Borealism

"Perhaps the Being simulating our world is only interested in it as long as we don’t know it’s simulated. So, as soon as we do… *plug pulled.*"

"It’s a beautifully coherent system, which — when properly updated to modern language — also happens to be in line with the majority view among modern philosophers, as well as with the available empirical evidence from cognitive science."

"What Jung discovered in the writings of ancient and medieval alchemists was a goldmine of psychological projections … He was mining alchemical texts for the psychological gold hidden in their strange symbols and formulas."

"Here’s what I’ve come to realize: we may be hard to find in space and time, but we are very much an integral part of a wonderful whole."

Examining our collective tendency to formulate, propagate and believe in conspiracy theories at the most uncertain of times 

"Of course, this nasty black cloud has various aesthetic silver linings. The sky above us and air around us wonderfully unpolluted. On our daily exercise walks, many notice the beauties of nature, such as flowers, as the shadow of actual and possible death focuses people’s minds on some of what is good in life. Many are paying attention to the aesthetics of their domestic environment. Yes, there is all that. But this is not to look right at the evil virus that is responsible for all of this and for the chaos in the human world. The Covid-19 virus certainly looks like an ugly ball of nastiness, at least as it is typically represented, and there is no reason to think that the representations do not do it justice. It looks like a limpet mine, and that’s what it is, in a way, with insidious hooks there to latch onto the innocent and deliver death. Is it really as ugly as it strikes us? Or is that a projection born of the fear of it and our knowledge of its merciless payload of death? Can it be so ugly, or is this just how we represent it because we fear it so?" - Professor Nick Zangwill, honorary research fellow at UCL and Philosopher of Aesthetics