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People have reality-dampers. It’s a popular fact that nine-tenth of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid C
by hprotagonist 4y ago
People have reality-dampers.
It’s a popular fact that nine-tenth of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.
It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work.
Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"
- ntr-- 4y ago> ...each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954