(Source: whyexistence)
Before defining art — or any concept — we must answer a far broader question: what’s the meaning of man’s life on earth?
maybe we are here to enhance ourselves spiritually. if our life tends to this spiritual enrichment… then art is a means to get there. This, of course, in accordance with my definition of life. Art should help man in this process.
Art enriches man’s own spiritual capabilities and he can then rise above himself to use what we call ‘free will.’
Andrei Tarkovsky on art.
The three levels of Freedom
There are 3 senses of ‘freedom’ that must be differentiated and argued individually:
political freedom — freedom(p)
(king/oppression vs. democracy/egalarianism)
This is the arena that the cultural critics and political philosophers focus on.
Political freedom is good, legitimate, attainable, and worth seeking.
existential/practical freedom — freedom(e)
The freedom to move my finger, the sense of freedom
This is the arena that the freewillists focus on - it’s at the apparent, surface level.
Existential freedom is undeniably real; your existential freedom is a concrete problem demanding active response
metaphysical/underlying freedom — freedom(m)
This is the arena that the determinists focus on - it’s on a hidden, underlying level. It probably doesn’t make any difference whether there is freedom at the underlying, metaphysical level.
Metaphysical freedom is illusory and virtual, false and unreal.
(via jumbi-ism)
(Source: thapfeifblog)
Dr. Strangeglove—played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic film—often used his left hand to control his right, which at times even clutched his throat. This behavior resembles a real-life condition called alien-hand syndrome, in which one hand evades voluntary control. Alien-hand syndrome often arises from a unilateral lesion of the medial frontal cortex, which includes both SMA supplementary motor area) and medial parts of MI primary motor cortex). Damage to the SMA, then, could give a hand a mind of its own.
Free Will and Free Won't -- American Scientist. →
In the 1980s, neuroscientists studying the brain processes underlying out sense of conscious will compared subjects’ judgments regarding their subjective will to move (W) an actual movement (M) with objective electroencepalographic activity called readiness potential, or RP. As expected, W preceded M: subjects consciously perceived the intention to move as preceding a conscious experience of actual moving. This might seem to suggest an appropriate correspondence between the sequence of subjective experiences and the sequence of underlying events in the brain. But researches actually found a surprising temporal relation between subjective experience an objectively measured neural events: in direct contradiction of the classical conception of free will, neural preparation to move (RP) preceded conscious awareness of the intention to move (W) by hundreds of milliseconds.
