Monday, October 24, 2016

Eze Vanessa writes



NATURAL NURTURED NONSENSE

These earthy fussy thoughts
Obnubilated her head again
Whilst the essential spit of God
Spluttered vigorously, causing others to run
As she rolled the tires of her wheel chair
The wind threw her off balance
And these thoughts,
Sprang up, disrupting her life again.
The earthy grumpy thoughts
Envisaged his mind again
Causing and forcing the verbalization of cockeyed ideas
And the air brewed nauseating odours.
She cursed
Her inability to run and walk freely.
The rain flogged her
And she just cursed.
A hapless victim,
So allergic to sweet brewing odour,
Fell out of place
And ended up epileptic.
These natural deficiencies bamboozled their kind
Like the mummery flummery of their minds
Unable to disencumber their noesis, they ask
Why does nature fail thus??
 Image result for lichtenstein woman wheelchair paintings

 Woman in a Wheelchair -- Roy Lichtenstein

5 comments:

  1. Noetics is a branch of metaphysical philosophy concerned with the study of mind and intellect. "Nous" is the faculty of the human mind that is necessary to understand what is true or real, sometimes in an intuitive sense. The word "intellection" is sometimes used to describe the activity of this faculty, as are the Greek words "noēsis" and "noein." (In colloquial British English, "nous" also denotes "good sense," which is close to one of its ordinary meanings in ancient Greece.) Anaxagoras, born about 500 BCE, was the first to explain the concept of a nous (mind), which arranged all other things in the cosmos in their proper order, started them in a rotating motion, and continuing to control them to some extent, having an especially strong connection with living things. "All other things partake in a portion of everything, while nous is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself. For if it were not by itself, but were mixed with anything else, it would partake in all things if it were mixed with any; for in everything there is a portion of everything, as has been said by me in what goes before, and the things mixed with it would hinder it, so that it would have power over nothing in the same way that it has now being alone by itself. For it is the thinnest of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength; and nous has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have soul [psuchē]." Slightly earlier, Parmenides had held that reality as the senses perceive it is not a world of truth at all, because sense perception is unreliable, and what is perceived is uncertain and changeable; he argued for a dualism wherein nous and related words ("noein," the verb for mental perceiving activity, and "noēta," the unchanging objects of this perception ) describe an entirely intellectual form of perception.

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  2. In the 4th century BCE, Platon claimed that nous must somehow perceive truth directly, in the ways that gods do. In order to understand things, what our mind sees directly must not be the constantly changing material things but the unchanging "forms" or "ideas" that exist in a different way. In "The Republic," he wrote that people perceive more clearly because of the Form of the Good, something from outside themselves; however, in the "Meno,"he claimed people are born with ideas already in their soul, which they somehow remember from previous lives. Later philosophers argued that the individual nous required spiritual or divine assistance, such as a "cosmic nous" which created order. This concept was influential in the development of medieval accounts of God, the immortality of the soul, and even the motions of the stars. In some Hindu philosophy, a "higher mind" (buddhi or mahat) is a property of the cosmos as a whole and exists within all matter (prakrti) and serves to differentiate matter from pure consciousness (purusha).

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  3. For Platon's student Aristoteles, nous was the basic understanding or awareness which allows human beings to think rationally and was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. "Anaxagoras makes the Good a principle as causing motion; for Mind (nous) moves things, but moves them for some end, and therefore there must be some other Good—unless it is as we say; for on our view the art of medicine is in a sense health." Much of the subsequent philosophical discussion about or intellect, in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, was about how to correctly interpret Platon and Aristoteles; but the Epicureans, who believed that the cause of error lay in the interpretation of bodily senses and not the senses themselves, used the term "prolepsis" to describe the way the mind forms general concepts from sense perceptions; and the Stoics thought cosmic order cames from Logos, cosmic reason, which was somehow connected to the reason of individual humans by physical means -- for them, nous was the ruling part of the soul. In the 1st century, Ploútarkhos criticized the Stoic idea of nous being corporeal and agreed with Platon that the soul is more divine than the body while nous is more divine than the soul; the mix of soul and body produces pleasure and pain, while the conjunction of mind and soul produces reason, which is the cause or the source of virtue and vice.

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  4. The Neoplatonists held that several levels (hypostases) of being exist, including the natural and visible world as a lower part. The hypostases are emanted from the Monad, or "the One," which determines the possibility of existence. The nous is described as the Demiurge, an image of God, that thinks its own contents; the Monad is prior to the Demiurge, but not in the sense that a normal cause is prior to an effect. Psuchē also actualizes its own thoughts and creates a separate, material cosmos that is the living image of the spiritual or noetic cosmos contained as a unified thought within the nous; it is the soul, then, that perceives things in nature physically, which it understands to be reality.

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  5. Nous ('aql in Arabic), the rational part of the soul, played an important role in the 10th-century philosphy of Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al Fārābī as well. Unlike his Greek predecessors he made "active intellect' the lowest ranking in a series of distinct transcendental intelligences. The faculty of imagination (Arabic "mutakhayyila," Greek "phantasia"), stores, disassembles, or recombines sense perceptions (maḥsūsāt) to create figurative or symbolic images (muḥākāt) which appear in dreams or visualize events, whether present or predicted, in a manner different from conscious deliberation (rawiyya) by an "acquired intellect" in which the human nous is in conjunction with the active intellect (God). Theoretical truth can only be received in a figurative or symbolic form, because the imagination is a physical capability and cannot receive theoretical information in its proper abstract form. Prophecy (nubuwwa) is available to those who have not yet perfected their intellect, but revelation (w-ḥ-y) comes exclusively to those who stand at the stage of acquired intellect. At about the same time, Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sīnā ("Avicenna") said that when people reason (as in deriving conclusions from syllogisms), people use a physical "cogitative" faculty (mufakkira, fikra) of the soul, which can err, but they can use insight to derive conclusions directly by conjoining with the active intellect. Once a thought has been learned in a soul, the physical faculties of sense perception and imagination become unnecessary, and as people acquire more thoughts, their soul becomes less connected to their body; though all of the soul is by nature immortal, the level of intellectual development affectc the type of afterlife it has: Only a soul which has reached the highest type of conjunction with the active intellect can form a perfect conjunction with it after the death of the body. Much later,in the 17th century, Rene Descartes claimed the human mind and body are different in kind; the human body is a kind of clockwork mechanism, and its workings include memory and imagination, but the "real" human is a thinking (a soul) which is not part of that mechanism. The active faculty of giving ideas to one's thought must be corporeal, because the things perceived are clearly external to one's own thinking, while one's passive faculty must be incorporeal, making it possible to think about objects never perceived by the senses. Error comes about because people make judgments about things which are neither in the intellect nor understanding, because the human will, which is free, is not limited like the human intellect. Most modern scientists regard anything that is innate in the mind as being a result of genetic and developmental factors which allow the mind to develop. However, in the early 20th century, phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl used "noema" and "noesis" to designate correlated elements of the structure of any intentional act — for example, an act of perceiving, or judging, or remembering. The noema is whatever is intended by acts of perception or judgement in general, whether a material object, a picture, a word, a mathematical entity, precisely as being perceived, judged, r otherwise thought about. Every intentional act has an "I-pole (the origin of the noesis)" and an "object-pole (or noema)."

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