When I first heard these ideas, I thought they were, at best, fanciful metaphors. Yet in the years since, I've watched as a growing body of scientific research has emerged to suggest they are much more than metaphors. Experiments with slime molds have demonstrated these organisms can navigate mazes in search of food - sensing its location and then growing in that direction. The mycelia in a forest do link the trees in it, root to root, not only supplying them with nutrients, but serving as a medium that conveys information about environmental threats and allows trees to selectively send nutrients to other trees in the forest. A forest is a far more complex, sociable, and intelligent entity than we knew, and it is fungi that organize the arboreal society.
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"...when it wouldnt stop and they couldn't make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo."
From a short story - Incarnations of Burned Children by David Foster WallaceComment
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There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time. Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.Comment
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Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength
-Notes from Underground, Fyodor DostoevskyComment
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Who, Fyodor?
Fyodor-Dostoevsky-0.jpg
he kinda looks like the type of guy who would hit on you in a bar then keep coming back to talk to you after you've made it clear you aren't interested
thats my hot takeComment
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He would not be reconciled to the wall fa shoComment
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"Past generations had wars and depression to build men. Now the war is a spiritual one, and the depression is our lives."
C/S,
Rev JComment
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“That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.”
― Ursula Hegi
Stones from the River
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You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses.
-Notes from UndergroundComment
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Already even then I had my underground world in my soulComment
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Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Such viewers are looking for closure, for the ways in which players can bring matters to a conclusion and finish whatever remains unfinished. They are looking for the way time has exhausted itself, or will soon do so. Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema of it.
If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.
If the goal of finite play is to win titles for their timelessness, and thus eternal life for oneself, the essence of infinite play is the paradoxical engagement with temporality that Meister Eckhart called "eternal birth."Comment
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