Rhetoric is a concoction of processed persuasions and artificial additives – a dubious philosophical sandwich – stuffed with beguiling logical-isms sitting between a premise (assumption) and conclusion, then served up to the gullible who are meant to swallow it whole.
But the worst of it is that, at its best, the reasoning ingested with the ‘conclusion’ is meant to be digested as if it gives nourishment to the premise.
Mike Laidler
The past may be seen to predict the future for all solid-state elements in a mechanistic universe. This excludes the sub-elements of the quantum universe and the supra-elements of the sentient universe.
However, what is known of the quantum universe, in the context of the everyday physical reality that is ‘more real’ to us, is that the peculiarities of the former support, but don’t resemble the nature of the latter, which can be seen to exist in addition, ‘on top’ – in a supra-reality that now includes the fact of the seeing.
Only it seems that we have yet to learn this lesson with respect to the sentient universe regarding itself, a lesson that can only begin by recognising it as a reality known to be peculiar to the nature of itself – a reality as real as the peculiar nature of solid rock, which we also know is really not solid in a different reality.
Perhaps the difference is due to the diverging nature of reality, whereby what is and what ‘is next’ simultaneously occupy different realities. And as we learn that there is more to existence than either quantum or Newtonian physics can explain, we know that we can know it because of our first-hand experience of a peculiar reality of a different order – of knowing, learning and explanation in a reality that simultaneously occupies the physical universe, yet is not peculiar to it.
Mike Laidler
The problem of happiness is that we have made it into a problem. Children are born with happiness in their being, which they systematically unlearn in learning to be happy.
There is no thing in the world that encapsulates happiness, apart from the things in the world said to make us happy. Thus ‘being happy’ is a construct that is conditional upon finding out how to be happy, which usually depends upon finding the things that make us happy – as if happiness is a thing to be found in the world.
Ironically, the quest to be happy can undermine our well-being on the premise there is something to be found that we do not have, as if it might flood into our lives to fill a vacuum – as if happiness is the experience of that it.
Unfortunately there is much sadness to behold in this quest for happiness – for those who need happiness to be defined for them will never find it on those terms.
Mike Laidler.
If there is a bigger scheme of things in which life and death are part, then is it not possible that death is no opponent of life, or neutraliser of personal existence, any more than individuality is our creator?
Mike Laidler
Every word is a translation of a meaning, which we change by degrees when translating words into words, believing the words to be the source of meanings to be discovered. And so we find ourselves actively exploring what we have to say in the process of saying it.
Yet all the words ever stated and yet to be stated cannot encompass the meanings by which we bring them to life. And so we are able to debate interminably the meaning of what was said, sometimes admitting: ‘I think what I am saying is ….’.
Mike Laidler
World debt may be ubiquitous but things aren’t quite as they seem. The world is not in debt, not as a world – the Earth owes nothing financially to the planet Mars. So if world debt is ubiquitous, then as a world we are no worse off financially. We remain as exquisitely wealthy as we can be, because creating debt doesn’t mean the money escapes.
What it comes down to is the old problem of distribution, but debt can’t be the enemy, not if everyone prospers from the wealth on their doorstep – doorstep Earth. However the real enemy is the service paid to money as our motivation – for making money. Hence we change our lives in the pursuit of money, which at best is meant to serve our lifestyle, now changed because of the need for money.
And we can see the results at the most fundamental levels of life and family, where the pursuit of money overtakes the priorities it is meant to serve. Thus debt is merely a device that binds us to the service of money – lest we forget that we have willingly chosen to make it our master.
Mike Laidler
We all know what luck is, most of us have seen it in action and some of us may claim to have benefited from it, but it is no ‘it’.
In fact luck doesn’t exist, yet it does. It exists as a state of knowledge about the world and the facts in that world. It exists in the world as known, and in that world we see people being lucky and unlucky to varying degrees. However, knowledge is another ‘none-it’ in existence. Coincidentally, we can talk about what we know, point to the books that have changed what we know, and learn from what we are told. Nevertheless, things are not as they seem – yet so they are, given that the seeming is now a fact in action.
In fact luck, like the knowledge by which we assess it, operates in a metaphysical reality of existence and non-existence – a dual reality where there are both facts and non-facts, according to our comparisons – facts that are so different from one another that they bear no point of comparison, except by way of contrast. So it is also true to say that we make our own luck, knowing that, in truth, there is more to existence than all we can make of it.
In the same vein, there can be more to coincidence than all we can attribute to luck, chance or our knowledge of it, just as there is more to knowledge than all we can know of it at any one time. Perhaps we are ‘lucky’ to be able to know anything at all, given the reality of oblivion and ignorance in which it operates on the way to becoming something more than it was.
And who dares say what is real and not real in the world of coincidence, a world in which opposites come together.
Mike Laidler
Human being espouses friendship and enmity with equal conviction. Indeed, the intensity of the one easily converts into the intensity of the other when emotions run wild. And all the advances of technology are rendered primitive in the hands of those ready to wage war, whilst civilisation is reduced to a merciless grab for money in the belief that it solves all problems and makes us wealthy. But our final degradation is sealed of the power to lie to ourselves.
27.1.15 – 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The singularly most significant singularity behind all singularities in aeons of universes to become, is the power of becoming, which we know of indirectly by its manifest non-random implications in this universe.
“Whatever the big bang was, it must have been a state of very very small entropy – a highly organised state.” – Sir Roger Penrose, Copernicus Centre Lecture 2010: ‘Aeons before the Big Bang’.
Mike Laidler
The most momentous pronouncement of human thought relates to the recognition of thought as itself, in the recognition that ‘ideas are bigger than the brain that hatches them’.
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 