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“Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability-except the order of a dead universr filled with a uniformly distributed gas.”
― The Ghost in the Machine
― The Ghost in the Machine
“Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.”
― The Act of Creation
― The Act of Creation
“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.”
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.”
― The Ghost in the Machine
― The Ghost in the Machine
“But by meditation I do not mean a practice or exercise undertaken as a preparation for something, as a means to some future end, or as a discipline in which one is concerned with progress. A better word may be "contemplation" or even "centering," for what I mean is a slowing down of time, of mental hurry, and an allowing of one's attention to rest in the present—so coming to the unseeking observation, not of what should be, but of what is.”
― The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
― The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Giannis’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Giannis’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
423 books
|
198 friends
1,401 books
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172 friends
1,266 books
|
87 friends
241 books
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72 friends
71 books
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12 friends
55 books
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55 friends
16 books
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13 friends
18 books
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1 friend
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