“Pinker told us he wanted to have entered into the record Kahneman’s statements on the irrationality of much of human thought. I don't think of religious traditions primarily as irrational, I think of them primarily as imagination, which is what they are” https://www.edge.org/conversation/elaine_pagels-the-social-history-of-religion …
The history and philosophy of science are excellent teachers of the value of irrationality. Quantum mechanics would never have emerged from a community of practitioners with no tolerance for the irrational in scientific investigation. The Bohr atom was obviously contradictory.
-
-
Even Dirac, who was hardly a wild-eyed mystic, insisted that real breakthroughs come only from recognizing that heretofore-unquestioned assumptions may be essentially wrong. The real challenge is to identify unknown unknowns -- which takes a certain wildness of mind.
-
“Accordingly, genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service.” Schopenhauer
- 7 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.