Biography

An incomplete “who's who” list of thinkers (and ideas), past and present:  

Mikkel Aaland
    Wrote Sweat: The Illustrated History and Description of the Finnish Sauna, Russian Bania, Islamic Hammam, Japanese Mushi-Buro, Mexican Temescal, and Americ 1978.  See also Alan Konya; and "Steam of Life" documentary

Ansel Adams
    Photographer; one of his works is titled “Mount Williamson.”
Miguel Altieri
    Wrote an article about the favorable state of agroecology in Cuba.  See also the ANAP (National Association of Small Scale Farmers) and MACAC (Farmer to Farmer Agroecological Movement).  

Charles Anderson
    Discovered that dragonflies cross oceans.
Isaac Asimov
    Science writer.  Wrote “The History of Physics,” in which he described of the musical scale (frequency ratios) (pg 167), pitch, octaves, timbre, fundamental notes, overtones, resonance (from Latin words meaning "to sound again"). Musical instruments depend upon the resonance of the materials making up their structure, and the air filling their hollows, to strengthen and add richness to the notes produced (pg 177). Reverberation, acoustics (the study of the behavior of sound in enclosed spaces, from a Greek word meaning "to hear").

Mikhail Bakunin
    From "God and the State:" "The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.  Unless, then, we desire the enslavement and degradation of mankind... we may not, must not make the slightest concession either to the God of theology or to the God of metaphysics. He who, in this mystical alphabet, begins with A will inevitably end with Z; he who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.  If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist.  I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose." "A Boss in Heavan is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished." - Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)  (Compare with "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. - Voltaire, 1694-1778)

Julian Barbour
    Proponent of eternalism.  "Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them." (Psa. 139:16)  "And the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read." (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, quatrain 73)

Ed Begley Jr
    Environmentalist and actor
Walter Benesch
    Professor of philosophy at UAF and author of several books including “An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy.”  He described "Continuum Logic Levels" and "Five Aspect Naturing Minding Continuum". "Four ways of logic, each providing a different answer: object, subject, situations, and  process continuum."  Said that Aristotle's ideas were: non-contradiction (contrast with dialetheism), identity, and excluded middle.  Two sins in Western thought 1) There is no infinite regression in Western thought 2) Contradiction.  And again, "In Western thought contradiction and paradox are sins." "To Zen/Chan Buddhism, enlightenment is being here and now beyond duality."  
    Examples of paradox and antinomy: burn in water and wash in fire, moving without motion, the first number is two, observe yourself observing.  Dichotomies identified by Dr. Benesch: mind/body ("consciousness [possibility of thinking] can never be reduced to an object of consciousness"), mind/thoughts it holds, deduction/induction (inference), certainty/probability, naturing/minding, aspect/perspective, aspects/things, subject/predicate ("you have to be a dualist to talk about the world"), harmony/dichotomy, aesthetics/ethics, real/apparent, essence (real)/appearance, reason/intuition, imitation/abstraction, images/concepts, being/not being, relativity/certainty, materialism/asceticism (spiritualism), Sunyata/Tathata, emptiness/thusness, static/process.  
    Benesch made a simple diagram outlining basic areas of philosophical inquiry:   
Metaphysical - What are things really? Topics: essences/appearances
Epistemological - How do I know? Topics: experience, reason, intuition, revelation
Ontological - What do I mean? Topics: definitions, meaning, language, what is being/existence
Axiological - What is true/beautiful/harmonious? Topics: good/evil, subjective/objective, true/false

Wendell Berry
    Farmer, sustainable agriculture advocate and “man of letters.”  Suggested "solve for pattern coherence" when addressing issues in sustainability.  Greatest living advocate for Albert Howard's ideas.  

William Blum
    Critic of American government.  (see also Howard Zinn, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emma Goldman, Arundhati Roy,)

Niels Bohr
    Physicist.  At his grave is written "contraria sunt complementa" (opposites are complementary).   
Nick Bostrom
    Made an argument that we are likely to be within a computer simulation.

Jacob Bronowski
    “It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken." I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”  (Source: The Ascent of Man, Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty")
    Wrote in his 1951 book The Commonsense of Science: "It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests".  

Albert Camus
    … But the most popular of the group [of French and German existentialists] was the saturnine Algerian-born writer Albert Camus (1913-60).  In his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," a meditation on the predicament of humans attempting to make sense of a senseless universe, he memorably expressed a central existentialist tenet: the absurd. Reflecting on the Greek figure of Sisyphus, who is condemned eternally to roll a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again, Camus tells us that by recognizing the absurdity of his situation, Sisyphus gains at least the dignity of forthright clarity. "We must imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus famously concludes, for "being aware of one's life, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum." Camus died in the most absurd way of all - a car crash.  (From page 118: 90 Existentialism Defines an Absurd Existence)
    We value our lives and think them important, but we also know that we will die and that time will erase all our work.  Though we long for it, we cannot create meaning or hope in a world that contains neither.  Our awareness of the paradox between our desire on the one hand and our disappointment on the other are the terms of an absurd life.  Camus states:  “Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me.”  And later concludes: “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.  They are inseparable.”  The image of a happy man devoid of hope is the mark of absurdity.  (This reminds me of the story of the monk hanging on the end of a rope above a chasm.  Above him a black mouse and a white mouse gnaw at the rope, slowly reducing its width to that of a single strand.  The monk sees a strawberry near the cliff by which he hangs, so he picks it, and eats it.  Live in the present.)  
    Albert Camus was 46 when he died in 1960.  Three years before his death he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his writings against capital punishment (Reflections on the Guillotine, 1957).  In 1942 he published The Myth of Sisyphus, and in 1951 The Rebel, which builds upon the ideas of the earlier work.  Also wrote La Peste.  "The important thing, as Abbe Baliani said to Mme d'Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments." (The Myth of Sisyphus 38) "The tragic work might be the work that, after all future hope is exiled, describes the life of a happy man." 137
Camus wrote Reflections on the Guillotinne, a powerful critique of capital punishment.  One of his arguments was that this punishment had no deterrant effect at all:  “If fear of death is, indeed, a fact, another fact is that such fear, however great it may be, has never sufficed to quell human passions.  Bacon is right in saying that there is no passion so weak that it cannot confront and overpower fear of death.  Revenge, love, honour, pain, another fear manage to overcome it.  How could cupidity, hatred, jealousy fail to do what love of a person or a country, what a passion for freedom manage to do?”  [621]

Noam Chomsky
    Noam Chomsky on Anarchism:  "...anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of, say, Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin and others. They had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally, they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization which might be national or even international in scope. And these decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return, and in which, in fact, they live." (Noam Chomsky interviewed by Peter Jay "The Relevance of Anarcho-syndicalism" July 25, 1976)  As a younger man he was influenced by anarcho-syndicalist ideas of Rudolf Rocker, as well as democratic socialist George Orwell (a more familiar name) but his views may be equally described as libertarian socialist.

Terrance Cole
    History professor at UAF who shared “Six Rules to Remember About the Past:”
1.    "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." L.P. Hartley
2.    The past can not be judged by the standards of the present.
3.    The past is hidden everywhere, and we must learn how to read it.
4.    "The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner
5.    The past is not frozen in time; it is constantly being revised. Works of history - like other acts of memory or imagination - often reveal more about the time period in which they were written than the time period they were written about.
6.    The present can either inspire our search for the past, or it can poison it.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464)
    The Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes the following information under his name.
“The weakness of human reason was evident to Cusa because its primary rule is the principle of noncontradiction, which states that contradictories cannot be simultaneously true of the same object. He insisted that there is a "coincidence of opposites" (coincidentia oppositorum) in reality, especially in the infinite God. He criticized the Aristotelians for insisting on the principle of noncontradiction and stubbornly refusing to admit the compatibility of contradictories in reality. It takes almost a miracle, he complained, to get them to admit this; and yet without this admission the ascent of mystical theology is impossible.
    “Cusa preferred the Neo platonists to the Aristotelian philosophers because they recognized in man a power of knowing superior to reason which they called intellect (intellectus). This was a faculty of intuition or intelligence by which we rise above the principle of noncontradiction and see the unity and coincidence of opposites in reality. He found this faculty best described and most fruitfully cultivated by the Christian Neoplatonists, especially St. Augustine, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Anselm, the School of Chartres, St. Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart. Following their tradition, he constantly strove to see unity and simplicity where the Aristotelians could see only pluraltiy and contradiction. He frequently expressed his views in symbols and analogies, often mathematical in character, because the rational language of demonstration is appropriate to the processes of reason but not to the simple views of the intellect.”

