841
that is not merely the trap of hedonism and its blinders, but some other far more
dignified and gentle mode of behavior, kindly tropes of expression, wherein between
language and cognition, perception and action, there is no impossible gulf, but the
perpetual yearning to be fully reconnected, enchanted, accepted by the rest of the
world.
12
If that were the case.
Imagine the fossils, carbon, sand, mountain ranges, the sky, and the stone, the
biology teeming within every cranny, all reminding our kind of fellow beetles and
moths, hummingbirds and whales, the beginning and end of worlds. With an impassioned fellowship that craves not the rules and certitudes. Let go of the fools who
think themselves lofty in ourselves, to otherwise take a first step, initial glimpses of
our untold loss, not unimagined, that biosphere which is by uninterrupted definition,
every definition, beyond humanity. Has somehow miraculously touched us. Just as
we have all but systematically renounced this final possibility. It is like the story of
zero, commencing in Sumer, perhaps long before that. Plus-or-minus, on either side
of that primordial zero: the story is not over (Fig. 97.3).
12 For additional reflections on such precepts, see Patricia S. Churchland’s Conscience – The Origins
of Moral Intuition, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2019; Michael Graziano’s Rethinking
Consciousness – A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience, W.W. Norton & Company, New York,
2019; Flynn Coleman’s A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are,
Counterpoint Publishers, Berkeley, CA, 2019; Brian Christian and Tom Griffith’s Algorithms to Live
By – The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2016; and Jim
Holt’s When Einstein Walked With Gödel – Excursions to the Edge of Thought, Macmillan Audio,
2018, Macmillan Publishers, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018.
Fig. 97.3 Since 1970, bird populations in the US have declined by nearly one-third. (Photos ©
Dancing Star Foundation)
97.3 Scintilla Conscientiae
that is not merely the trap of hedonism and its blinders, but some other far more
dignified and gentle mode of behavior, kindly tropes of expression, wherein between
language and cognition, perception and action, there is no impossible gulf, but the
perpetual yearning to be fully reconnected, enchanted, accepted by the rest of the
world.
12
If that were the case.
Imagine the fossils, carbon, sand, mountain ranges, the sky, and the stone, the
biology teeming within every cranny, all reminding our kind of fellow beetles and
moths, hummingbirds and whales, the beginning and end of worlds. With an impassioned fellowship that craves not the rules and certitudes. Let go of the fools who
think themselves lofty in ourselves, to otherwise take a first step, initial glimpses of
our untold loss, not unimagined, that biosphere which is by uninterrupted definition,
every definition, beyond humanity. Has somehow miraculously touched us. Just as
we have all but systematically renounced this final possibility. It is like the story of
zero, commencing in Sumer, perhaps long before that. Plus-or-minus, on either side
of that primordial zero: the story is not over (Fig. 97.3).
12 For additional reflections on such precepts, see Patricia S. Churchland’s Conscience – The Origins
of Moral Intuition, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2019; Michael Graziano’s Rethinking
Consciousness – A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience, W.W. Norton & Company, New York,
2019; Flynn Coleman’s A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are,
Counterpoint Publishers, Berkeley, CA, 2019; Brian Christian and Tom Griffith’s Algorithms to Live
By – The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2016; and Jim
Holt’s When Einstein Walked With Gödel – Excursions to the Edge of Thought, Macmillan Audio,
2018, Macmillan Publishers, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018.
Fig. 97.3 Since 1970, bird populations in the US have declined by nearly one-third. (Photos ©
Dancing Star Foundation)
97.3 Scintilla Conscientiae