10 ms·
The point you make is an important one...as the article points out, we knew bacteria moved toward light for years...now we know how... As humans we imagine tha
by Outdoorsman 11y ago
The point you make is an important one...as the article points out, we knew bacteria moved toward light for years...now we know how...
As humans we imagine that we're very efficient processors, and we are...but, much of the time we're very likely just on on "auto-pilot", responding to stimuli...with all the senses...
Example: Say you're driving down the road, feel hungry, and catch a glimpse of Golden Arches ahead...without very much processing at all you pull into a McDonalds and order a meal...birds in the McDonalds parking lot flit around constantly under cars, checking for bits of French fries dropped or discarded...there's not a lot of difference between us and the birds...we're both responding to stimuli in our environment...without much deep thought at all...it keeps us alive...
One of my favorite quotes is one from "The Judge", a character from Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian...it puts our existence into a unique perspective:
>“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning."<