Oh yeah. Truth can sting like a jelly fish and fire ants.

Endless poems of half certain lengths can be written about truth. And still sometimes leave one beyond words for inestimable moments. It's gotta remain true when forgotten and when obvious to be the truth.

So can a jelly fish and fire ants. (Sorry, I seem momentarily to be possessed by the spirit of Brian.)

I actually advertise as a poet. Which makes me my own personal modern humorist.

A bit old definition of philosophy. You are kind of re-inventing words. Makes me confused, maybe rightly so. Have to first get over that obstacle, but can't.

Maybe the dualism you presented isn't a dualism.

To the first question - Nothing comes to mind for me.

To the second question - Going to a poetry reading for the sole purpose of listening to some poet yap it up. If the actual reason you show up is to meet and impress some chick.............

This guy knows how to do it

While the students are usually nice, their poems are rarely precise. They are usually wrong when their words are a song but they never admit its a vice.

Precision in poetic depictions of life. Seems more fitting to scientific depictions. And other depictions that fall terribly short of capturing what matters: the smell of freshly baked baguettes in the morning.

Don't deny. You'd much rather hear a poet describe the smell of freshly baked baguettes in the morning than a scientist describe the function, reason or structure of it.

There's poetry and then there's poetry. The only ones that call to mind who have affected me are Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot.

I make no sense of this as Whitman is so upbeat whereas Eliot enters the darkness of a marginal light.

LOL

The enthalpy of baking bread is poetry in motion. The somewhat common notion that science detracts from beauty and understanding is silly - it actually enhances my enjoyment of all that makes up the universe. Poets get confused by this. As do many others. To Brian, Chicken Sandwiches are poetry. And nothing confuses Brian. QED

Poetry, like music, philosophy and all good art: makes you feel. Science makes you know.
Neither devalue each other...only fixation does.

I disagree. The simple fact that you imply that Science doesn't make you feel illustrates to me at least that you have a very narrow and limited view of Science in practice and in application and in appreciation. Knowledge enhances beauty and appreciation.

It seems to me that you are the one with a fixation. Science is art also. Didn't you know that?

Disagree away.

Someone once said that science is art. If science is art then baguettes are a fruit and I'm a fruitloop.

We all have our fixations.

Scientists use an iterative method to analyze and piece together the jigsaw puzzle of reality. We rely on making detailed observations, constructing theories to explain these facts, then gathering new data to test and refine our theories.

Rational and systematic, this process works splendidly. We have learned so much about ourselves, the Earth, our fellow creatures, and the universe. Yet once we adopt this scientific mindset, through training or through proclivity, it becomes difficult to fully recapture that experience of newly-minted, breath-taking awe. This is a fragile wonder, easily suffocated by the narrow focus and tedium inherent in the scientific process. Good art, like good philosophy, can bring it back.

For example, I give Nietzsche's view on his reading of Schopenhauer:

‘I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who know quite definitely after reading the first page that they will read every page and will listen to every word he has to say. My confidence in him was instantaneous and remains …he knows how to say the Serious simply, the Moving without rhetoric, and the Rigorously Scientific without pedantry.’ - Nietzsche.

Now some Schopenhauer:

‘If what makes death seem so terrible to us were the thought of non-existence, we should necessarily think with equal horror of the time when as yet we did not exist. … An entire infinity ran its course when we did not yet exist, but this in no way disturbs us.’ - Schopenhauer.

We didn't have anything to lose then. Did he miss that?

He's expressing that non-experience is not to be feared, since it can't be known.

You may fear loss, but really what you're doing is clinging onto something that is worthy only because it is impermanent.

Eternal life could also be fun.

You can't know non-experience so you already have eternal experience. It's better than eternal life.

You can model non-experience, anticipate it. I can't know what it's like to be old and decrepit either. Does that mean I'm eternally young? I don't think so.

You can't experience non-experience, no matter how many terrible analogies you got in your back pocket. Principle of non-contradiction.

If you want to apply logic, do it to your on statements. You're saying words but they don't mean anything. To the extent that they do mean anything, they're false or irrelevant.
How does not being able to know non-experience mean you have "eternal experience"?

The issue with mortality is not that we don't experience forever - it's that we anticipate the end of experience, and we don't like that, survival being an integral part of our being.

So there is absolutely a difference between mortality and immortality. We certainly don't have "eternal experience". You can do some trick with words and the cracks in philosophy to avoid this truth in a very very cowardly manner, but it's nothing other than self-delusion, and doesn't work for people who don't want to play along with deluding themselves.

Infinite space-time beyond observable universe.
The current combination of matter will recur infinitely and in infinite variety.
You don't experience time passing when "dead" since you can't experience non-experience.
Time between your "death" and recurrence - from your perspective of experience - is less than a second (since you can't experience non-experience).

Que...

But but....no evidence of infinite space-time.