Tag: galileo

• Pop Psychology, Alice and the Concept of Evil

  Pop psychology has a habit of taking ideas from psychology and science and transforming them into half-truths – ideas that can be simplistic and misleading.

  Some examples include ego and intuition.

  With the help of Alice (from Alice Through the Looking Glass), we will also explore the concept of EVIL.

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  19 March 2021

• The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason

  Popular commentators often contend the The Enlightenment and The Age of Reason was accompanied by a loss of connection with our emotional and intuitive instincts resulting in a purely mechanical view of nature and the universe.

  Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is one of the modern instigators of the “Age of Reason” although similar sentiments can be found in other cultures such as ancient Greece and Islamic civilisations. He believed that knowledge must be found in sensory experience - in observation. However, he was aware that our senses can be deceived. He was a supporter of Nicolaus Copernicus' (1473-1543) view that the sun was at the centre of the solar system even though each day we see the sun rise in the east and set in the west.

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  2 April 2019

• Belief versus Truth

  Stephen Colbert defined a new word: Truthiness, The belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

  A number of popular commentators write that we should trust our intuition (without explaining what that may be) rather than relying on what we read. Most of these commentators have written many, many books to tell us that we do not need these books.

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  24 November 2018

• Quotes Relating to Health

  Authors including Plato, Plutarch, Charles Darwin, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein had a say about health.  Given that the state of our health has such an impact on our lives it is really not a surprise.

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  29 June 2016

• How do we know what we know?

  Many “facts” have a long history of discovery, with a sometimes bitter and acrimonious debate before a final acceptance.

  In Life, the Universe and Everything (part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series), Douglas Adams explains our inability to take in new information as a result of the Someone Else's Problem field. Effrafax of Wug utilised the SEP field to create an invisibility device that would run for a hundred years on a single torch battery.

  It relied on people's inability to see anything that they do not want to, were not expecting or cannot explain.

  We obtain our information initially from parents and from interacting with the world around us. We learn that fire is something that should be avoided if we put our hand in it.

  As we grow older, we learn from other people, reading, school, television. Observation is not always a reliable guide. It is obvious that the sun and the moon revolve around the earth - we see the sun rise each morning in the east and set at night in the west.

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  14 April 2016