News of The Academy

I
In an online visual art community, people were rating each other's artwork. One person wrote:
3/10 if you worked from a photo, 9/10 if you actually drew it.

II
In a different community, a fellow posted some of his photographs and took pains to insist:
The mist and lighting effects were created by just me, the camera, and stuff in the room - no Photoshop involved!

III
When I started off with one of ...

Over the past month, I had a thread going called Proof That We know Just About Nothing. I claimed that since anything was possible, no one could certainly know something (a fact). For example, my famous monkey living in the center of the earth controlling gravity. No one can know for certain that a monkey does not live in the earth controlling gravity no matter how hard they try and think. But recent posts have ...

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity bends or warps space-time. this is because the gravitons, or gravity waves, contain no mass and therefore exert their force over large distances with infinite speed. in other words, light from a star that passes by a large body, like our sun, could appear in a place that it is not. the gravity from the sun would bend space time so that even though light may seem ...

Hello everyone! I am new to these forums, and this is my very first thread! It is very nice to be here. Anyway, I created this thread to address a certain topic. I would like to discuss the topic of existence and the quote that is the title of this thread. René Descartes said the following: I think therefore I am. How many of you people agree with this statement? I, for one, think this ...

How do you prove something? Well that's the thing; you cannot prove something. First off lets start with something we all think is true. For example, we are all under the effects of gravity from the earth. Okay, this theory seems very wild at first, but take a while to think this over...Some people might get it and others may not. Back to example...tell me how you know that there really isn't a monkey sitting ...

Hello everyone, I hope that you accept me as a new member of this wonderful forum. I also hope that you accept my broken English :oops: because it is not my mother tongue.

A few days ago I came across a logical argument which attempted to disprove infinity. It goes like this:

1) We cannot imagine two objects that are infinite in size to be anything but ...

He who does not search finds.

Althought I made this up myself, this is derived strongly from Buddhist wisdom which I endorse very much so.

I would not like to explain this quote at this moment, but I ám wondering if there is anyone who recognizes himself in these poetic words and finds himself not searching?

st. Anselm - Fides quaerens intellectum (or Proslogion)
there´s a thing, the biggest thing in the whole kosmos, over which nothing else, nothing bigger can be thought, and it´s God.
but it necessarily implicates that the thing is in your mind. not as a projection but the thing itself. If it was a projection, you would know that, so it still exists as a bigger thing outside your mind.
doesn´t that necessarily mean that it ...

Just something I’m interested in right now... there are some modern philosophers around, who claim that we will never know how consciousness first came about. It’s the common view it seems that it is not practically impossible, but generally impossible to know this. That we may find out sometime in the future is ruled out entirely, the reason being we don’t know how matter came into existence out of nothing so how can we know ...

my little sister just turned 18 and is going through an anti-establishment phase. she was explaining to me why she will never shave her legs again:

but it's just not natural. It's too, corporate America. I wan't to douse the fact that people think that if you /don't/ shave your legs, it's not natural. Seeing as women have been on the earth for centuries upon centuries and shaving only came up around the 1920's.... ...