Crime and Punishment (1866) [ edit ] Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. These are just a few samples; for more quotes from this work, see Crime and Punishment Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do. Yes — you, you alone must pay for everything because you turned up like this, because I'm a scoundrel, because I'm the nastiest, most ridiculous, pettiest, stupidest, and most envious worm of all those living on earth who're no better than me in any way, but who, the devil knows why, never get embarrassed, while all my life I have to endure insults from every louse — that's my fate. What do I care that you do not understand any of this? Ivan Karamazov ... does not absolutely deny the existence of God. He refutes Him in the name of a moral value. ... God, in His turn, is put on trial. If evil is essential to divine creation, then creation is unacceptable. Ivan will no longer have recourse to this mysterious God, but to a higher principle – namely, justice. He launches the essential undertaking of rebellion, which is that of replacing the reign of grace by the reign of justice. And what is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? All it does, I'd say, is to develop in man a capacity to feel a greater variety of sensations. And nothing, absolutely nothing else. And through this development, man will yet learn how to enjoy bloodshed. Why, it has already happened . . . . Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty. f(0) = 1, because if you have zero suffering, there’s no multiplier effect (and multiplying your pleasure by 1 leaves it unchanged).

In PART TWO: A THOUSAND RED BUTTERFLIES, Broks delves more into his trade, musing much on the nature of consciousness between scientific research and theory and philosophical explorations. I kept having to set the book aside and digest his thoughts. One section prompted a mental WTH? and given that in his prologue he said that facts sit alongside fiction and that he thought the fictional elements were easily identified, I'm not sure if he was serious that not all humans are sentient - at least, that's what a colleague discovered in that particular story (although...there was considerable evidence of such in 2016 and since, but that would make his 10% far too low...) I won't spoil where the title of this second part comes from...you'll have to find that out yourself. I admit that I was, because I am by nature, less enamored of the philosophy elements, but the stories are still good anyway. Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it's not true and that it's blushing just as I am now, all over. Broks' shares his grief following his wife's death in PART ONE: A GRIEF OBSERVED, meandering through nonlinear memories, fantasy and myth, and talking points of his trade. (He mentions Julian Jaynes, whose Origin of Consciousness is on my to-read list, nudging the book up a notch or two closer to "eventual".) The grief is palpable. The Brothers Karamazov is a joyful book. Readers who know what it is about may find this an intolerably whimsical statement. It does have moments of joy, but they are only moments; the rest is greed, lust, squalor, unredeemed suffering, and a sometimes terrifying darkness. But the book is joyful in another sense: in its energy and curiosity, in its formal inventiveness, in the mastery of its writing

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevsky [Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский] ( 11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as multiple of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. A really innovative book about the nature of consciousness. Rather than just try to answer the question of consciousness directly, Broks uses illustrations from different sources to touch on the answer from many angles. It is at one time both biological, cultural, personal and individual. It is one thing to experience it, and another to describe it or define it. It could be described differently at different times and places and life stages. It is the subject of philosophical discourse. Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth and nothing easier than flattery. If there’s the hundredth part of a false note in speaking the truth, it leads to a discord, and that leads to trouble. But if all, to the last note, is false in flattery, it is just as agreeable, and is heard not without satisfaction. It may be a coarse satisfaction, but still a satisfaction. And however coarse the flattery, at least half will be sure to seem true. That’s so for all stages of development and classes of society. Does life have meaning if we die? The Being of the now that leads to consciousness is it the ‘hard problem’? Is there a ‘self’ over time, does the question even make sense or is the ship of Theseus not a paradox. Is my partner a Zombie with 15% probability as the author implies with a vignette? All of these kinds of questions are standard neuroscience ponderings, but they are told with finesse and nuance within this story and are always highly entertaining and at times laugh out loud funny. But,' I [Dmitri Karamazov] asked, 'how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?' 'Didn't you know?' he said. And he laughed. 'Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,' he said.

I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth — it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it.You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Notes from Underground (1864) [ edit ] The characteristics of our romantics are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it often incomparably more clearly than our most realistic minds see it... Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is an extended meditation on selfhood, consciousness, life, and death. The book traces a loose arc of loss, acceptance, and renewal through interlinked fragments of autobiography, neurological case stories, and excursions into myth and speculative fiction. Why such diverse modes of storytelling? Well, I say, why not? I am writing about brains and selves. The human brain is a storytelling machine, and the self is a yarn it spins. From the first glimmerings of self-awareness, we enter a nexus of stories, and those stories take many different forms, from the mundane to the magical, from scientific to mythic. My mind is in the habit of shooting off in every direction, and I have honored the old cliché: Write something you yourself would want to read. And since we’ve worked out that f(S) = aS + 1, we know that f'(S) = a, and we can plug both of those expressions into the equation above:

And now once again I asked myself the question: do I love her? And once more I could not answer, that is to say, again, for the hundreth time, I answered that I hated her. Is it really not possible to touch the gaming table without being instantly infected by superstition? Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also. And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth last November — on the third of November, to be precise — and I remember every instant since.The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in. I hadn’t intended including any Greek mythology when I started writing the book, but the stories crept in. My explanation is post hoc, but here goes: For the Greeks, the myths were a means of making sense of the world, from the origins of the cosmos to the nature of society, individual identity, and mortality. The Darker the Night is about all of those things. Also, the first century BCE was a period of great cultural and cognitive transition. Logos (reason) was gaining ground on mythos (mythological stories), the gods were gathering doubters, and the shoots of western science and philosophy were starting to push through. According to some scholars, this coincided with a psychological revolution through which the foundations of the modern, introspective mind were laid. People were gaining a clearer sense of the distinction between the inner, individual world of thought and the outer world of objects and events, and thus were sown the seeds of the mind-body problem: the problem of consciousness. If we want to understand the modern mind, we need to know something of its history. In this gorgeous kaleidoscope of a book, the neuroscientist Paul Broks takes us image by image, story by story, into an exploration of life with all its brilliant hues of grief and despair, joy and resilience, biology and society. There's science here, and curiosity, and humanity, all forming a remarkable portrait of who we are—and who we hope to be." The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly. Variants of such a statement have also been attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche, but the only definite source found for any is in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra: " Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!"