V.S. Ramachandran

I attended a lecture by professor V.S. Ramachandran today. Great stuff. Learned a lot. 98% of people believe that they are above average as far as the intelligence. This means 50% of these people are delusional. People who have a corpus callosum split. They have 2 sphere of consciousness. Sort of half brain or split brain. One like blond, one like brunet. Left can talk, right cannot talk. Are you a male ? No

Do you believe in god?

Tsunami

If he dies will he go to hell or heaven?

It works even if you don’t believe in it.

Obama v. McCain

silly me. so I decided to watch the debate tonight despite studying for my big exam. I tried nbc, cnn, cspan, cbs, pbs, msnbc, finaly fox, etc. But none of them had it online (remember, I don't have a tv). So I go to BBC to read the news, like I always do. And yes. Right there on the first page I see the link for the debate.

Once again, thank you my non-fellow citizens.

These are some of the people McCain Should not isolate. a) non-educated whites: these are the key to McCain's victory. He should not sit back for Obama to win Joe Six Pack. b) Hockey Moms: Palin should take care of this department.

In doing so he should start sentences with phrases like: "let me translate that for you if you are from South Dakota ... "

Masoud Raouf "A Tree That Remembers"

This is a must watch video.

Masoud Raouf and his documentary "A Tree That Remembers" Sep 01 2007

فيلم درختي که بخاطر ميآورد مسعود رئوف
This movie is about Iranian political prisoners and the mass killings of 1988.

Salvation

If religion in a human being is founded only on a feeling, the latter has no other function than to be the feeling of his dependency, and thus a dog would be the best Christian, for it possesses this feeling most intensely and lives mainly in it. A dog even has the feeling of salvation when its hunger is satisfied by a bone.

Poetry is the Higest form of Art: Hegel

Dog, Hund, chien, perro all represent the same thought. One word can be substituted for another in translation. Thus, language shows itself to be merely a vehicle and not a constitutive of thought.

Ideal in Paintinig for Hegel

The beauty of an art work corresponds to its degree of organization, No element of an artwork may appear, unplanned, accidental or irrational. "the artist must omit little hairs, pores, little scars, blemishes, and grasp and represent the subject in its universal character and its steadfast individuality. It makes a great difference whether the artist merely reproduces a person’s physiognomy, as it quietly presents itself to him in its surface and external configuration, or whether the artist insightfully represents the true features which express the subject's own soul"

God And Art

God in Paintings

The inner-dependence of the Christian God and Christian man intertwine with the expression of the medieval art. Art takes the human as a measure of the divine. The conception of divine unlike the Greek which depicted gods in forms of symbolic animals is no longer vague it is determinate to be sensuously embodied in fine art. Its essential massage is to conform a form of god in its architecture, paintings, music and writings. The idea of the God is so simple to them that it can be expressed in form of a man in a sensuous medium for instance the God in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.

The art however did become independent of god and religion. Art losses the internal harmony that it displayed in the classical times, it points to a meaning which art itself cannot fully express. It becomes Allegory

The Diffrence Between Hegel and Kant in Understanding

Kant had distinguished two kinds of logic:

The analytic logic of understanding which focuses the data of sense-experience to yield knowledge of the natural phenomenal world.
The dialectical logic of understanding which operates independently of sense-experience and erroneously professes to give knowledge of the transcendent noumena ("things in themselves" or also the "infinite" or the "whole")

Hegel's view is completely different.

Analytic understanding is only adequate for natural science and practical everyday life, not for philosophy.
Dialectic reason s not concerned with Kant's "transcendent", nor with the abstract "mutilated" parts of reality, but with reality as a totality, and therefore gives true knowledge.