Paradoxes and Contradictions

"We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding."

- Benjamín Labatut (1980 - )
When We Cease to Understand the World

Dissolved Into The Picture

"I have for many years searched for the possibility of letting the viewer 'stroll' in the picture, forcing him to forget himself and dissolve into the picture.

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A frightening depth of questions, weighted with responsibility, confronted me. And the most important: what should replace the missing object? The danger of ornamentation was clear, the dead make-believe existence of stylized forms could only frighten me away.

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It took a very long time before this question (What should replace the object?) received a proper answer from within me. Often I look back into my past and am desolate to think how much time I took for the solution. I have only one consolation: I could never bring myself to use a form which developed out of the application of logic—not purely from feeling within me. I could not think up forms, and it repels me when I see such forms. All the forms which I ever used came “from themselves,” they presented themselves complete before my eyes, and it only remained for me to copy them, or they created themselves while I was working, often surprising me. "

- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

Esse Est Percipi

"...neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And to me it is no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) , cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them … The table I write on I say exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed-meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it ... or as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them. [Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, quoted by JLB]

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With the continuities of matter and spirit denied,
with space denied, I do not know by what
right we retain that continuity which is time.
Outside each perception (real or conjectural),
matter does not exist;
outside each mental state,
spirit does not exist;
neither then must time exist
outside each present moment.
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[We] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity ... The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations ... The comparison of the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed. [Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, quoted by JLB]"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
A New Refutation of Time

Symbiogenesis

"The tendency of 'independent' life
is to bind together and reemerge
in a new wholeness at a higher,
larger level of organization.

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Living beings defy neat definition. They fight, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die. At the base of the creativity of all large familiar forms of life, symbiosis generates novelty. It brings together different life-forms, always for a reason. Often, hunger unites the predator with the prey or the mouth with the photosynthetic bacterium or algal victim. Symbiogenesis brings together unlike individuals to make large, more complex entities. Symbiogenetic life-forms are even more unlike than their unlikely 'parents.' 'Individuals' permanently merge and regulate their reproduction. They generate new populations that become multiunit symbiotic new individuals. These become 'new individuals' at larger, more inclusive levels of integration. Symbiosis is not a marginal or rare phenomenon. It is natural and common. We abide in a symbiotic world."

- Lynn Margulis (1938 - 2011)
Symbiotic Planet

Amorphous Morphology

"I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid - a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry - Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity ... The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being 'formless,' to investigate the morphology of the 'amorphous.' Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel."

- Benoit Mandelbrot (1924 - 2010)
The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Mossy Path

"Whence are we born into this world? Wither lies the way by which we may return thither? So deign you to ask in your quest for that knowledge now lost to you. Yet I implore you, seek not that which lies within your good self in some place far removed from yourself. The several teachings that the Buddha has bequeathed us, different one from another though they may seem, have, as he himself has taught us, but a single source. People’s desires and aspirations are as different as their faces, and thus the Buddha teaches through a variety of Expedient Means. Yet the Way by which one endeavors to attain enlightenment, whether one be of high station or low, can be no other than to penetrate to the very source of consciousness. The rain falls alike on all plants and trees; and though the season of their bloom may be early or late, all blossom forth in colorful splendor. Likewise is it with the many different teachings of the Buddha; they are like the dewdrops, having but a single hue of their own, [but appearing to differ] because the cast of people’s minds is not constant. The body, be it that of one either deep in sin or one exalted in virtue, ends ultimately in the same form, as dew upon the mossy path. That which knows no limits, from the distant past into the future, which has neither beginning nor end, lies within your own honored mind. If it be tied by earthly cares and attachments, then never will it escape from the Three Worlds but must wander aimlessly through the Six Realms. In the dark of night, the three thousand greater worlds are far removed and invisible to the Corporeal Eye. Yet open the Mind’s Eye and that far-off world of enlightenment may be seen unobstructed. So you see, there is no need for you to become a monk and relinquish your reign. Even in your present exalted position, if you just set your mind upon it, you can attain enlightenment."

- Reading The Tale of Genji:
Sources from the First Millennium

Reflecting Surrealities

"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream, and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, surreality, so to speak.

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Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory."

- André Breton (1896 - 1966)
Manifestoes of Surrealism