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Oct. 25th, 2006 05:16 amim on the front page of the metro section! im even quoted accurately!
Oct. 25th, 2006
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Oct. 25th, 2006 02:54 pmSo I went straight from finishing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to Sam Harris' The End of Faith, which may have been a mistake--they're both so heavy, maybe I should put something lighter in between?
I was afraid they'd be too alike, seeing as Dawkins' books quotes Harris'! But they approach the subject from two different angles. The first chapter has been explaining what "belief" really means, and so I've been trying to make sense of a lot of cognitive science.
What doesn't help is Harris' writing style--the footnotes in the back, are also asides. I swear to gods, trying to read this is sometimes like how I talk--"here's this idea...here's a bunch of side information about this idea...okay, back to the original subject!" Sometimes it helps explain things, but often it just interrupts the text. I'm finding it irritating, because I don't know when a footnote will illuminate the idea I'm trying to understand, and when it'll confuse me more, or just be a reference. Argh.
Anyway. There's an idea (okay, one of many) in both books that I'm really liking: Our brains developed to survive in the environment we evolved in. Our brain is constantly translating information coming through from our senses, into things we recognize and/or understand--"That is a human face, and it's making sounds, and the sounds are language, and the language is telling me that the person speaking wants something..." It's always filtering sensory input. At any given time, we're only noticing a tiny percentage of what's going on around us, and we're understanding it in a very particular way, based on our actual experiences, and what we've needed to survive and pass on our genes.
The problem with all this is, when we receive information that isn't something our brains are evolved to handle. Astronomy tells us that the universe is so many billion years old, or that our galaxy is many light-years across, and there are billions of galaxies. Or physics, telling us how much empty space is in an atom. It's very hard to truly understand! A lot of people, I'm sure, don't believe in evolution simply because the idea seems so alien to them, and they just can't wrap their minds around it--around the idea that it's taken millions of years to become the complex creatures we are. Well, just because it's hard for our brains to understand something, doesn't negate that it's true.
Just because my eyes don't see ultraviolet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The tiny amount of stuff that I'm capable of seeing and hearing etc., is dwarfed beyond belief by what I'm not taking in.
I mean, like, wow.
As an amusing endnote: Both books have mentioned quantum theory, both in the context of how nothing at that level acts anything like we expect. But one included this quote, supposedly said by Richard Feynman: "If you think you understand quantum theory...you don't understand quantum theory." *LOL*
I was afraid they'd be too alike, seeing as Dawkins' books quotes Harris'! But they approach the subject from two different angles. The first chapter has been explaining what "belief" really means, and so I've been trying to make sense of a lot of cognitive science.
What doesn't help is Harris' writing style--the footnotes in the back, are also asides. I swear to gods, trying to read this is sometimes like how I talk--"here's this idea...here's a bunch of side information about this idea...okay, back to the original subject!" Sometimes it helps explain things, but often it just interrupts the text. I'm finding it irritating, because I don't know when a footnote will illuminate the idea I'm trying to understand, and when it'll confuse me more, or just be a reference. Argh.
Anyway. There's an idea (okay, one of many) in both books that I'm really liking: Our brains developed to survive in the environment we evolved in. Our brain is constantly translating information coming through from our senses, into things we recognize and/or understand--"That is a human face, and it's making sounds, and the sounds are language, and the language is telling me that the person speaking wants something..." It's always filtering sensory input. At any given time, we're only noticing a tiny percentage of what's going on around us, and we're understanding it in a very particular way, based on our actual experiences, and what we've needed to survive and pass on our genes.
The problem with all this is, when we receive information that isn't something our brains are evolved to handle. Astronomy tells us that the universe is so many billion years old, or that our galaxy is many light-years across, and there are billions of galaxies. Or physics, telling us how much empty space is in an atom. It's very hard to truly understand! A lot of people, I'm sure, don't believe in evolution simply because the idea seems so alien to them, and they just can't wrap their minds around it--around the idea that it's taken millions of years to become the complex creatures we are. Well, just because it's hard for our brains to understand something, doesn't negate that it's true.
Just because my eyes don't see ultraviolet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The tiny amount of stuff that I'm capable of seeing and hearing etc., is dwarfed beyond belief by what I'm not taking in.
I mean, like, wow.
As an amusing endnote: Both books have mentioned quantum theory, both in the context of how nothing at that level acts anything like we expect. But one included this quote, supposedly said by Richard Feynman: "If you think you understand quantum theory...you don't understand quantum theory." *LOL*
