denis
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Post by denis on May 8, 2024 20:21:25 GMT
fivebooks.com/best-books/harold-bloom-on-literary-criticism/#book-756The distinguished literary critic Harold Bloom discusses the five works of literary scholarship that have most influenced him 1 The Greeks and the Irrational by E R Dodds 2 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius 3 The Mirror and the Lamp by MH Abrams 4 The Rhetoric of Religion by Kenneth Burke 5 Colors of the Mind by Angus Fletcher archive.org/details/E.R.DoddsTheGreeksAndTheIrrational/mode/1up?view=theaterSOME YEARS ago I was in the British Museum looking at the Parthenon sculptures when a young man came up to me and said with a worried air, "I know it's an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff doesn't move me one bit." I said that was very interesting: could he define at all the reasons for his lack of response? He reflected for a minute or two. Then he said, "Well, it's all so terribly rational , if you know what I mean." I thought I did know. The young man was only saying what has been said more articulately by Roger Fry and others. To a generation whose sensibilities have been trained on African and Aztec art, and on the work of such men as Modigliani and Henry Moore, the art of the Greeks, and Greek culture in general, is apt to appear lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience. This fragment of conversation stuck in my head and set me thinking. Were the Greeks in fact quite so blind to the importance of nonrational factors in man's experience and behaviour as is commonly assumed both by their apologists and by their critics? That is the question out of which this book grew. To answer it completely would evidently involve a survey of the whole cultural achievement of ancient Greece. But what I propose attempting is something much more modest: I shall merely try to throw some light on the problem by examining afresh certain relevant aspects of Greek religious experience. I hope that the result may have a certain interest not only for Greek scholars but for some anthropologists and social psychologists, indeed for anyone who is concerned to understand the springs of human behaviour. I shall therefore try as far as possible to present the evidence in terms intelligible to the non-specialist
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denis
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Post by denis on May 10, 2024 0:03:57 GMT
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denis
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Post by denis on May 10, 2024 8:01:36 GMT
Meet 123-year-old Nguyen Thi Tru, who resides outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Tru was born May 4, 1893 and has outlived most of her 11 children. medium.com/@sabrinatoppa/the-oldest-living-people-in-the-world-are-all-women-18a5e1b697e7Aside from these regular meals, however, Nguyen has an intense sweet tooth. Specifically, she craves palm sugar, ground into a thin powder, or stirred into a thick banana soup. Sometimes a cup of jasmine or green tea sprinkled with the palm sugar will sate her sweet tooth. For a woman who has never imbibed alcohol and rarely consumes meat, ?’ường th?’t n?’t, as palm sugar is called in Vietnamese, remains Nguyen’s vice of choice. Shrimp or fish meet Nguyen’s protein needs, but sugar is the chief joy in the elderly woman’s life. nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12986-018-0244-4Dietary tocotrienols have been shown to have a preventive role in the development of atherosclerosis in both animal models and humans [17]. α-tocotrienol, for an instance, has been shown to be 40 times more effective than α-tocopherol in providing protection to rat liver microsomal membranes from oxidative stress and damage [101]. α-tocotrienol was also found to show higher peroxyl radical scavenging potential than α-tocopherol in liposomal membranes [24]. More recently, however, δ-tocotrienol is becoming regarded as the homologue with strongest activity amongst tocotrienols where lipid peroxidation inhibition is concerned The Unjust Retraction of Groundbreaking Research: A Call for Academic Integrity grahamhancock.com/natawidjajadh1/The documents below outline the recent and unfounded retraction of the peer-reviewed paper Geo-archaeological prospecting of Gunung Padang buried prehistoric pyramid in West Java, Indonesia, by Danny Hilman Natawidjaja et al. The groundbreaking paper, published in the journal Archaeological Prospection, provides strong evidence that Gunung Padang is home to the most ancient pyramidal edifice yet discovered anywhere in the world, with parts of its man-made interior structure being more than 20,000 years old. This finding shatters established historical timelines and calls for further investigation of the site. However, the possibility for further investigation, and the multiple years of dedicated study that Danny and his team have invested in uncovering the deep history of Gunung Padang, have been undermined and suppressed by conventional voices who find this discovery unacceptable. www.papolona.guru/pyramid-art/0
