I think you misunderstand Nussbaum's concept of capabilities. "Flourishing" includes things like the right to own private property, not free health care. Capabilities aren't positive rights in the socialist sense. In terms of health care, it means the ability to be healthy, which includes the ability to choose either junk food or snack food, and the ability to access doctors (but not necessarily the right to free treatment).
Most of what you name—physics and mathematics and astronomy—were once considered parts of philosophy, and philosophers were the people who did them. That's no small part of why PhD stands for "Doctor of Philosophy."
What you're complaining about is actually the specialization of certain branches of philosophy into their own separate disciplines. A physicist today no longer thinks of himself as a philosopher, except perhaps if he glances at the diploma on his wall. That does not mean that he is not a philosopher in the same sense in which the ancient Greeks used the word, namely as one who loves wisdom, and in which Plato would have understood the term as he pursued not only moral philosophy but also mathematics: Plato would almost certainly see a physicist as a philosopher. Anyone pursuing theoretical knowledge with no direct utility to daily life (unlike, say, pottery or baking) was a philosopher.
After all the specialization that has happened in academia, the people who still call themselves philosophers constitute a husk of a discipline. They mainly contemplate logic (but not computer programming), epistemology (but not neuroscience or psychology), and morality. Seeing them as the only philosophers, rather than as the one group of philosophers who didn't bother to come up with a new name for themselves, is a mistake.
I’ve been a student of early christianity (first three centuries) for just over a year. The wiki entry on Nonnus is scant. Can you please recommend quality literature to learn more about the Metabole? It’s not clear to me the purpose of the text.
That's not really my area, but I can offer a few. The big one would be the new Brill's Companion to Nonnus (2016) and anything by Domenico Accorinti, who seems to be the person most often working on Nonnus now.
- Accorinti, D. 2020. "Did Nonnus Really Want to Write a 'Gospel Epic?' The Amabiguous Genre of the _Paraphrase of the Gospel According to John._ In Hadjittofi, F. and Lefteratou, A. eds. _The Genres of Late Antique Christian Poetry_. Berlin: De Gruyter. 225–48.
- Accorinti, D. 2016. _Brill's Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis._ Leiden: Brill.
- Hadjittofi F. 2020. "The Poet and the Evangelist in Nonnus' Paraphrase of the Gospel According to John." Cambridge Classical Journal 66: 70–95.
Large universities are focused on research, and they incur a lot of expenses due to administrators' egos (build build build), the number of administrators, and the range of microstate services offered, like their own health care system and mental health counseling (a major thing in universities now). Community colleges are focused on teaching.
My gf and I don't have a television, but we watch Ghibli movies on my 13" laptop on a stool parked in front of my couch. In CRT's heydey, you'd have to be pretty rich to get more than a 24" screen, and that was just fine back then. The brain focuses attention on the story and blocks out everything else, the same way that you don't notice the rest of the theater during an opera or play (at least one that's engrossing).
So, if the trade-off is size vs advertising, I'd prefer to have a small, ad-free monitor instead of a large ad-box.
I wonder if any EU nation has put together a maritime warning system based on multiple inputs like transponder signals and satellite/UAV imagery. Except for imagery interpretation it wouldn’t even need AI, just check for anomalies like a ship off course or turning off its transponder.
The idea of spider webs in space was explored long before, in the second century AD, by Lucian of Samosata in his _Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα_ or "True Stories." Spiders run webs from the sun (land of the Heliots) and the moon (the Selenites) so that a vast space battle can be waged on a plain between them.
I'm not remotely convinced that LLMs are a chainsaw, unless they've been very thoroughly trained on the problem domain. LLMs are good for vibe coding, and some of them (Grok 3 is actually good at this) can speak passable Latin, but try getting them to compose Sotadean verse in Latin or put a penthemimeral caesura in an iambic trimeter in ancient Greek. They can define a penthemimeral caesura and an iambic trimeter, but they don't understand the concepts and can't apply one to the other. All they can do is spit out the next probable token. Worse, LLMs have lied to me on the definition of Sotadean verse, not even regurgitating what Wikipedia should have taught them.
