epigones

And “fruitful” is by no means a synonym for “soluble.” What is man? One answer on offer is: An organism whose haunting questions perhaps ought not to be meaningful to the organ that generates them, lacking as it is in any means of “solving” them. Another answer might be: It is still too soon to tell. We might be the creature who brings life on this planet to an end, and we might be the creature who awakens to the privileges that inhere in our nature—selfhood, consciousness, even our biologically anomalous craving for “the truth”—and enjoys and enhances them. Mysteriously, neither possibility precludes the other. Our nature will describe itself as we respond to new circumstances in a world that changes continuously. So long as the human mind exists to impose itself on reality, as it has already done so profoundly, what it is and what we are must remain an open question.

fecund

But this would dignify religion and characterize the mind as outwardly and imaginatively engaged with the world, as, in parascientific thought after Comte, it never is.

quotidian

What was thought to be known about the effect of gravity, that it would slow cosmic expansion, could not be reconciled with new data, and a major and novel factor, in effect an antigravitational force, emerged as a hypothesis in a changed conception of the universe.

But why are these seductions necessary? Why are they lovely to us? Why would nature bother to distract us with them? Why do we stand apart from nature in such a way that the interests that really move us should be concealed from us? Might there not be fewer of these interfamilial crimes, honor killings, child abandonments, if nature had made us straightforwardly aware that urgencies more or less our own were being served in our propagating and nurturing? There is more than a hint of dualism in the notion that some better self—the term seems fair—has to be distracted by ingratiating pleasures to accommodate the practical business of biology.

“How does the spook interact with solid matter? How does an ethereal nothing respond to flashes, pokes and beeps and get arms and legs to move? Another problem is the overwhelming evidence that the mind is the activity of the brain. The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals,” and so on. By identifying the soul with the mind, the mind with the brain, and noting the brain’s vulnerability as a physical object, he feels he has debunked a conception of the soul that only those who find the word meaningless would ever have entertained.

I am hungry, I am comfortable, I am a singer, I am a cook. The abrupt descent into particularity in every statement of this kind, Being itself made an auxiliary to some momentary accident of being, may only startle in the dark of night, when the intuition comes that there is no proportion between the great given of existence and the narrow vessel of circumstance into which it is inevitably forced.

gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us.

t will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of brilliant and diligent labor.

primarily the existing scientific community which must evolve a basic philosophical approach to the meaning of science and technology in terms of the needs of man and must put it into practice. This is the supreme task lying before mankind today.

These considerations lead to the ready and unconditional abdication by the individual scientist of his responsibility for the orientation of his research to the organization which employs him. He is a specialist having neither knowledge nor competence in the ordering of the scheme of things of which he is a part. This attitude is strongly reinforced by the respect for authority and the sense of obligation that most of us feel for doing the bidding of our organizational super-iors. His career is bound up with the organization and he will readily accept assignments to research which will advance the purposes of his organization. Even if he feels the researc~ policies of his group to be wrong, he has usually little practical influence to change them. In the end, he must submit to the prevailing policy or resign his position.

it was quite reasonable to ask of what possible use were these abstract ideas to the welfare of man. The technology to make use of these ideas was yet to emerge. So it is with most fundamental scientific advances. It is usually quite impossible to predict the nature of the social consequences of any given maior scientific discovery. In retrospect, we see that the possible ramifications of the results of past major scientific advances have been far too complex to fore-see at the time that they were made. Both good and bad have arisen out of all of them. Thus the scientist can say, since the end social results of his work are largely unpredictable, "Let's get on with the job."

eoples

While it is manifest in the mammoth budgets for research for advancement of military technology, this is more a symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself. It i

illusory~