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denis
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Post by denis on May 10, 2024 9:59:38 GMT
The meaning of Darwin's “abominable mystery” bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3732/ajb.0800150#:~:text=It%20represented%20the%20exact%20same,no%20fossil%20record%20of%20the Perhaps unwittingly, Ball captured the essence of Darwin's angiosperm dilemma. “To my mind there is no alternative between abandoning the doctrine of evolution and admitting that the origin of the existing types of flowering plants is enormously more remote than the period as to which we have direct evidence. The difficulty to be got over is the utter absence of such evidence” (2, p. 580). As Darwin had confessed to Heer four years earlier (and noted above), the “sudden appearance of so many Dicotyledons in the Upper Chalk appears to me a most perplexing phenomenon to all who believe in any form of evolution, especially to those who believe in extremely gradual evolution” (17, p. 239) And is the mystery solved? In short, no. "One hundred and forty years later, the mystery's still unsolved," says Prof Buggs. "Of course, we've made lots of progress in our understanding of evolution and in our knowledge of the fossil record, but this mystery is still there." www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55769269.ampwww.themarginalian.org/2022/02/04/universe-in-verse-bloom/
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denis
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Post by denis on May 11, 2024 7:39:58 GMT
There's been a recent explosion of knowledge about various circuits within our body. Two black swans. It's not only fascinating, but has relevance for new approaches to diseases, health, and aging. v/ Eric Topol erictopol.substack.com/p/our-body-axis-maps-are-getting-redrawn?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2ZnUgr-tN9waRXlxWbvH7tgVWydPGhivMtQzzE7c4XPzLqtXG5xVYeJ38_aem_AQmfZPnvGI_lLChWfZz6lzhPzKb031jXYxekedz7_alVfTRjjUA24LBly-z6RwSCQz5ShiqmVSRXhsz66HHFewbsThe use of advances in techniques, including imaging, single-cell sequencing, and optogenetics, are helping us understand our intra-body circuits. Such work is accelerating, as evidenced by this recent crop of impressive reports appearing within a matter of days. It would be easy to conclude that everything is connected to everything, but it’s the granular details of these circuits that will be crucial to know and translate for potential clinical benefit. Who would have anticipated that fathers could transmit gut microbiome signals through their sperm to their offspring (if this holds up in humans)? Or that there’s a master immune rheostat in the cNST? No less the vagal nerve’s ever-expanding, pluripotent role. What we’re seeing in just one post, with the circuits delineated to some degree here, has substantial relevance to all major diseases including autoimmune, cancer, neurodegenerative, and even the process of aging. Undoubtedly, such illumination off our intra-body circuitry will eventually help us make critical progress for promoting health and preventing disease.
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denis
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Post by denis on May 11, 2024 8:29:05 GMT
beezone.com/1main_shelf/spirit_worship.htmlThe ultimate and secret (or nighttime”) Teaching of Jesus (such as he is reported to have given to Nicodemus, in the third chapter of the Gospel of John) goes beyond the traditional esoteric and mystical notion that we are each identical to an individuated immortal soul and need to identify with that soul inwardly and apart from the body in order to ascend to the nonphysical spiritual or psychic world. Jesus Taught recognition of our total born bodily (or psycho-physical) being as soul, not merely in the sense of being an immortal subtle individual, but in the eternal sense, totally inhering in and thus totally identical to the Spiritual and Transcendental Divine. He Taught that we are utterly Spiritual (or eternal, and thus, in Truth, unborn), now and forever in intimate