Brendan Macmillan (bren at molly.cs.monash.edu.au) wrote: [.]
> Ian Kemmish (ian at five-d.com) wrote: [..]
>:bjm10 at cornell.edu says... [...]
When you were a child and you were like the boy Isaac Newton
walking on the seashore, you discovered minor challenges for your
mind. While your ancestors had long since emerged from the
primordial ooze, you, impelled by the "wandering" idea contained
in the word "planet," were dimly following the negentropic
principle of escape to the stars by making rockets.
As you grew up, you searched farther and wider for challenges
worthy of your intellect. You experienced the "gravitation" of
strong intellects towards eternal mysteries:
- the oldest things (paleontology; cosmogony);
- the smallest things (particle physics);
- the largest things (Heavy Metals; universes = ASTRONOMY);
- the most complex things (ecosystems; organisms; brains).
Like Alexander weeping for no more worlds to conquer, you matured
and knocked down all the challenges that life had set up for you.
What to do? Take up river-rafting? Prove through your own
oeuvre that "The Great Gatsby" has been prematurely regarded as
The Great American Novel? Live through your children? Freeze
your body for resurrection when more exciting times have arrived?
You are like the marauder in "Lawrence of Arabia," rummaging
among the train wreckage and shrieking, "Is there nothing
honorable in this place?"
You seek meaning in life, but here are sands, ignoble things.
Bored out of your wits, reading each astronomy magazine but no
longer feeling the intense and awesome challenges of youth, you
drift towards the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation.
But there is a GRAND CHALLENGE taunting you and your species,
uttered by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:
Nunmehr werden jene Auserkornen, vor denen die Ahnung
einer solchen Pflicht aufzudaemmern beginnt, den Versuch
machen, ob sie ihr wie als ihrer groessten Gefahr nicht
noch "zur rechten Zeit" durch irgend einen Seitensprung
entschluepfen moechten: zum Beispiel indem sie sich
einreden, die Aufgabe sei schon geloest, oder sie sei
unloesbar, oder sie haetten keine Schultern fuer solche
Lasten, oder sie seien schon mit andern, naeheren Auf-
gaben ueberladen, oder selbst diese neue ferne Pflicht
sei eine Verfuehrung und Versuchung, eine Abfuehrung von
allen Pflichten, eine Krankheit, eine Art Wahnsinn.
<PRE>
/^^^^^^^^^^^\ Theorie des Denkens im Gehirn /^^^^^^^^^^^\
/ Sehkanal \ ________ / Hoerkanal \
| /--------|-------\ / Syntax \ | Gedaechtnis |
| | Wieder-|er- | \________/---|-------------\ |
| ___|___ |kennt- | Zwang| Spirale| _______ | |
| / \ |nis __|___ ___V___ | / \ | |
| / Bild \ | /tiefe \------/ Wort- \----|--/ Wort \| |
| \ /---|---/Begriffe\----/begriffe \---|--\ / |
| \_______/ | \________/ \_________/ | \_______/ |
</PRE>