Partial Knowledge Quotes

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We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.
Ariel Durant (The Lessons of History)
It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely
Flora Rheta Schreiber (Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities)
From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.
Donna J. Haraway
It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
Teju Cole (Open City)
it is well known that if there is anything that makes men thirstier than the acquisition of knowledge it is the full or partial prohibition of drinking.
Andrzej Sapkowski (Blood of Elves (The Witcher, #1))
For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?
Rachel Carson (The Sense of Wonder)
There is none of us whom life regards with any partiality. Sleet falls as she walks these streets, holding this knowledge inside her. Sleet that leaves cheeks and eyebrows heavy with moisture. Everything passes.
Han Kang (흰)
The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.
Alvin Toffler (Third Wave)
I thank you; but I assure you you are quite mistaken. Mr. Elton and I are very good friends, and nothing more;' and she walked on, amusing herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into; and not very well pleased with her brother for imagining her blind and ignorant, and in want of counsel.
Jane Austen (Emma)
The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality.
James George Frazer (The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, Part 1)
This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.
C.S. Lewis (God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics)
Every machine has had the same history – a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry. Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle – all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present. By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say – This is mine, not yours?
Pyotr Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread (Working Classics))
The (false) suspicion that we can somehow be separated from God is the root of every form of anxiety in the universe, and the cure for it—which I received partially within the Gateway and completely within the Core—was the knowledge that nothing can tear us from God, ever.
Eben Alexander (Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife)
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.
Hilary Mantel
Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman's bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation. To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!
Chinua Achebe (The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays)
A distinguished writer [Siméon Denis Poisson] has thus stated the fundamental definitions of the science: 'The probability of an event is the reason we have to believe that it has taken place, or that it will take place.' 'The measure of the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favourable to that event, to the total number of cases favourable or contrary, and all equally possible' (equally like to happen). From these definitions it follows that the word probability, in its mathematical acceptation, has reference to the state of our knowledge of the circumstances under which an event may happen or fail. With the degree of information which we possess concerning the circumstances of an event, the reason we have to think that it will occur, or, to use a single term, our expectation of it, will vary. Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave neither room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.
George Boole (An Investigation of the Laws of Thought)
The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things.
Ernst F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (Vintage classics))
The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance. We can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge.
David Brooks (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources Of Love, Character, And Achievement)
Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .
Roland Barthes (The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978)
The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail.
Sri Aurobindo
All knowledge is local, all knowledge is partial.
Ursula K. Le Guin
All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism. Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
Namkhai Norbu (Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State)
a laugh herself inside the consideration of the mistakes which frequently rise up from a partial knowledge of instances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into;
Jane Austen (Emma)
Thus religion, beginning as a slight and partial acknowledgment of powers superior to man, tends with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a confession of man’s entire and absolute dependence on the divine; his old free bearing is exchanged for an attitude of lowliest prostration before the mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit his will to theirs: In la sua volontade è nostra pace.
James George Frazer (The Golden Bough)
Give me a scholar, therefore, who is able to think and to write, to look with an eye of discernment into things, and to do business himself, if called upon, who hath both civil and military knowledge; one, moreover, who has been in camps, and has seen armies in the field and out of it; knows the use of arms, and machines, and warlike engines of every kind; can tell what the front, and what the horn is, how the ranks are to be disposed, how the horse is to be directed, and from whence to advance or to retreat; one, in short, who does not stay at home and trust to the reports of others: but, above all, let him be of a noble and liberal mind; let him neither fear nor hope for anything; otherwise he will only resemble those unjust judges who determine from partiality or prejudice, and give sentence for hire: but, whatever the man is, as such let him be described.
Lucian of Samosata (Lucian's True History)
He was becoming something the world had never seen before - a dream animal - living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams.
Loren Eiseley
[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.
Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)
This is what it is to have bitten the apple, and to understand for the first time why female desire and knowledge are the most feared and demonized forces in history. This is what it’s like to be a destroyer of worlds: that woman, that apple, that serpent, all at once. Even if your Eden was partially imaginary, this is what it’s like to watch the dream of it fade forever into the mist and to want to turn back the clock, to want to return, but also to never want to return, to ache to keep running. This is what it’s like to have feared your entire life becoming your martyr of a mother, and to instead have become the monster under your children’s bed. This is what it’s like to choose love.
Gina Frangello (Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason)
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.
Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
It is important to refuse to be intimidated. That refusal must not be based simply on a calculation of the odds of succeeding. At times, in my case, multiple lawsuits and an ethics charge seemed overwhelming, and the fact that I knew my work to be accurate and responsible was only partial solace. l was well aware that court, like the National Football League, is an arena in which, on any given Sunday, anybody can win. The refusal to be intimidated must come, in the end, not from a sureness of succeeding but from a knowledge of the cost of scurrying for shelter through fake retractions and disowned truths. It is a question, in the end of self-respect. Who among us could, in good faith, ever face a survivor of childhood abuse again were we to run for cover when pressed ourselves? Children are not permitted that choice, and the adults who choose to work with them and with the survivors they become cannot afford to make it. It would be a choice to become. Through betrayal and deceit, that to which we object. Our alternative, then, is not to hide. Not to refuse to treat adult survivors, not to refuse to go to court in their defense, not to apologize and retract statements we know are true, but to cultivate endurance and tenacity as carefully as we read the research. Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998
Anna C. Salter
If indeed we only have partial knowledge, it follows that a Christian perspective on politics should begin in a context of humility and love. As limited humans, we don’t have all of the answers. Instead of arrogantly proclaiming our political views, we should approach this subject, as all others, with awareness of our limitations and reliance on God’s love and wisdom
Amy E.E. Black (Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Grace, and Reason)
When ideology has become total through its possession of total power, and has changed from partial truth to totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has been so totally annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which whatever has previously happened is determined solely by its police.
Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle)
When I got to Crude Sciences at the end of the day, Dante was waiting for me at our table. This time, with no Latin book, no journal. “Hello,” he said, pulling my chair out for me. Surprised, I sat down next to him, trying not to stare at his perfectly formed arms. “Hi,” I said, with an attempt at nonchalance. “How are you?” I could feel his eyes on me. “Fine,” I said carefully, as Professor Starking handed out our lab assignments. Dante frowned. “Not very talkative today, I see.” I thrust a thermometer into the muddy water of the fish tank in front of us, which was supposed to represent an enclosed ecosystem. “So now you want to talk? Now that you’ve finished your Latin homework?” After a prolonged period of silence, he spoke. “It was research.” “Research on what?” “It doesn’t matter anymore.” I threw him a suspicious look. “Why’s that?” “Because I realized I wasn’t paying attention to the right thing.” “Which is?” I asked, looking back at the board as I smoothed out the hem of my skirt. “You.” My lips trembled as the word left his mouth. “I’m not a specimen.” “I just want to know you.” I turned to him, wanting to ask him a million questions. I settled for one. “But I can’t know anything about you?” Dante leaned back in his chair. “My favorite author is Dante, obviously,” he said, his tone mocking me. “Though I’m partial to the Russians. I’m very fond of music. All kinds, really, though I especially enjoy Mussorgsky and Stravinsky or anything involving a violin. They’re a bit dark, no? I used to like opera, but I’ve mostly grown out of it. I have a low tolerance for hot climates. I’ve never enjoyed dessert, though I once loved cherries. My favorite color is red. I often take long walks in the woods to clear my head. As a result, I have a unique knowledge of the flora and fauna of North American. And,” he said, his eyes burning through me as I pretended to focus on our lab, “I remember everything everyone has ever told me. I consider it a special talent.” Overwhelmed by the sudden influx of information, I sat there gaping, unsure of how to respond. Dante frowned. “Did I leave something out?
Yvonne Woon (Dead Beautiful (Dead Beautiful, #1))
Perceiving the ugliness and selfishness of the soul marred by sin and the effects of sin can produce scrupulosity or despair if the mercy and goodness of God is not seen in close proximity. Bernard describes well the despair that can result from a partial knowledge of self, aware only of areas of sin, isolated from knowledge of God. If he does not know how good God is (Ps. 72:1), how kind and gentle (Ps. 85:5), how willing to pardon (Is. 55:7), will not his sensually-inspired reason argue with him and say: “What are you doing?