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
    "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." (Compare with Henry David Thoreau: "Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify.")

Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
    Author of The God Delusion “Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief.  The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning.  The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book.” (282) 402 "argumentum ad consequentiam"  Who does not like the consequences of supernatural belief but persists in supernatural belief anyway?  Nobody!  But if something is true, despite not liking the consequences, we deny its factuality at our own risk.  Dawkins described many important evolutionary scientists and their work, among those I found most interesting were Richard Lenski's experiments with E. coli, John Endler's work with guppies, and Sydney Brenner's work with C. elegans.  See also Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Dan Barker.  Daniel Dennett gives a deflationary account of the “hard problem of consciousness”, while John Searle is anti-deflationary.  

Democritus (~460-370 B.C.)
    [In order to achieve cheerfulness]... one must keep one's mind on what is attainable, and be content with what one has, paying little heed to things envied and admired, and not dwelling on them in one's mind. Rather must you consider the lives of those in distress, reflecting on their intense sufferings, in order that your own possessions and condition may seem great and enviable, and you may, by ceasing to desire more, cease to suffer in your soul... One must... [compare] one's own life with that of those in worse cases, and must consider oneself fortunate, reflecting on their sufferings, on being so much better off than they. If you keep to this way of thinking, you will live more serenely (fr. 191, cf. fr. 3; Kirk, Raven and Schofield). This fragment from Democritus is one of the earliest examples of therapeutic arguments used by Hellenistic schools - Scepticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, etc. (Warren p.46).  See also Pyrrho of Elis who was fond of Homer's lines (Il. 21.106-7): "Ay friend, die thou; why thus thy fate deplore? Patroclus, thy better, is no more."  

Jared Diamond
    “I decided to add up all the animals in the world that have ever been domesticated, and I was amazed by what I found… I counted up 148 different species of wild, plant-eating terrestrial mammals that weighed over 100 pounds, but of those 148, the number that has ever been successfully farmed for any length of time is just 14… Goats, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, Bactrian camels, Arabian camels, water buffalo, llamas, reindeer, yaks, nithans, and bally cattle.” (Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1999)

Diogenes the Cynic
    Ancient Greek philosopher who lived in a barrel.  When he was offered anything by the king, he only requested that the king step out of his sunlight.  

Gerard Dorn (1530?-1584)
    Alchemist, cited by Carl Jung.  Wrote "There is nothing in nature that does not contain as much evil as good."     

Fyodor Dostoevsky
    Dostoevsky talks about freedom in the sense used by philosophers when they talk about determinism.  In "Notes from Underground" Dostoevsky describes how any purely determined system will act rationally and do what is in its best interest.  But it will not necessarily have free will.  Free will is the freedom to not only do what is in our best interest, but to even do what is not good for us.  Since people like to know they are free, they often do what isn't in their best interest.  And this is a cause of war, among many other things.  But it is also the cause of altruism, for in loving others we put their interests ahead of our own (interests that we may not share, and may even be counter our own).  We have nothing to gain from showing selfless love, and hence one might say that the ultimate act of freedom to sacrifice our own interest to help another.  Love is freedom, Q.E.D.
    I tried to construct this argument using only Dostoevsky's ideas, which I do not necessarily share.  And I think it is a conclusion he might have tentatively agreed with, considering what we know about his thoughts on psychology and religion.  Of course, suicide may be another conclusion one could reach about an "ultimate act" asserting our free will (in this case, the freedom to end our life), but it is a far less desirable a way to realize that goal for obvious reasons.  Perhaps this has more to do with the "dizziness of freedom" described by existentialists than Freud's "death drive," though the superficial similarities have crossed my mind.  Personally, the I think the concept of free will cannot be easily separated from the host of relationships that it depends upon, preventing  us from making any kind of absolute pronouncement about its status. Similarly Dostoevsky deals with other unclear ideas, like freedom, determinism, rationality, and I combined them with altruism, another difficult to define idea (personally, I like Frans de Waal's opinions on that).

Wang Dulu
    Wuxia novelist who wrote the Crane/Iron Pentalogy: Crane Frightens Kunlun; Precious Sword, Golden Hairpin; Sword’s Force, Pearl’s Shine; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Iron Knight, Silver Vase.

Bart Ehrman
    Ehrman is engaged in textual criticism of the Bible.  His view of the text is basically to stop forcing agreement and correspendence with reality where there is obviously disagreement and error.  Three examples: the God of the Jews and the God of Jesus are not the same, Jesus is obviously wrong about the end of the world, and Jesus didn't claim to be God.  Ehrman made it clear that we can't come to any contemporary moral conclusions based on the Bible alone.  It would be so out of context and misunderstood.  I think it was p14 of Misquoting Jesus he wrote "we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own."  (Compare with Thomas Friedman, author of “Who Wrote the Bible?”)
     Also interesting was that Ehrman lost his faith due to theodicy.  Or in other words, he concluded that a good god would never allow so much suffering in the world. (A point best made by Dostoevsky in The Brother's Karamazov chapter "Rebellion") Others have suggested that religious ideas involve a problem of knowledge. How do we know any of the claims of religion? In most other fields of knowledge there is an expectation that some sort of proof, usually physical proof, be made available before belief is granted.  The assumption being that if something is true, it should in principle be accessible to everyone, not just available to some people.  Inevitably, discrimination based on what we claim to know, but cannot prove, will face resistance since it is seen as wrong and unjustified.  

Albert Einstein
    Einstein was critical of those forms of religious belief that are selfish and anthropomorphic, but he did find common cause in those that aspired to superpersonal values. “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion." (12 Feb 1950) "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science... It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion." (The world as I see it, 1931) “The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.” (20 Nov 1950) “Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state. (1932) “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.” “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.”

Loren Eiseley
    Essayist
Michael Ende
    Author of "Die Unendliche Geschichte" in which the character Morla states "We don't care" followed shortly by "We don't even care whether or not we care."  

Ben Falk
    Author of “The Resilient Farm and Homestead” in which he describes permaculture as “applied disturbance ecology” and recommends having a year of food always on hand.  Quotes: "...humans seem good enough at understanding very simple and immediate cause and effect, but we are particularly poor at grasping this process when there is a time delay or when the system contains complexity, such as when numerous agents are acting upon it." (p5, he cites Fritjof Capra and Peter Senge,  systems theorists).  "No democratic civilization can last long if it is built upon a citizenry that consume more than they produce... If our goal is a peaceful, just society, self-reliance at the home and community levels must be a central focus of our lives." (p6)  "Our task, then, at the dawn of the third millenium, is to transition from a society based on mining the most value as quickly as possible to a long-haul culture living not on the principal but on the interest." (p13)  "If being the "toolmakers" sustained humanity through the last epoch, evolving into soil makers and water purifiers might just get us through the next." (p104)  "Today, there's an intense concentration of money in the same way there is an intense concentration of other forms of energy and power... Energy tends to concentrate, stagnate, and become ill distributed. Our job as a resilient homesteader is to activate the most direct mechanism for releasing these energies and spreading them across a landscape, a community, a region, and the world. This applies to money the same way it applies to water, electricity, fertility, biomass, or anything else." (p255-256) Also describes “fleeing” versus “staying” (p13) and the use of hedges and swales (p158). See also Brad Lancaster's book “Rainwater Harvesting.” Similar topics addressed by Sepp Holzer and P.A. Yeomans' Keyline agriculture design.  Falk is a proponent of silvopastures, aka forest agriculture.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
    "Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God—the evil being—of religious fanaticism." - The Essence of Christianity, Chapter 4 (pages 52-53)

Feyerabend
    Wrote "Killing Time."  If atheism is the belief that there is no god, non-absolutism is the belief that there are no absolutes of any kind, which includes a belief that "a unified theory of the physical world simply does not exist" (Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason, 1987), "all methodologies have their limits" (Against Method, 1975).  Feyerabend claimed that non-scientific ways of knowing "kept people alive and made their existence comprehensible."

Fibonacci
    The sequence named after him approximates the Golden Ratio.
Masanobu Fukuoka
    Wrote One Straw Revolution, he applied the concept of "Mu" to farming.  With Albert Howard, Bill Mollison and Wes Jackson, one of the seminal thinkers in alternative, sustainable agriculture.  

