Science and Spirit

Pacifism without ifs or buts, that is, as a pure desire for peace, if he throws one unjustified, abusive moral superiority compared to other positions, when he wants to smuggle you there pace used as a tool, for the peace as the ultimate goal.

In fact, this pacifism takes it for granted that the exclusive instrument for achieving peace is the offer of peace itself. But the only case in which the offer of peace between two contenders automatically coincides with peace itself is that of unconditional and unilateral surrender.

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About one year ago, at this time, I fell on my skis and fell about a hundred meters, rolling without being able to stop, but rather picking up more and more speed. I had thought my time had come and I felt ready. Suddenly, instead of hitting a rock, I stopped. Even though I got up straight away, for the rest of the day and partly into the following one too, I continued to experience a curious sensation of erasure of the boundary between dream and reality; a decidedly positive and exhilarating feeling and a breaking of the space-time dimension, in a certain way, of the harsh reality”.

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I realize I haven't written here for several months. Since the first premise of these pages is to share reflections and stimuli that gradually strike me, The past months must not have particularly affected me. Today's date, of the 1 January 2024, instead, It reminds me of a Catholic custom, that I remember from my childhood, of the renewal of baptismal and confirmation promises, which was done at mass on the first day of the year (I don't know if it's still done today). I would therefore like to take this opportunity to renew and summarize what drives me to define myself as a believer.

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The article The truth of the crocuses, published by Alessandro D'Avenia on Corriere, It struck me for various aspects and for its closeness to my ideal of secular spirituality. The first is the definition of beauty as «propensity of things among themselves and dialogue of things with us». Indeed, in nature, the transition between the so-called “inanimate object” and the living being is without interruption. Even if it is apparently clear whether a being is alive or dead, in reality death itself is not instantaneous for all its parts. We know, for example, that some cells continue to live after death for a non-negligible time. Conversely, we also know that some chemical compounds have behaviors and organizational forms that closely resemble those of living cells.

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The recent, disconcerting and lonely (apart from China and North Korea) ban in Italy of ChatGPT, in the name of an alleged violation of data privacy calls into question a highly questionable scale of priorities.

I would like to talk here both about ChatGPT, both of privacy.

Read on “Assurance of privacy or computer illiteracy?”

(from Corriere della Sera: Alessandro D'Avenia | 17 April 2023)

On Easter Monday I was wondering if the resurrection celebrated the day before was about me too, disappointed by a nice sweater received at Christmas that already showed the first dots. All things human, sooner or later, they go "balls". Yet even if nothing fails to satisfy us, we keep looking, listening to the infinite call that sets us in motion: the desire.

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The very recent blocking of ChatGPT in Italy, decreed by the Privacy Guarantor, an old magistrate, still in service despite its near misses 80 years, and exponent of a category that is most foreign to new technologies (accustomed as she is to files, photocopies and various cartridges), in the name of privacy, of whose invasion by services like Google and everyone else he seems not to have been informed, suggests the prevalence of a worrying situation in Italy fear of the new.

Read on “Towards a new Counter-Reformation?”

I haven't written on this blog for a long time. I didn't do it because I hadn't found elements that would push me to share beliefs that are important to me. When I think I have developed a concept, there is a force that drives me to share it, a “sell it”. Even art and artistic creativity are daughters of this mechanism of communication and sharing.

Read on “Finding an old friend”

Let's look at the world we have left behind, while we are here worrying about the energy crisis, of drought and climate change, of the Covid and, especially the war in Ukraine, that in the face of all these problems it seems to us the height of absurdity.

We went in a matter of days and from a climate of global interdependence to a Cold War scenario.

Read on “The glass is half full or half empty? ”

War is almost always to be considered as the result of the prevalence of the irrational element of humanity over reason. Any dispute can be resolved with a compromise that constitutes the meeting point between two contrasting positions. War, on the contrary, always contains a large portion of gamble and tends often, even when it stops, to leave the seeds for new wars, in which today's defeated hopes one day to be able to make up for it.

Read on “The triumph of irrationality”