"If the world overwhelms you with its constant production of useless crap which you filter more and more to things that only interest you can I calmly suggest that you just create things that you like & cut out the rest of the world as a middle-man to your happiness?
From where I sit creating things does the following:

Let’s you filter to something you like…Frees you…Makes you happy…Plays to strengths not weaknesses…

I can’t say it better than _why [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff ]: "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

…

If you quiet your mind & allow yourself to stop judging everything you will find that you have more potential for innovation (at work, in the kitchen…with your hobbies…your thoughts) than you thought before. You were using the same brutal quality filter on yourself that you used on viral videos, talk radio, and blog posts. You deserve better."

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

> This guide is intended for use by all students of the London Philosophy degrees, BA, MA and its research degrees. It contains an entry for each of the papers currently available within the B.A. degree. For each of these you will find a number of general hints about studying for that particular paper, together with a number of central readings. These reading lists vary greatly in length, but no inferences should be made on this basis about the comparative difficulty of the papers. In every case these reading lists will be supplemented by others you will receive in lectures or tutorials, and there is no attempt here at comprehensive coverage.

What does it mean to be awake? What exactly is therapeutic about retail therapy? And what are you really working on when you're at your desk, in the gym, or having dinner? From getting ready in the morning, through heading to work, going to a party, having sex and falling back to sleep, Breakfast with Socrates provides an hour-by-hour commentary on what history's greatest philosophers have said about the meaning behind everything we do. A fascinating exploration of our daily lives, Breakfast with Socrates also draws on literature, art, politics and psychology to offer an informal introduction to the history of ideas that will help anyone to think more healthily. Breakfast will never be the same again…

> Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

> But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine's activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

> The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

(via: http://kottke.org/11/01/the-goal-of-business)

Can a novelist write philosophically? Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no.

For 350 years, the Royal Society has called on the world's biggest brains to unravel the mysteries of science. Its president, Martin Rees, considers today's big issues, while leading thinkers describe the puzzles they would love to see solved.

Evgeny Morozov: It’s fascinating reading because it brings together mostly historians of technology and a handful of philosophers, who approach the question of determinism from different perspectives. You have Marxist historians, economic historians, feminist historians, business historians, who look at the evolution of industry, all of whom are trying to answer the question of whether certain technologies influence the course of history and if so, how?

Join our experts as they blog great works of religion and philosophy.

So long as people read Wittgenstein, people will read Peter Hacker. It’s hard to imagine how his work on the monumental Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations could possibly be superseded. He spent nearly twenty years on that project (ten of them in cooperation with his friend and colleague Gordon Baker), following in Wittgenstein’s footsteps, and producing a large number of important articles and books on topics in the philosophy of mind and language along the way. Nearer the end than the beginning of a distinguished career as an Oxford don, at a time of life when most academics would be happy to leave the lectern behind and collapse somewhere with a nice glass of wine, Hacker is in the middle of another huge project, this time on human nature. He also seems keen to pick a fight with almost anyone doing the philosophy of mind.

We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.

There is a famous speech by Demosthenes that he ends by chiding his fellow statesman for their flattery. As was common in Athens, the speakers who’d gone before him had filled their orations with examples of great and proud moments in the country’s history like victories at Marathon and Salamis. This was a distraction, he said, a trick to tell the audience what they wanted to hear instead of prompting them into the action they desperately needed to take, which in this case was war. “Reflect,” he concluded, “that your ancestors set up those trophies, not that you may gaze at them in wonder but that you may also imitate the virtues of the men who set them up.”

“What is happiness?” is one of those strange questions philosophers ask, and it’s hard to answer. Philosophy, as a discipline, doesn’t agree about it. Philosophers are a contentious, disagreeable, lot by nature and training. But the question’s hard because of a problematic prejudice about what kind of thing happiness might be. I’d like to diagnose the mistake and prescribe a corrective.

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." So writes acclaimed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in his path-breaking book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Instead, such natural forms, and many man-made creations as well, are "rough," he says. To study and learn from such roughness, for which he invented the term fractal, Mandelbrot devised a new kind of visual mathematics based on such irregular shapes. Fractal geometry, as he called this new math, is worlds apart from the Euclidean variety we all learn in school, and it has sparked discoveries in myriad fields, from finance to metallurgy, cosmology to medicine. In this interview, hear from the father of fractals about why he disdains rules, why he considers himself a philosopher, and why he abandons work on any given advance in fractals as soon as it becomes popular.

