Gaurang

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Gaurang

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“It will be said that this enlarging is impossible. How can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see? Our attention can increase precision, clarify and intensify; it cannot bring forth in the field of perception what was not there in the first place. That鈥檚 the objection.鈥擨t is refuted in my opinion by experience. For hundreds of years, in fact, there have been men whose function has been precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists.”
― Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics

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“It seems perverse to define intelligence as including rationality when no existing IQ test measures any such thing!”
― Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss

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“statistical thinking is merely an artifact of human ignorance. we need to use statistics nature does not.”
― Pierre-Simon Laplace

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“On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you are trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself, that is also not being serious. A great deal of our whole life is not serious. And society teaches you that. It teaches you not to be very serious 鈥� that there are all sorts of incoherent things, and there is nothing that can be done about it, and that you will only stir yourself up uselessly by being serious. But in a dialogue you have to be serious. It is not a dialogue if you are not 鈥� not in the way I鈥檓 using the word. There is a story about Freud when he had cancer of the mouth. Somebody came up to him and wanted to talk to him about a point in psychology. The person said, 鈥淧erhaps I鈥檇 better not talk to you, because you鈥檝e got this cancer which is very serious. You may not want to talk about this.鈥� Freud鈥檚 answer was, 鈥淭his cancer may be fatal, but it鈥檚 not serious.鈥� And actually, of course, it was just a lot of cells growing. I think a great deal of what goes on in society could be described that way 鈥� that it may well be fatal, but it鈥檚 not serious.”
― David Bohm, On Dialogue

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“The stating and solving of the problem are here very close to being equivalent; the truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved. But many little problems are in the same position. I open an elementary treatise on philosophy. One of the first chapters deals with pleasure and pain. There the student is asked a question such as this: 鈥淚s pleasure happiness, or not?鈥� But first one must know if pleasure and happiness are genera corresponding to a natural division of things into sections. Strictly speaking the phrase could signify simply: 鈥淕iven the ordinary meaning of the terms pleasure and happiness should one say that happiness consists in a succession of pleasures?鈥� It is then a question of vocabulary that is being raised; it can be solved only by finding out how the words 鈥減leasure鈥� and 鈥渉appiness鈥� have been used by the writers who have best handled the language. One will moreover have done a useful piece of work; one will have more accurately defined two ordinary terms, that is, two social habitudes. But if one claims to be doing more, to be grasping realities and not to be re-examining conventions, why should one expect terms, which are perhaps artificial (whether they are or not is not yet known since the object has not been studied), to state a problem which concerns the very nature of things?”
― Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics

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