free Communion with God, Who is Spirit, or Radiant Transcendental Being�in (and thus as) Whom we live and move and exist. According to Jesus, the Way is to embrace and participate in the Mystery of the “Kingdom of God.” That Way involves (1) acknowledgment that we are inherently free, or of the nature of Spirit, and (2) awakening to the process of Spirit-Communion as a self-transcending exercise of the total body-mind, from the point of view that the total psycho-physical being and all its conditions and relations inhere in and are ultimately identical to the Transcendental Spiritual Divine. The more public Teaching of Jesus is associated with the moral exotericism and animistic terrestrialism of the Emanationist religion of the first three stages of life. And he is also often quoted or depicted in the terms of traditional formulations that affirm the dualistic ideal of evolutionary soul-culture (or the fourth to fifth stage views of traditional Emanationism, which are concerned with mystical soul-travel, or ascent through the cosmic hierarchy to the “Throne” or “Heaven” of God). But Jesus’ ultimate Confession of the Realization of his oneness with the “Father,” or the Spiritual and Transcendental Divine Being, implies free and utter transcendence of the point of view and conventional independence of body, mind, self, and soul. By virtue of that Confession, we may consider Jesus of Nazareth to be an Adept in the seventh stage of life, an Advocate of the point of view of Emanationist Non-Dualism, and thus, in Truth, an Enlightened “Buddha,” “Bodhisattva,” “nani,” “Jivanmukta,” or “Mahasiddha,” Occupied with Transcendental Wisdom in the midst of a traditional culture of animistic spiritualism and Emanationist monotheism
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denis
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Post by denis on May 11, 2024 8:39:56 GMT
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denis
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Post by denis on May 11, 2024 9:09:49 GMT
Every human being must acquire a taste for his own peculiarity. –Franz Kafka
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denis
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Post by denis on May 12, 2024 6:37:16 GMT
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denis
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Post by denis on May 12, 2024 11:38:27 GMT
www.yogicphysio.com/blog/the-myth-of-core-stability-amp-low-back-painLow back pain is now the number one cause of disability globally and will be experienced by most people at some point in their lives (84% lifetime prevalence) (1,2). However, it is best understood as a symptom, and not a disease in and of itself (1,2). The prevalence and complexity of low back pain have led to much argument over the best way to manage it, this is particularly seen in the contrast between statements in the image below from the late Dr Alf Nachemson, a pioneering researcher and clinician in LBP, and Professor Stuart McGill, a famous spine biomechanics researcher
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denis
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Post by denis on May 12, 2024 16:58:31 GMT
actaps.sinh.ac.cn/qikan/manage/wenzhang/2015-1-01.pdfNrf2, a master regulator of detoxification and also antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and other cytoprotective mechanisms, is raised by health promoting factors The transcription factor Nrf2, nuclear factor erythroid-2-related factor 2, activates the transcription of over 500 genes in the human genome, most of which have cytoprotective functions. Nrf2 produces cytoprotection by detoxification mechanisms leading to increased detoxification and excretion of both organic xenobiotics and toxic metals; its action via over two dozen genes increases highly coordinated antioxidant activities; it produces major anti-inflammatory changes; it stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis and oth- erwise improves mitochondrial function; and it stimulates autophagy, removing toxic protein aggregates and dysfunctional organelles. Health-promoting nutrients and other factors act, at least in part by raising Nrf2 including: many phenolic antioxidants; gamma- and delta-tocopherols and tocotrienols; long chain omega-3 fatty acids DHA and EPA; many carotenoids of which lycopene may be the most active; isothiocyanates from cruciferous vegetables; sulfur compounds from allium vegetables; terpenoids. Other health promot- ing, Nrf2 raising factors include low level oxidative stress (hormesis), exercise and caloric restriction.