Howard Gabennesch
    Wrote "Critical Thinking: What Is It Good for? (In Fact, What Is It?)" in Volume 30.2, March / April 2006 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, in which he points out "the truth comes in pieces and is unlikely to be found all in one place." (cf. 1 Corinthians 13: 9-12) The article outlined seven traits belonging to the concept of intellectual due process.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994)
    Georgescu-Roegen was concerned with entropy and biodegradation of the environment due to the economic process... the economy must shrink.  The depletion of mineral resources and energy must be as small as feasible.  ...A bioeconomic program emphasizing such factors as solar energy, organic agriculture, population limitation, product durability, moderate consumption, and international equity.  (paraphrased from "Energy and Economic Myths")
    The only reasonable solutions to the energy crisis are to economize in the use of fossil fuels, or to rely on less energy intensive technologies.  Any successful program to economize on energy will require international cooperation.  - Georgescu-Roegen 1986 "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in Retrospect"  Promethean technologies: fire, heat engine, nuclear, but not yet a "solar breeder".  The only solution is to conserve, or rather, "economize"... the hourglass cannot be turned over.

Siddharta Gotama
    Guatama described the importance of understanding anguish, which leads to letting go of its origins, realizing its cessation, and cultivating the path. Stephen Batchelor explains that "these are not four separate activities but four phases within the the process of awakening itself."  It is not a "linear sequence of "stages" through which we "progress."  We do not leave behind an earlier stage in order to advance to the next rung of some hierarchy.  All four activities are part of a single continuum of action."  Thich Nhat Hanh paraphrased the Four Noble Truths: Identify your suffering, see its sources, find ways to transform it and realize peace. (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, p. 251) "Both formerly and now, it is only suffering that I describe, and the cessation of suffering." (Samyutta Nikaya 22.86) See also The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, chapter 2, sutra 16, which reads: Pain yet to come is to be avoided (heyam duhkham anagatam).
    In a text called Majjhima-nikaya (Questions Which Tend Not to Edification) Gotama is asked if he has any theories, and his answer in part is that theories concerning the eternity of the world or one's existence after death are "a jungle, a wilderness, a puppet-show, a writhing, and a fetter, and are coupled with misery, ruin, despair, and agony, and do not tend to aversion, absence of passion, cessation, quiescence, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and nirvana." The Buddha does not affirm a positive reality underlying the world of change, a self underlying the empirical series of mental happenings, and the positive character of nirvana. Whereof we cannot speak we must keep silent.  
    “The Great Sage preached the Law of Emptiness In order to free men from all personal views. If one still holds the view that Emptiness exists, Such a person the Buddhas will not transform." (The Cheng-kuan lun (Treatise on the Correct View) [also called Chung lun (Madhyamika sastra)])   "Irrigators lead the waters. Fletchers bend the shafts. Carpenters bend wood. The virtuous control themselves." (Dhammapada 80 and 145)  "He abused me, he beat me, he worsted me, he robbed me." Hate never is allayed in men That cherish suchlike enmity. "He abused me, he beat me, he worsted me, he robbed me." Hate surely is allayed in men Who cherish no such enmity. For enmity by enmity Is never in this world allayed; It is allayed by amity — That is an ancient principle." (Dhammapada, vv. 3-5, and Majjhima Nikaya, Sutta 128) Four Buddhist virtues are frequently mentioned together - love, equanimity, compassion, and joy.
    The Buddha said that if in a certain moment or place you adopt something as the absolute truth, and you attach to that, then you will no longer have any chance to reach the truth. Even when the truth comes and personally knocks on your door, and asks you to open the door, you won’t recognize it. So you must not be too attached to dogmas–to what you believe, and to what you perceive…. We have to free ourselves from these views–even the views of non-self, the view of impermanence, of inter-being–we have to let go of all of these. These are instruments to work with, but they are not to be venerated in themselves.  (Thich Nhat Hanh in Parabola magazine Vol 30:4 Winter 2005)  The central message of the Diamond Sutra is “Let your mind function freely without abiding anywhere or in anything.”  For Hui-neng, “no thought” simply means “the seeing of all things with your mind without being tainted or attached to them.” The doctrine of no-thought must never be understood as demanding that we must think of nothing or cut off all thoughts.
    The Madhyamika-Sastra, or Treatise on the Middle Doctrine, verses 17 through 24, says in part that there is no difference between nirvana and samsara, and basically "bliss consists in the cessation of all thought, in the quiescence of plurality. No separate reality was preached at all, nowhere and none by Buddha!" (See also Feyerabend)  T'ang poet Han-shan's metaphor for duality "there is no inside or out!"  John Daido Loori said "In nonattachment, on the other hand, there's unity. There's unity because there's nothing to attach to. If you have unified with the whole universe, there's nothing outside of you, so the notion of attachment becomes absurd. Who will attach to what?"  Maybe Dogen said it best in the first line of the Fukanzazengi:  "The Way is basically perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent upon practice and realization?"  Compare with Zen Master I-hsuan: “Seekers of the Way. In Buddhism no effort is necessary. All one has to do is to do nothing, except to move his bowels, urinate, put on his clothing, eat his meals, and lie down if he is tired.”  
    Feng Youlan's five main points of Ch'an bear repeating in connection with this topic:
1.    The Highest Truth or First Principle is inexpressible.
2.    “Spiritual cultivation cannot be cultivated.”
3.    In the last resort nothing is gained.
4.    “There is nothing much in the Buddhist teaching.”
5.    “In carrying water and chopping wood: therein lies the wonderful Tao.”

Colin Groves
    Wrote about declining merkwelt in a paper titled “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Being Domesticated.”  Groves supported his thesis by explaining that just as all domestic animals have reduced brain sizes over their wild counterparts, so too has the cranial capacity of humans, during the Holocene continuing to present day, reduced even as body size has remained the same.  This apparently parallels our history with the domestication of the dog, which occurred in the late Pleistocene.  Groves states that in domestic animals the part of the brain that is reduced the most is the limbic system, “presumably signifying reduced aggression.”  Could this be the path by which domesticating dogs made humans more compassionate, by reducing our own limbic systems and aggression?  I doubt it.  Though I wonder if Steve Pinker explored this as a potential contributing factor in his book “Better Angels of our Nature.”  Not only the limbic system is affected, but sense organs of sight and hearing are measurably diminished.  It is important to note that techonolgical innovations, such as “fire, tools, and culture” may have had a similar effect on humans as domestication did on animals, that is, enabling us to flourish as a species even as our merkwelt diminished. See also "Lobo the king of Currumpaw"

Nick Hanauer
    Wealthy entrepreneur and advocate of raising the minimum wage and supporting the middle class. Wrote article “The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats” in July 2014 (see also “middle-out economics,” and journalist Barry C. Lynn)

Thich Nhat Hanh
    “The Third Door of Liberation is aimlessness, apranihita. There is nothing to do, nothing to realize, no program, no agenda. This is the Buddhist teaching about eschatology. Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else… There is no need to put anything in front of us and run after it. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become… Be yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. …there is “nothing to attain.” …enlightenment is already in us. We don’t have to search anywhere. We don’t need a purpose or goal… We are at peace in the present moment, just seeing the sunlight streaming through our window or hearing the sound of the rain… Aimlessness and nirvana are one… The practice of apranihita, aimlessness, is the practice of freedom.” (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching)  See also the four Brahmaviharas (love metta, equanimity, compassion karuna, and sympathetic joy mudita)

Sam Harris
    Author of The Moral Landscape, in which he referenced Robert Edgerton's book Sick Societies, also wrote "Lying"

Robert Heinlein
    "By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man – man himself.  So he must supply his own indispensable competition.  He has no enemy to help him.... anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons."  (“Time Enough for Love”, 1973)

Heraclitus (540-475B.C.)
    He believed that only change is certain. You can't step in the same river twice.
Herman Hesse
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Christopher Hitchens
    Author of “God is Not Great” and “The Portable Atheist.”  He wrote “...atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it.”  (PA, xvi) “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers.  Our belief is not a belief.  Our principles are not a faith.  We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.  We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”  (GNG, p.5) “Religious faith is, precisely because we are still evolving creatures, ineradicable.  It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.  For this reason I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could.” (GNG, 12) “There can be no serious ethical position based on denial or a refusal to look the facts squarely in the face.”  (PA, xxii)  

Thomas Hobbes
    Wrote Leviathan, said that life in the state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Sepp Holzer
    Austrian farmer, author of “The Rebel Farmer” and “Sepp Holzer's Permaculture.”  Known for "hugelkultur" among other methods he uses.  

