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...
The title of this post is definitely quotable material. It neatly sums up in one single sentence one of the problems (if not THE problem) with rationalistic, let's-replace-everything-we-have-with-this-great-system-I'tve-come-up-with ideas to improve the world. It made me think of the French Revolution. I'm not sure that was your intention. But it does fit nicely in the context of several things you've been writing.
ReplyDeleteYes, the French Revolution is the paradigm of the phenomenon the title describes.
DeleteYes, please, let's make step-by-step improvements in what we've got, and not think we can build a new society from scratch!