Philosophical Consideration of Death - Dimitris Liantinis (PhD)

Dimitris Liantinis, Professor of Philosophy in University of Athens, gives a lecture at the Military School of Sanitary Practise about how we must face death. Βio: http://www.liantinis.org/english/

Anaheim police violence: "They Shot At Little Kids Too"

Please click below to sign the petition:
http://act.presente.org/sign/anaheimbrutality/

Demand that Attorney General Kamala Harris investigate this incident and the recent increase in police violence in Anaheim.

The Legend of Wunda Woman

Basically, I read all there was in nineteenth century newspaper accounts, plus the odd republished volume like Edward Curr’s Recollections of Squatting in Victoria. These gave me the subject matter for a book that never materialised, although most of the component parts were later published in journals, magazines and newspapers in the early 1980s.

‘The Legend of Wunda Woman’ was one of them:

A long time ago the Bungambrawatha clan lived on the banks of their creek.

The white creatures arrived in summer, when the creek was dry. The Bungambrawatha thought they were wunda – the ghosts of dead people with nowhere to settle.

The ghosts settled by the creek and tied to make contact, without much success. The Bungambrawatha had established ways of dealing with spirits, but not with ghosts they could see and touch, who ate and drank like real people. The amount the ghosts drank was alarming.

After the autumn rains, the ghosts wanted so much water they dammed up the creek and fenced it off. When the Bungambrawatha tried to go down they were driven away. It was a strange way for ghosts to behave.

The question arose whether the wunda were ghosts at all. Perhaps they were a kind of devil. Or perhaps they were real people who through misfortune had been inflicted with a deathly skin.

The Bungambrawatha watched the wunda more closely, to establish what kind of creature they were, but were frustrated by the wunda custom of wrapping themselves up, even in the heat of the sun. And at night, what was the purpose of fire if not to wrap round with warmth and protection?

Then the wunda spent a day screening off a section of their dam with branches and early the following morning one came down to bathe. When the creature removed its wrappings the Bungambrawatha could see it was not only white all over, but female. There could be no doubting the ghostliness now: all her parts were the colour of death. The creature was perfect, white like the witchetty – a wunda woman indeed.

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Jessica Yu: Meet Mr. Toilet

Meet Mr. Toilet | Jessica Yu from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

For those without access to a simple toilet, poop can be poison. Businessman-turned-sanitation-superhero Jack Sim fights this oft-neglected crisis affecting 2.6 billion people...

Join the conversation and tweet #MrToilet to have your tweet featured on the Focus Forward website. Go to http://www.focusforwardfilms.com/films/5/meet-mr-toilet to see the discussion.

Watch more FOCUS FORWARD films at vimeo.com/focusforwardfilms/films and enter our filmmaker challenge at www.vimeo.com/focusforwardfilms/challenge.

Downriver Productions, LLC

DIRECTED BY - Jessica Yu
PRODUCED BY - Elise Pearlstein, Jessica Yu
EDITED BY - Adam Parker
MUSIC BY - Jeff Beal
ANIMATION BY - Chris Darnbrough

Does Quantum Physics Make it Easier to Believe in God?

Stephen M. Barr writes:

Materialism is an atheistic philosophy that says that all of reality is reducible to matter and its interactions. It has gained ground because many people think that it’s supported by science. They think that physics has shown the material world to be a closed system of cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of any non-physical realities --- if any there be. Since our minds and thoughts obviously do affect the physical world, it would follow that they are themselves merely physical phenomena. No room for a spiritual soul or free will: for materialists we are just “machines made of meat.”

Quantum mechanics, however, throws a monkey wrench into this simple mechanical view of things. No less a figure than Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, claimed that materialism --- at least with regard to the human mind --- is not “logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.” And on the basis of quantum mechanics, Sir Rudolf Peierls, another great 20th-century physicist, said, “the premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being ... including [his] knowledge, and [his] consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.”

How, one might ask, can quantum mechanics have anything to say about the human mind? Isn’t it about things that can be physically measured, such as particles and forces? It is; but while minds cannot be measured, it is ultimately minds that do the measuring. And that, as we shall see, is a fact that cannot be ignored in trying to make sense of quantum mechanics. If one claims that it is possible (in principle) to give a complete physical description of what goes on during a measurement --- including the mind of the person who is doing the measuring --- one is led into severe difficulties. This was pointed out in the 1930s by the great mathematician John von Neumann. Though I cannot go into technicalities in an essay such as this, I will try to sketch the argument.

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