Sir Albert Howard
    Organic agriculture owes more to Howard than any other figure in history.  He wrote "An Agricultural Testament" and "The Soil and Health."  Howard described how the key to soil fertility is the return of the waste products of agriculture back to the land for the maintenance of soil humus; and later with Newman Turner and George Stapledon, went on to develop lay farming methods. From the introduction to The Soil and Health:
1.    The birthright of all living things is health.
2.    This law is true for soil, plant, animal, and man: the health of these four is one connected chain.
3.    Any weakness or defect in the health of any earlier link in the chain is carried on to the next and succeeding links, until it reaches the last, namely, man.
4.    The widespread vegetable and animal pests and diseases, which are such a bane to modern agriculture, are evidence of a great failure of health in the second (plant) and third (animal) links of the chain.
5.    The impaired health of human populations (the fourth link) in modern civilized countries is a consequence of this failure in the second and third links.
6.    This general failure in the last three links is to be attributed to failure in the first link, the soil: the undernourishment of the soil is at the root of all. The failure to maintain a healthy agriculture has largely canceled out all the advantages we have gained from our improvements in hygiene, in housing, and our medical discoveries.
7.    To retrace our steps is not really difficult if once we set our minds to the problem. We have to bear in mind Nature's dictates, and we must conform to her imperious demand: (a) for the return of all wastes to the land; (b) for the mixture of the animal and vegetable existence; (c) for the maintaining of an adequate reserve system of feeding the plant, i.e. we must not interrupt the mycorrhizal association. If we are willing so far to conform to natural law, we shall rapidly reap our reward not only in a flourishing agriculture, but in the immense asset of an abounding health in ourselves and in our children's children.

Howard delivered a sharp criticism of the dominant food system paradigm in 1940 and the agricultural research objectives of his day:  
    "In allowing science to be used to wring the last ounce from the soil by new varieties of crops, cheaper and more stimulating manures, deeper and more thorough cultivating machines, hens which lay themselves to death, and cows which perish in an ocean of milk, something more than a want of judgment on the part of the organization is involved. Agricultural research has been misused to make the farmer, not a better producer of food, but a more expert bandit. He has been taught how to profiteer at the expense of posterity -- how to transfer capital in the shape of soil fertility and the reserves of his live stock to his profit and loss account. In business such practices end in bankruptcy; in agricultural research they lead to temporary success. All goes well as long as the soil can be made to yield a crop. But soil fertility does not last for ever; eventually the land is worn out; real farming dies" (Howard, An Agricultural Testament, 1940)
    See also Joseph Jenkins (The Humanure Handbook), Paul Stamets (Mycelium Running), Malcolm Beck (composting guru), Keith Addison (Journey To Forever), Green burial documentary "a will for the woods," Permaculture founders Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, F. H. King "Farmers of Forty Centuries," Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Gary Nabham, Allan Savory, Aldo Leopold "Thinking Like a Mountain," Wes Jackson (perennial grains)  
    Paraphrased from James Nardi's book The World Beneath our Feet: "In death all living plants and animals actually return more elements and compounds to the soil than they ever took during their lifetimes."  

Elbert Hubbard 1856-1915
    American author, "The path of least resistance is what makes rivers run crooked."  Nancy Newhall wrote “The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned how to ask.”

Hume
    "The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish....' When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion."  Hume asserted that it is impossible to deduce “oughts” from what “is”

Nicholas Humphrey
    Wrote 1976 article "The Social Function of Intellect" about the origin of consciousness. "I argue that the higher intellectual faculties of primates have evolved as an adaptation to the complexities of social living. For better or worse, styles of thinking which are primarily suited to social problem-solving colour the behaviour of man and other primates even towards the inanimate world."

    In the article "Seeing and Somethingness" he writes about what blindsight can tell us about consciousness. It's a useful way of thinking about the topic, and how easily we can project self awareness onto things that may lack it entirely. He arrives at the somewhat startling conclusion (no doubt for some at least) that many things which may appear to experience consciousness may nonetheless lack that experience of an "inner self". He quoted Jerry Fodor: "Consciousness … seems to be among the chronically unemployed … As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well if they weren’t conscious. Why, then, did God bother to make consciousness? What on earth could he have had in mind?" Recall what Robert Rosen wrote about “psychomimesis”. He called the Turing Test “sympathetic magic” - while it may reveal the appearance of an inner consciousness in machines, it may in actuality reveal no more than blindsight at best, and psychomimesis at worst. If Rosen and Humphrey are both right about the matter, we need a better test. Iain McGilchrist also wrote about blindsight in The Matter with Things, under the chapter "Intuition's claims on truth". But for him it was to illuminate the capacities we tend to neglect or deny. Describing the case of a man who doubted his capacity for blindsight: "The conscious articulating mind, not knowing what is going on, prefers anything to accepting the truth of the matter - that we are getting along OK without its input." (cf. “Swarm” by Bruce Sterling and “Zima Blue” by Alastair Reynolds, two short stories that portray the contrast between intuition, or blindsight, and conscious thought.)

Jesus
    "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering." (Isaiah 53:3) Jesus said:  Do to others what you would have them do to you. Love one another. Love those who do not love you in return, and do good without expecting to get anything back. Do not resist those who intend to harm you.  [See Matthew 5:38-48, 6:33, 34, 7:12, 25:35-40; Luke 6:27-38, 17:21-22; John 4:23-24, 6:29, 10:30, 13:34-35, 15:4, 15:17. A more complete list of references is possible.]  This inspired St. Francis to compose a prayer, the second half of which runs: Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted; to understand, than to be understood; to love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.” (Compare with chapter ten of Shantideva's Bodhicharyavatara.) See also Martin Buber, Thomas a Kempis, Baltasar Gracion. (see also ethic or reciprocity, and intergenerational reciprocity, negative consequentialism, the "Precautionary Principle," and tonglen. Thomas Aquinas wrote that "God is infinitely simple.")
    John 4:16 says simply that "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." (See also 1 John 4:7 and 4:12) Consider 1 Samuel 16:7 "The Lord looks at the heart," John 7:24 "Stop judging by mere appearances and make a right judgment," and John 7:8  Mt.25:40 describes the reality of the interconnectedness of everything.  Ecclesiastes 7: 15-18 “In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: a righteous man perishing in his righteousness, and a wicked man living long in his wickedness. Do not be overrighteous, neither be overwise- why destroy yourself?  Do not be overwicked, and do not be a fool- why die before your time?  It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other. The man who fears God will avoid all extremes."
    Matthew 5 verses 3 and 5, also 1 John 4:16 "Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him," and James 5, quoted by Pope Francis.  James 5:1-6 was translated by J.B. Phillips in 1962 includes the word “plutocrats.”  Another translation by Eugene H. Peterson (called The Message) in 1993: “All the workers you’ve exploited...You’ve looted the earth...”  

Carl Jung
    Author of “Aion” and "Mysterium Coniunctionis" To Jung, the religious question is asked in order to come to a greater understanding of "What am I?"     Opposites form a syzygy; like the rod of Asclepius, sign of the medical profession.  Alchemists used the phrase "solve et coagula", which means dissolve and coagulate, and “everything will dissolve in its opposite.”
    In "Answer to Job", Jung wrote "In Christ's sayings there are already indications of ideas which go beyond the traditionally "Christian" morality..." [CW vol.11 para. 696] He referred to Luke 16:1-9 and a quote in the Codex Bezae, an early Greek New Testament manuscript from the fifth or sixth century (scholars designate it by the letter D) characterized by numerous additions, and some omissions, from the ordinary text. The quote goes "Man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed; but if thou knowest not, thou art cursed, and a transgressor of the law." Jung explains that "here the moral criterion is consciousness, and not law or convention." Why the emphasis on being conscious of one's actions? "Obviously, it makes a great deal of difference subjectively whether man knows what he is living out, whether he understands what he is doing, and whether he accepts responsibility for what he proposes to do or has done. Before the bar of nature and fate, unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse; on the contrary there are very severe penalties for it." [para. 745] As opposed to law, this idea does not depend upon which actions are good and evil. Rather, it depends on how good or evil actions are done. "We are called upon to be alert, critical, and self-aware". [para. 659] This is the moral of Luke 16:1-9, "The parable of the Shrewd Manager".
    Jung wrote “Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, which moves according to laws entirely different from those of our [individual] consciousness.”  In an interview in 1959 on "Face to Face" Jung said: "We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil." (Compare with Robert Heinlein)  Freud said the goal of psychoanalysis is to reduce hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness.

