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
Our hosting service, Joyent, had a miassive bank of servers down...
ReplyDeleteCool coinage, Gene! A combo of "massive" and "miasma" (a toxic atmosphere). I like it.
Hey Gene,
ReplyDeleteDon't worry I keep backups of all my comments on this blog, especially since some disappear--even when the rest of your site appears to be functioning fine.
The "dsappeared" comments will re-appear at the right time. Truat me on that.
Hey, I just thought it was a "crash landing".
ReplyDeleteDr. Murray, you are a bit obsessive, I believe.
ReplyDelete