[ … ] the birth of a new fourth culture, one that seeks to discover relationships between the humanities and the sciences. This fourth culture, [ … ] , will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience. It will take a pragmatic view of the truth, and it will judge truth not by its origins but in terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem or protein teach us about ourselves? How does it help us to understand who we are? What long-standing problem has it solved?
If we are open-minded in our answers to these questions, we will discover that the poem can be just as true and useful as the acronym. An while science will always be our primary method of investigating the ...
The artist describes what the scientist can't. Though we are nothing but flickering chemicals and ephemeral voltages, the self seems real. In the face of this impossible paradox, [Virginia] Woolf believed that science must surrender its claims of absolute knowledge. Experience trumps the experiment.
Why is music capable of inflicting such pain? Because it works on our feelings directly. No ideas interfere with its emotions. This is why "all art aspires to the condition of music."
[Fernando] Nottebohm, in a series of remarkably beautiful studies on bird brains, showed that neurogenesis was required for bird song. To sing their complex melodies, male birds needed new brain cells. In fact, up to 1 percent of the neurons in the bird's song center were made fresh every day.
Chaos is everywhere. As Karl Popper once said, life is not a clock, it is a cloud. Like a cloud, life is "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." Clouds, crafted and carried by an infinity of currents, have inscrutable wills; they seethe and tumble in the air and are a little different with every moment in time. We are the same way. As has happened so many times before in the history of science, the idée fixe of deterministic order proved to be a mirage. We remain as mysteriously free as ever.
It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art.
Additional information
- Pages: 256
- ISBN: 0547085907
- EAN: 9780547085906
- Dewey: 500
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: Mariner Books