Juvenal
    Roman poet, attributed with quote "Who watches the watchmen?" found in his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–8). It is often attributed to Plato's Republic because it expresses Socrates' concerns.

Jon Kabat-Zinn
Lloyd Kahn
    Author of Shelter, Homework, Builders of the Pacific Coast, etc.
Sandor Katz
    Wrote “The Art of Fermentation” and other books on the same subject.  
John F Kennedy
    "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

Søren Kierkegaard
    "Anxiety may be compared with dizziness.  He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy.  But what is the reason for this?  It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.  Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom…" - The Concept of Anxiety (1980), Princeton University Press, page 61.  See also Begrebet Angest (The Concept of Dread), and Freud's todstreib.

Laozi
    Author of Tao-te ching.  From "A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy", in Taoism, "Tao is the One, which is natural, eternal, spontaneous, nameless, and indescribable. It is at once the beginning of all things and the way in which all things pursue their course. As the way of life, it denotes simplicity, spontaneity, tranquility, weakness, and most important of all, non-action (wu wei). By the latter is not meant literally "inactivity" but rather "taking no action that is contrary to Nature" - in other words, letting Nature take its own course." Laozi wrote "The sage never strives for the great, and thereby the great is achieved."  (This a paradox few understood better than Masanobu Fukuoka, Japanese farmer and author of One Straw Revolution.)  
    In chapter 48 of the Tao-te ching, Lao-tzu said “No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone.” Similarly, Hui-neng maintained that so long as our mind remains unattached to any particular thought, it is capable of thinking all thoughts suitable to all situations. The pure or unattached mind “comes and goes freely and functions fluently without any hindrance.” (The Golden Age of Zen)
    "Mine is the heart of a very idiot.  So dull am I.  So many people are there who shine.  I alone am dark.  They look lively and self-assured, I alone, depressed.  I seem unsettled like the ocean, blown adrift, never brought to a stop.  All men can be put to some use.  I, alone, am intractable and boorish."
    “Reversion is the action of Tao” TTC 40

Hugh Laurie
    Actor and comedian: "I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness. It is a snare and a delusion. It's jolly nice sometimes, like steak and chips, but is it a goal?" (similar to Einstein's criticism of utilitarianism)  

Stanislaw Lem
    "Finis vitae sed non amoris" means "life ends but not love." - Solaris
Linji
Gene Logsdon
    “So precious was manure that Chinese farmers stored it in burglarproof containers.  The polite thing to do after enjoying a meal at a friend's house was to go to the bathroom before you departed.” (p.5 Holy Shit) "Farming is by its nature not truly sustainable" (p.144 Holy Shit)

Benoit Mandelbrot
    Fractals.  “A fractal is a shape made of parts similar to the whole in some way”

Abraham Masolow
    Famous for his Hierarchy of Needs, wrote about the "self actualizing" person in "Motivation and Personality."  "Our subjects are in general strongly focused on problems outside themselves... In general these tasks are nonpersonal or "unselfish", concerned rather with the good of mankind in general, or of a nation in general or of a few individuals in the subject's family." (pg. 159-160)  Vincent van Gogh wrote: "I can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create."

Karl Marx
Marcel Mauss
    Author of “The Gift”
Ernst Mayr
    Evolutionary biologist, debated with Carl Sagan.  Mayr was not in favor of the SETI program.  His perspective was elaborated somewhat in a blog post by PZ Myers titled "A little pessimism about Extraterrestrial Intelligence," in which PZ identified the following obstacles to ET intelligence: Mortality, Counterforces, Local opportunity, and "Life can’t cope with the Big Empty."

Christopher McDougall
    Wrote “Born to Run.”  Compare with the Tarahumara people, the indigenous Mexicans known for endurance running or "persistence hunting".  Bernd Heinrich wrote "Why We Run" and Scott Carrier wrote "Running after Antelope".  The Tarahumara have a toe strike method of running common in barefoot running, which is supposedly best for foot health.  It is important to be mindful of how and where we land on our feet, an idea rebranded as "chi running".

James McLurkin
    Works in area of swarm robotics and swarm theory, featured on Nova episode.  
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
    Wrote "L'homme machine" or "Man the Machine" in 1748.  It is described as an important contribution to the development of the Age of Enlightenment.  To La Mattrie, thought is not incompatible with organized matter, rather it is a property of it.  "Let us then conclude boldly that man is a machine and that the whole universe contains only one substance variously modified."

Ted Mosquin
    Advocate for ecocentrism, and with Stan Rowe wrote "A Manifesto for Earth" in Biodiversity 5(1): 3-9 which contains a Statement of Conviction followed by a set of Core Principles with their associated Action Principles. Compare also with Kopytin, A.; Gare, A. (2023). Ecopoiesis: A manifesto for ecological civilization. And see also pedosphere, rhizosphere – the nexus of the ecosphere.  Soils lie at the interface of Earth's atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere.  Therefore, a thorough understanding of soils requires some knowledge of meteorology, climatology, ecology, biology, hydrology, geomorphology, geology and many other earth sciences and natural sciences.  

Nagarjuna (2nd century)
    "When buddhas don’t appear And their followers are gone, The wisdom of awakening Bursts forth by itself ."

Piotr Naskrecki
    Author, conservationist
Scott Nearing
    Author of “The Good Life.”  See also Jean Hay Bright “Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life”

Friedrich Nietzsche
    Described morality as the "danger of dangers".  Nietzsche expressed an opinion that we owe many of our advances to the effects of suffering, which has urged humankind to become better than we otherwise might be (Beyond Good and Evil p225).

Tor Norretranders
    Wrote "The Generous Man: how helping others is the sexiest thing you can do" and claimed "Computers and robots will have to learn about hau, about generosity, and in the final analysis, about sex." (p293)

William of Ockham
Richard Ogust
    Featured in documentary “Chances of the World Changing”, about his passion for saving turtles from extinction.  

George Orwell
Jean Pain
    Author of “The Methods of Jean Pain” about living a more sustainable life.  Pain pioneered a method of compost heat recovery that has since been repeated by many, and advanced by Agrilab and the Highfields center for composting in Vermont.  

Thomas Paine
    Father of the American Revolution.  Though government is a necessary evil at best, it's purpose is to provide security and prevent anyone from developing a monopoly on power and profit, if I read Thomas Paine correctly.  "It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed."  "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." (The Rights of Man 1791)  
    "I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene."  "Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came." (Agrarian Justice)

Thomas Piketty
    Wrote "Capital in the 21st Century."
Steven Pinker
    Wrote "Better Angels of our Nature"
Plato  
    “It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside to be heard. There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any organ by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested. Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing. Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely with and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellant than one which depended upon anything.”
(from Timaeus, 33-The construction of the world)

Karl Popper
    Wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies.  Chapter 9: Aestheticism, Perfectionism, Utopianism  is primarily concerned with “the realm of political activity”. He contrasts two approaches to politics, “Utopian engineering” and “piecemeal engineering”, and gives numerous reasons why the former is the more dangerous of them.

Matthieu Ricard
    Wrote “The Philosopher and the Monk” and participated in a study involving fMRI brain scans to see the effect of meditating on compassion.

Velcrow Ripper
    Made a 2008 film titled Fierce Light about spirituality and activism. He narrated "I wonder, will we be able to save the farm? Will we be able to save the planet?" He used the protest to save South Central Farm in LA as metaphor for what is happening in the world today. And he proposed that the many grassroots civil rights movements seen today, including one which calls itself a conference of "spiritual progressives," are a part of the Earth's immune response.  The phrase "Siempre Verde" (always green) came up a few times, as did references to culture jammers and Shambala warriors.  I was impressed by Darryl Hannah's commitment to South Central Farms, and John Lewis' fight for civil rights. Desmond Tutu described the ethic of Umbutu as "I am because you are." Rodney King once stated "Can't we all just get along?" And Gandhi said "There is no religion higher than truth."  Thich Nhat Hanh said "You have to do both" referring to maintaining a sense of inner peace and working for social justice.  We can't ignore suffering, whether it is ours or that of others.

