Excellent. Ill just add something from Bronowskis The Ascent of Man. I was always intrigued by what Bronowski said about mathematician John Von Neumann and the way he distinguished between short term tactics and long range strategies. “In his last years he wrote a beautiful book called The Computer and the Brain, the Silliman Lectures that he should have given, but was too ill to give, in 1956. In them he looks at the brain as having a language in which the activities of the different parts of the brain have somehow to be interlocked and made to match so that we devise a plan, a procedure, as a grand overall way of life - what in the humanities we would call a system of values.” Well worth pursuing. I’d just add that there is more to a system of values than rational calculation, we are rationalising beings more than rational beings. We are emotional beings. Bronowski, of course, knew this. ‘The human race is not divided into thinkers and feelers,’ Bronowski wrote, ‘and would not long survive the division. To touch people, we need to tap the roots that feed politics and ethics. “Johnny von Neumann was in love with the aristocracy of intellect. And that is a belief which can only destroy the civilisation that we know. If we are anything, we must be a democracy of the intellect. We must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power, by which Babylon and Egypt and Rome failed. And that distance can only be conflated, can only be closed, if knowledge sits in the homes and heads of people with no ambition to control others, and not up in the isolated seats of power.” (Bronowski, The Ascent of Man). Fine man. In addition to his achievements in science, he wrote a wonderful book on poet and artist William Blake. inyourpocket/poland/lodz/In-pursuit-of-Jacob-Bronowski_72345f?fb_action_ids=1492923604278597&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B10150773119180572%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.likes%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 01:21:07 +0000
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