With Christmas and New Year approaching I can’t avoid trying once again to offer a gift to all who read this article.  I say “trying” because it takes two to make a gift:  the one giving and the one receiving, and the latter often is not able or simply does not want to receive it.
I am only a modest philosopher and therefore my offering is not of the material kind.  It is just a small piece of wisdom extracted from the nature of earth and the heavens using the tools of “significant” cognitive capacity, the skills of higher consciousness that come from processes of cognitive perception at an increased level of vigilance.
Irreverently, my perception in this case was not inspired by the great philosophers, but instead by two well-known magicians, or more accurately “illusionists”:  the celebrated Harry Houdini, who died in 1926, and the North American Chris Angel, who levitates at will and constantly eludes death.
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                                                                        Dario Salas Sommer
I have always been fascinated by Chinese culture, by its high level of comprehension of nature, its philosophical conception of human existence and the imperative of striving for spiritual and moral perfection.  A profound mysticism cuts across its endeavors, deeply influenced by the teachings of Confucius, of whom I am a great admirer, y by other philosophers and scientists such as Lao Tze.  I therefore was deeply pleased by the recognition that I recently received from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
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Extreme poverty, war, depletion of non-renewable energy resources, global warming, delinquency, terrorism, violence, all are the work of Man, not of Nature: clear evidence of a global dislocation in education which focuses on material progress and excludes human development.
There are many in the world who possess a good formal education; intelligent people who, paradoxically, tend to behave foolishly when they apply their knowledge to daily life.  continues »

 
When I was 11 years old, I read a story about our world in the future, written by a well-known science fiction writer of that era. It told of a time when the world had become a kind of cement tomb, as cities packed with buildings had grown to such proportions that “the countryside” as we know it had ceased to exist, along with mountains, animals, and birds. Regardless of how far one traveled, it was impossible to leave behind the concrete cities. I remember that this dreadful vision of the disappearance of nature, in its “natural” state, gave me nightmares for quite some time.
Now, many years later, the issue of global warming brings this horrifying story to mind once again.
As stated in the October 31^st edition of La Tercera, a prominent Chilean newspaper, Britain has issued an official report warning of the drastic effects of the climate change. continues »

A group of Chinese scientists from the University of Science and Technology of Shandong has succeeded for the first time in directing by remote control the flight of a pigeon.  The work team, part of the Center for Technological Research of the Robotic Engineering Department of that university, developed an electronic technology that had already been used with mice to implant a series of micro-electrodes n the bird’s brain, through which they stimulated different zones of the brain.  In this way, they forced it to fly to the left or the right, up or down, according to the whim of the remote control.  According to the specialists who participated in the experiment, the electronic impulses simulated the signals generated by the brain to control the movements of the bird’s body, so that it obeyed them as if they were coming from its own brain.  This is the first experiment of this type that has been applied successfully to a pigeon.  The objective is to “improve the mechanism” in order to “apply it in the future in a more practical form,” although no one has yet specified what that may be.  In fact, this initiative is pretty disturbing when we consider that the micro-electrodes could be implanted in a human being.
 
EFE (Spanish news agency) News – February 2007