9
" We say that a human being is a person and a distinctive, fixed self with a name and a life. He has an identity. But what is this self really made of, except from the basic elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus etc. and their subatomic particles? If a person is a specific, static, unchanged entity and existence, then what if an accident or a disease completely alters his body features? What if fear or madness changes his thoughts and perceptions? If dementia takes away his memories, or if drugs alter his emotions? And what if life circumstances, good or bad luck, modify his motives, his plans and his desires? Is it still the person we say he is? Or is selfhood a ghost, a useful fiction of the brain? An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and perceptions? Flashes of hopes and desires? A bundle of alternating opinions and ideologies, of conflicting instincts and urges? If we take away all these from him, what would be left behind? If every drop of the ocean evaporates, is not the whole ocean gone? The immutable selfhood is a very old illusion and the last of illusions we ‘re going to abandon; if we ever will… "
― Giannis Delimitsos , A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms
13
" Of course, 1+1 makes 2 and blue to yellow gives green. But if we forget for a while the abstract knowledge or the laws of nature, and focus on the “knowledge” of particular situations, events, persons etc., then we can observe that it is almost never: “I know”; it is practically always: “I believe”.
Humans and all the intelligent creatures of this world operate through beliefs, more or less justified, more or less true, more or less convincing. Because the biological apparatus of one hundred percent accuracy has not yet been “invented” in nature. And it never will. "
― Giannis Delimitsos , A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms
