Crown Shyness

 

"The Mind-Body Problem" - Rene Descartes

Our mind-body problem is not just a difficulty about how the mind and body are related and how they affect one another. It is also a difficulty about how they can be related and how they can affect one another. Their characteristic properties are very different, like oil and water, which simply won’t mix, given what they are.

Mind: What is characteristic of a mind, Descartes claims, is that it is conscious, not that it has shape or consists of physical matter. Our bodies are certainly in space, and our minds are not, in the very straightforward sense that the assignation of linear dimensions and locations to them or to their contents and activities is unintelligible. 

Body: According to Descartes, matter is essentially spatial, and it has the characteristic properties of linear dimensionality. Things in space have a position, at least, and a height, a depth, and a length, or one or more of these. Mental entities, on the other hand, do not have these characteristics. 

Objection to mind-body problem: The difficulty, however, is not merely that mind and body are different. It is that they are different in such a way that their interaction is impossible because it involves a contradiction. It is the nature of bodies to be in space, and the nature of minds not to be in space, Descartes claims. For the two to interact, what is not in space must act on what is in space. Action on a body takes place at a position in space, however, where the body is. Apparently Descartes did not see this problem. 

• Our minds are not physically connected to our bodies! How could they be, if they are nonphysical? That is the point whose importance Princess Elisabeth and Gassendi saw more clearly than anyone had before them, including Descartes himself.
   

Significance of the problem: That this straightforward test of physicality has survived all the philosophical changes of opinion since Descartes, almost unscathed, is remarkable.

 

Reference: Descartes and the discovery of "The Mind-Body Problem"

 

Self-attention mechanism

 

Reference: Attention is All You Need - NIPS'2017

Musings of Odysseus

Man are haunted by the vastness of the eternity. So we ask ourselves - 

Will our actions echo across centuries?

Will strangers hear our names long after we’re gone, and wonder how we were,

how bravely we fought,

how fiercely we loved?

- Odysseus (Ulysses)

Friedrich Chopin

 

 

                                             

                                               Chopin - Nocturne #20 In C Sharp Minor, Bi 49

 

 

                                                                 Chopin - Waltz No.7

3 Iron - Kim Ki-duk

 

3 Iron (South Korea)

"I want to make such a film that nobody has made yet: something that has never been made before and that nobody else will be able to shoot." - Kim Ki-duk

Mars and Venus - Jacques-Louis David

“This is the last picture I want to paint, but I want to surpass myself in it. I will put the date of my seventy-five years in it and afterwards I will never again pick up the brush.” - David