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
He probably relied on Samuelson's textbook.
ReplyDeleteI loved Asimov's Foundation series when I first read it (7th grade, I think) but realize now that his outlook, as opposed to that of Heinlein, Banks, most other authors that I've enjoyed, is, if not statist, quite thoroughly of the opinion that society needs to be run. By someone. I have always found this surprising, given his personal history.
ReplyDeleteLook at the entire premise of the Foundation series, and try to imagine the person who wrote it pondering anarchism. Look at his stories of UNIVAC, where all our problems were solved because we finally had a computer that could run the economy and the government efficiently.
He probably thought that the USSR would struggle on, because he couldn't see that something could be fundamentally wrong with trying to run an economy in a top-down manner.
Right-o, Andy, and consider a very different take on much the same subject: Heinlien's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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