Ralph Martin (The Fulfillment of All Desire: A Guidebook to God Based on the Wisdom of the Saints)
She said, ‘I want sharp borders, right now. I want to deal with this myself.’ ‘I understand.’ He let the partial model of her which he’d acquired as they’d made love fade from his mind, leaving only an ordinary, guesswork-driven Elena-symbol, much like those he possessed for everyone else he knew. Paolo took the responsibilities of intimacy seriously; his lover before Elena had asked him to erase all his knowledge of her, and he’d more or less complied – the only thing he still knew about her was the fact that she’d made the request.
Greg Egan (Diaspora)
page 358-359 In everyday life the exchange of opinion with others checks our partiality and widens our perspective; we are made to see things from their standpoint and the limits of our vision are brought home to us.... The benefits from discussion lie in the fact that even representative legislators are limited in knowledge and the ability to reason. No one of them knows everything the others know, or can make all tie same inferences that they can draw in concert. Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments
John Rawls (A Theory of Justice)
a stunning glimpse of Buddy, at a later date by innumerable years, quite bereft of my dubious, loving company, writing about this very party on a very large, jet-black, very moving, gorgeous typewriter. He is smoking a cigarette, occasionally clasping his hands and placing them on the top of his head in a thoughtful, exhausted manner. His hair is gray; he is older than you are now, Les! The veins in his hands are slightly prominent in the glimpse, so I have not mentioned the matter to him at all, partially considering his youthful prejudice against veins showing in poor adults’ hands. So it goes. You would think this particular glimpse would pierce the casual witness’s heart to the quick, disabling him utterly, so that he could not bring himself to discuss the glimpse in the least with his beloved, broadminded family. This is not exactly the case; it mostly makes me take an exceedingly deep breath as a simple, brisk measure against getting dizzy. It is his room that pierces me more than anything else. It is all his youthful dreams realized to the full! It has one of those beautiful windows in the ceiling that he has always, to my absolute knowledge, fervently admired from a splendid reader’s distance! All round about him, in addition, are exquisite shelves to hold his books, equipment, tablets, sharp pencils, ebony, costly typewriter, and other stirring, personal effects. Oh, my God, he will be overjoyed when he sees that room, mark my words! It is one of the most smiling, comforting glimpses of my entire life and quite possibly with the least strings attached. In a reckless manner of speaking, I would far from object if that were practically the last glimpse of my life.
J.D. Salinger (Hapworth 16, 1924)
He walked back to St George's-in-the-East, which in his mind he had now reduced to a number of surfaces against which the murderer might have leaned in sorrow, desperation or even, perhaps, joy. For this reason it was worth examining the blackened stones in detail, although he realised that the marks upon them had been deposited by many generations of men and women. It was now a matter of received knowledge in the police force that no human being could rest or move in any area without leaving some trace of his or her identity; but if the walls of the Wapping church were to be analysed by emission spectroscopy, how many partial or residual spectra might be detected? And he had an image of a mob screaming to be set free as he guided his steps towards the tower which rose above the houses cluttered around Red Maiden Lane, Crab Court and Rope Walk.
Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor)
She played a great deal better than either of the Miss Musgroves; but having no voice, no knowledge of the harp, and no fond parents to sit by and fancy themselves delighted, her performance was little thought of, only out of civility, or to refresh the others, as she was well aware. She knew that when she played she was giving pleasure only to herself; but this was no new sensation: excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, know the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste. In music she had been always used to feel alone in the world; and Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove's fond partiality for their own daughters' performance, and total indifference to any other person's, gave her much more pleasure for their sakes, than mortification for her own.
Jane Austen
Reading The Waste Land, then, is in part reading about reading in the early twentieth century. The crisis in epistemology brought on by the discrediting of objectivity is especially relevant to understanding the poem, because the problem of knowledge is itself one of its major subjects. Like Joyce, Valéry, and other contemporary writers, Eliot consciously adds a dimension in which his work is self-reflexive, a dimension in which it refers to itself and its nature as a linguistic structure, a dimension which incorporates the larger subject of the crisis in Western culture into the process of reading. The Waste Land contains, in addition to its many other gifts, a partial set of instructions on how to read in the twentieth century. We believe and shall try to demonstrate that Eliot's poem, in one of its aspects, is a brief and striking primer, a McGuffey's Eclectic Reader for the twentieth century.
Jewel Spears Brooker (Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation)
The off curve of her ear was what he had noticed first. A roundness echoed in her cheeks and her mouth. Then it was the way her body looked solid, as though meant to take up space and weight in the world. When she moved, she left behind footprints in the forest floor. Because she didn't know how to glide silently, to disturb no leaf of branch. He felt smug to see how bad she was at even such an easy thing. It was only later that it disturbed him to think back on the shape of her boot in the soil, as though she was the only real thing in a land of ghosts. He had seen her before, he supposed. But at the palace school, he really looked. He noted her skirts, spattered with mud, and her hair ribbons, partially undone. He saw her twin sister, her double, as though one of them were a changeling child and not human at all. He saw the way they whispered together while they ate, smiling over private jokes. He saw the way they answered the instructors, as though they had any right to this knowledge, had any right to be sitting among their betters. To occasionally better their betters with those answers. And the one girl was good with a sword, instructed personally by the Grand General, as though she was not some by-blow of a faithless wife.
Holly Black (How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (The Folk of the Air, #3.5))
Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re impostors. They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re committed to improving their sight. They don’t boast about how much they know; they marvel at how little they understand. They’re aware that each answer raises new questions, and the quest for knowledge is never finished. A mark of lifelong learners is recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet. Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
But it is so very hard to be an on-your-own, take-care-of-yourself-cause-there-is-no-one-else-to do-it-for-you grown-up. 27. Each of us is ultimately alone. 28. The most important things, each man must do for himself. 29. Love is not enough, but it sure helps. 30. We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that’s all there is. 31. How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it. 32. We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge. 33. All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. 34. Yet we are responsible for everything we do. 35. No excuses will be accepted.
Sheldon B. Kopp (If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients)
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not the truth, though they are part of it - information is not knowledge. And history is not the past - it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It is the record of what is left of the record. It's the plan of positions when we stop the dance to note them down.
Hilary Mantel (A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing)
All of our actions and decisions are governed by our core beliefs. Our core beliefs define the limits of what we will and will not do. You may need to change your core beliefs in order to get healthy. At this point, you know that eating more vegetables has health benefits, but you may not really feel that this life-saving information will give you control of your health destiny, save you from suffering with pain, and add many quality years to your life. Your subconscious mind hasn’t accepted it yet. For many people, the partial knowledge that they have acquired is in conflict with their core beliefs. They are unable to accept it, so their awareness of it dims and, with it, the ability to make the changes.
Joel Fuhrman (Eat For Health)
Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything to be arranged according to the dictates of our own reason; although in fact, what our reason pronounces bad is not bad as regards the order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards the laws of our own nature taken separately.45 . . . As for the terms good and bad, they indicate nothing positive considered in themselves . . . . For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead.
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
it is well known that nothing is such thirsty work as the acquisition of knowledge. Although the chancellor’s orders forbade students and tutors to drink and play before dusk, drinking and playing took place around the clock in Oxenfurt, for it is well known that if there is anything that makes men thirstier than the acquisition of knowledge it is the full or partial prohibition of drinking.
Andrzej Sapkowski (Blood of Elves (The Witcher, #1))
Dionysius the Areopagite points out that God—as the creative source of form and matter—does not exist. God is not an existing being amongst other existing beings. Hence, pure existence and pure matter do not exist, as both arise from, and are dependent upon, God. What exists is the actualized combination of timeless intellective forms partially, particularly, and uniquely expressed within space, time, matter, and energy. The mystery of the incarnation, then, is that God embodies Godself as a particular man in space and time, becoming a being amongst beings. St. John is suitably staggered that the very Reason (Logos) that gives rise to both form and matter in the material cosmos, would become concrete and particular flesh. This is truly the stunning mystery at the heart of Christianity.
Paul Tyson (De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being)
for it is well known that nothing is such thirsty work as the acquisition of knowledge. Although the chancellor’s orders forbade students and tutors to drink and play before dusk, drinking and playing took place around the clock in Oxenfurt, for it is well known that if there is anything that makes men thirstier than the acquisition of knowledge it is the full or partial prohibition of drinking.
