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Quote by Giannis Delimitsos

“When a philosopher happens to read some of his older texts, and most of the time he shakes his head in disapproval, he can be sure that he is on the right path. For this is an infallible sign that his thought has evolved and that he possesses the capacity to learn, to unlearn, to adapt. He is brave enough to acknowledge that he may have been naive, and this, at the same time, is a useful reminder that he might be wrong even with his current views. Thus, he protects himself against arrogance and intransigence.”

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Giannis Delimitsos

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“As also noted by Morris, empirical data from various lineages of fish and amphibians have shown, for instance, that more plastic clades tend to be more speciose than sister taxa of similar age but with less plasticity, due to a combination of greater opportunities to diversify and augmented evolvability of plastic features and thus of decreased risk of extinction. In addition, empirical studies show that even populations that derive from ancestors that were particularly overspecialized for a certain, very specific way of life, including parasitism, have successfully changed their behavior by becoming non-parasitic and displaying a morphology that is substantially different from that of their ancestors as seen for example in lamprey evolution. Morris argued that random variations arising in a population may decrease plasticity and that the plastically changed phenotype linked with the behavioral shift may be negatively affected. Therefore, these variants will be likely eliminated by selection, whereas variants that decrease plasticity in the direction of the plastic change will tend to be selected and spread through the population. This may lead to a situation in which the phenotype might appear similar across generations, but its plasticity is actually increasingly reduced until an environmental shift will no longer provoke phenotypic changes. As noted by Morris, Baldwin allowed for other non-mutually exclusive scenarios to occur, such as the rise of variants that increase plasticity in general, thus increasing the ‘fit’ between organisms and their environment and the degree to which evolution could be directed, thus leading to evolutionary trends.”

EvolvabilityPlasticy
Book:Evolution Driven by Organismal Behavior: A Unifying View of Life, Function, Form, Mismatches and Trends
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“The realization that the brain used so many different kind of chemicals, in addition to classical neurotransmitters, to communicate beween neurons was just the first step in a major conceptual shift in neuroscience. Many of these substances are neuropeptides, and most of those affect mood and behavior. The specificity of their effects resides not in the anatomical connectivity between neurons, but in the distribution of receptors within the brain. Different receptors have very different patterns of distribution, and the distributions differ between species in ways that correlate with differences in behavior. The mere fact of a receptor-peptide mismatch in a particular brain area might have no great importance. It might be that many cells are promiscuous in the receptors that they express: If some receptors see no ligand, the cost to the cells is negligible. Profligate receptor expression might contribute to the evolvability of neural systems, and might be common because organisms with a liberal attitude to receptor expression are those most likely to acquire novels functions. Because extrasynaptic signaling does not require precise point-to-point connectivity, it is intrinsically 'evolvable': a minor mutation in the regulatory region of a peptide receptor gene, by altering the expression pattern, could have functional consequences without any need for anatomical rewiring. That peptide receptors have distinctive patterns of expression, and that peptides produce coherent behavioral effects when given quite crudely into the brain, suggests that volume transmission is used as a signaling mechanism by many different populations of peptidergic neurons. We thus must see neuropeptides as 'hormones of the brain'.”

HormonesNetworksEvolvabilityNeuropeptidesReceptors
Book:The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones
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“Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now? How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you declare that this raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, For the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have arisen quite naturally. If God created the world by an act of his own will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else — and who will believe this silly nonsense? If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is form-less, action-less and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all morality, would have no desire to create anything. If he is perfect, he does not strive for the three aims of man, so what advantage would he gain by creating the universe? If you say that he created to no purpose because it was his nature to do so, then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created because of the karma of embodied beings [acquired in a previous creation] He is not the Almighty Lord, but subordinate to something else. If out of love for living beings and need of them he made the world, why did he not take creation wholly blissful free from misfortune? If he were transcendent he would not create, for he would be free: Nor if involved in transmigration, for then he would not be almighty. Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all, And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created. If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place? Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning or end, and is based on the principles, life and rest. Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own nature. [By 9th century Jain (the religion of Jainism) Acharya, Jinasena, in his work, Mahapurana, a major Jain text. The Jains have never believed in any gods as creators of the universe, unlike most other religions, and have focused on acting morally on Earth rather than wasting time supplicating the supernatural.]”

PhilosophyTimeAtheismCreationArgumentPerfectionIndiaEternityCreatorScriptureGuruJainismAtheistic ReligionReligious TextArgument Against TheismArgument Against Perfect CreatorMahapuranaTags Ancient
Book:Mahapurana
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“Think of the Omega Point as a star radiating energy, a transcendental attractor, a divine 'tractor beam' - things are not being pushed from behind on the evolutionary timeline but being pulled toward the Omega Singularity, a point of maximum complexity and connectivity.”

ConsciousnessComplexityConnectivityOmega PointTeleological AttractorCosmological SingulartiyEvolutionary TimelineOmega SingularityTractor BeamTranscendental Attractor
Book:Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality
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“It became obvious why Catholics had built such beautiful cathedrals and churches throughout the world. Not as gathering or meeting places for Christians. But as a home for Jesus Himself in the Blessed Sacrament. Cathedrals house Jesus. Christians merely come and visit Him. The cathedrals and churches architecturally prepare our souls for the beauty of the Eucharist.”

JesusChristChristianityJesus ChristCatholicismCommunionEucharistCathedralsBlessed SacramentChurches
Book:Confessions of a Mega Church Pastor: How I Discovered the Hidden Treasures of the Catholic Church
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“If a well-known and trustworthy person were to go to a public square and tell all the idlers loitering there that on a certain hill they would find a gold mine and could take all they wanted, do you think anyone would shrug his shoulders and say he did not care? They’d be dashing there as fast as they could! Well, now, doesn’t the tabernacle hold the most precious treasure ever to be found on earth or in heaven? Unfortunately, there are many who cannot see it because they are blind. Yet our faith unerringly tells us that endless riches are to be found there. People sweat and toil to make money, and yet, in the tabernacle dwells the Lord of the universe. He will grant you what you ask, if you really need it. Isn’t Our Lord Jesus Christ Lord and Master of all? Go to Him then. Ask and it shall be given you; knock and it shall be opened to you! Jesus longs to grant you favors, especially those you need for your soul.”

CatholicCatholicismSaintsBlessed Sacrament
Author:St. John Bosco
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“Make this experiment whether you believe in God or not. At your first opportunity, stop in a Catholic Church for a visit. You need not believe, as we Catholics do, that Our Lord is really and truly present in the tabernacle. But just sit there for an hour, and within that hour you will experience a surpassing peace the like of which you never before enjoyed in your life. You will ask yourself as a sensationalist once asked me when we made an all-night vigil of adoration in the Basilica of Sacre Coeur in Paris: “What is it that is in that church?” Without voice or argument or thundering demands, you will have an awareness of something before which your spirit trembles — a sense of the Divine.”

CatholicCatholicismBlessed Sacrament
Book:The Cries of Jesus From the Cross: A Fulton Sheen Anthology
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