reading a history of christianity this morningg.
The ‘giant’ task occupying the church at the time of Origen is “illuminating the significance of Jesus Christ in the divine plan”? p.149.
Its a complicated web of thought, the book is so dense. I guess what I’m searching for is questions about Christianity. I just can’t relate to the motivations to understand the ‘book’ at all. Or maybe its just a lack of effort in empathising.
Theres a lot there, I feel, in terms of human cognitive biases that have become so popular. The need to create narratives and the difficulty of changing ones beliefs when they are established. A ‘crisis’ normally occurs with this need to change ones beliefs normally trying to find evidence, or ‘fit’ the evidence to your current beliefs or some slight mutation of them. It seems a bit shit to just put it all down to human nature but that does seem to be the case of most human history. It’s a reason why this new ideas in psychology, like that of the ‘press secretary’ are so revealing about ourselves. That we can’t even trust ourselves is a scary notion but what would be scarier would be if we could do nothing about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDa4vpkNKeQ
- The glamour, the charisma of the Greek and Roman world seemed a world full of colour vs what the world of Christianity seemed to be, grey and depressing. The former more appealed to him as a child and growing up.
- Found the idea of ‘inhabiting’ the heads of the Romans and greeks quite distressing over a time. For instance, Caesar considered it an achievement to slaughter a million Gauls.
- He began to ask himself: “Why do I find this disturbing?”
- Religio was a bond from the people to the gods. The idea of religios changed with the Christians, they maintained just one religios, one bond to God.
- Holland says that Augustine sets up this counterpoint between the ‘cyclulum’ and religio. Twin dimensions, that the secular and religious worlds are separate?
- He was affected by a trip to Iraq, he saw a lot of brutality over the symbol of the cross.
Tom Holland talks about ‘original sin’ from the point of view of those that deny it. Nowadays, what is virtuous is that which helps others. If you deny original sin, you’re saying that you can be washed of your sins, that you can become ultimately virtuos. This implies that those who aren’t virtuous need to ‘try harder’ you dont acknowledge fault in yourself or think that you too are subject to the same fancies.
I think its interesting to see the influence that Christian thought has on modern culture but I don’t believe its the way forward. I don’t believe that we should keep looking backwards for wisdom all the time. Especially about new things that our ancestors did not encounter.
Reading history of thermodynamics from Julian Barbour.
A caloric, developed by Lavoisier and Laplace was thought to be a substance that occupied things which allowed them to do work. It doesn’t seem there was any notion of conservation, just that we drew on some infinite resource of this substance.
Carnot sees heat everywhere in nature he says:
It causes the agitations of the atmosphere, the ascension of clouds, the fall of rain … the currents of water which channel the surface of the globe … Even earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are the result of heat.
The object of heat-engines is to “develop this power, to appropriate it to our purposes”
In order to consider in the most general way the principle of the production of motion by heat, it must be considered independently of any mechanism or any particular agent. It is necessary to establish principles applicable not only to steam engines but to all imaginable heat-engines, whatever the working substance and whatever the method by which it is operated
This reminds me of a general theory like computation, where you generalise from instances. It’s interesting to note that Carnot foresaw that these engines could make completely new jobs or industry.
What the hell are my goals?
Research
I need to get better at convincing myself that ‘this is something I like doing’ similar to Sivers beliefs thing yesterday. I say it but I don’t do the positive talk in my head, so hopefully can try improve on this.
Working through the methodology a bit.
Research objectives section
- I think its worth stating that one of the objectives is to produce something useful.
- Morphing objectives with this in mind, consultation with Liam and Aron.