Image-generating AIs are really good at producing passable human forms, but they'll fail at generating anything realistic for dice, even though dice are just cubes with marks on them. Ask them to illustrate the Platonic solids, which you can find well-illustrated with a Google image search, and you'll get a bunch of lumps, some of which might resemble shapes. They don't understand the concepts: they just work off probability. But, they look fairly good at those probabilities in domains like human forms, because they've been specially trained on them.
LLMs seem amazing in a relatively small number of problem domains over which they've been extensively trained, and they seem amazing because they have been well trained in them. When you ask for something outside those domains, their failure to work from inductions about reality (like "dice are a species of cubes, but differentiated from other cubes by having dots on them") or to be able to apply concepts become patent, and the chainsaw looks a lot like an adze that you spend more time correcting than getting correct results from.
When I was tutoring algebra, I sometimes ran into students who could solve the problems in the book, but if I wrote a problem that looked a little different or that combined two of the concepts they'd supposedly learned, they would be lost. I gradually realized that they didn't understand the concepts at all, but had learned to follow patterns. ("When it's one fraction divided by another fraction, flip the second fraction over and multiply. Why? No idea, but I get an A.")
This feels like that: a "student" who can produce the right answers as long as you stick to a certain set of questions that he's already been trained on through repetition, but anything outside that set is hopeless, even if someone who understood that set could easily reason from it to the new question.
That's one way to put it, but a negative way. The other might be more humbling: how significant are we? Or, as a statement instead of a question, we are the only significant thing of which we know.
We can theorize about life elsewhere, and we can write space-opera fiction about life on other worlds, but, to the best of our knowledge, we are the only ones who can. We know there is other life on our world, but not as rational as we. We do not know for a fact that there is any equivalent, rational species in all that vast universe that we can see, let alone any more advanced than we are.
Asking the question that way makes me, at least, wonder if we comport ourselves in accordance with our knowledge of our exceptionalism. If we are the most advanced form of life that we know and can prove to exist, do we behave like it?
"Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better." -- David Deutsch
I wouldn't attack people's emotions like that, the approach of 'my opinion is better than yours and your emotions are wrong' ain't the best.
Its just one of those concepts or facts of life like our (im)mortality that each of us has to handle on their own terms since each of us is wired in pretty unique ways. Its perfectly fine to be in awe or even stunned by it, it means one actually started to grasp vastness of that topic and the fact we don't have it all figured out and during our lifetime this won't change.
Every time I look at starry night sky and realize those distances, thermonuclear furnaces glowing across vast distances in absolute cold (or their massive groups looking similarly yet being vastly further), I am in awe. It puts my efforts and happiness in my life in a good perspective, in similar fashion spending my time with my kids does. And I look at stars every night I can, its a beautiful calming sight for me.
Emotions are like waves; we can’t choose which ones appear, but we can choose which one to surf. The person you’re replying to (well, really, the person they quoted) didn’t really seem to be “attacking” anyone’s emotions to me. It seemed pretty gently advising the reader not to spend all their time riding the emotional waves that lead to depression or nihilism.
I do believe we all must face these emotions to become aware. But the depression/nihilism trap is very real for many people (myself included), and learning to walk that line and stay curious is part of our emotional/psychological development.
Who said anything about being depressed? It’s a fact, we are insignificant in the universe. Less than a rounding error. I am simply acknowledging it.
It doesn’t make me feel like anything, other than trying to imagine the universes’ vastness - in an attempt at futility. I don’t think my mind (or any human mind) can ever truly fathom it.
The image in question is likely a blow up of a point in the sky that’s 1mmx1mm, about the size of a grain of sand, and it is rich with many many galaxies, way more than we can see - if you account for the vast and infinite depth. The Milky Way is said to have 400 billion stars. So if there are a 1000 galaxies present in the image, that’s trillions of stars in a square mm of the sky.
I think it’s pretty darn empowering to think your life’s problems mean that less, one part in numbers so large I can’t even pronounce. Don’t you think?