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denis
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Post by denis on May 13, 2024 12:15:26 GMT
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denis
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Post by denis on May 14, 2024 1:47:00 GMT
Interview with Ashis Nandy: psychoanalytic sociology and post-colonial predicament by Livio Boni eirikgarnaas.no/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Jansson-Chapter-2.pdfLivio Boni: Finally, I'd like to take the risk of skipping to current events for a moment. The recent cases of violence against women, following the gang rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi at the end of 2012, have been widely relayed by the European press as well. In an interview given two weeks after the events, you pointed out the inadequacy of the category of sexual violence to analyze this kind of crime. You put forward the idea of an excess of violence, overtaking the "traditional" function of rape as a means of asserting social status, and you insisted on the idea of generalized anomic violence which worries the social body because, from then on, everybody can become a victim of it. Could you expand on this idea? How to understand the overexposure of women to anomic violence in contemporary India? Ashis Nandy: For the moment I shall only say this: Not only did women have power in traditional India, which was a phenomenon natural to all agricultural societies, this power came from the religious and ‘magical’ equation or continuity made in such societies between women’s re-productivity and the fertility of land. In Europe, modern political economy and modern knowledge systems curtailed these powers of women by masculinizing the Christian pantheon and making Protestant Christianity the predominant paradigm of faith (partly because Weber’s thesis on the Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism in particular, and modernity in general, had probably become a tacit part of common sense even before Weber articulated it so clearly). But the traditional fear of women and her access to the primal magical powers of women remained just below the surface. The growing presence, self- assertion and self-confidence of women in the modern sector re-activates these fears and there is a desperate attempt to put the genie back in the box. The violence comes from that fear. It is a bit like the European witch-hunt towards the end of the Medieval period. As modernity spread, witch hunting, instead of decreasing, increased between 13th and 15th centuries (see A.J.P. Taylor and Norman Cohn). arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2711We mathematically model Ignacio Matte Blanco’s principles of sym- metric and asymmetric being through use of an ultrametric topology. We use for this the highly regarded 1975 book of this Chilean psychiatrist and pyschoanalyst (born 1908, died 1995). Such an ultrametric model corre- sponds to hierarchical clustering in the empirical data, e.g. text. We show how an ultrametric topology can be used as a mathematical model for the structure of the logic that reflects or expresses Matte Blanco’s sym- metric being, and hence of the reasoning and thought processes involved in conscious reasoning or in reasoning that is lacking, perhaps entirely, in consciousness or awareness of itself. In a companion paper we study how symmetric (in the sense of Matte Blanco’s) reasoning can be demar- cated in a context of symmetric and asymmetric reasoning provided by narrative text. Introduction Before introducing and then discussing in detail Matte Blanco’s work in sec- tion 3, in section 2 we deal with alternative models of mental processes – the geometry or the topology of mental processes. These are neural model cen- tered. Therefore they can be taken as influenced by physical models of the brain. They provide a useful starting point for us because they also avail of ultrametric topological representations and processing frameworks. It will become clearer later that our primary motivation is not with a physical (and hence, let’s assume, observable through physico-chemical and biological processes) view of the brain. Instead our motivation is to have a processing framework to model human reasoning that is, as reasoning, based on data such as text or dialog data, or other behavioral or expressive signals. In section 3 we survey Matte Blanco’s “logico-mathematical”, albeit largely descriptive, theory of psychoanalysis. 1 In section 4 we look at how ultrametrics can provide an appropriate frame- work for understanding Matte Blanco. In section 5 we tie the ultrametric topol- ogy strongly to input data. In section 6 we note how the unconscious can be vastly more efficient – quicker in reasoning – compared to the conscious mind. An implication of this is why unconscious thought processes are of interest, as well as conscious reasoning, for computation and for decision making. In general we address through our mathematical – topological and, at times when metric, geometric – modeling how the unconscious differs from the con- scious. Modeling for us consists of formulating and defining heuristic data struc- tures, with the intention of allowing us to explore how the unconscious can be expressed in terms of measured data.
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denis
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Post by denis on May 14, 2024 2:05:07 GMT
Consciousness came before life The fundamental cause of evolution iai.tv/articles/life-and-consciousness-what-are-they-auid-2836#:~:text=Most%20scientists%20and%20philosophers%20believe,language%20and%20tool%2Dmaking%20abilities. Most scientists believe that consciousness came after life, as a product of evolution. But observations of extraterrestrial organic material, along with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s quantum theory of consciousness, provide reason to believe that consciousness came before life. In fact, argue Hameroff and his collaborators, consciousness may have been what made evolution and life possible in the first place.