Andrzej Sapkowski (Blood of Elves (The Witcher, #1))
The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general. They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage.
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
In Anton Chekhov’s play the Three Sisters, sister Masha refuses ‘to live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars are in the sky. Either you know and you’re alive or it’s all nonsense, all dust in the wind.’ Why? Why? The striving to know is what frees us from the bonds of self, said Einstein. It’s the striving to know, rather than our knowledge-which is always tentative and partial- that is important. Instead of putting computers in our elementary schools, we should take the children out into nature, away from those virtual worlds in which they spend unconscionable hours, and let them see an eclipsed Moon rising in the east, a pink pearl. Let them stand in a morning dawn and watch a slip of a comet fling its trail around the Sun…Let the children know. Let them know that nothing, nothing will find in the virtual world of e-games, television, or the Internet matters half as much as a glitter of strs on an inky sky, drawing our attention into the incomprehensible mystery of why the universe is here at all, and why we are here to observe it. The winter Milky Way rises in the east, one trillion individually invisible points of light, one trillion revelations of the Ultimate Mystery, conferring on the watcher a dignity, a blessedness, that confounds the dull humdrum of the commonplace and opens a window to infinity.
Chet Raymo (An Intimate Look at the Night Sky)
It is easy for a small intellect that knows only a single philosophical presentation, only one secret oral instruction, or only one system of practice, to fall prey to the idea that that is the only correct way. Being open to various traditions can free the mind from bias and partiality, bestowing the insight that perceives the interconnectedness of the various teachings and traditions, their scope, and their particular qualities: this benefit alone outweighs the danger of becoming confused when confronted by different and sometimes apparently divergent Buddhist teachings and traditions.
Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye (The Treasury of Knowledge: Book One: Myriad Worlds)
A second reason for declining to provide a date for superintelligent AI is that there is no clear threshold that will be crossed. Machines already exceed human capabilities in some areas. Those areas will broaden and deepen, and it is likely that there will be superhuman general knowledge systems, superhuman biomedical research systems, superhuman dexterous and agile robots, superhuman corporate planning systems, and so on well before we have a completely general superintelligent AI system. These “partially superintelligent” systems will, individually and collectively, begin to pose many of the same issues that a generally intelligent system would.
Stuart Russell (Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control)
At the heart of the Love Chapter, 1 Corinthians 13 (vv. 9–12), Paul used the same idea when he spoke of growing up: My knowledge is imperfect, including my knowledge about myself. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned like a child. When I grew up, I put away my childish ways, and yet even so I still see as in a mirror that offers me only reflections. But one day I’ll have perfect knowledge. Then I’ll see God and reality face-to-face. Now I know in part, but I will then understand myself fully, even as I have been fully understood. My present partial understanding comes because I see myself in a mirror darkly and dimly. (Author’s paraphrase)
David A. Seamands (Healing for Damaged Emotions)
Their dad said, “Heaven is beautiful like your mother was beautiful, but like it beauty is fleeting and once beheld for years, for decades, gold that seemed precious and unique no longer holds the significance it once held to the one who has possessed it and been possessed by it. And heaven resides in God’s breast, not the true god, for there is no true god, only many faces and many incarnations of want, of structure, of meaning. And his heart-tent is vast drawing to it those who swear allegiance to beauty and partial truth. Partial,” their father said, stroking Maggie’s arm, “because truth is independent of religion or creed or upbringing. It is a matter of the heart, separate from fact, without the limitations of doctrine. And what would heaven feel like? More of the same corrupt single-mindedness of a deity who abhors independence, who truly and fiercely fights the accumulation of knowledge in its worshipers. So the weak run to it, the road-weary, the undecided. Because God makes things easy, they do not have to make choices for themselves, they do not have to study the greater mysteries that echo like a clarion call in their souls and resonate in their hearts, seeds planted in the dark soil of their youth that are burned to chaff in the commonplace, never tilled or watered, hopeless due to acquiescence.
Lee Thompson (The Collected Songs of Sonnelion (Division, #3))
When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work. Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.
Herbert A. Simon (The Sciences of the Artificial)
Genius loci cannot be designed to order. It has to evolve, to be allowed to hapen, to grow and change from the direct efforts of those who live and work in places and care about them...No matter how sophisticated technical knowledge may be, the understanding of others' lives and problems will always be partial. Just as outsiders cannot feel their pain, so they cannot experience their sense of place. I believe, therefore, that it is impossible to make complete places in which other poeple can live. And, in a world dominated by international economic processes and global telecommunications, there can be no return to an environment of integrated and distinctive places.
Edward Relph
If buyers either are partially integrated or pose a credible threat of backward integration, they are in a position to demand bargaining concessions.9 The major automobile producers, General Motors and Ford, are well known for using the threat of self-manufacture as a bargaining lever. They engage in the practice of tapered integration, that is, producing some of their needs for a given component in-house and purchasing the rest from outside suppliers. Not only is their threat of further integration particularly credible, but also partial manufacture in-house gives them a detailed knowledge of costs which is a great aid in negotiation. Buyer power can be partially neutralized when firms in the industry offer a threat of forward integration into the buyers’ industry.
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
Just spending time together is not enough, he said. The sorts of activities you engage in are vital. Graham concluded you are driven to grow, to expand, to add to your abilities and knowledge. When you satisfy this motivation for self-expansion by incorporating aspects of your romantic partner or friend into your own skills, philosophies and self, it does more to strengthen your bond than any other act of love. This opens the door to one of the best things about misattribution of emotion. If, like those in the study, you persevere through a challenge - be it remodeling a kitchen yourself or learning how to dance the Dougie - that glowing feeling of becoming wiser, that buoyant sense of self-expansion, will be partially misattributed to the presence of the other person.
David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
What causes love, since it is a passion, is its object; and since it is a sort of affinity or agreement with the object, what causes love is the goodness or agreeableness of that object. Evil can only be loved because it seems good, because being partially good it is perceived as wholly so. And the beautiful is a form of the good: if something is agreeable in general we call it good, and if the perception of it is agreeable we call it beautiful. But goodness must be known before it can become the object of love, so knowledge itself can be said to cause love. Knowing is an activity of reason, which abstracts from things and then makes connections between them, needing to know each part and property and power of things if it is to know them perfectly. But loving is an appetite for things as they stand, and to love perfectly we need only love them as they are perceived to exist in themselves.
Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation)
What is amiss, even in the best philosophy after Democritus, is an undue emphasis on man as compared with the universe. First comes scepticism, with the Sophists, leading to a study of how we know rather than to the attempt to acquire fresh knowledge. Then comes, with Socrates, the emphasis on ethics; with Plato, the rejection of the world of sense in favour of the self-created world of pure thought; with Aristotle, the belief in purpose as the fundamental concept in science. In spite of the genius of Plato and Aristotle, their thought has vices which proved infinitely harmful. After their time, there was a decay of vigour, and a gradual recrudescence of popular superstition. A partially new outlook arose as a result of the victory of Catholic orthodoxy; but it was not until the Renaissance that philosophy regained the vigour and independence that characterize the predecessors of Socrates.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
Love is patient and  fkind; love  gdoes not envy or boast; it  his not arrogant 5or rude. It  idoes not insist on its own way; it  jis not irritable or resentful; [2] 6it  kdoes not rejoice at wrongdoing, but  lrejoices with the truth. 7 mLove bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,  eendures all things. 8Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9For  nwe know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but  owhen the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12For  pnow we see in a mirror dimly, but  qthen face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as  rI have been fully known. 13So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
The most perfect and satisfactory knowledge is that of perception but this is limited to the absolutely particular, to the individual. The comprehension of the many and the various into *one* representation is possible only through the *concept*, in other words, by omitting the differences; consequently, the concept is a very imperfect way of representing things. The particular, of course, can also be apprehended immediately as a universal, namely when it is raised to the (Platonic) *Idea*; but in this process, which I have analysed in the third book, the intellect passes beyond the limits of individuality and therefore of time; moreover, this is only an exception. These inner and essential imperfections of the intellect are further increased by a disturbance to some extent external to it but yet inevitable, namely, the influence that the *will* exerts on all its operations, as soon as that will is in any way concerned in their result. Every passion, in fact every inclination or disinclination, tinges the objects of knowledge with its colour. Most common of occurrence is the falsification of knowledge brought about by desire and hope, since they show us the scarcely possible in dazzling colours as probable and well-nigh certain, and render us almost incapable of comprehending what is opposed to it. Fear acts in a similar way; every preconceived opinion, every partiality, and, as I have said, every interest, every emotion, and every predilection of the will act in an analogous manner. Finally, to all these imperfections of the intellect we must also add the fact that it grows old with the brain; in other words, like all physiological functions, it loses its energy in later years; in this way all its imperfections are then greatly increased.” —from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne in two volumes: volume II, pp. 139-141
Arthur Schopenhauer
Even the heavens are open to the mind of Man. Man alone of all the animals has traced the pathways of the rising and the setting of the stars. Man has measured out the days and months and years. Man alone has understood and can predict the eclipses of the sun and moon for all future time, when they will occur, and whether they will be partial or total. When the mind contemplates these phenomena, it learns also knowledge of the gods. So religion is born, and with it goodness and all the virtues which make up the good life, a life which reflects the divine life. We need to be inferior to the gods in nothing except our mortality, which need in no way hinder us from living well. In explaining these things, I think that I have shown clearly enough how much superior is human nature to that of all the other animals. From which we must infer that such a shape and arrangement of our limbs and such a power of intelligence cannot have been the work of chance alone.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (The Nature of the Gods)
In a deserted stretch of the Karadj highway Munis had come face-to-face with unbridled lust, although she knew what lust was before being touched by it. The problem was that she had an unbounded awareness of things, an awareness that instilled undue caution in her, making her fearful that action would lead to ignominy, humiliation. This created in her a desire to be ordinary, average. Yet she did not truly know what it meant to be ordinary. She did not know that it meant not loving an earthworm, not genuflecting at the altar of withered leaves, not standing in prayer at the call of a lark, not climbing a mountain to see the sunrise, not staying awake all night to gaze at the Ursa Major. She did not differentiate between earth and gravel, but she distinguished the earth from the sky. She had not seen the skies of the earth, but she knew there were earths of the sky. She saw herself in an inevitable process of stagnation. She was already partially rotten within. "What can I do with this mass of trivial knowledge?" she wondered aloud. "How can I cut through it?
Shahrnush Parsipur (Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran)
It is often asserted that education is breaking down because of overspecialisation. But this is only a partial and misleading diagnosis. Specialisation is not in itself a faulty principle of education. What would be the alternative - an amateurish smattering of all major subjects? Or a lengthy studium generale in which men are forced to spend their time sniffing at subjects which they do not wish to pursue, while they are being kept away from what they want to learn? This cannot be the right answer, since it can only lead to the type of intellectual man, whom Cardinal Newman castigated -'an intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him. ,..one who is full of "views" on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day'. Such 'viewiness' is a sign of ignorance rather than knowledge. 'Shall I teach you the meaning of knowledge?' said Confucius. 'When you know a thing to recognise that you know it, and when you do not, to know that you do not know - that is knowledge.' What is at fault is not specialisation, but the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of meta- physical awareness. The sciences are being taught without any awareness of the presuppositions of science, of the meaning and significance of scientific laws, and of the place occupied by the natural sciences within the whole cosmos of human thought. The result is that the presuppositions of science are normally mistaken for its findings. Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory. In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view is implicit in their teaching and that nearly all their theories would have to change if that view changed. How could there be a rational teaching of politics without pressing all questions back to their metaphysical roots? Political thinking must necessarily become confused and end in 'double-talk' if there is a continued refusal to admit the serious study of the meta- physical and ethical problems involved. The confusion is already so great that it is legitimate to doubt the educational value of studying many of the so-called humanistic subjects. I say 'so- called' because a subject that does not make explicit its view of human nature can hardly be called humanistic. All
Ernst F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered)
The odd curve of her ear was what he had noticed first. A roundness echoed in her cheeks and her mouth. Then it was the way her body looked solid, as though meant to take up space and weight in the world. When she moved, she left behind footprints in the forest floor. Because she didn't know how to glide silently, to disturb no leaf of branch. He felt smug to see how bad she was at even such an easy thing. It was only later that it disturbed him to think back on the shape of her boot in the soil, as though she was the only real thing in a land of ghosts. He had seen her before, he supposed. But at the palace school, he really looked. He noted her skirts, spattered with mud, and her hair ribbons, partially undone. He saw her twin sister, her double, as though one of them were a changeling child and not human at all. He saw the way they whispered together while they ate, smiling over private jokes. He saw the way they answered the instructors, as though they had any right to this knowledge, had any right to be sitting among their betters. To occasionally better their betters with those answers. And the one girl was good with a sword, instructed personally by the Grand General, as though she was not some by-blow of a faithless wife.
Holly Black (How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (The Folk of the Air, #3.5))
To Harry James Potter,’” he read, and Harry’s insides contracted with a sudden excitement, “‘I leave the Snitch he caught in his first Quidditch match at Hogwarts, as a reminder of the rewards of perseverance and skill.’” As Scrimgeour pulled out the tiny, walnut-sized golden ball, its silver wings fluttered rather feebly, and Harry could not help feeling a definite sense of anticlimax. “Why did Dumbledore leave you this Snitch?” asked Scrimgeour. “No idea,” said Harry. “For the reasons you just read out, I supposed . . . to remind me what you can get if you . . . persevere and whatever it was.” “You think this a mere symbolic keepsake, then?” “I suppose so,” said Harry. “What else could it be?” “I’m asking the questions,” said Scrimgeour, shifting his chair a little closer to the sofa. Dusk was really falling outside now; the marquee beyond the windows towered ghostly white over the hedge. “I notice that your birthday cake is in the shape of a Snitch,” Scrimgeour said to Harry. “Why is that?” Hermione laughed derisively. “Oh, it can’t be a reference to the fact Harry’s a great Seeker, that’s way too obvious,” she said. “There must be a secret message from Dumbledore hidden in the icing!” “I don’t think there’s anything hidden in the icing,” said Scrimgeour, “but a Snitch would be a very good hiding place for a small object. You know why, I’m sure?” Harry shrugged. Hermione, however, answered: Harry thought that answering questions correctly was such a deeply ingrained habit she could not suppress the urge. “Because Snitches have flesh memories,” she said. “What?” said Harry and Ron together; both considered Hermione’s Quidditch knowledge negligible. “Correct,” said Scrimgeour. “A Snitch is not touched by bare skin before it is released, not even by the maker, who wears gloves. It carries an enchantment by which it can identify the first human to lay hands upon it, in case of a disputed capture. This Snitch”—he held up the tiny golden ball—“will remember your touch, Potter. It occurs to me that Dumbledore, who had prodigious magical skill, whatever his other faults, might have enchanted this Snitch so that it will open only for you.” Harry’s heart was beating rather fast. He was sure that Scrimgeour was right. How could he avoid taking the Snitch with his bare hand in front of the Minister? “You don’t say anything,” said Scrimgeour. “Perhaps you already know what the Snitch contains?” “No,” said Harry, still wondering how he could appear to touch the Snitch without really doing so. If only he knew Legilimency, really knew it, and could read Hermione’s mind; he could practically hear her brain whirring beside him. “Take it,” said Scrimgeour quietly. Harry met the Minister’s yellow eyes and knew he had no option but to obey. He held out his hand, and Scrimgeour leaned forward again and placed the Snitch, slowly and deliberately, into Harry’s palm. Nothing happened. As Harry’s fingers closed around the Snitch, its tired wings fluttered and were still. Scrimgeour, Ron, and Hermione continued to gaze avidly at the now partially concealed ball, as if still hoping it might transform in some way. “That was dramatic,” said Harry coolly. Both Ron and Hermione laughed. “That’s all, then, is it?” asked Hermione, making to prise herself off the sofa. “Not quite,” said Scrimgeour, who looked bad-tempered now. “Dumbledore left you a second bequest, Potter.” “What is it?” asked Harry, excitement rekindling. Scrimgeour did not bother to read from the will this time. “The sword of Godric Gryffindor,” he said. Hermione and Ron both stiffened. Harry looked around for a sign of the ruby-encrusted hilt, but Scrimgeour did not pull the sword from the leather pouch, which in any case looked much too small to contain it.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7))
No one was more curious and excited about other cultures and peoples than Caroline. She sometimes still remembered facts about cultures, ancient secrets and rituals, sites of ruins that excited her when she talked about them. But her knowledge was partial where it had once been whole, her frequency of recall erratic and often fuzzy, like a station she couldn’t quite get tuned in on the dial so that it was clear. The drugs that had been given her on the night she was gang-raped in Cozumel had scrambled her memories permanently, and sent her knowledge into dark scattered corners where she could no longer access them at will. Most of the time, she couldn’t access them at all. When she did remember, she wrote it down on little notes she kept in her pockets. She had an I-Phone now, and sometimes she would transfer some of the notes to there, and to an I-Pad we kept around Sweet Caroline for that purpose. But Caroline still kept her paper notes, not trusting technology any more than I did. She took no chances, except the chance she’d taken on me, trusting me, letting me love her. From the outside, it might have appeared as though she needed me more than I needed her, but only to those who didn’t know I’d crossed a moral line from which I might never have returned had it not been for the strength and spirit of Caroline.
