I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Good article Gene. I might just add it to my Austrian II reading list. In particular I liked the thing about no experiment being able to prove the utility of conducting experiments. And the Lewis Carrol thing was good.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me, I once checked that book out full of excitement, but it was a disappointment. I thought it was more silly than incredibly deep. It's definitely deep in the 365-1 example you mention, but I thought that was more the exception. Should I give it another try?