Raoul Robinson
    British/Canadian plant pathologist and author of "Return to Resistance," probably the staunchest defender and strongest promoter of horizontal/quantitative resistance breeding of crops to create more disease resistant strains. See also Roberto Garcia, Gregor Mendel.  

Niels Röling
    Wrote "Gateway to The Global Garden: Beta/Gamma Science for Dealing with Ecological Rationality" in which he quotes "According to Maturana and Varela, cognition is the very process of life. Mind is immanent in matter at all levels of life."  His paper contains two premises: 1) Ecological rationality seeks to create structural coupling [between agent and domain] and to bring forth a world that allows structural coupling to be maintained. 2) People's activities must be increasingly guided by ecological rationality [as opposed to rational choice theory]. See also "intergenerational justice"

Franklin D. Roosevelt
    Proposed a “Second Bill of Rights,” and described the “Four Freedoms.”
Arturo Rosenblueth
    In 1943 he set the basis of cybernetics, proposing that behavior controlled by negative feedback, whether in animal, human or machine, was a determinative, directive principle in nature. Cybernetics focuses on how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes to better accomplish the first two tasks. It is "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action" according to Louis Couffignal. A premise one might find implied here is that the stimulus behind behavior is the achievment of a goal.
    In the field of psychology, the importance of monitoring and regulating one's attention to a task prompted George Miller to coin the acronym T.O.T.E.: test-operate-test-exit. In the same breath we could also talk about optimal foraging theory and control theory (a close sister to cybernetics). Each employs a specific example of the classic feedback model. In general terms, feedback is the process in which part of the output of a system is returned to its input in order to regulate its further output.  
    In 1973 William Powers built upon ideas like those of Rosenblueth's. He proposed the Perceptual Control Theory model of behavioral organization, which states that living organisms are closed-loop systems that act to keep perceptual variables in pre-specified states, protected from disturbances caused by variations in environmental circumstances. Which makes sense when considering a quote from Claude Bernard (1813-1878): "The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life."

Hans Rosling
    Statistician who in 2013 used the trendalyzer program to visually represent a falling global birthrate.  Compare with Malthus and Paul Ehrlich.  

John Ruskin
    Author of "Unto this Last" (1862). (The title is a phrase taken from Matthew 20:14.)  His ideas had a formative influence on Both Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  "Profit, or material gain, is attainable only by construction or by discovery; not by exchange. Whenever material gain follows exchange, for every plus there is a precisely equal minus." "the art of making yourself rich... is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor." "The sum of enjoyment depends not on the quantity of things tasted, but on the vivacity and patience of taste."

Carl Sagan
    "The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science."

Bernie Sanders
    Vermont senator, socialist, health care advocate. See also Elizabeth Warren.
Sartre
     "Man's existence precedes his essence."  "First we must acknowledge that Kierkegaard is right; anguish is distinguished from fear in that fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself.  Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid of not falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over.  A situation provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being changed from without; my being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation." - "Being and Nothingness" trans. pub. 1966 pg. 65 or 2001 pg. 29
    John M. Hoberman says that "Sartre's primary interest is to show the fact of human freedom and the flight from freedom, the nostalgia of the for-itself for the condition of the in-itself (a nonhuman stasis).  The temptation, as Kierkegaard points out in the second journal entry on vertigo, is to construe a pressure that comes from within as one that comes from without.  To avoid anguish and vertigo, says Sartre, it is necessary "that I apprehend in myself a strict psychological determinism."  Kierkegaard is far less interested both in the illusion that such a determinism represents and in the attendant wish to reify oneself.  It is not Kierkegaard but Sartre, with his affinity for images of petrification, whose gaze is transfixed by the Biblical "heart of stone."

Harry Schoell
    Developed the “Cyclone Engine,” a rankine cycle engine, featured in Popular Mechanics.  
Eduard Seuss
    Geologist who in 1875 coined the term “biosphere” to describe the thin shell of life that covers the planet.

Ronald Shimek
    Wrote that sea urchins "have one of the most complex and architecturally interesting feeding structures known in the animal kingdom. Just inside the mouth is a complex arrangement of both fused and articulating ossicles, supporting five continuously growing teeth [which can exert tremendous force due to simple mechanical advantages]... They meet at an acute angle and the action of eating serves to sharpen the teeth... Such a strong feeding structure developed really for only one reason, to eat calcareous algae." (There are examples of uni eating through lead, copper, iron, and concrete.)

David Simon
    In 2013 Simon gave a presentation at the "Festival for Dangerous Ideas."  We can end war if we wanted, all we have to do is end the monetization of our legislative branch (what others call a "dollarocracy" - one dollar one vote) so we get real effective democratic representation in government instead of (what David Simon calls) our currently inert government.

Adam Smith
    Throughout history, Adam Smith observed, we find the workings of "the vile maxim of the masters of mankind": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other People." [Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book III, Chapter IV, p. 448] He had few illusions about the consequences. The invisible hand, he wrote, will destroy the possibility of a decent human existence "unless government takes pains to prevent" this outcome, as must be assured in "every improved and civilized society." It will destroy community, the environment and human values generally - and even the masters themselves, which is why the business classes have regularly called for state intervention to protect them from market forces. (from Notes of NAFTA: "The Masters of Man" Noam Chomsky, The Nation, March, 1993)
    In The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote that “civil government . . . is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor.” In Adam Smith’s Astronomy, he makes a fleeting reference to the phrase “invisible hand.”  He wasn’t talking about a commercial mechanism; he was referring to the Hand of God.  Adam Smith believed that the rich should share some of their riches with the poor.  He said, “They [the rich] are led by an invisible had to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.”  Smith said this while still a professor teaching young men to be ministers, men of the cloth.  Smith warned us about the power of businesses and their desire for more profits.  “The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce [for the merchant class] ought always to be listened to with great precautions.” (from “The Authentic Adam Smith, His Life and Idea” by James Buchan)
    Compare with Marquis de Mirabeau, who wrote “The whole magic of a well ordered society is that each man works for others, while believing that he is working for himself.”

Socrates
Kenneth Snelson
    Tensegrity guru and artist, worked with Buckminster Fuller.  
Victor Stenger
    Physicist, made the point that it is more likely there is something than nothing, a bald statement about the probability of the universe (contained in Hitchens' anthology “The Portable Atheist”).  Compare with Stephen Hawking: "[A mathematical model] cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"

Joseph Stiglitz
    Wrote “Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity” for the Roosevelt Institute, released May 28, 2014.  

Alexis de Tocqueville
    "As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity " - Book Four, Chapter VIII, Democracy in America, Volume II (1840) "And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation [America], I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women [in relative social status]."  - Book Three, Chapter X

Leo Tolstoy
    “Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source. - "War and Peace"
    “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. - "Anna Karenina"
    “...the law of love is in accord with the nature of man. But men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when they have completely freed themselves from all religious and scientific superstitions and from all the consequent misrepresentations and sophistical distortions by which its recognition has been hindered for centuries. - "A Letter to a Hindu" (1908)
    "There can be but two solutions: either to find an absolute and indubitable criterion of evil, or not to resist evil by violence." - The Kingdom of God is Within You
     "We labor, generation after generation, to secure our lives by violence and the consolidation of property. We think that our happiness depends upon power and property. We are so used to that idea that the doctrine of Christ – which teaches us that the happiness of man does not lie in wealth, that a rich man cannot be happy – seems to us to require some great sacrifice for the sake of future bliss. And yet Christ does not call upon us to make any sacrifice; His doctrine does not tend toward making our present lives worse for us, but better." - "What I Believe" (1884)
    The "institutions of property, courts of law, kingdoms, the army, and so on" all achieve their ends through the use of violence, according to Tolstoy.  And so, if we are not to resist the evil one, and the law of "an eye for an eye" is no more, as Jesus says, then we cannot partake in any of these.  