Bobby Underwood (Eight Blonde Dolls (Seth Halliday #3))
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild Clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent—others merely SENSIBLE, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot. In short, all good things are wild and free.
Henry David Thoreau (Walking)
The argument between nature and our species is certainly not restricted to measurements of the physical universe. It includes the great variety of possible human reactions and responses to nature that the social sciences and humanities have also described. The manner in which the argument is now being conducted is less a struggle for control and more a desire for participation. Western peoples have previously believed that scientific knowledge could indefinitely provide them with techniques to control and understand nature. They partially accomplished this goal by reducing the phenomena of nature to objects valuable only because they could be measured and modified. Even while technological progress continues, scientists are retreating from an absolute stance that purports to explain everything in theoretical terms. “The primary significance of modern physics lies not in any disclosure of the fundamental nature of reality,” Ian Barbour writes, “but in the recognition of the limitations of science.”31 If we have knowledge of nature at all, we must conceive it as a “modest, sharply delimited sector of, and extract from, the multiplicity of phenomena observed by our senses,”32 Heisenberg argued. Complete knowledge of the world, either in the scientific or philosophical sense, would require the reintroduction of factors previously omitted from consideration. The metaphysical task that brings together all facets of human knowledge
Vine Deloria Jr. (Metaphysics of Modern Existence)
Knowledge as a whole has its triadic movement. It begins with sense-perception, in which there is only awareness of the object. Then, through sceptical criticism of the senses, it becomes purely subjective. At last, it reaches the stage of self-knowledge, in which subject and object are no longer distinct. Thus self-consciousness is the highest form of knowledge. This, of course, must be the case in Hegel's system, for the highest kind of knowledge must be that possessed by the Absolute, and as the Absolute is the Whole there is nothing outside itself for it to know. In the best thinking, according to Hegel, thoughts become fluent and interfuse. Truth and falsehood are not sharply defined opposites, as is commonly supposed; nothing is wholly false, and nothing that we can know is wholly true. 'We can know in a way that is false'; this happens when we attribute absolute truth to some detached piece of information. Such a question as 'Where was Caesar born?' has a straightforward answer, which is true in a sense, but not in the philosophical sense. For philosophy, 'the truth is the whole', and nothing partial is quite true. 'Reason,' Hegel says, 'is the conscious certainty of being all reality.' This does not mean that a separate person is all reality; in his separateness he is not quite real, but what is real in him is his participation in Reality as a whole. In proportion as we become more rational, this participation is increased.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
Evolution is largely a temporal phenomenon, Merrill. The environment changes, and populations in that environment change in turn, or they languish. Individual organisms don't evolve; populations do. Nature doesn't give a damn about individuals. The only role we play in evolution is surviving long enough to give birth to offspring who are slightly different from us. Some of our offspring will prosper in a changing environment, and some of them will not. As for us individuals, once we've reproduced, nature has no more use for us. We perish along with our ill-adapted young. Death has always been an essential factor in species survival. Now consider the human race. We are a partial exception to the rule. Unlike other species, we have developed culture. Instead of adapting to a changing environment biologically, we can sometimes adapt to it culturally. If an Ice Age comes along, we don't need to grow fur on our bodies if we invent the fur coat. Culture allows us to adapt to almost any environment, including the harshest, like space. In fact, our cultural adaptation is so robust that it all but obviates the need to evolve biologically. We are so good at adapting to changing conditions with our knowledge and technology that we may deceive ourselves into believing that we are above nature. But only a fools believes that. Nature always has the last word. A star in our neighborhood could go supernova and wipe out all life in our solar system, and no amount of culture could save us from that. That, I believe, is the main reason you want to seed humanity throughout the galaxy. So as not to have all our eggs in one basket... The chief difference between biological and cultural adaptation is that while biological evolution doesn't care about individuals, cultural evolution does, often at the expense of the species. Look at how many times we've nearly wiped ourselves out through cultural means: the nuclear bomb, pollution, climate change, the Outrage. We can't seem to help ourselves. Look at what we've done: we've made individuals all but immortal, even when it means we can have no more children. In one stroke, we've eliminated the two key ingredients of evolution: offspring and death. From a biological perspective, we're skating on mighty thin ice. ... ...as long as the individual reigns supreme, there's a finite limit to our survival. ... We need a means for the individual, not just the species, to participate in biological evolution, and that's what my project is all about. We need to be able to let our biological bodies die, to have offspring that are molded by the changing needs of the environments we find ourselves in, and yet to serially inhabit these bodies as the same individual. That means we need to be able to move our minds from one body to the next. ... Mine is a singularity in which the obsolete individual is invited to cross over to the new, not simply to die out. The existing person need not die to make room for the newcomer. Anyone can play.
David Marusek (Mind Over Ship)
In his well-known statement in the Poetics that poetry has a higher truth than history since it expresses truth of general application whereas that of history is partial and limited, he is not speaking as a scientist nor would the statement commend itself to the scientific mind outside of Greece. There is no evidence, again, of the scientist’s point of view in the great passage where he sets forth the reason for the work of his life, his search into the nature of all living things: The glory, doubtless, of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than the contemplation of these lowly things, but the heavens are high and far off, and the knowledge of celestial things that our senses give us, is scanty and dim. Living creatures, on the contrary, are at our door, and if we so desire we may gain full and certain knowledge of each and all. We take pleasure in a statue’s beauty; should not then the living fill us with delight? And all the more if in the spirit of the love of knowledge we search for causes and bring to light evidences of meaning. Then will nature’s purpose and her deep-seated laws be revealed in all things, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another of the beautiful. Did ever scientist outside of Greece so state the object of scientific research? To Aristotle, being a Greek, it was apparent that the full purpose of that high enterprise could not be expressed in any way except the way of poetry, and, being a Greek, he was able so to express it. Spirituality inevitably brings to our mind
Edith Hamilton (The Greek Way)
There Is No Freedom of Thought I do not know if it is clear to each one of us that we live in a state of contradiction. We talk about peace, and prepare for war. We talk about nonviolence, and are fundamentally violent. We talk about being good, and we are not. We talk about love, and we are full of ambition, competitiveness, ruthless efficiency. So there is contradiction. The action that springs from that contradiction only brings about frustration and further contradiction…. You see, sirs, all thought is partial, it can never be total. Thought is the response of memory, and memory is always partial because memory is the result of experience, so thought is the reaction of a mind that is conditioned by experience. All thinking, all experience, all knowledge is inevitably partial; therefore, thought cannot solve the many problems that we have. You may try to reason logically, sanely, about these many problems, but if you observe your own mind you will see that your thinking is conditioned by your circumstances, by the culture in which you were born, by the food you eat, by the climate you live in, by the newspapers you read, by the pressures and influences of your daily life…. So we must understand very clearly that our thinking is the response of memory, and memory is mechanistic. Knowledge is ever incomplete, and all thinking born of knowledge is limited, partial, never free. So there is no freedom of thought. But we can begin to discover a freedom which is not a process of thought, and in which the mind is simply aware of all its conflicts and of all the influences impinging upon it.
J. Krishnamurti (The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti)
In another building, I was shown his [Mr Brunel's] manufactory of shoes, which, like the other, is full of ingenuity, and, in regard to subdivision of labour, brings this fabric on a level with the oft-admired manufactory of pins. Every step in it is effected by the most elegant and precise machinery; while as each operation is performed by one hand, so each shoe passes through twenty-five hands, who complete from the hide, as supplied by the currier, a hundred pair of strong and well-finished shoes per day. All the details are performed by ingenious applications of the mechanic powers, and all the parts are characterized by precision, uniformity, and accuracy. As each man performs but one step in the process, which implies no knowledge of what is done by those who go before or follow him, so the persons employed are not shoemakers, but wounded soldiers, who are able to learn their respective duties in a few hours. The contract at which these shoes are delivered to government is 6s. 6d. per pair, being at least 2s. less than what was paid previously for an unequal and cobbled article. While, however, we admire these triumphs of mechanics, and congratulate society on the prospect of enjoying more luxuries at less cost of human labour, it ought not to be forgotten, that the general good in such cases is productive of great partial evils, against which a paternal government ought to provide. No race of workmen being proverbially more industrious than shoemakers, it is altogether unreasonable, that so large a portion of valuable members of society should be injured by improvements which have the ultimate effect of benefiting the whole.
Richard Phillips (A Morning's Walk from London to Kew)
That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
To wit, researchers recruited a large group of college students for a seven-day study. The participants were assigned to one of three experimental conditions. On day 1, all the participants learned a novel, artificial grammar, rather like learning a new computer coding language or a new form of algebra. It was just the type of memory task that REM sleep is known to promote. Everyone learned the new material to a high degree of proficiency on that first day—around 90 percent accuracy. Then, a week later, the participants were tested to see how much of that information had been solidified by the six nights of intervening sleep. What distinguished the three groups was the type of sleep they had. In the first group—the control condition—participants were allowed to sleep naturally and fully for all intervening nights. In the second group, the experimenters got the students a little drunk just before bed on the first night after daytime learning. They loaded up the participants with two to three shots of vodka mixed with orange juice, standardizing the specific blood alcohol amount on the basis of gender and body weight. In the third group, they allowed the participants to sleep naturally on the first and even the second night after learning, and then got them similarly drunk before bed on night 3. Note that all three groups learned the material on day 1 while sober, and were tested while sober on day 7. This way, any difference in memory among the three groups could not be explained by the direct effects of alcohol on memory formation or later recall, but must be due to the disruption of the memory facilitation that occurred in between. On day 7, participants in the control condition remembered everything they had originally learned, even showing an enhancement of abstraction and retention of knowledge relative to initial levels of learning, just as we’d expect from good sleep. In contrast, those who had their sleep laced with alcohol on the first night after learning suffered what can conservatively be described as partial amnesia seven days later, forgetting more than 50 percent of all that original knowledge. This fits well with evidence we discussed earlier: that of the brain’s non-negotiable requirement for sleep the first night after learning for the purposes of memory processing. The real surprise came in the results of the third group of participants. Despite getting two full nights of natural sleep after initial learning, having their sleep doused with alcohol on the third night still resulted in almost the same degree of amnesia—40 percent of the knowledge they had worked so hard to establish on day 1 was forgotten.
Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
Reaching the door of his mother’s apartments, Marcus found it locked. He rattled the handle violently. “Open it,” he bellowed. “Open it now!” Silence, and then a maid’s frightened reply from within. “Milord… the countess bade me to tell you that she is resting.” “I’ll send her to her eternal fucking rest,” Marcus roared, “if this door isn’t opened now.” “Milord, please—” He drew back three or four paces and hurled himself against the door, which shook on its hinges and partially gave with a splintering sound. There were fearful cries in the hallway from a pair of female guests who happened to witness the astonishing display of raging frenzy. “Dear God,” one exclaimed to the other, “he’s gone berserk!” Marcus drew back again and lunged at the door, this time sending chunks of paneling flying. He felt Simon Hunt’s hands grasp him from behind, and he whirled with his fist drawn back, ready to launch an attack on all fronts. “Jesus,” Hunt muttered, retreating a step or two with his hands raised in a defensive gesture. His face was taut and his eyes were wide, and he stared at Marcus as if he were a stranger. “Westcliff—” “Stay the hell out of my way!” “Gladly. But let me point out that if our positions were reversed, you would be the first to tell me to keep a cool—” Ignoring him, Marcus swerved back to the door and targeted the disjointed lock with a powerful, accurately aimed blow of his boot heel. The housemaid’s scream shot through the doorway as the ruined portal swung open. Bursting into the receiving room, Marcus charged toward the bedchamber, where the countess sat in a chair by a small hearth fire. Fully dressed and swathed in ropes of pearls, she stared at him with amused disdain. Breathing heavily, Marcus advanced on her with bloodlust racing through his veins. It was certain that the countess had no idea that she was in mortal danger, or she would not have received him so calmly. “Full of animal spirits today, are we?” she asked. “Your descent from gentleman to savage brute has been accomplished so very quickly. I must offer Miss Bowman my compliments on her efficacy.” “What have you done with her?” “Done with her?” Her expression taunted him with its innocent perplexity. “What the devil do you mean, Westcliff?” “You met with her at Butterfly Court this morning.” “I never walk that far from the manor,” the countess said haughtily. “What a ridiculous asser—” She let out a strident cry as Marcus seized her, his fingers wrapping around the pearl ropes and tightening them around her throat. “Tell me where she is, or I’ll snap your neck like a wishbone!” Simon Hunt seized him from behind once more, determined to prevent a murder from occurring. “Westcliff!” Marcus closed his hand in a harder grip around the pearls. He glared without blinking into his mother’s face, not missing the flicker of vindictive triumph that lurked in her eyes. He did not take his gaze from hers even as he heard his sister Livia’s voice. “Marcus,” she said urgently. “Marcus, listen to me! You have my permission to throttle her later. I’ll even help. But at least wait until we’ve found out what she’s done.” Marcus tightened the tension of the pearls until the elderly woman’s eyes seemed to protrude from their shallow sockets. “Your only value to me,” he said in a low tone, “is your knowledge of Lillian Bowman’s whereabouts. If I can’t obtain that from you, I’ll send you to the devil. Tell me, or I’ll choke it from you. And believe that I have enough of my father in me to do it without a second thought.
Lisa Kleypas (It Happened One Autumn (Wallflowers, #2))
But, all joking apart, there are more serious objections. The sociology of knowledge is not only self-destructive, not only a rather gratifying object of socio-analysis, it also shows an astounding failure to understand precisely its main subject, the social aspects of knowledge, or rather, of scientific method. It looks upon science or knowledge as a process in the mind or ‘consciousness’ of the individual scientist, or perhaps as the product of such a process. If considered in this way, what we call scientific objectivity must indeed become completely ununderstandable, or even impossible; and not only in the social or political sciences, where class interests and similar hidden motives may play a part, but just as much in the natural sciences. Everyone who has an inkling of the history of the natural sciences is aware of the passionate tenacity which characterizes many of its quarrels. No amount of political partiality can influence political theories more strongly than the partiality shown by some natural scientists in favour of their intellectual offspring. If scientific objectivity were founded, as the sociologistic theory of knowledge naïvely assumes, upon the individual scientist’s impartiality or objectivity, then we should have to say good-bye to it. Indeed, we must be in a way more radically sceptical than the sociology of knowledge; for there is no doubt that we are all suffering under our own system of prejudices (or ‘total ideologies’, if this term is preferred); that we all take many things as self-evident, that we accept them uncritically and even with the naïve and cocksure belief that criticism is quite unnecessary; and scientists are no exception to this rule, even though they may have superficially purged themselves from some of their prejudices in their particular field. But they have not purged themselves by socio-analysis or any similar method; they have not attempted to climb to a higher plane from which they can understand, socio-analyse, and expurgate their ideological follies. For by making their minds more ‘objective’ they could not possibly attain to what we call ‘scientific objectivity’. No, what we usually mean by this term rests on different grounds8. It is a matter of scientific method. And, ironically enough, objectivity is closely bound up with the social aspect of scientific method, with the fact that science and scientific objectivity do not (and cannot) result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be ‘objective’, but from the friendly-hostile co-operation of many scientists. Scientific objectivity can be described as the intersubjectivity of scientific method. But this social aspect of science is almost entirely neglected by those who call themselves sociologists of knowledge.
