Join 📚 Christian Champ's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Christian's read, .
What happens to essence when we let go of our particular perspective—the perspective that the feelings that shape the perceived essences of things were designed to serve? I think the answer is that essence disappears. After all, without a perspective to serve, there would be no feelings in the first place. As Robert Zajonc, the psychologist whose work figured centrally in chapter 11, explained, “Affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the judge in relation to the object of judgment.” In the absence of a particular point of view—yours or someone else’s—the whole idea of an affective judgment, a feeling, makes no sense. If you truly and completely adopt the vantage point Einstein adopted—if you transcend the perspective of the self, any self, and view things from nowhere in particular—essence disappears, along with the feelings that created it in the first place.
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
“War is the ultimate finite game. Religion is the ultimate infinite game,” said Jim Carse last night. “Evil does exist: it is when an infinite game is absorbed utterly in a finite game. All evil is an attempt to eliminate evil.”
SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-Term Thinking
Stewart Brand
When we consider, however, instead of the physical, the psychological character of our species, the most evident distinguishing sign is man’s organization of his life according primarily to mythic, and only secondarily economic, aims and laws. Food and drink, reproduction and nest-building, it is true, play formidable roles in the lives no less of men than of chimpanzees.
Myths to Live By
Joseph Campbell
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise