By Chris Dick|2020-05-01T13:59:42-04:00May 1st, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: ageing, health, poetry|
Camera Obscura I Have Cobwebs in My Eyes I have cobwebs in my eyes -- real or metaphorical? Real says the white coat -- fluid detaches, hardens, black strings float like spastic spiders on the edges of my view. What of my mind’s eye -- something skitters in there too. Intimations, divinations flicker and dance I seek for clarity, a more piercing glance, I have cobwebs. - by C. Christian Dick
By Chris Dick|2020-06-26T07:41:19-04:00April 28th, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: argument, critical thinking, debate|
This is Part Two of a Discussion on Argument and Debate. You might also want to read Part One. I don’t usually go back and forth with people in YouTube comment sections. Comments are a healthy, liberating forum for millions of people, and I don’t deny that at all. I do find that the pseudo-courage supplied by digital anonymity makes it too easy for discussion to morph quickly into personal disparagement of the ‘so’s your mother’ variety; but the web is what it is, the good outweighs the bad. I will occasionally make a sarcastic rejoinder [...]
By Chris Dick|2020-04-24T17:58:36-04:00April 24th, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: idealism, skepticism|
Skeptical Idealist The Contradiction in Being Me? I was idly wondering the other day how many of us have ever gone through the exercise of trying to sum up our orientation to the world, our sense of what reality is, in as few words as possible -- a sentence or less. It is quite a stimulating exercise and I recommend giving it a go. For instance,... I am a skeptical idealist. ( Sound of fanfare played with trumpets,slightly out of tune.) Now skeptic and idealist are not usually found together on the same page of your [...]
By Chris Dick|2021-02-23T21:46:08-05:00April 24th, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: apps, death, living, technology|
I just put a memento mori app on my phone. For those of you who did not take four years of Latin in high school, which is no doubt most of you who are not close personal friends with Methuselah, memento mori means remember you are mortal, -- that is, remember that, like Monty Python’s infamous parrot, you are going to be bloody well deceased some day, kick it, shuffle off this mortal coil, end up stone cold dead. In ancient Rome when a successful general returned to the City after a conquering spree in foreign parts, [...]
By Chris Dick|2020-05-03T13:57:39-04:00April 22nd, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: communication|
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” said the nasty prison warden in Cool Hand Luke – so true it seems. Why do we talk past each other so much? Why do dialogues so quickly become duelling monologues, debate turn into debunk, speech into screech? Books such as Daniel Kahneman’s 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' are filled with impressive experimental verifications that we often do not reason well; that our thinking is hobbled by an array of cognitive biases and that we are prone to making lazy intuitive judgments that we do not trouble to verify [...]
By Chris Dick|2020-04-28T21:34:55-04:00November 14th, 2016|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: argument, critical thinking, debate|
Most of us don’t argue very well. I’m not talking about the “…so’s your mother” type of argument — most of us do just fine there; I’m talking about debating points of disagreement in politics, economics, or anything where facts are in dispute and abstract reasoning has to come into play. Now, I should declare my biases here. Unlike Aristotle, I do not believe that man is, in his deepest depths, a rational animal. Nor do I believe that most people, much of the time, will change their most deeply held convictions on the basis of even [...]
