Jamy > Recent Status Updates

"But where intentions themselves come from, and what determines their character in every instance, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms." Why do I feel you are being coy here? This only weakens your point out, or worse, confuses it.

"A voluntary action is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out, whereas an involuntary action isn’t." But since our thoughts don't belong to us, neither would our intentions. Doesn't that justify crime and devalue virtue?

"There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself."
So a hypothetical, perfect machine of brain function detector and interpreter would allow someone else to know my thoughts before I do.
That would make them a predictor, or worse, a seer, a "knower" of my every move thereby rendering me a eunuch at the poker table. Got it.

"Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it." So whatever I choose to do, my brain will have decided it for me in advance and I can not disrupt this.

"Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent."

My ignorance has swallowed this pill without much side effects to its well being.

The good old borrowing from the Bible. Neat!

I am completely lost. He's led me into the middle of nowhere and I am frustrated. I cannot picture the world he is describing.

"Just think: if the soul were truly as ethereal as we tend to say it is, a merciless tongue of fire couldn’t lap the sinner’s skin, and the martyr couldn’t find bliss in the fleshy bosom of his promised seventy-two virgins, nor could familiar faces of those that have gone before flash us a warm, toothy grin as we “entered the light.”

Thanks for sucking the joy out of even the afterlife (or pain, as the case may be).

"One wouldn’t normally say that men should be promiscuous because, after all, the pulpy underflaring of their penises’ coronal ridges is specially tailored by God for excessive use with multiple women, retracting competitors’ sperm."

Haha. Another day another lesson. Right folks?

Is it just me, or is this book espousing a theory to all the questions I have been hurling my head at the brick wall all these years for answers? But I was told I aught to try the ramparts on the Great wall of China next. No? You got to read a book? Bugger!!

"So he supposed that there was a great and strong man, somehow hiding himself behind the hills. The sun was his ball of fire as a toy, and he amused himself in throwing it very high in the sky every morning and catching it every evening." Wow! Particularly insightful as to how the human mind will weave stories to make sense of his world because a deaf-mute without external knowledge actually concluded this as truth.

During the introduction, the author relates a personal anecdote about how he broke his neighbour's beloved Fabergé egg, which is one of those intricately painted decorative eggs, as a child and when eventually interrogated, invoked the name of God to extricate himself out of that pickle. Funny thing is, I already heard it related once before on an episode of Through the Wormhole. Sign of God??

"And, as a rule, it will be found that a man is sociable just in the degree in which he is intellectually poor and generally vulgar. For one's choice in this world does not go much beyond solitude on one side and vulgarity on the other. It is said that the most sociable of all people are the negroes; and they are at the bottom of the scale in intellect."

You old geezer! Wtf are you saying!

"....he will elect to live in retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude."

Well, well. Cat's out of the bag, I guess. How did you know?

“What should you say to ten livres a month?”
“I should say that it isn’t exactly the riches of Peru.”

Haha. Is that you Marlowe?

This is going to be a hell of read.

Ahem, where is this going? Somebody do something.

Holy grenade! Such yarn of wickedness he weaves.