![]() ![]() So premise one, I'm thinking, premise two, I couldn't be thinking unless there were a self doing the thinking. But there must some kind of self, there's no such thing as just free-floating thought, thought must always belong to a mind of some kind. And I'm not making any substantial assumptions about what that self would have to be. Second premise: I couldn't be thinking unless there were a self there to do the thinking. I'm not mistaken in thinking that I'm having thoughts, so that's the first premise. Even if I'm being deceived by Zeke even if the Zeke is producing much chemical stimulation for my brain, I'm still having thoughts. And that is the basis of one of the more famous arguments in the Western philosophical tradition, what we now refer to as the cogito argument, where cogito is Latin for "I'm thinking." So here's an argument: premise one: I am thinking. ![]() That is, he writes, I am, I exist, that's necessarily true every time that I utter it or conceive it in my mind. But then he notices that, even if I did persuade myself of something, I had to have existed if I did that. He suggests, maybe I can't know anything at all, maybe I can't be certain of anything. In which Descartes raises this radical, what we now refer to as radical scepticism. This course was created by a partnership between The University of Edinburgh and Humility & Conviction and Public Life Project, an engaged research project based at the University of Connecticut and funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation. They will also gain an appreciation of a challenge to the assumption of a coherent, unified self that derives from the Buddhist tradition. Learners will also become familiar with contemporary research in experimental social psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience into the emotions, the unconscious, the role of affect in decision making, and self-deception. In the course of doing so, they will gain an appreciation of the relation of self-knowledge to wisdom, of the value of intellectual humility, as well as of methods of learning about oneself that do not depend on introspection. Learners will gain familiarity with prominent themes from Western, classical Chinese, and Buddhist approaches to our knowledge of ourselves. What is missing from a person lacking in self-knowledge that makes her less wise, virtuous, or competent in certain areas than others who have this capacity, and what if anything might she do to fill that gap? Historical sources as well as recent research in philosophy, experimental social psychology, and neuroscience will inform our investigation, in the course of which we will become students of our own dreams, and cultivate some meditative practices. This course will be an examination of the latter injunction in an effort to discover what self-knowledge is, why it might be valuable, and what, if any, limitations it might face. Ironically, what they simply accepted intuitively is now being proven by the very science that rejected their thinking as primitive and backward.According to legend, inscribed on walls of the temple on the sacred site of Delphi in Ancient Greece were two premier injunctions: NOTHING IN EXCESS, and KNOW THYSELF. Indeed, we appear to be quantum beings! Mind and body are inextricably connected and interactive, an idea reflective of ancient tribal philosophies. ![]() Humanity represents a miraculous expression of these energies: We are the implicate energy of mind, and the explicate energy of body there is no separation. Physicist David Bohm classified this energy as either invisible (“implicate”) or visible (“explicate”). Quantum physics and quantum science are increasingly demonstrating that all matter arises from and is connected to an infinite (and likely unified) field of universal energy, which in its myriad forms creates everything in existence - including us. A striking example of this thinking is found in traditional allopathic medicine, wherein the human mind and body have been treated as separate entities for the past 400 years or so. In essence, dualism promotes the idea of isolation and separation in the dynamics between thought and matter, between the cerebral and corporal. ![]()
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