Robert Trivers
    Wrote paper titled “Parent-Offspring Conflict” in American Zoologist 1974 14(1):249-264.  "Throughout the period of parental investment the offspring competes at a disadvantage. The offspring is smaller and less experienced than its parent, and its parent controls the resources at issue. Given this competitive disadvantage the offspring is expected to employ psychological rather than physical tactics."  Also wrote "The Folly of Fools"  See also "Passing Pains: Revenge, Retaliation, and Redirected Aggression in a New Light" by Barash and Lipton

Roy Underhill
    Author of “The Woodwright's Shop” and host of popular TV show by the same name.  
Nikolai Vavilov
    Crop scientist (See Gary Paul Nabham “Where Our Food Comes From”)
Craig Venter
    Created the first artificially synthesized genome after sequencing the human genome.  The census of marine microbes puts the total at about 20 million to a billion or trillion species.  
Voltaire
    “What makes, and will always make, this world a vale of tears is the insatiable greediness and the indomitable pride of men.”  -Letter to J.J. Rousseau, August 30, 1755

Kurt Vonnegut
    "You've got to be kind." from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (or "Pearls Before Swine") Kurt Vonnegut, in his last years, criticized our supposedly Christian leaders in government for not following the humble example of Jesus who asked us to love one another.

Frans de Waal
    Wrote "The Bonobo and the Atheist" in which he describes how animals are altruistic, caring and loving.  This bolster's his argument that we derive our morals from our animal heritage, a bottom up approach rather than religion's standard "handed down from above" view of morality.  Consider our pet dogs, they have all the same emotions and sentiments as you and I, without any knowledge of religion.  

Edward O. Wilson
    Elevated interest in sociobiology, which he saw as bridging the gap between the humanities and the sciences in a new and revealing way, tried to show the consilience of knowledge (Gould disagreed with him).  He would like to be a  microbial ecologist if he were starting new today.  Wilson identified evolution as the “modern creation myth” and I think in time it will supplant religion as it becomes more accepted in culture and as it is coupled to esoteric, aesthetic and cathartic motivations.  Described a 12-point strategy in his book “The Future of Life.”

Richard Wolff
    Marxian economist, commentator, author of "Democracy at Work" and "Contending Economic Theories."  Wolff takes a closer look at microeconomics and surplus analysis.  "This book is written from the standpoint of this new way of thinking, which is called "surplus analysis."  "What defines an economic system... is how the production and distribution of the surplus are organized." (Democracy at Work 104) See also Mondragon Corporation in Spain.  “In economics, Marxists point out, neoclassical and Keynesian theories ignore or dismiss the existence of class, exploitation, and class conflict.  Marxists want to direct attention to class because they see it as a part of social life that will have to be changed if social justice is to be achieved.” (p47 Contending Economic Theories)
    Wolff noted that before Marx, Thomas Hobbes foresaw that any society that allowed its citizens to pursue their individual self-interest without social constraints upon them would yield a nightmare.  Hobbes called for the intervention of a powerful state (not necessarily an autocratic king) to ensure harmony and peace within society.  - from Wolff's book "Contending Economic Theories"
    From an article published on 2/2/14 titled “Political Corruption and Capitalism” Wolff proposed that we “...make the democratized enterprises and a genuinely democratized politics (of residence-based government at all levels) interdependent. Governmental decisions would need to be ratified by the democratized enterprises affected by those government decisions. Likewise, democratized enterprise decisions would need to be ratified by the affected democratized governmental institutions... In effect, legislatures would be reconstructed as bi-cameral - but in a new sense. One chamber would be enterprise-based, while the other would be residence-based. The key checks and balances of such a system could reasonably be expected to reduce political corruption relative to anything so far attempted.”  
    He explained that idea further on 2/26/14 in “Enterprise Structure is Key to the Shape of a Post Capitalist Future” when he wrote “In the socialist enthusiasms of the new Weimar government in post-World War I Germany, a parliamentary arrangement emerged that helps us to answer this question. In that bicameral system, one legislative body was based on residence in the by-now conventional manner of voting by geographic district. The other legislative body was based on the economy. It was representational too, but the voting was by enterprise and industry.” (Compare with Chomsky's description of an anarchist society.)

Xenophon
    Greek philosopher who believed that “agriculture is the mother of all arts. When it is well conducted, all other arts prosper. When it is neglected, all other arts decline.”

Xunzi
    A “naturalistic Confucian” who wrote "When one makes distinctions among the myriad beings of creation, these distinctions each become potential sources of obsession." "There are two things it is important to do in the world: to perceive the right in what men consider wrong, and to perceive the wrong in what men consider right."  (page 136, Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings) Compare with Mencius, who said "People must be decided on what they will not do, and then they are able to act with vigor in what they ought to do." Xunzi compared the mind to a pan of water. Let it still and you can see your face.  

Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529)
    Wang Yang-ming said “People fail to realize that the highest good is in their minds and seek it outside.” The Diamond Sutra says “let the mind function freely without abiding anywhere or in anything”, but it doesn’t say how to do this (though I should review it to be sure). Wang, however, shows how this is possible. He tells us “Once it is realized that the highest good is in the mind and does not depend on any search outside, then the mind will have definite direction and there will be no danger of its becoming fragmentary, isolated, broken into pieces, mixed, or confused” (662). In other words, it will be able to “function freely”. Furthermore, in apparent contrast to the Diamond Sutra, Wang recommends “abiding in the highest good” (671), i.e. abiding in “the pure intelligence and clear consciousness of the mind”. He employs many other adjectives when describing the mind, such as “shining”. These descriptions metaphorically point to the idea that the mind is that which enables and provides for all other things.  “Whenever a thought arises or an event acts upon it, the mind with its innate knowledge will thoroughly sift and carefully examine whether or not the thought or event is in accord with the highest good… and in this way the highest good will be attained” (662). What could be better than this? It should come as no surprise then that Wang is a strong advocate for sincerity as opposed to selfishness.
    Wang describes innate knowledge as “the original substance of the mind,” “the Principle of Nature,” “the pure intelligence and clear consciousness of the mind,” the mind that is “always shining” and reflects things as they come without being stirred, the spirit of creation, which “produces heaven, earth, spiritual beings and the Lord,” and “man’s root which is intelligent…. It naturally grows and grows without cease.” In short, it is the Principle of Nature (T’ien-li), which is not only the principle of right and wrong but also the principle that naturally extends. The mind in its original substance naturally knows the principle of filial piety, for example, when one sees one’s parents, and naturally extends it into action.  (p656 All selections are from “A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy” translated and compiled by Wing-tsit Chan)
    "There have never been people who know but do not act. Those who are supposed to know but do not act simply do not yet know." (section 5) "But people today distinguish between knowledge and action and pursue them separately, believing that one must know before he can act. They will discuss and learn the business of knowledge first, they say, and wait till they truly know before they put their knowledge into practice. Consequently, to the last day of life, they will never act and also will never know. This doctrine of knowledge first and action later is not a minor disease and it did not come about only yesterday. My present advocacy of the unity of knowledge and action is precisely the medicine for that disease. The doctrine is not my baseless imagination, for it is the original substance of knowledge and action that they are one. Now that we know this basic purpose, it will do no harm to talk about them separately, for they are only one. If the basic purpose is not understood, however, even if we say they are one, what is the use? It is just idle talk." (section 5) "Knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge. Learning to be a sage involves only one effort. Knowledge and action should not be separated." (section 26, echoing a sentence in section 5)
    Wang Yang-ming's doctrine of the extension of the innate knowledge of the good. He describes innate knowledge as "the pure intelligence and clear consciousness of the mind."  Wrote "all things form one body."  “In the works of Wang Yang-ming, the oneness of nature as manifested in the human mind represents a special awareness, for in human awareness the world is ‘self-aware’…”  (Walter Benesch, An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy, p. 186)  The neuroscietist Roger Sperry (1913-1994) echoed similar ideas when he said “Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.”  

Fung Yu-lan
    Wrote “Philosophy gives no information about matters of fact, and so cannot solve any problem in a concrete and physical way… What it can do, however, is to give man a point of view… From the “practical” point of view, philosophy is useless, yet it can give us a point of view which is very useful. To use an expression of the Chuang-tzu, this is the “usefulness of the useless.” (A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Chapter 10, The Third Phase of Taoism: Chuang Tzu, p115)  Yu-lan Fung described philosophy as “thinking about thinking.”