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
Gnan (knowledge) of every living being of the entire world exists in a Soul. However, only the Gnan that is able to see the ego and everything as gneya (object to be known) is considered as 'Gnan'. Yet, that is still ansh-gnan (partial knowledge), and is considered as upayog (applied awareness as the Self) from that moment on. Where there is Gnan, there is upayog, either partially or completely.
Dada Bhagwan (Simple & Effective Science for Self Realization)
First, the subjects we teach are as large and complex as life so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. Second, the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole and respond to them wisely in the moment requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve.
Parker J. Palmer (The Courage to Teach: A Guide for Reflection and Renewal)
...when a seemingly neutral data collection mechanism is substituted for ethical conflict about the contents of the forms, the moral debate is partially erased. One may get ever more precise knowledge, without having resolved deeper questions, and indeed, by burying those questions.
Geoffrey Bowker; Susan Leigh Starr
And partially it was exciting because of the eagerness on the part of students of all ethnicities to engage in what Foucault has called, "the insurrection of subjugated knowledges." To teach a course on Black women writers and have hundreds of the students signing up, that let's you know that there has been a transformation in the academy.
bell hooks (Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life)
It is of the very nature of partial seeing that we cannot see all the reconciliation of the parts we see, because it is only in the whole that they are one, and we do not see the whole. The word we form cannot wholly express God: only the Word He generates can do that. To be irked at this necessary darkness is as though we were irked at not being God.
Frank Sheed (Theology and Sanity)
One of the worst disconnects of a business software development effort is seen in the gap between domain experts and software developers. Generally speaking, true domain experts are focused on delivering business value. On the other hand, software developers are typically drawn to technology and technical solutions to business problems. It’s not that software developers have wrong motivations; it’s just what tends to grab their attention. Even when software developers engage with domain experts, the collaboration is largely at a surface level, and the software that gets developed often results in a translation/mapping between how the business thinks and operates and how the software developer interprets that. The resulting software generally does not reflect a recognizable realization of the mental model of the domain experts, or perhaps it does so only partially. Over time this disconnect becomes costly. The translation of domain knowledge into software is lost as developers transition to other projects or leave the company. A different, yet related problem is when one or more domain experts do not agree with each other. This tends to happen because each expert has more or less experience in the specific domain being modeled, or they are simply experts in related but different areas. It’s also common for multiple “domain experts” to have no expertise in a given domain, where they are more of a business analyst, yet they are expected to bring insightful direction to discussions. When this situation goes unchecked, it results in blurred rather than crisp mental models, which lead to conflicting software models. Worse still is when the technical approach to software development actually wrongly changes the way the business functions. While a different scenario, it is well known that enterprise resource planning (ERP) software will often change the overall business operations of an organization to fit the way the ERP functions. The total cost of owning the ERP cannot be fully calculated in terms of license and maintenance fees. The reorganization and disruption to the business can be far more costly than either of those two tangible factors. A similar dynamic is at play as your software development teams interpret what the business needs into what the newly developed software actually does. This can be both costly and disruptive to the business, its customers, and its partners. Furthermore, this technical interpretation is both unnecessary and avoidable with the use of proven software development techniques. The solution is a key investment.
Vaughn Vernon (Implementing Domain-Driven Design)
The third preliminary problem for every theory of reality is that of the experience of transcendence. We saw in the case of Berkeley that his erroneous principle *percipi est esse*, and his assertion that any being which we think, just for the reason that it is thought, cannot at the same time be regarded as subsisting independently of thinking, incorporate a failure to recognize the consciousness of transcendence peculiar to all intentional acts. This is an instance of the failure to recognize that not only all thinking in the narrower sense, in the sense of grasping an object on the basis of “meanings” and grasping a state of affairs through judgments, but *every* intention in general, whether perception, representation, remembering, the feeling of value, or the posing of ends and goals, points beyond the act and the contents of the act and intends something other than the act [*ein Aktfremdes*], even when what is thought is in turn itself a thought. Indeed, *intentio* signifies a goal-directed movement toward something which one does not have oneself or has only partially and incompletely. Berkeley (following Locke, who was the first to make the basic philosophical error which introduced “psychologism” into epistemology) arrived at the principle *esse est percipi* by making the idea [*Vorstellung*] (and even the sensation) into a thing, an immaterial substance, and by failing to distinguish between the act, the content of an act, and the object. Furthermore, Berkeley confused the being of objects with the fact of being-an-object, even though the latter has only a loose and variable connection with the former. On the other hand, the transcendence of the intentional object with respect to both the *intentio* and its present content is common to every instance of being-an-object. It is, for instance, proper to objects of pure mathematics which are certainly not real but ideal (for example, the number 3). These are produced from the *a priori* material of intuition in accordance with an operational law governing the steps of our thought or intuition. Transcendence is further proper to all fictitious objects and even to contradictory objects, for instance, a square circle. All these sorts of objects, e.g., the golden mountain or Little Red Riding Hood, satisfy the basic principle of the transcendence of objects over and above that aspect of them which is, at any moment, given in consciousness, just as much as do real objects existing independently of all consciousness and knowledge." ―from_Idealism and Realism_
Max Scheler
God’s authority is original and absolute, while all human authority is derivative and limited. God’s judgments are always perfectly holy and righteous, while human judgments are tainted by sin. God’s judgments are based on perfect, exhaustive knowledge of the facts of the case, while human judgments must be based on partial, imperfect knowledge
Vern Sheridan Poythress (The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses)
Can you give us some examples of the intangible benefits being conveyed by a salesperson? Absolutely. Here’s a partial list of some of the things you might bring to the table in a sale: • Integrity • Honesty • Thought leadership • Competence • Confidence • Capability • Responsiveness • Accountability • Follow-through • Comfort level • Humility • Attitude • Vision • Being forthright • Humor • Knowledge • Experience • Expertise • Understanding • Empathy • Caring …just to name a few. Of course, I can keep going. A successful rep is also hardworking, diligent, well prepared, credible, purposeful, professional, relevant, and customer focused, rather than self-serving. Are these intangible benefits important in the strategic sales process? You bet they are! In fact, your ability to convey many of these qualities in a short period of time is likely to be the difference between gaining the customer’s trust or losing the sale. The challenge for sellers is knowing how to convey this much intangible value without trying to personally claim it.
Thomas Freese (Secrets of Question-Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results (Top Selling Books to Increase Profit, Money Books for Growth))
Anderson’s use of the word ‘grotesque’ is quite important in this context. In its usual sense in reference to human beings it connotes disgust or revulsion, but Anderson’s use is quite different. To him a grotesque is, as he points out later, like the twisted apples that are left behind in the orchards because they are imperfect. These apples, he says, are the sweetest of all, perhaps even because of the imperfections that have caused them to be rejected. He approaches the people in his stories as he does the apples, secure in his knowledge that the sources or natures of their deformities are unimportant when compared to their intrinsic worth as human beings needing and deserving of understanding. This approach is based on intuition rather than objective knowledge, and it is the same sort of intuition with which one approaches the twisted apples; he believes that one dare not reject because of mere appearance, either physical or spiritual; that appearance may mask a significant experience made more intense and more worthwhile by the deformity itself. In the body of the work proper, following this introductory sketch, Anderson has set up an organizational pattern that no only gives partial unity to the book but explores systematically the diverse origins of the isolation of his people, each of whom is in effect a social displaced person because he is cut off from human intercourse with his fellow human beings. In the first three stories Anderson deals with three aspects of the problem of human isolation. The first story, ‘Hands,’ deals with the inability to communicate feeling; the second, ‘Paper Pills,’ is devoted to the inability to communicate thought; and the third, ‘Mother,’ focuses on the inability to communicate love. This three-phased examination of the basic problem of human isolation sets the tone for the rest of the book because these three shortcomings, resulting partially from the narrowness of the vision of each central figure but primarily from the lack of sympathy with which the contemporaries of each regard him, are the real creators of the grotesques in human nature. Each of the three characters has encountered one aspect of the problem: he has something that he feels is vital and real within himself that he wants desperately to reveal to others, but in each case he is rebuffed, and, turning in upon himself, he becomes a bit more twisted and worn spiritually. But, like the apples left in the orchards, he is the sweeter, the more human for it. In each case the inner vision of the main character remains clear, and the thing that he wishes to communicate is in itself good, but his inability to break through the shell that prevents him from talking to others results in misunderstanding and spiritual tragedy. David D. Anderson “Sherwood Anderson’s Moments of Insight
David D. Anderson (Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation (American Authors and Critics Series))
The cards dealt at blackjack also seem to appear at random but not if you “track the shuffle,” which is a way to beat the game by watching the order in which the discarded cards are stacked, then mathematically analyzing the particular shuffling technique being used, leading to a partial prediction of the new ordering of the cards for the next deal. The likelihood of any card being the one that is dealt next is not random if you count the cards. What appears random for one state of knowledge may not be if we are given more information. Future prices are not predictable and no one can beat the market, but only when market prices “truly” fluctuate randomly.
Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
Contrary to some popular opinions and partial teachings, Zen is not, in the end, opposed to rational thought. But it does teach that we need to dig down beneath discursive reasoning by means of meditation, reconnecting intellectual knowledge to a deeper, more holistic wisdom.
Bret W. Davis (Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism)
There are many who call themselves after the name of Christ, who are yet outside the Church of Christ. Theirs is in every way a woeful lot. To be so near Jesus, and yet not to be of his blessed fold,—to be within reach of his unsearchable riches, and yet to miss of them, to be so blessed by his neighborhood, and yet not to be savingly united to him,—this is indeed a desolation. Their creed is words: it is not life. They know not the redeeming grace of Jesus rightly. They understand not the mysterious dispositions of his Sacred Heart. They disesteem his hidden Sacraments. They know God only wrongly and partially. Their knowledge is neither light nor love. Every thing about Jesus, the merest accessory of his Church, the faintest vestige of his benediction, the very shadow of his likeness, is of such surpassing importance, that for the least of these things the whole world would be but a paltry price to pay. The gift of being in the true Church is the greatest of all God’s gifts which can be given out of heaven. We cannot exaggerate its value. It is the pearl beyond price. Hence also the woefulness of being out of the Church is not to be told in words. I doubt if it is even to be compassed in thought. What, then, if we had so far lost Jesus, as to be out of his Church? Unbearable thought! yet not without some sweetness, as it makes us feel more keenly how indispensable he is to us, and what a merciful good-fortune he has given us to enjoy.
Frederick William Faber (The Precious Blood)
DETERMINISM AND PROBABILITY We may understand determinism as “the thesis that there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future” (Van Inwagen, 1983, used by Dennet in his Edinburgh University lecture). But, a theory, or a thesis, must be based on our concepts, knowledge, and understanding of reality. Our very concepts, understanding, and conclusions about reality may be only partially correct or accidental since there is not enough knowledge (not to mention evidence) to support the particular theory or thesis. In light of these ideas, it would not only be more economical but also prudent and wise to consider the reality out and beyond the customary spectrum and, by doing this, to come to conclusions or theories that would more significantly, possibly more accurately, reflect not only our ideas but the reality itself as it could be, beyond established and accepted paradigms, and, ideally, reflect the reality as it is. In that way, we would provide the ground (or possible grounds, or open the possibility) for defining the actual reality in a more tangible or, ideally, more accurate and useful manner than defining ideas and concepts based on theories, which may very well be, more or less, futile attempts to define the indefinable, depending on the degree of accuracy of any single approach. Dennett uses the example of quantum physics to prove that “at any instant, there are many possible futures, and they are completely undetermined.” Once the organism of the Universe is in motion, its destiny is determined to a large extent. This destiny will be different if the same Universe starts motion (walk, experience, life) at any other “moment.” Every destiny of every new Universe or revival is different. That is the potential of the Absolute. This potential or its variations are not known even by the omnipotent intellect or God. Even an “intellect, which knew all the forces that animate Nature at any given moment,” could not know precisely how its potential “materialized” in every new birth, revival, and cycle.
Dejan Stojanovic (ABSOLUTE (THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS))
There can be no right to truth except recognition and knowledge of truth. Once we try to establish the right to truth and God, we leave the territory of truth and enter the domain of demagogy and deceit. The truth is an almost absolute category, and the same applies to God. What is indisputable or nearly absolute can only be partially known. Still, major monotheistic religions not only steal God, but they steal him (It) absolutely, not somewhat.
Dejan Stojanovic (ABSOLUTE (THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS))
In history, power stems only partially from knowing the truth. It also stems from the ability to maintain social order among a large number of people. Suppose you want to make an atom bomb. To succeed, you obviously need some accurate knowledge of physics. But you also need lots of people to mine uranium ore, build nuclear reactors, and provide food for the construction workers, miners, and physicists. The Manhattan Project directly employed about 130,000 people, with millions more working to sustain them. Robert Oppenheimer could devote himself to his equations because he relied on thousands of miners to extract uranium at the Eldorado mine in northern Canada and the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo —not to mention the farmers who grew potatoes for his lunch. If you want to make an atom bomb, you must find a way to make millions of people cooperate.
Yuval Noah Harari (Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI)
Those few single ones who, on the essential paths of grounding Dasein (poetry—thinking—deed—sacrifice), ground in advance the sites and moments for the realms of beings. In this way they create the essentially occurring possibility for the various shelterings of truth in which Da-sein becomes historical. Those numerous affiliated ones to whom it is given, in virtue of their understanding of the knowing will and of the groundings of the single ones, to surmise and to make visible, by carrying them out, the laws of the re-creation of beings as well as the laws of the preservation of the earth and of the projection of the world in the strife between earth and world. Those many who are referred to one another according to their common historical (earthly-worldly) origin, through whom and for whom the re-creation of beings and thereby the grounding of the truth of the event acquire constancy. The single ones, the few, and the many (not taken in terms of their numbers, but with respect to their distinctiveness) still partially stand in the old, common, and planned orders, which are either only a shell-like safeguard of the precarious continuance of the single ones, the few, and the many or the guiding power of their will.     The agreement among these single, few, and many ones is hidden, is not fabricated, and grows suddenly and for itself.     This agreement is pervaded by the essential occurrence (different in each case) of the event, wherein an original gathering is prepared. In this gathering and as this gathering, that which may be called a people becomes historical. In its origin and destiny this people is unique, in accord with the uniqueness of beyng itself, whose truth this people must ground once and for all in a unique site and a unique moment. How can this decision be prepared? Do knowledge and will have a space at their disposal, or would that amount merely to a blind intrusion into hidden necessities? Yet necessities shine forth only in a plight. The preparing of a preparedness for the decision certainly stands in the plight of merely hastening, in the end, the snowballing lack of history and of hardening its conditions, whereas this preparing indeed wants the opposite. Whoever does not know about this plight cannot surmise a shadow of the impending decisions. The decision takes place in stillness. In that way, however, the destruction of the possibility of decision results afortiori, through the impending inexorability of the uprooting. The decision and its necessity and even its preparation remain all the more difficult to perceive, the more the incidents of “world-historical” revolutions require clamor and the more exclusively all hearing and listening respond only to the gigantic and loud and allow everything in the opposite condition, even the great stillness, to sink into nullity.
Martin Heidegger (Contributions to Philosophy: (Of the Event) (Studies in Continental Thought))
A boy can be said to have partial knowledge of the counties of England, if he knows some of them and does not know others. But he could not be said to have incomplete knowledge of Sussex being an English county.
Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind)
enter your mind, in which case a two-stage inference chain is assembled, governed by two probabilistic parameters, P(False alarm) and P(Prank call). Later, when the possibility of an earthquake enters consideration, the parameter P(False alarm) undergoes a partial explication; a fragment of knowledge is brought over from the remote frame of earthquake experiences and is appended to the link Burglary → Alarm as an alternative cause or explanation. The catchall hypothesis All other causes shrinks (to exclude earthquakes), and its parameters are readjusted. The radio announcement strengthens your suspicion in the earthquake hypothesis and permits you to properly readjust your decisions without elaborating the mechanics of the pressure transducer used in the alarm system. The remote possibility of having forgotten to push the reset button will
Judea Pearl (Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Representation and Reasoning))