As many others and I have written, the real world always wins, in the sense that no matter how much we think we are in control, outcomes result from whatever forces are at work out there. Objects will always fall down, not up, when we drop them. People will behave the way their brains tell them to, no matter how we think they should respond to our commands. Even proven scientific theories don’t work when the circumstances depart from those from which the theory was deduced. Newtonian mechanics do predict the path of a cannonball, but not how electrons in… Read More
Continue ReadingHalf-brain-dead Politics
David Brooks had an interesting oped in the NYTimes on August 7 about the state of the Republican party. The sub-headline read: “The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches.” For me, this wording is quite intriguing because I have been re-reading, The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist’s book about the divided brain. His arguments about the different functions of the two brain hemispheres seem to fit the way that the Republican party and especially, Donald Trump, look out at the world and respond to it. Using McGilchrist’s model, I would say that the right-hemisphere of both Trump… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Persistence of Memory
I have been looking at a few of my unpublished work going back to the 90’s The task is complicated because many of the files cannot be opened in the original format, but I can recover the text and try to reconstruct the papers. Today’s post is an extract from a working paper written in 1992. It is taken out of context of the whole piece, which was about design and human action, but seems to be pretty self-contained. I can see, even back then, where the impetus for my books and other work since then arose. The main difference… Read More
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