Wonder
"Man has to awaken to wonder -- and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again... as though lightning were more commonplace or less astounding today than 2000 years ago." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
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...
Yeah, in a different vein, atheists/agnostics often say, "Why doesn't God show Himself in nature, at the very least?"
ReplyDeleteIt's like they want him to put on a laser light show or something...