I completely agree with you, yet this morning I was looking at pictures of Lingchi execution, and now I'm picturing the victim thinking to themselves "you know, my problems really aren't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things."
I cannot see it as a "feat", as I literally did nothing to make that happen. So, it's not dissimilar to the wonders of other animals: cool but not thanks to me.
That is just a massive ego trip, no? Very similar to scientists of old who posited that humans were special amongst the other animals in having intelligence. Well turns out all animals are intelligent just the same way, we simply lack the communication skills to understand one another much. Every time someone makes an argument like this I can't help but feel it's like a child saying they're the best at something because they haven't seen anyone else better.
I actually feel like it goes to say whether we are significant or not is irrelevant - your life is the only life you’ll ever experience, and it is of penultimate significance to the universe you will ever experience.
I'm with you on this. Until proven otherwise I'm going to assume that we're very, very special, maybe even the point of the whole thing, that all of it is necessary just so we can be here. More of an excuse to not mess up what little we do have control over.
I can't see how one can come to such conclusion. We know that there are trillions of stars, and an even greater number of planets, in the universe. We know that life can start relatively easily on some planets, as we know it happened at least once. Out of trillions, there must be at least millions of planets that "look like" ours out there. How can one conclude "we are very very special" given that information? It's illogical to me.
> The other might be more humbling: how significant are we? Or, as a statement instead of a question, we are the only significant thing of which we know.
We may assume that we are the only intelligent life in the universe and that life on our planet is highly significant. Humanity itself faces a great challenge in finding its way. We are currently in a dark period of our evolution—one where we have mastered a great deal of technology to make our lives materially comfortable, yet we have not mastered the "demons" within our minds. We fail to control them as individuals, and even less so as societies. These demons were instilled in us by natural evolution, serving us well until the Neolithic age. But in the modern era, they have become our greatest enemy. At this point, the biggest problem facing humanity is human nature itself. We stand on the brink of destroying our planet in numerous ways. Humans have already caused one of the greatest mass extinctions of large animals in Earth's history.
One argument supporting the theory that Earth is the only planet with advanced life is the growing realization of how many rare conditions must be met for life to emerge. In the past, scientists believed it was enough for a planet to be located within the habitable zone of its star. We are now beginning to understand that this is merely one of the most basic requirements among many others.
Earth itself has come close to losing all its life on multiple occasions—such as during the Snowball Earth period—despite the Sun remaining stable and the planet still being within the habitable zone.
One crucial factor for sustaining life is a planet’s internal magmatic activity, which must be powerful enough to generate a stable magnetic field. This field protects the atmosphere from being stripped away by solar winds. Additionally, it seems that magmatic activity played a key role in warming the planet during its early years when the Sun’s radiation was weaker. In fact, the gradual increase in solar radiation over billions of years appears to have offset the decrease in Earth's internal heat, maintaining the planet’s temperature within a range suitable for life to thrive.
However, Earth's prolonged and vigorous magmatic activity appears exceptional, likely because a colossal collision with a rogue protoplanet—the event known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis—not only formed the Moon but also injected an enormous amount of thermal energy into the young Earth. This impact created a long-lasting magma ocean phase, effectively resetting the planet's internal heat and driving rapid mantle convection and differentiation. Such enhanced magmatic activity contributed to the early formation of a stable geodynamo, which has sustained Earth's magnetic field and, consequently, its atmosphere over geological time.
For all we know, Earth may be unique in the universe, but we are far from certain enough to make such a claim.
The other possibility is that intelligent life exists elsewhere, but the barriers imposed by the speed of light—combined with the unimaginable vastness of the universe—may render it impossible for advanced civilizations to find or communicate with one another. Who knows? Perhaps the universe was created by some form of intelligence that ensured life could develop, but only in such rare and distant pockets that no two civilizations could ever reach each other, or even communicate.
EDIT: expanded the paragraph about the big impact hypothesis.
If taxes at sales time (capital gains on real estate) are keeping people from selling houses, why not eliminate those taxes to free up the frozen housing market?
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