With the death of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest,” who took his own life on Sept. 12, the world of contemporary American fiction lost its most intellectually ambitious writer. Like his peers Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann, Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including lexicography, poststructuralist literary theory and the science, ethics and epistemology of lobster pain. He wrote a book on the history and philosophy of the mathematics of infinity. Even his signature stylistic device — the extensive use of footnotes and endnotes — was a kind of scholarly homage.

What a writer Montaigne was (and what a chatterbox)! Un-plagued by worries of being selfconscious, sentimental or inappropriate, he looked at everything with curiosity, and tried to make sense of everything he studied – for the benefit of his readers, but above all for himself. Nothing better can be said of Montaigne than the words of these two eminent nobodies: "It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience" (Emerson); "It is not in Montaigne but in myself, that I find all that I see in him" (Pascal).

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be. This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. We’ve all got this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!"

The reality is that conservative thinking provides a deep well of arguments for protecting the environment and tackling climate change. I would argue the long political and philosophical heritage of environmentalism is in essence, conservative rather than radical. If the action needed to enhance the security of our own and future generations seems radical, that is merely a reflection of the extent to which we have collectively lost touch with the conservative tradition.

To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write, and in the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such as fathers and children, conscience and cowardice, coaches and cannibals, and, above all, himself. On Some Lines of Virgil opens out into a frank discussion of sexuality and makes a revolutionary case for the equality of the sexes. In On Experience he superbly propounds his thoughts on the right way to live, while other essays touch on issues of an age struggling with religious and intellectual strife, with France torn apart by civil war. These diverse subjects are united by Montaigne’s distinctive voice – that of a tolerant man, sceptical, humane, often humorous and utterly honest in his pursuit of the truth.

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog’s ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, readers still come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment – and in search of themselves. This first full biography of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored.

Maybe you don’t know anything about this man, Montaigne; perhaps you know him as the bane of your high school existence for inventing the word “essay.” What I’d like to do in this piece is tell you a bit more about him and hopefully remove him from the realm of people-from-history-you-don’t-care-about and place him in his proper context: as our greatest philosopher of life. And Montaigne was a philosopher in the truest sense; he studied life and how we can wring all that we can from the short bit of time each of us is given. Philosophy can seem boring—truthfully, most of it is—but Montaigne is not only incredibly accessible; just a brush with his brand of thinking can change our lives.

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

Eagleton talks about meaning in the context of literature. Which I think is very important, because I think the issue, the meaning of life, isn’t just a matter for philosophical discussion. It’s also something about which people can learn a lot from the great poets and playwrights and novelists. He also says that the meaning of life isn’t something that’s given to you, it’s not something that’s pre-fabricated. It’s something that you have to construct.

It is the best, most accessible work ever in the philosophy of mathematics. It is also beautifully conceived and executed. For those who want to know what philosophical analysis is, this is among the best example ever produced. He succeeded in laying the foundation for the stunning advances in mathematical logic in the 20th century that themselves provided frameworks for modern theories both of computation and of linguistically encoded information.

Is killing sometimes morally required? Is the free market fair? It is sometimes wrong to tell the truth? What is justice, and what does it mean? These and other questions are at the heart of Michael Sandel's Justice. Considering the role of justice in our society and our lives, he reveals how an understanding of philosophy can help to make sense of politics, religion, morality - and our own convictions. Breaking down hotly contested issues, from abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage, to patriotism, dissent and affirmative action, Sandel shows how the biggest questions in our civiv life can be broken down and illuminated through reasoned debate. Justice promises to take readers - of all ages and political persuasions - on an exhilarating journey to confront controversies in a fresh and enlightening way.

Ryan's 35 lessons in 35 years is required reading if you are a man. And probably if you are a woman: http://j.mp/bzpCCY

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, or practice that focuses on human values and concerns.

Nobody predicted this. The pioneers of political economy expected eventual stagnation. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Robert Malthus all predicted that diminishing returns would eventually set in, that the improvement in living standards they were seeing would peter out. “The discovery, and useful application of machinery, always leads to the increase of the net produce of the country, although it may not, and will not, after an inconsiderable interval, increase the value of that net produce,” said Ricardo, who perceived an inexorable tendency toward what he called a “stationary state.” John Stuart Mill, conceding that returns were showing no signs of diminishing in the 1840s, put it down to luck. Innovation, he said, was an external factor, a cause but not an effect of economic growth.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."