Genes are...essential to self-organisation at all the scales of life – just not in a deterministic way. Rather, the genes are needed to make the machines that mediate feedback-driven self-organisation: the self-organisation is a high-level property that emerges from the underlying network, not a feature of any of the individual components.from The Closed Loop by Jamie A. Davis
If imagination helps children find the truth, finding the truth also increases the power of the imagination. Very young children can use their causal maps of the world – their theories – to imagine different ways that the world might be. They can think about counterfactual possibilities. As those theories change, as children learn and their ideas about the world become more and more accurate, the counterfactuals they can produce and the possibilities they can envision become richer and richer. These counterfactuals let children create different worlds and they underpin the great flowering of pretend play in early childhood. Eventually, they enable even adults to imagine alternative ways the world could be and make those alternatives real.
...So imagination depends on knowledge, but it also depends on love and care. Just as children can learn so freely because they are protected by adults, they can imagine freely because they are loved. More, counterfactual thinking necessarily has a normative element – imagining the future also means evaluating which futures you should bring about. From the time they are very young children root these decisions in moral responses. They try to do good and avoid harm. And those responses are themselves rooted in the deeply empathic, intimate, and...selfless interactions between babies and caregivers.from The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik (2009)
The genre is characterized by point of view, by brevity and by incident. The ones that go viral contain something extraordinary, be it unimaginable risk, uncharted beauty, unlikely encounter or unexpected twist. The categories bleed.So writes Nick Paumgarten of GoPro videos. GoPro technology can certainly capture extremes and make available things that may be “worthy of wonder” if not necessarily “great wonder” according to Girolamo Cardano's classification of 1557; but it can also leverage self-obsession and instrumentality. Paumgarten suggests that, like Google Glass, GoPro has the insidious effect of making the pervasiveness of cameras seem benign when it may one day be anything but.
To me the converging objects of the Universe perpetually flow– from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman (1855)
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
...As for those hieroglyphics that gave him no moment's peace, they were to be found on the shell of a medium-sized conch from New Caledonia, set in pale reddish-brown against an off-white background. The characters, as if drawn with a blush, blending into purely decorative lines toward the edge, but over large sections of the curved surface, their meticulous complexity gave every appearance of intending to communicate something. As I recall, they displayed a strong resemblance to early Oriental script, much like the strokes of Old Aramaic...– Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (1947)
– from The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness (1957)...if there were anything happening in the room you never heard the clock at all, no more than if it did not exist; but when all was quiet and the visitors had gone and the table had been cleared up and the door shut, then it would start up again, as steady as ever; and if you listened hard enough you could sometimes make out a singing note in its workings, or something very like an echo.How did it ever come about, I wonder, that I got the notion that in this clock there lived a strange creature, which was Eternity? Somehow it just occurred to me one day the that the word it said when it ticked, a four syllable word with the emphasis on alternate syllables, was et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y. Did I know the word, then?It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all men are mortal – yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself. It was as if a fish were suddenly to discover the water it swam in. I mentioned this once to my grandfather one day when we happened to be alone in the living-room.“Do you understand the clock, grandfather?” I asked.“Here in Brekkukot we know this clock only very slightly,” he replied.“We only know that it tells the days and the hours right down to second. But your grandmother's great-uncle, who owned this clock for sixty-five years, told me that the previous owner had said that it once told the phases of the moon – before some watchmaker got at it. Old folk farther back in your grandmother's family used to maintain that this clock could foretell marriages and deaths; but I don't take that too seriously, my boy.”
...the ice spires of Callisto; Verona Rupes a great cliff on Miranda, a tiny moon of Uranus; the weird sunrises and sunsets of Mercury; the equatorial mountain range on Iapetus; the asteroid Hektor; Herschel Crater on Mimas; the methane seas of Titan; and, of course, the fabulous geysers of Enceladus.– phenomena nominated as candidates for sixth and seventh place in a list of wonders of the solar system.
And so they tell us that Anaxagoras answered a man who was...asking why one should choose rather to be born than not – “for the sake of viewing the heavens and the whole order of the universe.”– from the Eudemian Ethics of Aristotle, quoted by Jonathan Glover.
