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Tag Archives: metaphysics

Christopher Alexander – Mechanistic: A Mental Toy

Published: December 26, 2017
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“The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. He ideas was: if you want to know how something works, you can find out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in … from everything else, and you invent a mechanistic model, a mental […]
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Christopher Alexander on Essential Awe

Published: June 1, 2016
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“… In this conception, value is not something merely grafted onto space, as a passenger might be who carries no weight and does no work. It is part of the same nearly mechanical picture of space that we have come to believe in, and respect and trust. Yet, at the same time, in a most […]
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Christopher Alexander on an Extended Physics

Published: May 31, 2016
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“… In physics, the effort has always been to take the geometry of a material system and to derive from it, predictions about the dynamic behavior, forces, and causal interactions … which follow from a particular configuration. In art and building … Again we have geometry, but here we seek especially to derive from it, […]
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Christopher Alexander on A Gift from Art to Science

Published: May 28, 2016
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“What is, truly, the ultimate nature of matter? … I have expressed my conviction that architecture cannot be good so long as we try to to do it within a mechanical conception of matter … I have argued … that we must have a vision of the world in which life, as the foundation of […]
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Christopher Alexander on a Gift to God

Published: May 26, 2016
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This felt like a demanding excerpt to put together. “When the field of centers appears in something, its deep feeling appears and it is … spirit made actual, spirit made manifest … It is not an indication of God living behind all things, but it is actually God itself … As we understand this more, […]
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Christopher Alexander on Never Truly Beautiful

Published: May 24, 2016
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“What kind of beauty could go so deep that a person would be afraid of creating it? … Working with architects, I have experienced it again and again. Many traditional shapes, especially the most profound shapes with deep and serious centers in them, for some reason trouble modern architects profoundly. Even when an architect does […]
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Christopher Alexander on Pleasing Yourself

Published: May 21, 2016
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“In order to create living structure, we must please ourselves … And you need only please yourself. But you must please yourself truly. And to do that you must first discover your own true self, come close enough to t, and to listen to it, so that it can be pleased. Does this sound absurd? […]
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Christopher Alexander on Making as Healing

Published: May 20, 2016
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“When the I-stuff is created, it nourishes the maker – not only the viewer, but the maker too. For some reason, the process of making things which are alive enlarges us, deepens our experience. I feel more alive for having done it. It is like food … What is the reason for this ‘food-like’ character […]
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Christopher Alexander on Tears, Sadness and Unity

Published: May 17, 2016
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This resonates deeply with me. A pursuit of happiness has never appealed or worked out for me. If what Alexander is true, then the oh-so-popular notion of “pursuit of happiness” is bound to hit a wall. My experiences of happiness seem to expire quickly, while my experiences of sadness seem resonate deeper and longer … […]
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Christopher Alexander on Schrödinger’s Yellow

Published: May 16, 2016
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“Schrödinger, the physicist who discovered the matter-wave equation of quantum mechanics, has a great deal to teach us about color and its real existence. He outlines [in his short book Mind and Matter] the following argument. ‘You and I, both see yellow. But according to the prevailing view of science, there is no way of […]
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Christopher Alexander on Color Properties of Inner Light

Published: May 16, 2016
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This post is an except from an extensive chapter about color. As I was reading through the chapter and excerpting from it the subject of relationships was on my mind and in my heart. When I speak of relationships between people, especially between myself and people close to me, things tend to get personal(!). However […]
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Christoppher Alexander on Windows to the Ground

Published: May 8, 2016
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This (kind of?) makes up for my not excerpting sooner about centers … but without the previous, softer, experiental introduction, this may be harder to swallow ..anyways … here it is: “I am going to start with the idea that the I exists physically, that there is some plenum, not part of the physical space […]
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Christopher Alexander on Searching for Being

Published: May 6, 2016
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“Many years ago I lived in India. In the village where I lived, at night especially, some sounds travel a long way … I remember walking around in the fields at night, and once hearing in the very far distance, very, very far off, a flute playing in the night. You could barely pick out […]
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Christopher Alexander on Persuasion through Experience

Published: May 3, 2016
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“Strangely, I believe the beauty of the world is almost more touching, more profound, if the harsh, ugly world of ours, is married, mixed, with the more perfect world in which the beings are fully living … But it is necessary for us to cross that bridge … It does not come easy. But when […]
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Christopher Alexander on Centers as Beings

Published: April 29, 2016
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“… every living structure is composed of thousands of pictures of the eternal self. A being is a small thing. It is a name for a center which is connected to the I … But, unlike the phrase ‘living center’ or ‘living structure.,’ the word ‘being’ draws attention to the nearly animate quality that appears […]
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Christopher Alexander on “The I”

Published: April 28, 2016
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“Some experiences of I, within the things of the world, and especially within the things of nature, is shared, I think, by every human being, in some degree … I look at the waterfall and say I find it pleasing … In a second, also mild, version of this experience, I enjoy the waterfall, and […]
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Christopher Alexander on a Real Relatedness

Published: April 27, 2016
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I was this person who’s relatedness was damaged by dead structures (physical and metaphysical) of the world. It makes me wonder if being at Bhudeva is a phase of cleansing and re-nourishing? Will I one day look back at it as my “great retreat”? I acknowledge, I want to see, I am willing to experience […]
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Christopher Alexander on Devotional Atmosphere

