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'Spirit' comes from the Latin word 'to breathe.' What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin.
— Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Should I be a smart-ass and disprove Carl Sagan? — Lionino

Yes please.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

— BR

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

— BR — Mikie

That would depend on the definition of stupid would it not.

According to some dictionaries:
Stupid, adj

• Lacking or marked by lack of intellectual acuity
• Lacking intelligence
• In a state of mental numbness especially as resulting from shock
• Devoid of good sense or judgment

:up:

Stupidity, n. Habitual refusal to think (i.e. maladaptive judgment or conduct); H. Arendt's "banality" ...

*

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. — Milan Kundera

Yep that is a good definition, stupid people fail to use the intelligence and education they were given, regardless of the level they are at.

But the blame for stupidity cannot be laid upon the educational systems, when they fail to do their job properly the product is ignorant people.
Stupidity is a personal choice or habit disease picked up from other stupid members of society.

Courage. That is the enabling virtue. All the other virtues are empty without courage. — Cornel West

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All true emancipatory politics has to have a universal dimension in it. It doesn't mean you renounce your particularity, but you somehow read your particularity as a sign of what is wrong in our universality itself. — Slavoj Žižek

'All bad art is the result of good intentions' — Oscar Wilde

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes — an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. — Carl Sagan

Good one. I deeply miss Sagan. With Chomsky on his way out, I’m running out of heroes.

“Who’ll be my role model, now that my role model is gone, gone…He ducked back down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl.” — Paul Simon

:cool:

A carrot usually works better than a stick

@Agree-to-Disagree :up:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/881459

"If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand."
---Gotthold Lessing

Not necessarily because I would do the same, but because I think that encapsulates the human struggle in matters of philosophy. And not out of humility, but more the opposite. Presumably, Socrates told his disciples the Truth about the futility of pursuing knowledge, but Plato went off pursuing anyway. Cant blame him. It's what we do. We displace the "God given"* Truth with our constructedKnowledge.
*I don't mean scripture nor revelation. I mean we are already the Truth. Like every organism, the Born Truth.

AND

"Not the wind, not the flag. It is the mind that is moving!"
---Huineng, the 6th Chinese Patriarch of Chan

For reasons which I cannot disclose. And I mean literally cannot; not, "not at liberty to".

"And I have no cause for complaint on the grounds that God has not given me a greater power of
understanding or the natural light which God gave me is no greater than it is; for it in the nature of a finite intellect to lack understanding of many things, and it is in the nature of a created intellect to be finite. Indeed, I have reason to give thanks to him who has never owed me anything for the great bounty that he has shown me, rather than thinking myself deprived or robbed of any gifts he did not bestow."

- Descartes

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:cheer:

Indeed.

Great quote. :cheer:

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I was drowned,
I was washed up and left for dead
I fell down
to my feet and saw they bled, yeah yeah
I frowned
at the crumbs of a crust of bread
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I was crowned
with a spike right through my head — Mick & Keef

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know. — Daniel Kahneman, d. 2024

If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be? — Frans de Waal, d. 2024

Easter? :sweat:

Forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today. — Lawrence Krauss

One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.

Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.

Philosophy is to science what pigeons are to statues.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.

The mind is the effect, not the cause. — Daniel Dennett, d. 2024

We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.

— some say Kurt Vonnegut, but I’m not sure.

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Humans don't fight over territory and food. They fight over imaginary stories in their minds. — Yuval Noah Harari

Humans don't fight over territory and food. They fight over imaginary stories in their minds. — Yuval Noah Harari

Sure, but we do everything based on imaginary stories in our minds.

This from the Wikipedia article on tychism.

In his theory of tychism, Peirce sought to deny the central position of the doctrine of necessity which maintains that "the state of things existing at any time, together with certain immutable laws, completely determine the state of things at every other time." One of the principal arguments of the necessitarians is that their position involves a presupposition of all science. Peirce attacks this idea asserting: "To 'postulate' a proposition is no more than to hope it is true." Thus an avenue is opened up allowing the entry of chance as a fundamental and absolute entity. — C.S. Peirce