An idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung paramount among them—insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas. An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact. When it manifests itself within a person, it has a strong proclivity to make of that person its avatar: to impel that person to act it out. Sometimes, that impulsion (possession is another word) can be so strong that the person will die, rather than allowing the idea to perish. This is, generally speaking, a bad decision, given that it is often the case that only the idea need die, and that the person with the idea can stop being its avatar, change his or her ways, and continue.

- Jordan Peterson

The bro code🍻

إنّ في الإنسانِ شوقًا إلى أن يكون خرافيًا، إنّ الحقيقةَ وحدها كئيبة، غبية، دميمة.

- عبد الله القصيمي

"Sunlight And Shadow" by Albert Beirstadt

“Hannibal with Chopin”

“You teach students to memorize lots of facts,” he told me. “You say: ‘Look at this patient. Look at how he’s standing. Look at his facial features. That particular pattern represents one disease, and this pattern represents another.’ We teach those patterns so that the next time the doctor comes across it, he or she comes up with a diagnosis.” What’s missing, says Braverman, is how to think when an oddity appears. That requires careful and detailed observation. After years of teaching he still wasn’t certain he’d found the best way to communicate that complex set of skills.
In 1998 Braverman came up with a way to teach this skill. What if he taught these young medical students how to observe in a context where they wouldn’t need any specialized knowledge and so could focus on skills that couldn’t be learned from a book, where the teaching would force students to focus on process, not content? He realized that he had a perfect classroom right in his own backyard, in Yale’s Center for British Art. The course, now part of the curriculum, requires first-year medical students to hone their powers of observation on paintings rather than patients.

- Irwin Braverman, Every patient tells a story

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Christ in the House of His Parents,
By John Everett Millais

Neurological lesions above the red nucleus (intercollicular line in the midbrain) tend to cause decortication and lesions below, decerebration.

Decorticate vs decerebrate posturing

The average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants.
Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.
Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses. They listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits, beehives and bird nests. They moved with a minimum of effort and noise, and knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and efficient manner. Varied and constant use of their bodies made them as fit as marathon runners. They had physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practising yoga or t’ai chi.
The hunter-gatherer way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.

- نسيت من يا كتاب (يمكن Sapiens)

يرى الجاحظ أنَّ الترجمة مهما حاولت بذل جهود في نسخ النص، إلّا أنّها لا تستطيع فعل ذلك بل يمكن لها المقارب، وعلى الرغم من هذا التشابه، إلّا أن الترجمة تبقى عاجزة عن النقل التام للنص، وذلك لأنّها مهما سعت لهذا التشابه والنسخ فهي لن ترقى إليه.