I just finished Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden. I don't think I've ever had so many epiphanies while reading a text as I did while reading this! It is magical, truly scientific. Here are my favorite bits:
The Cosmic Calendar
This is Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar. Sagan wanted to present the life of the universe in a format that would really represent how old it really is. Most people know it's billions of years old (cough*palin*cough), but still don't really grasp the enormity of it's existance. I know I didn't! So Sagan scaled down the time line to one Earth calendar year. So, 12:00am on January 1st would be the Big Bang and 11:59pm December 31st would be right now. All of human history takes place solely on December 31st! Holy Shit!
"Man is probably the only organism on Earth with a relatively clear view of the inevitability of his own end."
"Patients who have had prefrontal lobotomies have been described as losing a "continuing sense of self"- the feeling that I am a particular individual with some control over my life and circumstances, the "me-ness" of me, the uniqueness of the individual. It is possible that lower mammals and reptiles, lacking extensive frontal lobes, also lack this sense, real or illusory, of individuality and free will, which is so characteristically human and which may first have been experienced dimly by Proconsul."
"In other words, genital display is a ritual derived from sexual behavior, but serving social and not reproductive purposes."
"It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically preprogrammed behavior in human beings more than any other species."
"The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it."
"[Robert] Ornstein offers an interesting analogy to explain why, in the West at least, we have made some much contact with left-hemisphere functions and so little with right. He suggests that our awareness to right hemisphere function is like our ability to see stars in the daytime. The sun is so bright that the stars are invisible, despite the fact that they are just as present in our sky in the daytime as at night. When the sun sets, we are able to perceive the stars. In the same way, the brilliance of our most recent evolutionary accretion, the verbal abilities of the left hemisphere, obscures our awareness of the functions of the intuitive right hemisphere, which in our ancestors must have been the principal means of perceiving the world.*"
Sagan litters the bottom of his pages with personal footnote theories on whatever the current topic of the book happens to be on...
"* Marijuana is often described as improving our appreciation of and abilities in music, dance, art, pattern and sign recognition and our sensitivity to nonverbal communication. To the best of my knowledge, it is never reported as improving our ability to read and comprehend Ludwig Wittgenstein or Immanuel Kant; to calculate the stresses on bridges: or to compute Laplace transformations. Often the subject has difficulty even writing down his thoughts coherently. I wonder if, rather than enhancing anything, the cannabinols (the active ingredients in marijuana) simply supress the left hemisphere and permit the stars to come out. This may also be the objective of the meditative states of many [Asian] religions."
"Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right-hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity."
"As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our governments, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to thoe societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future."
No comments:
Post a Comment