‘If you don’t behave, I’ll call the police,’ is a lie that parents might use to get their young children to behave. Parents’ lies elicit compliance in the short term, but a new psychology study suggests that they are associated with detrimental effects when the child becomes an adult. (1)
At the end, the truth will always come to light.
So don’t be afraid if it. Use it.
Lies will only breed lies.
Look at humans today. So engulfed in their need for life.
Trying to convince themselves that there is nothing more important.
And the quest for life creates what else but more thirst for life!
More thirst for sensing the cosmos.
More thirst for feeling the universe.
A deep urge to find other sources of life elsewhere!
And we will keep on going until we discover life everywhere!
At the end, we will behold a loving universe.
So beautiful.
So vibrant.
So true.
So perfectly wrong…
Question the obvious!
Only fake things are perfect.
Only illusions are so true.
There is ugliness in truth. For it is raw in nature. Killing anything which does not exist. And since nothing does, a loving cosmos cannot do anything but wrench the world in blood.
About Children’s Philosophy: A series of articles that will show how small children answer the greatest philosophical questions of humanity. Philosophers need to question everything. And in order to do that, one must think as a child again!
One can find wisdom in crazy persons and in children. So that is what I did: I asked the greatest philosophical questions to a seven years old child. And the answers were amazing.
Some of them you can find in various posts hidden in Harmonia Philosophica (e.g. in the There is no death article). This is an attempt to gather the major answers of the child here.
Humans have been pondering on big questions of philosophy for thousands of years now. And yet, no definitive answers have been found. Harmonia Philosophica tries to guide humans to these questions by promoting non thinking and irrationality, for this is the only way to discard all dogmas and think freely. The child provided great input that helps us enhance our faith in the path we have taken.
A child thinks with no premises, no dogmas, no prior knowledge of things. In that way one can say that a child’s thought is more close to non-thinking than to thinking. This way of thinking can be a true revelation for a grown up who is too used to the things he or she already ‘knows’. True philosophers and scientists alike question everything.
Are you ready to stop thinking in order to think?
Let’s see what the child had to say…
Truth puzzle filled in by a child (Brain map: There is no death!)
EPISODE 1: Does death exist?
Truth puzzles are an invention of Harmonia Philosophica that helps someone formulate a ‘solution’ to the great philosophical questions of human mind. In these ‘puzzles’ you have all the basic elements of philosophy and all you have to do is connect them with lines or arrows to indicate their relationships. There are no rules on how to do that and that is the basic rule: there are no predefined rules on how to think!
One can read the Truth Puzzles article here to learn more about that method of philosophical investigation.
Details set aside, what is of interest here is that I have a Truth Puzzle to the child to complete.
The instructions were simple: My child, take that page and draw lines or arrows between these words.
An important note is that the child did not have English as its mother tongue so it was difficult for it to understand the words, let alone the fact that the child could not in any case be fully aware of the meaning of the words in the Truth Puzzle anyway due to its age.
After a minute the puzzle was completed. And the result was astounding.
What I saw was that…
The child had connected with lines all elements on the page except one: Death!
Besides the importance of the coincidence that the word Death was the only one omitted (Read the ‘There is no death‘ article for that), another important thing we should always keep in mind: There are no rules on how to think! I had thought that one should connect all elements I had written on the page, but the child showed me that this should not be the case!
Lesson learned: There are no rules on thinking! Question everything! Especially the things that you don’t!
That is how philosophy and science progress!
What is Being? – It is a word (!)
EPISODE 2: What is Being?
I once asked a child ‘What is Being?’.
I have the question written on a piece of paper and waited to see how this difficult philosophical question will be tackled by a seven-year old brain.
After a minute, the answer was handed back to be.
“What is Being?” – “A word”
To my astonishment the child answered that “Being” is a word. Thinking in a simple manner is and has always been a trait of wise men and women. And children. Yes, Being is a word. Perhaps the best answer to our great philosophical questions cannot be found through Logos but through the experience of life and existence itself.q
Lesson learned: Don’t think too much about questions that you yourself has invented. Question everything. Especially yourself!
In a glance: IRRATIONAL PATHS are very short videos that try to provoke unconventional philosophical ideas via the promotion of irrational thoughts on crucial philosophical subjects…
Electrical stimulation delivered when memory is predicted to fail can improve memory function in the human brain, a team of neuroscientists shows for the first time. That same stimulation generally becomes disruptive when electrical pulses arrive during periods of effective memory function. (1)
We stimulate and see memory improving.
We do thing and see results.
But all our perception is based on the belief in many other notions. For example the notion of time or the notion of change. What does it mean “memory is improved”? It is improved at a specific moment in time. Obvious and yet very complicated. What if the memory of a person is improved but after some time he forgets again? Isn’t that what we all do anyway? Will we say that memory is improved then? No, would be the “obvious” answer. Now what can we say for the “improvement” of memory in humans who will anyway die after some years? Not so obvious now is it?
What does it mean that the “memory of a person” is improved? Is it the same person always? Do we remain the “same” even after major changes (like not remembering anything) happen to us? If we change and yet remain the same person, then it is like saying that the notion of change exists for a person but at the same time it does not: If change means nothing for the person itself, then the person does not… change! Weird huh?
Question the obvious and you will see that you remember everything.
A paper published last year in Icarus, the prestigious journal of planetary science, asked if it was possible that terrestrial life on Earth had been ‘seeded’ from beyond the Earth – and if so, does the building block of that life, DNA, contain any sort of message from our alien creators. Using mathematics, the authors of the paper – “The “Wow! signal” of the terrestrial genetic code” – looked for evidence of a statistically strong ‘informational’ signal in the genetic code, with surprising results.
The DNA data, according to the paper, display readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality.
This was not the first time that Icarus had featured a paper entertaining the idea of ‘biological SETI’. In 1979 the journal – under editor Carl Sagan – published a paper titled “Is bacteriophage φX174 DNA a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence?”, written by Japanese biochemists Hiromitsu Yokoo and Tairo Oshima. Given how crazy the idea sounded, Sagan asked a young protégé, David Grinspoon (now a prominent astrobiologist in his own right), to check out the paper to assess whether it was legitimate. (1)
Despite of the outcome – which will need of course more research to validate – what is important is that science can only progress if it analyzes the obvious. Question what is right in front of your, ask about things taken for granted and you shall see miracles. There is no such thing as “junk” (junk DNA). Even the trashiest garbage bin can contain gold…