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Post by denis on May 14, 2024 4:37:25 GMT
www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/decolonizing-the-virtual-future-knowledges-and-the-extrahuman-in-africa/CB945D7E54FB7861F0BA72B98946036F?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2yCuBKtkpX-ayoKgqgfz_bVGRk3rMSv8nulU0Lawg2KdJuJe6WoTpL8m8_aem_AS1nYqeemWnhmz-we-mdqlai3jyefz9UMKpTIVyC9dZ3_JNWojRyVBLB0576-4d8dbArmF2e6Uj4swYv5FzgqIhNThe Virtual and the Occult Dialoguing with Mbembe’s efforts to bring the occult, digitality, and capitalism together, it is worth looking into the analytical purchase of the concept of “the virtual.” Various layers of meaning are obscured in everyday understandings of “virtuality.” The Oxford English dictionary assigns the following meanings to the entry “virtuality”: (a) “force, power; something endowed with force or power”; (b) “essential nature or being, as opposed to embodiment, and external form”; (c) “a virtual, as opposed to an actual thing, quality, etc. Something which is unrealized, a potentiality, a possibility”; (d) “virtual reality, cyberspace.” It seems significant that power, force, and opposition to the external are meanings that lie at the roots of virtuality, making the connection with Mbembe’s discussions of animacy and the plasticity of African cosmologies even more relevant.Footnote 4 However, the longstanding opposition between virtual or second worlds and the external form and embodiment gains nuance in the world of digital modernity. The impetus here is to discover what it might mean to use the archive of African representations of virtual worlds and their interrelations with the actual to think through contemporary global transformations with digital virtuality. Based on longstanding fieldwork among the Gawa community in Papua New Guinea, Nancy Munn (Reference Munn1992) argues that fame is a kind of virtual influence that circulates as an imagined third party witnessing each transaction. In this sense, kula objects are a material media producing a virtual (or imagined) community through which names circulate and augment in grandeur, transforming the actual fate of the particular Gawans who sent off their shells. Virtual worlds are spaces where one can fabricate symbolic selves (in the plural), play with alterity, and imagine what we could be(come). Most importantly, we can capitalize on the force of virtual reality as virtually circulating representations accumulate and translate into actual influence. In this sense, the stories that circulate in gossip of radio trottoir are a kind of avatar in the public imagination—a doubling of self with shape-shifting capacity and powers far beyond those of which one’s physical body is capable. In a pioneering study of virtual realities, in particular the digital culture of Second Life, Tom Boellstorff (Reference Boellstorf2008:19) shows how a gap between the virtual and the actual is always necessary: “Were it to be filled in, there would be no virtual worlds, and in a sense no actual world either.” The virtual, as a space of potentiality, exists “whenever there is a perceived gap between the experienced and ‘the actual’” (Boellstorff Reference Boellstorf2008). This experience of the gap, of a fracture, is a common trope in the Africanist literature, perhaps better known under the guise of “the broken mirror” (De Boeck & Plissart Reference De Boeck and Plissart2004). One of the first scholars to engage critically with the disjuncture between lived realities and symbolic spaces in sub-Saharan Africa is Wim M.J. Van Binsbergen (Reference Van Binsbergen1998). In a critical study of the affordances of “the virtual” for a deeper understanding of African societies, he demonstrates that the virtual as a kind of fourth dimension draws on medieval optics, when around 1700 the idea of the “virtual image” was defined: “the objects shown in a mirror image do not really exist, but are merely illusory representations, which we apparently observe at the end of the light beams connecting the object, the surface of the mirror, and our eye” (Van Binsbergen Reference Van Binsbergen1998:876). A similar language was reiterated by Filip De Boeck and Marie-Françoise Plissart (Reference De Boeck and Plissart2004) in their intimate ethnography of Kinshasa’s various universes, where engagements with colonial and the “modern” often produced refracted distortions through which the colonized glimpsed themselves. But the origins of virtuality are found not only in optics but in physics as well, where Aristotelian conceptions of latent potentiality can be transformed into actual effects (Van Binsbergen Reference Van Binsbergen1998:876). Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation m.quest-journal.net/shikanda/general/virtuality_edit%202003.pdfcdn.inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net/b1112605-650b-4120-b565-caaddf8b5641/Munn%20-%20%22Introduction%22.pdf?token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzUxMiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCIsImtpZCI6ImNkbiJ9.eyJyZXNvdXJjZSI6Ii9iMTExMjYwNS02NTBiLTQxMjAtYjU2NS1jYWFkZGY4YjU2NDEvTXVubiUyMC0lMjAlMjJJbnRyb2R1Y3Rpb24lMjIucGRmIiwidGVuYW50IjoiY2FudmFzIiwidXNlcl9pZCI6bnVsbCwiaWF0IjoxNzE1NjUxNDcwLCJleHAiOjE3MTU3Mzc4NzB9.I2xv51M-dvb-unMEa2jMnNlb0WsUzAbs7W5EPEdEg76dK3Y9VtMJSosWQgJq8nCglGw-k1-GwvM9VJciUtc9eA&download=1&content_type=application%2Fpdf
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