#nat

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence — legitimately — our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature — by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse — we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature — natural selection — gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. ↗

— Robert Wright

#evolution #morality #nature

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. ↗

— Ted Chiang

#knowledge #science-fiction #sf #writing #nature

Josh: "What is this thing?" Gasper: "It's a Yeti. An abominable snowman." Biff: "This is what happens when you fuck a sheep?" Josh: "Not an abomination, abominable. ↗

— Christopher Moore

#christ

For me, it’s not about winning an award. It’s also about not even being nominated. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#honor #ignored #nominated #nomination #praise

Once bitten twice shy? Sure, but... why not get a bigger dog and bite them back? ↗

— A.A. Bell

#bell #bit #comedy #crime #dogs

If only the scientific experts could come up with something to get it out of our minds. One cup of fixit fizzle that will lift the dirt from our lives, soften our hardness, protect our inner parts, improve our processing, reduce our yellowing and wrinkling, improve our natural color, and make us sweet and good. ↗

— Robert Fulghum

#nature

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the descernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#spirituality #nature

It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#morbid #moriarty #science #sherlock #skull

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#outdoors #science #nature

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#best #best part #end #exposition #lean