In an episode of TV series Endeavour (eg, IMDb, video), there’s a phrase that goes like this: there comes a time when you need to make a choice. That phrase struck me as very valid, and in probably everyone’s life. The Martin Luther King quote below adds an important element: conscience. I suppose that most of our choices are almost fully automatic, and hardly ever...
A few weeks ago, two people asked me if I meant conscience rather than consciousness in my draft blog. No, I did not. In my view, there is a clear distinction: all people have consciousness but some people appear to have no conscience (eg, criminals, psychopaths, sociopaths). Both conscience and consciousness have something in common: we know that we do not know...
There's a 5 billion year competition going on between (unicellular) bacteria and (non-cellular) viruses (Aeon-2014). The cells in multicellular organisms must cooperate - by definition. However, cooperation creates a dependence on others. Independence - or freedom from others - has its advantages and disadvantages. Quanta-2021: "And even today, there are far more...
For some time, there has been a question on my list of topics: why are strategies rooted in monism, and not in dualism or in trialism? I'm referring to strategies in business and/or politics. Perhaps, science has backup strategies for reaching its goals. Love may have several strategies but only one goal. I could blame the psychopathic traits in CEOs following Kevin...
Suppose, just suppose, that you could travel back in time and kill baby Adolf Hitler. Forget about the Law of Unintended Consequences. Forget about doubt (eg, is it him?). The Greater Good theory would applaud your act. Criminal law would argue that you murdered a (still) innocent child. Hence, my question: if Good does bad, does Good become Bad? Some 15 years ago,...
On June 8, my favourite Dutch columnist wrote about the Russian President not being invited for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. He quoted the words of the French historian Denis Peschanski: "Not inviting Putin is a way for humiliating an entire nation". In my remark, I stated that the notion of collective guilt is indeed a weird phenomenon in our culture....
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