I have a strong desire to comprehend stuff

Is empathy just an example of what you call "understanding", or is it synonymous? How can you have empathy with abstractions or non-humans? How can you have empathy with the universe? Does this mean you can't "understand" the universe?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

These days I read far more nonfiction than I did 10-12 years ago. The benefit of fiction (at least good fiction), though, is that it illuminates the mind with imagery, metaphor, and philosophic depth that you typically don't get with nonfiction. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Pope, Swift, and other classic writers tell more about humanity in a handful of lines or paragraphs than essays and newsprint. Find the depth beyond just the storyline, and you can obtain a greater grasp on humanism and peek into the minds of the brilliant for a taste of their figurative prowess.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

also good literature would not only teach you about psych and sociology it would teach you about other things which I started to list in an earlier post in this thread. It's aims are wider and generally deeper.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Non-fiction and fiction are concepts, therefore, when the associated object in our minds and "phosphenes" envision as originating from spirit and consciousness, we tend to treat the concepts as though they were part of reality but are not actual. The actual reality is but one, as there can be only one possible existence in a proportionally equivalent reality that is consciousness and awareness of the one that I am ---> God, Good, and Love are all the same. Therefore, you are God, Good, and Love. Separation is a concept to which the one reality defines itself and is itself holistic and monistic.

This rules out pluralistic explanations of reality, forcing us to seek an explanation at once monic (because nonpluralistic) and holistic (because the basic conditions for existence are embodied in the manifold, which equals the whole). Obviously, the first step towards such an explanation is to bring monism and holism into coincidence.

 

Kind of like Richard III, huh?

 

Empathy is the heart of understanding. Perhaps we can say they are synonymous, I have not thought about that but on first blush I would say so. A painting is an abstraction and all of us can empathesize with a painting either on that is realistic or abstract.

 

Do you understand the universe and if so what is it to you?

 

Maybe you should think about it some more before you make such statements based on nothing but ........ahh, what, ....thin air??

Baron Max

 

Good non-fiction books

The following is a quickie from Wickie regarding some of the best in non-fiction reading.

These books listed below are some selections from "Modern Library 100 best non-fiction" from Wickie.

An American Dilemma
The American Language
The Ants
The Art of Memory
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Civil War: A Narrative
The Double Helix
The Education of Henry Adams
The Elements of Style
Eminent Victorians
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
The Golden Bough
Good-Bye to All That
The Guns of August
Homage to Catalonia
In Cold Blood (book)
Mark Twain's Autobiography
The Mismeasure of Man
Notes of a Native Son
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Principia Mathematica
The Right Stuff
The Rise of the West
A Room of One's Own
Silent Spring
The Strange Death of Liberal England
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
A Study of History
A Theory of Justice
Up From Slavery
The Varieties of Religious Experience


Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Modern_Library_100_best_non-fiction"
Category: Non-fiction books

 

Just to pick on a few of the examples to put in a plug for fiction. I enjoyed this book, but transcripts of his debates, speeches and interviews are vastly more powerful. Neither stands up to Crime and Punishment, for example, if we are talking about knowledge in general. If one wants to know specifically about African-American issues, Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the novels of James Baldwin are at least equals.

Sure, if I wanted to write an essay a college professor would think is good, this is a good resource. But in terms of being a good writer it pales to insignificance next to almost anybody's list of classics.

Is this non-fiction? The issue is up for grabs. It runs and was received by America as running an odd line between the two categories.

Grand. But we would have lost more if one of his better novels dissappeared than if this did.

This has knowledge that is important to so few people.

Good stuff, very important in the lives and writing careers of many women and probably some men. The loss of Mrs. Dalloway, for example, would be the loss of more wisdom and knowledge about humans that this book, however.
[/QUOTE]

If you have specific goals, know what you want to learn and this knowledge is something that can be tracked as a specific increased ability in a limited area or specific increased fact based knowledge in a certain area, non-fiction is generally a better route. If you want to broaden the base of your knowledge, deepen your understanding of the world and humans in an open-ended way, if you are willing to be surprised and yours goals are not specific by a kind of general yearning to understand, then fiction is vastly more effective, deeper and broader. The results of reading the latter are harder to track in the ways statisticians favor, but for participants the results are palpable.

 

I think that self-actualization can best be accomplished by becomeing a self-learner. As such the self-learner is constantly trying to find answers to questions. The questions develop from a critical attitude and a critical eye driven by ones own needs to connect the islands of knowledge with one another and therebyacquire understanding, i.e. meaning. One of the problems with attending classes, I am talking about that period after our formal education is completed, is that we are not following our own curiosity but are contolledby whatever the teacher wants to teach us.

 

How long do you think it will take a person to learn everything that there is to know? For that matter, how long to learn just the things you might find an interest in knowing?

Is that all your life is going to be, Coberst?

Baron Max

 

Good post, baron max!

 

As member with 16,000 posts of nothing but the worst kind of post-modernist generalising i think you're probably the least qualified member to be making that kind of remark.

We could actually build a automated generator to come into every thread and say things "yeah but we dont necessarily know thats true though do we??" Thats how little you offer to this forum.

I think i speak on behalf of everyone here when i say "yes we get it. Noone is infallible, knowledge is not absolute, and it's doubtful that we can ever know everything"
It's what people learn by the age of 18, but you think its this startling revelation you have to remind everyone of.
Next time Coberst posts a thread, dont say anything, just read it - check the sources, draw your own conclusions and post any ideas you might have drawn from an actual understanding of the subject.
That's literally the only way i think you can salvage all the time youve wasted.

 

Yeah, that's exactly what I do. Thanks!

No, there's no way that I can salvage any of the time I've wasted here! If it wasn't fun n' games, I'd be doing something useful and productive ...just like everyone else here.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Baron Max

 

Baron Max...

coberst was talking some stuff that you're just bashing though.

 

And? What's your point? ...that we should all just accept what others post without question? ...'cause we don't want to hurt someone's feelings?

Baron Max

 

So, ....just to get this all straight in my head;

You're criticizing my posts which criticized Coberst's posts ...is that right?

And you don't see the hypocricy in that?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Baron Max

 

He did not criticise you FOR posting a critical post. He criticized you for the mechanical redundancy of your criticism.

 

I agree, but this seems aslant as a response to what I wrote.
1) self-actualization is a term I associate with Maslow and other psychologists in the 60s. And they certainly were not talking about the accumulation of factual information. they encouraged experience based open ended learning experiences. Something that fiction provides much more than non-fiction.
2) School education, especially pre-college parallels the MODE of learning one gets from non-fiction books. Here is the data you need to memorize. Fiction offers learning in a broader much more flexible process where the reader is generating knowledge in interaction with a text.