us to “know thyself.” The rewards of self-knowledge are profound because our Self — our true spiritual Self — is the doorway to the sacred.
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    When we finally turn our attention inward, we discover that we are not who we thought we were. To know ourselves is to recognize that we are far, far more than we believed. It is to exchange our shabby self-image for our true Self and to discover that our true Self is a sacred Self and a doorway to the Divine. What is the secret of life? You are!
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  5. From Reflecting on the Nature of Life and Death
    There are four ideas, known as “the four mind-changers” that help us to understand the nature of life, to change our minds, and to live our lives accordingly:
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    • Life is inconceivably precious.
    • Life is short and death is certain.
    • Life contains inevitable difficulties.
    • Our ethical choices mold our lives.

Those who would, may reach the utmost height — but they must be eager to learn.
…..— Buddha

Does Consciousness Generate Reality?

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When one claims that reality is in consciousness, one is claiming precisely that consciousness is irreducible, primary, fundamental. Consciousness, as such, is not generated by complex entities, or for that matter, by anything outside consciousness: it simply is. To say that irreducible consciousness generates reality poses no more problem than to say that irreducible laws of physics generate reality. In fact, it poses less problems, since it avoids the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ altogether.

For the same reason that materialists believe that simple laws of physics generated the unfathomable complexity of today’s universe, fairly simple ‘laws of consciousness’ could generate the phenomenology of all existence. In both cases, very simple rules generate unfathomable complexity, something well understood in complexity science. The difference is that materialism postulates these complexity-creating rules to exist fundamentally outside consciousness and, in some totally non-understood way rather akin to magic, to generate consciousness. Monistic idealism, on the other hand, sticks to the obvious: the complexity-generating rules are intrinsic regularities of the unfolding of consciousness itself. This is not only much more parsimonious and empirically honest, it avoids the artificial and unsolvable ‘hard problem of consciousness’ altogether.

Brief Peeks Beyond
Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Freewill, Skepticism, and Culture
Bernardo Kastrup

Kindness and Vulnerability – How Are They Related?

Gary Reiner3 Comments

The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened). Vulnerability — particularly the vulnerability we call desire — is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread. How can people, from childhood onward, feel confident to take such risks?

Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor
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From the back cover of the book
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Kindness is the foundation of the world’s greatest religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it often the last pleasure we permit ourselves? And why — despite our longing — are we frequently suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it?
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Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind’s “greatest delight”: the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.

Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips
born 1954

Adam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist. He began his career working as a child psychotherapist. Presently, Phillips divides his time between writing and his private practice in Notting Hill. He is a prolific author.

Phillips has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud since 2003. From 1990 to 1997 he was principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He worked in Britain’s National Health Service for seventeen years. Since 2006, Phillips has been a visiting professor at the University of York English department. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Phillips has been described as: 1) Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer; and, 2) the best theorist of the modes and malfunctions of modernist psychology. For his intellectual resources, Phillips draws from philosophy, literature, and politics, as well as other fields. Though highly touted by many experts, some question his opinions and methodology.

Books by Adam Phillips include:

Barbara Taylor is a Canadian-born historian based in the United Kingdom. Taylor specialises in Enlightenment history, gender studies and the history of subjectivity. She is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London.

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Taylor has written a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, the early English feminist and republican, and she continues to speak on Mary Wollstonecraft’s life.

.Upon coming to Queen Mary University in 2012, Taylor took up a joint professorship in the Schools of History, and English & Drama. Her previous post, which she held since 1993, was a post in History at the University of East London.  She has I also held visiting professorships at the universities of Amsterdam, Indiana, Notre Dame, and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, a leading French institution for research and higher education in the social sciences.

Taylor is an intellectual and cultural historian with a special interest in the subjective dimension of historical change. Her early research focused on feminist theory and history. She has published two well-known books on early British feminism.

Books by Barbara Taylor:

Barbara Taylor has edited these books: