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...
I tried to understand this--I really tried--but--and I subscribed to the Economist for two years (well, OK, someone did, and I read it) and, in addition having read it almost literally cover to cover and having the only two letters I ever sent to any magazine published therein--(END 1st-order hyphen-mediated subordination)--I am sorry, but I still don't truly understand (though I am shamelessly pretending to the contrary among the more guideable very young).
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