rollie’s Reviews > The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality > Status Update

"Just as every measurement involves an interaction and creates a reality exclusive to those parties involved, every individual creates a life that comprises myriad relations. The relations don't bloom between previously pristine individuals; rather, like the particles our measurements detect, the individuals spring forth from the relations themselves."

ahhh, its clicking for me now lol

"The outrage [Oppenheimer] and his fellows felt now, to be implicitly lectured by colleagues who had chosen to continue to work for a regime like that of the Nazis, was palpable. As one American physicist put it, just as the US team had, the 'German scientists worked for the military as best their circumstance allowed.'"

author also just Slays at his history writing cuz ooooooffff

"Like Frost's walker in the woods, when I look back at my life, the path I am on is the one I have taken, no other... I may not infer what I would have found on that other path, but other walkers won't know until they walk down it themselves."

my guy explaining the uncertainty principle in 3 sentences w a robert frost analogy is crazy

"We seek to know the world, to know it perfectly, but the very power of that knowledge, the very source of it drive, stems from its imperfection, its inability to be identical to what it knows... To experience anything at all... is also to experience something else, and to open the imagination toward what could have been, but wasn't."

hmmm i wish this chapter was longer tbh! (so is my free will truly free???)

"...Borges remarked... that [Peron's] party had won because of the votes of' six million idiots.'"

ohhh borges if only u'd been around for us 2024 l o l...

"... the passage offers a shining example of philosophical academese replete with the amusing of head-scratching repetitions..."

lowk me @ this current chapter sawry (3metaphysical5me)

my guy boethius alrdy knowing that we live in a simulation,,,

"Kant... published a small book in response... 'On a Discovery According to Which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One,' [a title which] would have made Borges proud for its temporal acrobatics and dripping irony."

omfg we love a hater

"...so our understanding of the natural world is led by a silent conviction that the universe that unveils itself before our eyes works toward an end and purpose, one it expresses from the greatest cataclysms of galaxies down to the most intimate crevices of possible perception, and yet one that was never meant, never intended, never planned by angel, god, or human mind, other than our own."

looooove this 🥲

"In both art and nature, we see beauty in signs of purposiveness without purpose, natural artistry -- but with an important difference. Whereas in nature we supply the artist, in art we supply the sense of naturalness, that it was produced without evident artifice."

this is SOOOO interesting 2 me,,,,,