Happy new year!
We don’t know who we are.
We don’t know why we are here.
We don’t know what death is.
(And yet we crave for life…)
We are happy only because we cry.
(And yet we crave for bliss…)
We seek health.
(And yet it is the pain that makes us think)
Deeply irrational beings we are!
In a deeply irrational cosmos!
One could call us crazy that we dance.
Within the silence of the void.
Does it really matter if we are?
Harmonia Philosophica exists for more than a decade now. There has been many years since it had a major revamp, but the time had finally come.
And just like that, everything changed.
New template that is more lean and modern. The old template was an old favourite one, but all things die at some point.
(And that adds more to the love we have for them)
New type of posts. From now on the articles will be of a more poetic type without any specific link to a news or scientific discovery article that they comments on. Anyway we had always been advocates of the irrational, so why stick to writing articles about something in such an ordinary way? (Of course posts already scheduled will be posted as scheduled)
(What is the point of writing with logic if you are to sound logical?)
Every moment all things change.
Every moment we change.
And yet, we stay the same.
There is nothing closer to eternity than the ephemeral…
Harmonia Philosophica is dead!
Long live Harmonia Philosophica!
Our brains have a remarkable ability to pick out one voice from among many. Now, a team of Columbia University neuroengineers has uncovered the steps that take place in the brain to make this feat possible.
The auditory cortex is the brain’s listening hub. The inner ear sends this brain region electrical signals that represent a jumble of sound waves from the external world. The auditory cortex must then pick out meaningful sounds from that jumble. The researchers were particularly interested in two parts of the auditory cortex’s hierarchy: Heschl’s gyrus (HG) and the superior temporal gyrus (STG). Information from the ear reaches HG first, passing through it and arriving at STG later.
The data showed that HG creates a rich and multi-dimensional representation of the sound mixture, whereby each speaker is separated by differences in frequency. This region showed no preference for one voice or another. However, in STG ” it is possible to amplify one speaker’s voice or the other by correctly weighting the output signal coming from HG”.
In other words: HG represents, while STG selects. It all happens in around 150 milliseconds.
The researchers also found that after selection, STG formed an auditory object, a representation of the sound that is analogous to our mental representations of the objects we see with our eyes. This demonstrates that even when a voice is obscured by another speaker – such as when two people talk over each other – STG can still represent the desired speaker as a unified whole that is unaffected by the volume of the competing voice. (1)
We learn to listen.
And distinguish voices from one another.
But could that be the problem of philosophy today?
Concentrating too much on specific voices? Caring too much on specific views? After all, there is no philosophical opinion today which has no opposition from an equally important philosopher. There is no case where the philosophy of one philosopher is not refuted in its entirety by the philosophy of another.
And this is where Harmonia Philosophica comes in play!
You see, for Harmonia Philosophica there is no right or wrong opinion!
For Harmonia Philosophica there is no right or wrong way of thinking!
Because for me, thinking itself IS the problem!
We must stop thinking and start accepting. Start truly living again as we once did.
You cannot explain the cosmos. You can just experience it.
You cannot understand what life is. You can just live it.
The highest forms of philosophy lie within the lowest forms of conscious thinking.
Where there is no thought to cast shadows under the light of Being.
Where there is no though to disturb the calm sea of One with ripples of existence.
The highest philosophy at the end is non-philosophy!
As I once wrote in my opening Harmonia Philosophica article, we must forget how to think in order to truly think.
Really.
Think about it…
Tired of having heated discussions on God and religion with angry people?
Tired of having impolite or rude reactions to your logical arguments?
The art of debating is simple: Just be polite and respect one another!
And yet, to-day it is harder and harder to find someone who can actually do that!
And that is a pity because too many interesting discussions are lost due to the simple inability of people to just sit and listen to each other. In modern era everyone is so keen on persuading others for their own opinion that the hardly find time to listen to the opposite opinions. But fool yourself not: No matter how right you think you are, the existence of an opposite opinion is a treasure that you should cherish!
To tackle this modern problem a new debate safe-space is introduced: COOD!
A private invitation-only group where polite discussion is the only rule!
> Join group at COOD: Civilized One-on-One Debates on God, Science, Religion & Metaphysics <
A place where people debate only on a one-on-one basis and not in the usual ‘everyone attacking everyone’ manner which resembles lynching more than it resembles actual discussion.
And that is not the only good thing about COOD!
The debates are structured in a way that allows for pure and civilized exchange of ideas, allowing everyone the time to read and understand the opinion of the other side! Debating happens with one person posting after the other in sequential order – posting avalanches of ‘arguments’ to burry your ‘opponent’ with arguments is simply not allowed. Strick administrative oversight ensures that each person says something and then waits for the answer of the other side before posting again!
Last but not least: The debates at COOD end after twenty (20) posts from each side and posted. No more than 20 posts are allowed per person! Keep it short and sweet! In that way everyone will pay more attention to the arguments they post rather than getting into a vindictive mode of constant posting until the other party does not have the time or the nerve to keep up. Civilized discussions happen with structure and at some point they have a civilized end.
Everyone reading can then assess the discussion at their own pace.
Any topic can be of course be the subject of another debate as many times as people wish, as long as the above rules are met (Read the Rules in the page for more details).
Too COOD to be true?
Perhaps it is time to believe in miracles…
Philosophers have pondered on the answers to the great metaphysical questions of humankind for aeons…
And they have failed miserably to find definitive answers.
Every philosopher has his or her own views, which usually are in complete opposition to the views of other philosophers.
There is currently no way to decide who is right and who is wrong. Perhaps there will never be.
Truth puzzles are here to the rescue!
But what are they?
Simply put, they are a way to easily and quickly draft your thoughts on how the great elements of philosophy and life connect to each other.
The elements of the puzzle are the major elements that trouble philosophers for centuries: God, existence, Being, self, others, life, death, phenomena, reality, One, faith, nothingness, knowledge, senses, thought, consciousness. You can of course add more as you please, but these are the major ones.
The goal of a truth puzzle is to draw the connections between these elements.
How to fill in the puzzles?
It is very easy: Just take all the elements, draw them on a paper and then connect them! The connections could be simple lines, lines with arrows or even lines with explanations detailing the nature of the connections.
I have created Truth Puzzles on paper while sitting for coffee, or with any of the various mind mapping applications available. For example the below image was created with the miMind Android application. Any brain map application will do the trick.
Now the important part of the instructions: Don’t think too much!
As said already, the solution of the problem is not evident and perhaps will never be! So don’t bother with thinking. Just like in automatic writing, let yourself go and just randomly draw lines and connections between the elements of the puzzle!
Given the complex nature of the problem and our almost total ignorance of what life and existence truly are, there is really no point in trying to think how to draw the Truth Puzzle.
And to be honest, randomly drawing without the arbitrarily created obstacles by human-defined logic, could be the best shot we ever had at the problem in the first place!
So go on and have fun!
Fill in your Truth Puzzles, share it with your friends or even send it to Harmonia Philosophica for publication and, you never know…
What you created might be the solution of the mysteries of the world that Parmenides and Aristotle were looking for…