Published: April 25, 2016
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“As a matter of observation, it is simply true to say that many of the most beautiful works of art in the world’s history, and many of the most profoundly living structures, large and small, that human beings have created, have been created within … a … mystical religious context. … What, then, about the […]
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Christopher Alexander on Ultra Mechanistic

Published: April 23, 2016
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For more on this dear-to-me subject see Robert Pirsig’s Lila and the work of Rupert Sheldrake … and this is just the opening of the book “Scientists often like to say that the materialist view of present-day science is potentially consistent with early any view of ethics or religion because it says nothing about these […]
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Christopher Alexander on Inert Matter

Published: April 21, 2016
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” … our view of matter is flawed … The substance which the 20th century world was made of remained the inert, mechanical space-time of Descartes, Newton and Einstein, of quantum mechanics and the string theorists. This mechanical substance is our cake. So far, our spiritual views and ethical views are only frosting on this […]
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Christopher Alexander on Tat Tvam Asi

Published: April 20, 2016
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I have been looking forward to book 4 … and then this in its preface: “Early in my life as an architect, as first I was confused or deceived by the teaching I received from architectural instructors. I thought that those things which are important – and perhaps the things which I aspired to make […]
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Reading Lila – Good

Published: May 2, 2010
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Take care of your goodness
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Reading Lila – Enlightment

Published: May 2, 2010
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Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi ... that’s what they were really involved in, the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn’t pass it on.
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Reading Lila – Dharma

Published: May 2, 2010
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Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of ‘rightness’ which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life ...
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Reading Lila – Rta

Published: May 2, 2010
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The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible
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Reading Lila – Meditation

Published: May 2, 2010
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Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams ... so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence.
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Reading Lila – Shock

Published: May 2, 2010
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The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. It’s value is that it destroys all patterns ... cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state ...
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Reading Lila – Religion

Published: May 2, 2010
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Religious mysticism is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved ...
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Reading Lila – Dynamic

Published: May 2, 2010
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Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself.
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Reading Lila – Contrarians

Published: May 2, 2010
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Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has ...
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Reading Lila – Sanity

Published: May 2, 2010
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... the insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one ...
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Reading Lila – Do You See the Light?

Published: May 2, 2010
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When a cartoonist wants to show someone getting a great idea he puts an electric bulb over the character’s head. Everybody understands ... Why?
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Reading Lila – Facts & Culture

Published: May 2, 2010
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Your static value system filters out the undesirable opinions & preserves the desirable ones ... it isn't just opinions that get filtered out. It’s also data.
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Reading Lila – Insanity

Published: May 2, 2010
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Insanity isn’t an ‘object’ of observation. It’s an alteration of observation itself ...
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Reading Lila – Ruthlessness

Published: May 2, 2010
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Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare.
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Reading Lila – Hippies

Published: May 2, 2010
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The intellect’s evolutionary purpose has never been to discover an ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recent fad. It’s historical purpose has been to help a society find food, detect danger, and defeat enemies.
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Reading Lila – Paradise

Published: May 2, 2010
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Paradise was always at the end of some intellectual, technological ride, but you knew that when you got there paradise wouldn’t be there either.
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Reading Lila – Indians & Cowboys

Published: May 2, 2010
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The moral values that were replacing the old European Victorian ones were the moral values of American Indians: kindness to children,maximum freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature.
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Reading Lila – Intellect

Published: May 2, 2010
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When the social climate changes from preposterous social restraint of all intellect to a relative abandonment of all social patterns, the result is a hurricane of social forces.
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Reading Lila – World War I

Published: May 2, 2010
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Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it out...
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Reading Lila – Celebrity

Published: May 2, 2010
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You can measure the quality of a university by comparing the relative strengths of the celebrity patterns and the intellectual patterns.
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Reading Lila – Science

Published: May 2, 2010
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If scientists had simply said Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong without any willingness to further investigate the subject, then science would have simply become another minor religious creed.
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Reading Lila – New York

Published: May 2, 2010
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Biological man doesn’t invent cities or societies any more than pigs and chickens invent the farmer that feeds them.
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Reading Lila – Sex & Me & We

Published: May 2, 2010
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The language of mental intelligence has nothing to say to the cells directly. They don’t understand it. The language of the cells has nothing to say to the mind directly. It doesn’t speak that language either.
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Reading Lila – Morals – Ideas Kill Societies

Published: May 2, 2010
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Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea.
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Reading Lila – Better is Everything

Published: May 2, 2010
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If chemistry professors exercise choice, and chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms, then it follows that atoms must exercise choice too.
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Reading Lila – Machine Language

Published: May 2, 2010
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Trying to explain social moral patterns in terms of inorganic chemistry patterns is like trying to explain the plot of a word-processor novel in terms of a computer’s electronics. You can’t do it.
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Reading Lila – Carbon

Published: May 2, 2010
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Evolution can’t be a continuous forward movement. It must be a process of ratchet-like steps ...
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Reading Lila – Chemistry Professors

Published: May 2, 2010
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If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds.
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Reading Lila – Dynamic is Better, Static is Good Too

Published: May 2, 2010
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Life can't exist on dynamic quality alone. It has no staying power.
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