What is a philosopher?

First one must decide what widom is. Then one must decide what a lover is. Then one can think they know what a lover of wisdom is.

So, what is wisdom? I think wisdom is about wholeness or totality, viewing things or ideas or events from all perspectives. An impossible feat indeed, yet that is why a philosopher is a lover and not a knower.

Maybe it is like viewing a raindrop as itself as well as part of the rainstorm as part of the clouds as part of the weather front as part of climate as part of ... and knowing that for a moment the raindrop is itself, as well as the whole in all its many forms as well as the cool drop hitting your tongue as well as the poem that forms in your mind.
    

Scientists and Philosophers

It becomes almost a game, science reveals a truth, then removes that truth from the philosopher's game board of mystery and the unknown, as though "science" were an entity that can possess. Science is a process, a tool, for discovering truth, it can no more claim truth than a shovel can claim a hole. Which leaves the game board where it has always belonged, in the hands of the philosophers! Mysteries or truths, both, more than enough for a philosopher's mind to forever ponder.      

Potential or inevitable?

A handful of basic building blocks (that would all fit nicely in your hand, quarks and electrons and protons and neutrons and such) + invisible laws of nature that guide the building blocks (gravity, thermodynamics, and more) = potential to build a universe with stars and birds and bugs and little fellows that are self aware.

The debate? Potential or Inevitable?

Fabric of the universe

And it is only the human mind that tries to make it better, to view nature through rose-colored glasses, to take in the beauty and the awe of nature while filtering out the unpleasant. The unconscious effort to make it better ... better, better. Yet with this 'gift' of selective focus, selective awareness 'to make it better' comes the power to make it worse. Innocent nature is unaware of this struggle between good and evil, for the struggle dwells only in the minds of humans, humans who can take invisible concepts and act them out, invisible concepts that are but the electrochemical activity of neurons? or invisible concepts that are 'built' into the fabric of the universe?

An indifferent universe?

I would think the universe is not indifferent if it created life 'out of itself' that can perceive itself -- the 'itself' being everything from the invisible thoughts created within pin-point minds to every building block of matter and energy that compose mind, thoughts, and universe. If anything, the universe is not random, the only randomness is our inability to solve 'problems' that create the illusion of randomness. So far, for every solution that science has come up with, a bit more randomness is removed from our ignorance.

Real

What is real? Real needs not humans, but humans need a realization of the real, as well as anticipation of the coming real, filtered through a vast storehouse of the past real -- memories -- memories of what proved to be real as well as memories of what proved not to be real. The human mind rarely is in the here and now, but always in the anticipated to be, or the always and ever growing was. The thing itself is an imaginary construct of the mind, just as a photograph is a "slice of time" dwelling in a reality that cannot and will not "stop" to become a separate reality. We dwell in the flow of time, and what was, will never again, be what will be, yet our minds need to make sense of this ongoing rush of reality, and does so, by imagining, slices of time, to be, things, unto, themselves.  

Oh Sun

Oh sun, so very big you are,
yet why are you so dumb?

In bigness you dwarf my imagination,
yet have you not a solitary thought!

Your energy fuels my very life,
yet ignorant are you of it all!

And my most fleeting thought?
dwarfs light you never see!

    

Understanding vs Knowledge

Understanding is the activity of the brain that seeks to make sense of knowledge.

Are we not animals, too?

Humans possess the potential to be different (better?) than the state they find themselves. And the power that humans possess, self-awareness and all those traits that distance (elevates?) humans from other creatures, can be used for 'goodness' or can be used to empower the animal nature within all of us, that nature that knows not good/bad. Ethics and morality, human (and unnatural?) concepts that are absent in the 'animal kingdom' -- dwell only in the human mind, and are a daily choice that only humans face, be more natural and know not good/bad, or be unnatural and wrestle with those unwieldy concepts of good and bad and make choices ... again and again and again.

Cycles

Awake to either or,
To sleep to neither nor,
In dreams to ever more.

Constructing Reality

What I find interesting about the human mind is that it "constructs" a "wholeness" from the limited data that the limited sensory apparatus stream to the brain. And most folks look out onto this constructed world (constructed inside the brain) and think it is real as they see it, and it is "out there" -- the illusion complete. When what is really out there is an infinite swirl of subatomic particles mixed and directed by a fabric of forces (strong nuclear, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and gravity), too small and too invisible for our sensors to make sense of except for a limited spectrum of the electromagnetic force, the photons. And of the photons we sense a tiny part of it's spectrum, we call it visible light, perhaps a self-centered description?

Wrong and right, right here, in your head

It seems 'everyone' has a tough time considering a God as anything less than a anthropomorphic being. Good and bad are human concepts that reside in the minds of humans. An isolated island with no humans has no good or evil or right or wrong or justice or injustice. Plants and animals and all the tiny microscopic critters live in a world devoid of these human concepts. So too does all the inorganic stuff of the universe exist without a right or wrong, a good or a bad, they just exist, but with a built-in potential to sometime evolve into a thing that lives in a world of right and wrong and good and bad. So far, we are the only stuff that can claim this potential realized.

The mystery of mathematics?

I think nature is ignorant of mathematics because mathematics resides in the minds of humans and not outside the brain. It is how the mind attempts to understand and describe the world by observing things, structures, relationships in time and space, and of course quantity. We observe patterns in the natural world, and the mind has created a language to assemble and understand and describe these patterns abstractly. We create concepts like 'numbers' to help our minds think abstractly about our observations, and thus the mind can then make conjectures about these abstractions. And again, a universe without human minds is a universe without the language of mathematics. Of course the natural structures of the universe remain, with or without humans or mathematics.

Holy stuff

I conceive 'God' in anthropomorphic terms, as well as I can conceive of a universe with or without a God/Creator, but I think the conception of these ideas were so long ago, childhood? that perhaps more accurate would be that I now consider various ways of thinking of Gauguin's "Whence Come We? What Are We? Whither Go We?" As for divinity, I can imagine divinity as entity, and too a force and power that permeates this universe. I can conceive and consider a Creator that is both an entity, and too a permeating force. And this permeating force/power? I think potentiality the greatest mystery of this force/power, providing ever change to the universe and all within. From the smallest in the micro-world to the night-sky grandeur, everything seems to be constructed of the same 'holy' stuff, all filled with potentiality, potential to be this now and to be that then. Divinity indeed!

Just visitors

And then they came
Atop the dead and gone
They built floor, walls
And a roof
And briefly they lived
There
And gone too
After some revolutions
Around the sun
No one remembered
But the earth
That life came
And lived
Here

Knocking on the noggin

Natural law germinated and grew inside the noggins of humans, and without humans, would vanish. Religion and philosophy have been the keepers of natural law, adding and subtracting as time and place and circumstance and wisdom dictate, even projecting what is inside the head, thoughts, onto the outside world, as natural. Of course with noggins that are free of innate direction, each newborn brain/mind is shaped by the entire life experience of humankind, and too, is free to further reshape itself into uniqueness -- as well, free to not reshape itself.

The paths of life

The path of nature can teach one truth and false, but the path of the human mind can teach one good and bad through the discernment of truth and false. Good and bad are absent in nature, a concept that dwells only in the minds of humans. 
----
Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe: the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.  
-- Immanuel Kant

Author, Finger, Imagination, Almost, and Huh?

"The vastness, beauty, orderliness of heavenly bodies; the excellent structure of animals and plants; and other phenomena of nature justly induce an intelligent, unprejudiced observer to conclude a supreme, powerful, just, and good author."
--Robert Boyle


"The book of nature which we have to read is written by the finger of God."
--Michael Faraday


“When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm . . . the realm of the imagination guides my thinking.”
--Jonas Salk


 "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."
--Francis Crick

“Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question "How?" but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question "Why?""
-- Erwin Chargaff

Do you see what I see

The human eyes and brain are wonderfully adapted to pattern recognition, one of the greatest survival tools of our ancient ancestors, quickly recognizing friend from foe, danger from safety, with but a minimal amount of visual input. But of course this 'quick and dirty' pattern recognition also provides for endless fun in seeing images in clouds, or the VIrgin Mary in the stains on a wall. But not to dismiss these fun images, for they do have importance, somewhat like dreams, they reveal what is of great import to ourselves. So I think of it as the outside world enters through the eyes, yet these perceived images are the mind exiting the eyes and creating Jesus on the wood grain of a door or a swirl of DNA in a ring nebula!

Imagine, a story

Ima was in her room, forbidden to go out doors to play with the other children, Rea and Int were strict parents, wanting only the best for Ima, so they knew best and Ima was homebound. Daily Ima peeked out the windows, in secret, while mother and father endlessly praised all the joys that the house held, on the mantel were knowledge and fact, each polished daily by Rea, it was almost a ritual. But one day Ima became ill, and the parents wondered why, of course they couldn't imagine why, for Reason and Intellect forbade Imagination, and of course, she soon died.