Teasers

TEASERS: 1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — ...

For some 2500 years the Western world has manifested an overwhelming tendency to think of knowledge as a cognitive organism's representation of an outside world, its structure, and how it works. The representation might not yet be quite perfect, but, in principle, it was thought to be perfectible. In any case, its goodness was supposed to depend on the degree of correspondence between it and the outside world called "reality." Today, this way of thinking is no longer viable... [more]	Magic becomes apparent when the world cannot be negotiated without its application. Then we do need to let ourselves believe.... If we are convinced that the life and matter around us are mute, then we are confined to the silence of the scientifically concrete. If we are open to subtlety, then the world resonates with significance.... Some folk never listen to the little hairs when they stand up on the back of the neck. I listen hard to those hairs. Because they're my intuition speaking to me. There have been countless times when they have helped me save a patient's life. And on more than one occasion, my own... [more]
	Reality, as I said before, always remains on the other side of our experiential interface and on the other side of our sense organs; hence it is at best an unfortunate metaphor when people say that the signals we receive through our senses are a "code" and contain "information" about reality. We are in no position to know this, because we never gain access to what is supposed to have been encoded... [more]
...it is precisely through its obstructions that ontological "reality" manifests itself: by impeding some of our actions and by thwarting some of our efforts. ... since this "reality" manifests itself only in failures of our acting and/or thinking, we have no way of describing it except in terms of actions and thoughts that turned out to be unsuccessful... [more]	Children, we must never forget, are not repositories for adult " knowledge," but organisms which, like all of us, are constantly trying to make sense of, to understand their experience... [more]
So what do we, in the field of medicine, do with unsettling disturbances, the supernatural ripples? Ignore them? Ban their discussion? Or do we declare them simply to be a puzzling mixture of science and spirit? Can we not, as doctors, allow ourselves to entertain the possibility that the supernatural, the divine, and the magical may all underlie our physical world? Would we not be the richer for just challenging our imaginations? Don't we owe it to those who come after us to at least raise the questions? Can we not admit we yearn to glimpse the mystery of the spirit? And we need to ask questions when we stumble across evidence that consciousness survives beyond the life of the brain... [more]
Two weeks after Titanic was lost, a large wooden crate left unclaimed at Pier 61, in New York harbour, was opened by port authorities. They were surprised to see that it contained a meticulously detailed model of the sunken vessel. It had originally been sent to the US for promotional purposes on behalf of the White Star Line and was supposed to be returned to the London offices on the doomed ship's return voyage. But the 30 foot-long representation was accurate in more particulars than anyone could explain. Although it presented a full complement of 20 davits, there were only a dozen miniature lifeboats. Moreover, the bow was partially ruined and a long crack appeared from the keel toward the upper deck, mimicking the actual damage sustained by Titanic... [more]	For about half a century behaviorists have worked hard to do away with "mentalistic" notions such as meaning, representation, and thought. It is up to future historians to assess just how much damage this mindless fashion has wrought. Where education is concerned, the damage was formidable. Since behaviorism is by no means extinct, damage continues to be done, and it is done in many ways. One common root, however, is the presumption that all that matters - perhaps even all there is - are observable stimuli and observable responses. This presumption has been appallingly successful in wiping out the distinction between training and education... [more]
Dawkins... seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. ...one can only be struck by the ridiculous realisation that the acerbic Oxford professor, one of the intellectual giants of our time, is engaging religion on the same philosophical level as 'Bubba' from the deep South of the United States of America... [more]	My claim is not simply that we lack sufficient knowledge or wisdom to predict the future evolution of the biosphere, economy, or human culture. It is that these things are inherently beyond prediction. Not even the most powerful computer imaginable can make a compact description in advance of the regularities of these processes. There is no such description beforehand. Thus the very concept of a natural law is inadequate for much of reality... [more]