Dinesh's photos with the keyword: Chapter

Emily Dickinson wrote these words in a letter to a mentor asking him to tell her whether she was a decent poet: “The sailor cannot see the north, but knows the needle can.” Without clear introspective access, we are such sailors. But a fact of life in this century is that we have the needle -- in fact, several needles, the ones from science being the most obvious. These needles point toward the next (perhaps last?) frontier: that of allowing us to understand not just our place among other planets, our place among other species, but the very core of our nature. ` Page 265

You can only come to the morning through the shadows. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

. . . .The sense organ appears to us to be affectged by the stimulant; the protoplasmic and physical-chemical modifications which appear in the sense organ are not actually produced by that organ; they come to it ‘from’ the outside. At least we assert this in order to remain faithful to the principle of inertia which constitutes all nature as exteriority. Therefore when we establish a correlation between the objective system (stimulant-sensory organ) which we presently perceive, and the subjective system which for us is the ensemble of the internal properties of the other object, then we are compelled to admit that the new motion with the stimulation of the sense is also produced by something other than itself. If it were produced spontaneously, in fact, it would immediately be cut off from all connection with the organ stimulated, or if you prefer, the relation which could be established between them would be ‘anything whatsoever.’ Therefore we shall conceive of an objective unity corresponding to even the tiniest and shortest of perceptible stimulations, and we shall call it sensation. . . . Page 413

Culturally transmitted ritualized behavior seems to capture people’s attention by mimicking the circumstances of potential threat detection. Such effects of “cognitive capture” are common in human cultures. For instance, people the world over are fascinated by masks because these man-made objects mimic the input conditions of our face-recognition systems. This suggests that, in order to find ritualized actions compelling, people do not need to be persuaded of the “meaning” conveyed (if any), or be mindful of the social effects of coordinated ceremonies. An action script that does engage our threat-detection systems, or engages them more acutely, is simply more attention-grabbing than one that does not or does it less, and is therefore more likely to be transmitted, thereby becoming a cultural ceremony. Note that this does not in any way imply that people actually think that there they are real persons. All that is required is that the relevant cognitive system is activated, which makes the action is question worthy of attention. Over long-term cultural transmission, this would result is apparently compelling, highly prescribed sequences of non-pragmatic actions that often constitute the core of what we call “rituals”. ~ Page 69

Portrait after a photograph in: Irvine W. 1955. Apes, and Victorians. A Joint Biography of Darwin and Huxley.' London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Motif after text in Darwin, C 1872. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray

Many of those who oppose the idea of predominantly contingent universe have misread contingency for 'accidental' or 'random.' Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, for example, have stated explicitly that, "The survivors, who produced us, did so by contingency, by sheerest accident;" "Gould [argues] that contingency -- randomness -- plays a major role in the result of evolution....." and Gould "sees the evolution of humanity as being accidental, purely contingent." Yet Gould states quite clearly in 'Wonderful Life': "I am not speaking of randomness, but of the central principle of all history -- contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before -- the un-erasable and determining signature of history." As Gould notes, contingency is an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, not randomness, chanciness, or accident. ~ Page 218

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We live on a smoky planet. Viewed from s;ace, the Earth is brighter than it once was, as sunlight reflects outward from a worldwide haze layer several kilometers thick. From the ground this baze makes skies that were once an intense dark blue appear milky over most of the planet's inhabited areas. The denser the population, the thicker the haze layer: One pollution plume streams out into the Atlantic from the east coast of North America, while and equivalent European plume spreads eastward into Asia. From China a thicker pall stretches across the Pacific, while smoky clouds from South Asia and southern Africa extend over the northern and southern portion of the Indian Ocean. Worldwide smoke dust, and other airborne particles released by human activity have the same combined effect as a constant medium-size volcanic eruption, scattering sulfur and soot high into the upper atmosphere. Here is another, very visible, manifestation of the Anthopocene: We have changed the color of the sky Together, these anthropogenic airborne particles are known as "aerosols," and their impacts jointly from one of climate science's greatest unsolved puzzles. The same particles may have a warming or a cooling effect overall, depending on its elemental makeup and where it hangs in the atmosphere at any precise time. .... Page 183

The pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right, says the Declaration of Independence in its list of self-evident truths. The greatest happiness of the greatest number wrote Jeremy Bentham, is the foundation of morality. To say that everyone wants to be happy sounds trite, almost circular, but it raises a profound question about our makeup. What is this thing that people strive for? At first happiness might seem like just desserts for biological fitness (more accurately, the states that would have led to fitness in the environment in which we evolved). We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved. Compared to their opposites, these objects of striving are conducive to reproduction. The function of happiness would be to mobilize the mind to seek the keys to Darwinian fitness. When we are unhappy, we work for the things that make us happy, when we are happy, we keep the status quo. ............. How do we know what can reasonably be attained? A good source of information is that other people have attained. If they can get it, perhaps so can you. Through the ages, observers of the human condition have pointed out the tragedy; People are happy when they feel better off than their neighbors, unhappy when they feel worse off. But, O! how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes! - William Shakespeare (As You Like it,) Happiness, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of others. Ambrose Bierce It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. - Gore Vidal When does A hunchback rejoice? When he sees one with a larger hump _ Yiddish saying