Amotz Zahavi
    Wrote "Mate selection - a selection for a handicap" (1975), studies Arabian Babblers, developed Handicap Principle, Signal Selection (generalization of sexual selection).  Amotz Zahavi elaborates this theory even more in his book The Handicap Principle: a missing piece of Darwin's puzzle.  Specifically in chapter 12 "Babblers, competition for prestige, and the evolution of altruism", he demonstrates that when an animal acts altruistically, it handicaps itself - assumes a risk or endures a sacrifice - not primarily to benefit its kin or social group but to increase its own prestige within the group and thus signal its status (and fitness) as a partner or rival.  "Altruistic acts obviously demonstrate - and are perceived as demonstrating - the abilities of those who perform them." (p225)  The two competing theories explaining the origin of altruism are Zahavi's Handicap principle, and W. D. Hamilton's "kin selection" theory.  See also Jonathan Sydenham, Geoffrey Miller

Belousov Zhabotinsky
Zhuangzi
    "The right may not be really right.  What appears so may not be really so.  Even if what is right is really right, wherein it differs from wrong cannot be made plain by argument.  Even if what appears so is really so, wherein it differs from what is not so also cannot be made plain by argument.  Take no heed of time nor of right and wrong.  Passing into the realm of the Infinite, take your final rest therein." (Lin Yutang translation)
    "Suppose you and I argue. If you beat me instead of my beating you, are you really right and am I really wrong? If I beat you instead of your beating me, am I really right and are you really wrong? Or are we both partly right and partly wrong? Or are we both wholly right and wholly wrong? Since between us neither you nor I know which is right, others are naturally in the dark. Whom shall we ask to arbitrate? If we ask someone who agrees with you, since he has already agreed with you, how can he arbitrate? If we ask someone who agrees with me, since he has already agreed with me, how can he arbitrate? If we ask someone who disagrees with both you and me to arbitrate, since he has already disagreed with you and me, how can he arbitrate? If we ask someone who agrees with both you and me to arbitrate, since has already agreed with you and me, how can he arbitrate? Thus among you, me, and others, none knows which is right. Shall we wait for still others?"
    “The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” (“External Things,” section Twenty-six)
    His book included short parables about the use of being useless (Carpenter Shih, Crippled Shu; in Japanese “without use's use” is muyonoyo, just as “without action” is mui) "All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!”  “As for me, I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it."  

Slavoj Zizek
    "Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism." [Zizek! 2005; repeated by Henry Giroux in Moyers interview. Graeber and Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything examined this apparent paradox in greater detail. Market fundamentalism reigns supreme today. Ursula Le Guin said "Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings." Don Huberts famously said, "The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones".]
    Zizek wrote "More than a century ago, in "The Brothers Karamazov" and other works, Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism, arguing in essence that if God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted... This argument couldn't have been more wrong: the lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations." - in the article “Defenders of the Faith,” March 12, 2006
    Zizek characterizes religion as an "objectively functional illusion."  For example, he cites Christmas and Santa Claus. We all realize that Santa doesn’t exist, it’s a mere illusion, and yet we haven’t discarded the belief. Why? Because it functions objectively as an illusion that signifies our worldview of the holiday. Another example is the ancient Greeks and mythology. Zizek claims the ancient Greeks were not idiots. They knew on top of Mt. Olympus they wouldn’t find Gods, yet it remained an illusion which functioned objectively in their worldview. From another perspective, we can say that money doesn’t bring happiness, but we clearly function as though it does. In the same way the Christian idea of God as transcendent/omnipresent is an illusion.
     Zizek then arrives at a startling conclusion: only atheists can be truly Christian.  For if you believe the illusion is a reality – thus, no illusion at all – you can’t function in the world as the true Christian ought, because you are too busy climbing Mt. Olympus, looking for Zeus (metaphorically speaking, of course), trying to keep the illusion real.

Anekantavada
    In various versions of the tale, a group of blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one touches a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes on what they felt, and learn they are in complete disagreement. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a tree; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a snake; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a spear. Each blind man has interesting and useful things to say, but what seems an absolute truth is relative due to where each blind man stands.  The story is used to indicate that reality may be viewed differently depending upon one's perspective.  

Anthropic Principle
Bounded rationality
    The notion that in decision making, the rationality of individuals is limited by: the information they have (we usually do not know the relevant probabilities of outcomes), the cognitive limitations of their minds (we can rarely evaluate all outcomes with sufficient precision and our memories are weak and unreliable), and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions.

The Doctrine of the Mean
    An ancient Confucian text that contributed to the development of the philosophical schools in China.  
Drake Landing Solar Community
    A planned community in Canada that collectively stores solar energy to meet 95% of their heating needs.  During 5 yrs of operation, the solar fraction (heating from sun) has risen each year - .55 .6 .8 .86 .97 (Compare with Cold Climate Housing Research Center and their integrated truss frame “Galena” house.)

Gravity
    (Opposite of levity) the acceleration of gravity on Earth is g = 32 ft/sec/sec or g = 9.80665 m s^-2. The names most often associated with leaps in the human understanding of gravity are Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.  Gravity is small unless at least one of the two bodies is large, but the small gravitational force exerted by bodies of ordinary size can fairly easily be detected through experiments such as the Cavendish torsion bar experiment.  "It is one of the deep mysteries of the world that entropy increases, disorder increases, as time goes on." (Schutz 306) "Regarding inertia, Ernst Mach was dissatisfied that physicists since Newton had studied only the forces that were required to accelerate masses, but not why the masses had inertial mass in the first place. (Compare with Hawking quote.)  Mach hoped to find a deeper physical principle underlying Newton's laws" (Schutz 254) See Tao-te ching chapter 25, tops, gyroscopes, hoop trundling, Foucault's pendulum, etc. for other physical forces.  “Any conceivable motion of the top can be considered as compounded of spin, precession, and nutation.”  Harmonic (periodic or oscillating) motion, elasticity and vibration, pendulums, wave motion, sound, and mechanical resonance . See also Witricity, wireless charging technology that uses a frequency lock (next generation Tesla stuff)

Nihilism
    In a nihilistic world, no one is right or wrong, there is no path to enlightenment. Nihilism deals "with questions about the meaning of an existence without knowable truth."  Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy" 1998, edited by Edward Craig, contains a brief but comprehensive description of philosophical, moral, epistemological, political, cosmic, and existential nihilism.  "Philosophical nihilism is a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial of some or all aspects of thought or life." I'd like to paraphrase the manner in which I think these ideas can have a direct impact on one's life: "Moral nihilism rejects any possibility of justifying or criticizing moral judgments. Similarly, epistemological nihilism denies the possibility of justifying or criticizing claims to knowledge." I think this is a crucial point. It gives the nihilist the ability to act spontaneously without bias of any kind and break habitual behavior patterns. He is free from self-criticism or the need for self-justification since ultimately everything has an equally unknowable value. Conversely, he can no more criticize than justify, since beyond the limits of subjectivity everything necessarily has equal value. But subjectivity forms the fabric of individual conscious existence.
    “Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5, Scene 5)  The epilogue of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky points out the emptiness of nihilism. See also “moral error theory” and moral abolitionists such as Richard Garner.  Moral Nihilism is well defended by J.L.Mackie and Richard Garner.  Presumptions that there is a right and wrong often get in the way of resolving conflicts according to Garner.   

Pantheism
    “Pantheism is a metaphysical and religious position. Broadly defined it is the view that everything that exists constitutes a “unity” and this all-inclusive unity is in some sense divine. Nature is intrinsically valuable.” If anything, pantheism is not anthropocentric. “It refuses to see religion in political and hierarchical terms.”  According to Michael Levine, “the philosophical Taoism (of the Tao Te Ching) is one of the best articulated and thoroughly pantheistic positions there is.” In China, Buddhism and Confucianism have not escaped Taoist influence. Pantheistic ideas continue to play a significant role in Eastern philosophies and religions. (Levine, Michael, “Pantheism“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta ed.)

Simple machines and mechanical advantage
    Inclined plane, lever, wedge, screw, pulley, wheel and axle.  See also Roy Underhill (carpenter), Bill Nye (science educator), Wally Wallington, James McCullagh (author of "Pedal Power") the "pedal powered prime mover" by David Butcher.  See also fresnel lens.  

Wabi-sabi
    Beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete."  "It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." -Richard R. Powell  See also Lacrimae rerum, Mono no aware, transiency, mujo, anicca, mottainai, Weltschmerz.  

Western Inscription, Chang Tsai (1020-1077)
    “Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst.  Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature.  All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”