Dear Don:
It is great to have you on the list. It reminds me of an Italian movie
where a Cardinal (Vittorio Gassman) having a mechanical car problem, ends
up entering a suburban village church where a young priest was dealing
(difficultly) with his Parish. Those who have seen the movie will not be
surprised by me addressing Rosan to the role of the young priest and
reserving for myself the role of one of the parish members.
On that quality, I would like to pose you some questions:
From the beginning of this thread some literary references came to my
mind. Not what we call literary in the scientific sense but in the
literature as art sense. Your wonderfully clear posts (some television
fuzzy images are clearest than David Letterman clear face if you have an
interest in abstract art) triggered the remembrance of literary characters
that could be helpful, on their nature, to enhance the dimensions of this
thread.
All of the following are in trouble with cognition:
1. Kafka's Gregor Samsa.
(I must admit that I feel, every morning, like poor Gregor transformed
into a huge cockroach). The problems are obvious: all vehicles for
cognition are obliterated although the cognition centre remains the same.
Understanding becomes an acute problem since the plain, regular vehicles
for understanding are new and blur so understanding itself becomes evident
in relation to common live problems.
2. Meyrink's Gollem
Not that Meyrink's version of the legend is more interesting than the
legend itself. The rabbi that built a mud and wax made homunculus is,
besides heretic, a cognitive techno-scientist. The Gollem is not
Frankenstein's work (a mechanical sum of death tissues once alive) but an
entity artificially constructed out of raw materials and magically put in
action with the minimal cognition powers. Understanding understanding
produces a semi-human creature (the same that we can describe by science)
3. Thomas Mann's Faust
Leverkhun is someone with his cognition powers enhanced by a deal with the
devil. Sadly, he is consumed by terrible headaches.
I could think of many more. It seems that cognition has also this cultural
power, enough power to create literature about it and sell books.
Those books (and I'm thinking, now, about the relations between
Melville's "whiteness of the whale" and Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp lost in
the snow and fog), aren't more eloquent than scientific experiments?
Well, this is late (sorry, after all it was only one question)
Thanks a lot for your newcoming,
Best,
Eduardo
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