DEATH... continued ;)
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
This page is part of the "tools" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues , dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "tools" section provides historical and geographical context (chronology, maps, entries on characters and locations) for Socrates, Plato and their time. For more information on the structure of entries and links available from them, read the notice at the beginning of the index of persons and locations .
Pindar
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life. The beginning is the most important part of the work. The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation. Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike. Many men are loved by their enemies, and hated by their friends, and are the friends of their enemies, and the enemies of their friends.
Plato Quotes
Theory of Forms
Plato 's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] asserts that non-material abstract (but substantial ) forms (or ideas), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation , possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. [ 4 ] When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized. [ 5 ] Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only true objects of study that can provide us with genuine knowledge; thus even apart from the very controversial status of the theory, Plato's own views are much in doubt. [ 6 ] Plato spoke of Forms in formulating a possible solution to the problem of universals . [ edit ] Forms The Greek concept of form precedes the attested language and is represented by a number of words mainly having to do with vision: the sight or appearance of a thing.This is a concise introduction to Plato’s use of the concept of “Form,” which many readers initially find to be puzzling, or even an egregious affront to common sense. The following is not intended to defend Plato’s theory as an adequate response to the problems it was designed to address. It is intended only to show that the theory is an intelligible and reasonable response to those problems. Plato assumes, following Parmenides, that what is real may be thought and what is thought may be said.
Platonic Forms
Happy Birthday, Sartre: Why "Being-in-the-World-Ness" is the Key to the Imagination
by Maria Popova On the figure-ground relationship between the real and the irreal. Today marks the 107th birthday of French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre .
The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination ( French : L'Imaginaire ) is a 1940 book by Jean-Paul Sartre that propounds his concept of the imagination and discusses what the existence of imagination shows about the nature of human consciousness. The Psychology of the Imagination (alternate title of The Imaginary ) [ edit ] Arguments There are two important points Sartre stresses in the book. First, while some believe imagining to be like an internal perception, Sartre argues that imagination is nothing like perception. Perception is our study over time of a particular object with our senses.
The Imaginary (Sartre)
Outline of Argument from Recollection
The Argument from Recollection: Phaedo 72e-77a 1. If a person is reminded of anything, he must first know that thing at one time or another. (73c 1-3) 2. Definition: Recollection is knowledge that comes about in this way: when a person upon seeing one thing not only becomes conscious of it, but also of something else which is a different object of knowledge. (73c 5-10)
We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense...There is no place in this new kind of physics for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality." Albert Einstein, with his general theory of relativity, opened the doors of science along with the mystical realities. Einstein theorized that space and time are intertwined and that matter is inseparable from an ever-present quantum energy field and this is the sole reality underlying all appearances. This theory challenged the basic assumptions about the universe and what it contained. Physicists found that the most basic atomic particles in the cosmos comprise the very fabric of the material universe. An electron, for example, can be shown to be both a wave and a particle depending on the observer's perspective.
Science - Quantum Physics of Consciousness and Physical Reality by StarStuffs
Quantum nonlocality is the phenomenon by which the measurements made at a microscopic level necessarily refute one or more notions (often referred to as local realism) that are regarded as intuitively true in classical mechanics . Rigorously, quantum nonlocality refers to quantum mechanical predictions of many-system measurement correlations that cannot be simulated by any local hidden variable theory . Many entangled quantum states produce such correlations when measured, as demonstrated by Bell's theorem . Experiments have generally favoured quantum mechanics as a description of nature, over local hidden variable theories. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Any physical theory that supersedes or replaces quantum theory must make similar experimental predictions and must therefore also be nonlocal in this sense; quantum nonlocality is a property of the universe that is independent of our description of nature.
Quantum nonlocality
Quantum entanglement occurs when particles such as photons , electrons , molecules as large as buckyballs , [ 1 ] [ 2 ] and even small diamonds [ 3 ] [ 4 ] interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description ( state ), which is indefinite in terms of important factors such as position , [ 5 ] momentum , spin , polarization , etc. Quantum entanglement is a form of quantum superposition . When a measurement is made and it causes one member of such a pair to take on a definite value (e.g., clockwise spin), the other member of this entangled pair will at any subsequent time [ 6 ] be found to have taken the appropriately correlated value (e.g., counterclockwise spin).
Quantum entanglement
Physics News :: Earth's mantle helps hunt for fifth force of nature
Interactions NASAElectrons' spin may give rise to a force that allows particles to interact over very long distances. In general, people tend to use the phrase "force of nature" loosely, as in "she's a real force of nature." But physicists are pickier--they reserve the phrase for just four separate, universal forces they call the "fundamental forces": gravity, electro-magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, which hold the nucleus together and are involved with radioactive decay, respectively.Professor Silas Beane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bonn in Germany said that his group of scientists have developed a way to test the 'simulation hypothesis'--the idea that we may be living in a computer generated universe that has been debated by the greats of philosphy, from Plato to Descartes , who speculated that the world we see around us could be generated by an 'evil demon'. Plato wrote that reality may be no more than shadows in a cave but the human species, having never left the cave, may not be aware of it. If the cosmos is a numerical simulation, there ought to be clues in the spectrum of high energy cosmic rays. Now more than two thousand years since Plato suggested that our senses provide only a weak reflection of objective reality, experts believe they have solved the riddle using mathetical models known as the lattice QCD approach in an attempt to recreate - on a theoretical level - a simulated reality.
"Is the Cosmos a Vast Computer Simulation?" New Theory May Offer Clues
Simulated reality
Simulated reality is the hypothesis that reality could be simulated—perhaps by computer simulation —to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality, and may in fact be such a simulation. It could contain conscious minds which may or may not be fully aware that they are living inside a simulation. This is quite different from the current, technologically achievable concept of virtual reality . Virtual reality is easily distinguished from the experience of actuality; participants are never in doubt about the nature of what they experience. Simulated reality, by contrast, would be hard or impossible to separate from "true" reality.Indra's net
"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection.continent. 2.2 (2012): 99–135 Originally appeared in Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra , 1981. This adaptation is based on an English translation by Paul Foss and Paul Patton.